ENH 394 - What Brought Me Here

Originally Posted: 7/2/07 at 10:04 pm

Everyone in my family knows that I love to write. On my mom's side of the family there are some incredibly humorous and uplifting stories from the last several decades.  So, they have been telling me to write about the family for years, but I just didn't have a hook. That is until I read the "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass".

I'd read slave literature before, but I was astounded by the details of horrific treatment of women and degrading treatment of men. It occurred to me (as I am sure many more scholarly people have already theorized) that some of the problems we're seeing today in black society may be the product of the slave movement.

Let's be clear.  If someone won't pay their bills, struggles with alcoholism and continually commits petty crimes we can't blame that on events that occurred well over 100 years ago. However, I think it's interesting to explore the question of how many generations it will take to overcome slavery. If men were systematically degraded, stripped of their honor and the right of caring for their own children, looking the other way when their wives were raped, what gifts did they have to give to their sons when they finally were set free.

We know from historical accounts that many emancipated slaves actually felt more humiliated by the disgust that was shown to them as they attempted to live side by side with whites.

So, since I am a fiction writer, my hope is to produce a work of fiction that closely parallels the events of my family and a family like mine that lived during slave times. I hope that this class will help me to get my feet wet as I look out into an ocean of possibilities for this piece.

How do I define family? Oddly enough, I really think of family as being the people who I am related to either by marriage or blood. I have friends that are closer to me than my sister and even my own mother. But I don't think that family is about closeness. I think of it as being about the connections we have with people even when those connections seem to have waned.

Family is about sharing a history with people who we do not get to choose. Family is about laughing, hurting, and hiding. I like the fact that we don't really get to choose our families with the exception maybe of choosing our spouses. I think that the complication that this can bring can also lead to a lot of learning and self evaluation that may not come out of relationships that are too easily constructed.