LaTanya McQueen
Excerpt
“Even
still,” my godmother says on the phone. I have called her again, as I
periodically do when I need to ask another question about our past, or
when in my scattered research stumble
across another detail, another piece. She is a history professor and in
my family is the only one I know left who can offer any clues or
advice. “Even still, she was a woman and she was black. How much power
could she have had, really?” VIA
There
is a story I must tell you and it begins like this—once, a woman once
had a relationship with a man. Her name was a Leanna Brown and she was a
slave to the Bedford
Brown and his family. Bedford Brown was Senator of North Carolina
during the 1830s. Next to Brown’s plantation lived a man by the name of
William Siddle. The two of them, Leanna and William, sometimes called
Willie, had a relationship that resulted in at least
two, possibly three children, and one of those children was my great
grandfather.
When
I look at history, at the ways in which black women’s bodies have been
treated and are continually treated, it is easy for me to look on this
past and believe she was raped—that her
children and their children and ultimately my own reason for existence,
is because of this. It is easier to simplify their history, to make
black and white a situation I don’t understand, but there is a fact that
keeps me questioning, one I come back to time
and time again. At least two of the children, born during
Reconstruction, took his surname.
This fact leads me to believe that there is perhaps a different story than the one I’ve originally believed.
Comments