The February Thing: A Family Birthday and History

There was a moment when my mother, pregnant with me, hears of the 1958 world’s fair human zoo of an African village populated with Congolese. She is gripped with fear for her unborn child. Her grandmother was a midwife just out of enslavement. Interestingly, I never heard my mother or grandmother speak anything about my great grandmother and enslavement. While the Emancipation Proclamation¹ was passed in 1863, to live in 1958 with the knowledge a human zoo of the African diaspora exists on the world stage is a kind of deep hellscape the defies a moral explanation. The dilemma of African American parents was to balance history and useful knowledge and yet not sacrifice the joy and spirit of a child with fear and hate.

When I was 8 or 9, my mom put together a photo album and I would sit as she described the photographs, There was one photo she would describe with a sense of sadness. It’s of 5 year old me handing her flowers I’d just picked in the yard before going to kindergarten. Year’s later I realized why. It was the fall of 1965; the year of the Alabama church bombing. The KKK planted a bomb in a Birmingham Alabama church killing 4 little girls in Sunday School. Practically everyone in the town knew who was responsible. The FBI had the information needed and yet no one was arrested. No one was held accountable. For my mother, could she possibly be sending her child off to the same fate? The phrase I often use to describe childhood was the parental whispers; adult discussions held just out of earshot as not to scare the children. In the 1960’s, there were a lot of them. What to tell the children and when.

There are times when I reminisce about my mom and someone will politely ask, “Is your mother still with us?” I pause, not out of grief. In my mind, of course she is with us, look at me. The history and what I know of her life, it’s with us. But, I know what the question means and I answer no. If she were alive, today would be her 103rd birthday. It’s the start of February, my mom’s birthday and the start of black history month. If you know the burial ground at Hampton University, you may notice the Emancipation Proclamation Oak² in the background. This week, consider what history you carry with you, what you tell and when.

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¹The Emancipation Proclamation, was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, during the American Civil War. The Proclamation had the effect of changing the legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the secessionist Confederate states from enslaved to free.

²The Emancipation Oak is a historic tree on the campus of Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia. In 1863, the Virginia Peninsula’s black community gathered under the oak to hear the first reading of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.