In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past - Hardcover

Gates Jr., Henry Louis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307382400 ISBN 13: 9780307382405

Verlag: Crown, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Unlike most white Americans who, if they are so inclined, can search their ancestral records, identifying who among their forebears was the first to set foot on this country’s shores, most African Americans, in tracing their family’s past, encounter a series of daunting obstacles. Slavery was a brutally efficient nullifier of identity, willfully denying black men and women even their names. Yet, from that legacy of slavery, there have sprung generations who’ve struggled, thrived, and lived extraordinary lives.

For too long, African Americans’ family trees have been barren of branches, but, very recently, advanced genetic testing techniques, combined with archival research, have begun to fill in the gaps. Here, scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., backed by an elite team of geneticists and researchers, takes nineteen extraordinary African Americans on a once unimaginable journey, tracing family sagas through U.S. history and back to Africa.

Those whose recovered pasts collectively form an African American “people’s history” of the United States include celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock, Don Cheadle, Chris Tucker, Morgan Freeman, Tina Turner, and Quincy Jones; writers such as Maya Angelou and Bliss Broyard; leading thinkers such as Harvard divinity professor Peter Gomes, the Reverend T. D. Jakes, neurosurgeon Ben Carson, and sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot; and famous achievers such as astronaut Mae Jemison, media personality Tom Joyner, decathlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Ebony and Jet publisher Linda Johnson Rice.

More than a work of history, In Search of Our Roots is a book of revelatory importance that, for the first time, brings to light the lives of ordinary men and women who, by courageous example, blazed a path for their famous descendants. For a reader, there is the stirring pleasure of witnessing long-forgotten struggles and triumphs–but there’s an enduring reward as well. In accompanying the nineteen contemporary achievers on their journey into the past and meeting their remarkable forebears, we come to know ourselves.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR., is the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and holder of the distinguished title of Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University. He is the author of several award-winning works of literary criticism as well as the memoir Colored People; The Future of the Race, co-authored with Cornel West; and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man.

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Maya Angelou
April 4, 1928

Maya Angelou is one of the most resonant voices of the history of American literature. She has written bestselling autobiographies, books of poetry, and plays that have affected more people than has the work of almost any other black author I can name. In the process she has infused the art form of the autobiography with a densely poetic discourse reminiscent of the old Negro Spirituals. She is also a historian, an educator, and a lecturer who has thrilled audiences with her mesmerizing, resonant, lyrical speaking voice. I have sat in those audiences, spellbound, and I know the power of her voice. So I was delighted when she agreed to participate in this project.

As I told Maya at the start of our work, my fascination with family history has been heavily influenced by her writing. Indeed, I cannot overstate the effect that her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings had on me. I was twenty years old when I read it—and it has been a part of my life ever since. It is a book that I have taught and studied, a book that I love. It was among my mother’s favorite books, something we shared. In researching Maya’s family’s past, I planned to revisit and reexamine some of the characters and settings in the book—to look at scenes and people I thought I knew so well through the lens of genealogy and historical documentation. I was a bit frightened at the prospect. It would be interesting, I thought, as a devoted reader to see how a great artist had molded experience to her own artistic purposes. But as a historian I feared that the power of Maya’s work would somehow be diminished by the genealogical or historical experience on which her memories were based. As it turns out, I had nothing at all to fear. Our research only confirmed her memories and has made her work even more rewarding to contemplate. We even found new stories, which I hope that she will one day narrate in her own voice.

Maya Angelou was born on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri. Her birth name was Marguerite Johnson, and she was the second child of Bailey Johnson and Vivian Baxter Johnson. I knew from her books that Maya’s childhood was deeply traumatic, and I expected that it would be painful for her to talk about. But I wanted to go over the events, exploring them in terms of her family history, and Maya was willing to oblige. She knows how important this history is. Even her famous first name has its origins in her troubled childhood. It was changed from Marguerite to Maya by her older brother, Bailey, when they were very young—and essentially alone.

“Bailey,” recalled Maya, “used to call me ‘my sister,’ because we were buffeted about and I was the only thing that was his. He was so proud of that. Everybody seemed to have lots of other things, but he had just one sister. So he called me ‘my sister,’ and sometimes he just used to call me ‘mine.’ And then, when he was about nine, I guess, he read about the Mayan Indians. And he was so taken that he said I was Maya. And I kept the name. I love it so, for many, many reasons. It is history with my brother.”

Maya told me that she grew up with little knowledge of her parents. “I was three years old when my parents separated,” she said. “And they sent me and my brother—who was five years old—to my father’s mother. And over the next ten years, save for one disastrous visit, we never heard from them. We would get a note or a card or a doll about every three years, and we poked the eyes out of the doll and buried it upside down, standing on its head. So I knew almost nothing, really, about them.”

The “disastrous visit” that Maya refers to here was an almost unimaginably awful crime. After four years of living in relative happiness with her paternal grandmother, Maya was briefly returned to her mother in St. Louis, where, at age seven, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. When she confessed to her brother, the family exploded in violence. Her uncle is reported to have killed the rapist, and young Maya and her brother were sent back to Arkansas to live with her grandmother. It would be years before Maya lived with her mother again—years filled with pain and private torment.

“I was raped at seven and returned to my grandmother,” she said with little emotion. “And I didn’t talk for six years. Just didn’t say a word.”

Maya’s mother, Vivian Baxter, played a central role in these events, yet Maya and she would eventually reconcile. This is evidence of Vivian’s rather remarkable character and of Maya’s enormous capacity to forgive and heal. Vivian was born on January 19, 1912, in St. Louis, Missouri. She spent much of her later life in San Francisco—moving there in the late 1930s and becoming active in a wide range of progressive causes. Maya rejoined her mother in 1940 and lived with her through her teenage years, gaining exposure to her mother’s views about the world while finding herself drawn into another world—that of dance, literature, and drama. Vivian supported her daughter in all these pursuits—emotionally, if not financially (indeed, Maya worked as a cocktail waitress and a brothel madam in her years as a struggling artist).

Given what I knew of her from Maya’s books, I knew that Maya bore Vivian no ill will and in fact admired her mother greatly. But I was still surprised at the rush of feeling that Maya displayed upon seeing a photograph of Vivian that I had brought.

“She is the bravest human being I ever met,” said Maya without hesitation. “She was a small woman, and she was a very pretty woman. But she was really tough. She’d fight in bars with her brothers. And they were big boys. And she was also very generous. In Stockton, California, on one edge of town there’s a library named for me. And the other edge as you go out, there’s a park named for her. She had an organization called Stockton Black Women for Humanity, and they were generous and caring of those in need. All folks in need. She was a terrible parent of young people. But she was generous.”

Maya recalls that her mother was also an extremely hard worker, devoted to a great number of causes—from union rights to civil rights to feminism. Over the course of an extraordinarily peripatetic life, she worked as a nurse, a real-estate agent, and, almost unbelievably, as a merchant marine. “She was marvelous,” said Maya. “A lot of women sailors ship out of San Francisco—white, black, Asian, Hispanic—because of her. They call her ‘the mother of the sea.’ She was the first. She said, ‘I put my foot in that door. They said women can’t get in the union. I put my foot in that door up to my ass. Women of every color will get in that union, get aboard a ship, and go to sea.’ And they did. She said, ‘I’m going to be a seaman.’ And she was. I mean, she was all sorts of things. I remember I saw her luggage one time, and there was a huge German Luger. She said, ‘If they weren’t ready for me, I was ready for them.’ She was really all of that. She was marvelous. And I wanted to write a book about her, but she said no. So I write essays, you know, I write around her.”

Listening to her talk, it was clear to me that Maya’s feelings about Vivian were shaped by her instincts as an autobiographical artist—by the degree to which she is able to appreciate and enjoy her mother almost as a literary creation. It’s inspiring to watch. But while Maya is able to celebrate her mother, her feelings about her father remain tortured. I showed her a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Crown
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0307382400
• ISBN 13: 9780307382405
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 438
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: MUSIC STORE professional GmbH; 022188841282; Lars.Mueller@musicstore.de; ; Istanbulstr. 22-26; Köln; 51103; Deutschland