Tell Me True

Date: 2011-04-11 | Author: June Cross [See Author’s Biography]

Write my autobiography began as a way to correct the public record. The false story that my white mother and stepfather adopted me needed to be replaced by truth. Counting the secret, making it public, it was my way of inserting my truth in national history. I was not motivated by a desire to tell the story of my life fascinating, but because I know that as a student of racial history and race relations in the United States, that my story has been replicated countless times by millions of sons and daughters who have never met their way to a publisher.

  To tell this story, though, I had to use the tools of the documentary, the medium in which I' m more fluent, as well as the sources of the historian. This is where I found the gap between recorded history and all of reality, between the oral tradition of public record.

  Probably because I was meditating on how to present the narrative sequence of my own life, the time became the first mystery of personal narrative for me. I needed to become a historian. I had to search through a variety of documents to the written records and artifacts of important moments. I had to listen to the meanings made in oral histories. This historic excavation yielded a more detailed definition of what happened to me and my parents. But as I researched my own life story to the documentary, which eventually became Secret Daughter, I found that the historical record itself is unreliable and incomplete.

  I grew up in a black neighborhood in Atlantic City, before the civil rights movement. We had a block from my house, two stores, two barbershops, a tailor, a notary and an agent. But beyond the title deeds in the Hall, there is no information about the people who owned houses and lived in that community. There' s no film of them, for the simple reason that those who had cameras and film in those days saw no reason to document the life of the black community. It was as if there were.

  So how is one to gather the fragments of the story inaccurate or incomplete and defective or incomplete memory? This is where you begin the detective work. How I came to the census data to trace the lineage of my father and my grandfather, who, according to the Social Security Administration, he worked as a laborer on construction sites philadelphia [Q3], I had to rely on the notes of faceless government bureaucrats with bad handwriting. It was my grandmother's name or Wilkes Wilkinson or Wilson? Depended on if I looked at my father's birth certificate or my grandmother's marriage certificate.

  My relatives recalled that she lived somewhere in North Philly, but couldnâ ™ € t remember exactly where. Using property records and title, I finally found the house my father had bought for her in North Philadelphia-a range of three-storey, four bedroom line with parquet flooring, which had been left to deteriorate. It took me three days of door knocking in the neighborhood where she had lived for a time to find the woman I was told was his best friend. In our interview, I discovered that she and my grandmother had lived in a committed relationship as partners for almost twenty-five years.

  Even in my mother's hand, the Anglo European side that is better documented, I had problems. A cousin told me that I was related to Miles Standish. But it turned out that I wasn' t. My mother's ancestral tree, very well documented, thanks to the Mormon genealogical research, really going back to colonial Boston. I was related to a Shipa's captain named William Pearce (or Pierse, or Pierce) plying the waters between London, Boston, and in the Bahamas on a ship called the Lyon and had done thirty passes during his career. Pearce also compiled the almanac was first published in North America in 1639, from Harvard College. My mother, who had attended only one semester of community college before going out, when she became pregnant, had plutocratic deeper roots than anyone knew.

  My grandfather seven times Pereira was a person standing, a person with a documented life. But he had a dark SIDEA € "kidnapped Indians of New England and sold them as slaves in Spain. He brought one of the first African slaves to Jamestown, Virginia in 1639. She was a woman listed in Shipa's manifest only as "€ œAngela.â I understand she was one of my father's ancestors.

  I found a note a little strange in Captain Pearcea's life story: He had three wives during his life. And the first that came to Jamestown aboard the ship back in 1639 with a slave woman named Angela, was appointed in June.

  She died in Jamestown, and left memories to tell his tale.

  (Originally published in GoArticles and reprinted with permission from the author, June Cross).

Tag : memories, family, mothers, daughters, parents, love, wealth, racememoir mixed, family, mothers, daughters, parents, love, wealth, mixed race, tell

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• MLA Style Citation:
  June, Cross, [See, Author’s, Biography] " Tell Me True" Tell Me True . 20 Dec. 2008. digitalpapir.com .20 Dec 2008 <http://en.digitalpapir.com/Tell-Me-True_269042/>.

• APA Style Citation:
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• Chicago Style Citation:
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