An Epic Journey

            My father has lived in New York for almost his entire life. He turned eighty about a month ago. I feel often times when I write, I write to transport myself into his history. Either I try to recreate New York City during any of the decades of his life, or I try to imagine what it must have been like for my grandparents. Most of those stories don’t feel like lore to me. If I tried to write about my father or my grandparents, I would feel obligated to get the story almost perfect. I would want to capture, as well as I could, their real lived lives. This has become especially important to me as I become more and more aware of my father’s advanced age.

When I think about lore, I think about how exactly my father’s family actually got to New York. I’m sure it’s a question on a lot of our minds, how our families came to be in this nation. It isn’t a question I can really ask about my mother’s family (Danish immigrants).

There is a piece of lore I would take up, however. I know that my grandmother’s grandfather (my great great grandfather) escaped from slavery into the mountains in North Carolina, and met a Cherokee woman (my great great grandmother). They remained in the mountains until slavery ended, and they eventually migrated north with my great grandmother Virginia. I have a picture of her. She didn't let my father call her grandmother, she was always "Aunt Ginnie". I would love to write that story because there is so little I know about those three people, yet I could do an enormous amount of research to deepen and authenticate their story. We know of tales of that journey from the south to the north, migrations during and after slavery was abolished. The story of my great great grandmother’s life in the mountains and her transition is less known. If I were seriously to take this up, I would like to travel there and do some research on the ground, almost in the style of Zora Neale Hurston. I would never feel right if I just invented that life that was once so real.