Real life and real history is complicated.

[Carnea]

We do ourselves little favor by simplifying things and making them suitable for today’s sheltered folks. Oh I know you can see tits on the internet with a few clicks but in many ways our society is much more innocent. (And don’t you think people saw more when they lived 12 to a cabin with two beds?)

I bring this up because of a problem I came across. One of the local schools was having a genealogy class where kids traced their roots. Well it turns out that a lot of great grandmothers in the south got married and had their first kid at 13 or 14 years of age. School officials banned the reading of genealogies altogether so as to not warp minds with the apparent child rape of the 20’s 30’s 40’s and 50’s.


This brought a smile to my face because I had such an assignment in middle school and needless to say innocently let loose some skeletons out of my family closet.

Back in the 1850’s my great (x4?) grandfather had a stroke of luck. He bought a farm and married his bride in South Carolina. Per records his farm had a decent acreage and he had two domestic slaves and 6 field slaves. He also had his wife’s family that was still technically owned by his wife and himself. He was a mulatto recently freed only a few years before and had received a sizable sum in his white fathers will.

Now you could judge a black man who bought and owned slaves but it wasn’t that uncommon at that time in that part of South Carolina and it is what he knew.

He was away during the Civil War and his wife and her family were killed. History books don’t write which side slaughtered them. But it is know the Union troops came through and burned the house and farm.

He went New Orleans after the war where he married a light skinned black woman and they settled down to a life of commerce. Skip two generations and my great grandfather found himself in the middle of Mississippi. World War 1 had broken out and he was drafted as a colored cook. My stepfather was yellow black but in Mississippi everyone figured a Negro was a Negro.

He found himself in France after the war only to learn his mother, wife and child had all died of the great flu while he was gone. There was no medicine for colored folks at the time.

He walked off his army base in France and surfaced in Ireland a year later. Not that anybody looked for him. He married a local girl and became a cattle rancher on her father’s farm. The Irish may have known he was black but if they did they didn’t care. My grandmother was born a few years later.


I’m a white man everywhere I go but like many white men I have both slave and slaveholding ancestors.

I am glad to vote for Obama for he is truly a man like me and a man like most Americans.

[Gabi Hayes]

1. holy mo......Thomas Pynchon should have written about your family

saga, instead of Mason & Dixon

[Hekate]

2. Real life and real history are tangled, for sure. Thanks for sharing.

:toast: I knew from the start that, with luck, Obama could be a Bridge for this nation. We just have to work hard to make that luck happen.

Hekate

[EFerrari]

3. Yes, real life and real histories are complicated.

Great story.

[angstlessk]

4. what a very interesting and diverse history yours is, thanks

for sharing that I found it extremely compelling!