My Family, My Blood

I am thinking of my own family these days. My maternal grandparents and all their children, brothers, sisters, etc., all moved to Vero Beach, FL in the late 1920's.

At first, I didn't question it. Vero is beautiful and I get why they were there. But as I got older and started learning and questioning, it occurred to me that something must have happened to make them just gather up and leave like that.

All of them.

I mean, families relocate often, but not like that. Not every single one of them all at once. My Grandfather and all his brothers and sisters and my Grandmother and all her brothers and sisters.

They all left together. At once.

Something must have happened.

I knew that they had all gone to Palatka but that they hadn't stayed there long. Later, I found out that they said the KKK was real prominent there and they couldn't stay there either, so they all fled again.

I heard about Rosewood and Ococee and I started putting things together. I asked one of my uncles once and he didn't want to talk about it. All he said was that the white folks were killing them and they had to go.

I remember once I asked Grandma why she considered herself a republican. She said that a white man had told them that they could vote but that they had to vote the way he told them to and they did.

She was surprised when I told her that she could vote for whoever she wanted to. She was later afraid to vote because she wanted to vote for a Democrat, but she was afraid the "folks in charge" would come down on her if she did.

I don't come from rich powerful folks. Most of my family didn't go to college and they weren't educated. My folks bought property and they all settled in Gifford, the town north of Vero Beach where Black folks were allowed to live. They opened grocery stores and bars and one of my cousins had a bus that went back and forth to Vero so that the people who worked for the white folks in Vero didn't have to walk those 7 miles between the towns. Some of my family owned orange groves and grew their own fruit.

White truck drivers would not take their fruit to the markets so they bought trucks and took it themselves.

When World War II happened, the government came to my Grandfather and told him they needed some of his land because they needed to build an airport. They didn't offer him any money. They didn't offer him anything in exchange. They just took a huge plot of land from him and built the airport and gave some of the rest of the land to some white folks. They thought it was wrong for a Black man to own that much land.

At night, after my Grandmother's store closed, my relatives would all gather there and they would sit and play music and drink and talk. Most times, it was wonderful. They would laugh and tell funny stories and jokes and I loved it.

But sometimes, someone would drink a bit too much and angry, hurtful stories came out. I was young and I really didn't understand a lot of it then. I didn't know about the things they had experienced. I didn't know how to process what I was hearing and later, when I asked questions, they would just dismiss it saying Uncle So-and-So had drank too much and had been running his mouth.

My Grandfather died when I was 13. I wish I had had more time with him but I cherish his life. He was wonderful to me in the short time I knew him. He was smart and had an entrepreneurial streak. He wanted all his family to have a place to live and he wanted us all to live close together. I guess now he felt that was the safest thing for us to do. He wanted to leave us something. But all the progress he was making stopped when he died. No one took up the mantle. It all ended with him.

My Grandmother only went to the 3rd or 4th grade. Folks back then didn't think girls needed an education. They needed to know how to work and how to get married, have kids and be a good subservient wife. She got part of that right. Papa's attempt to make her subservient resulted in his getting a pot of hot grits tossed on him. She died over 20 years ago.

But she had refused to let my Mother go to college. Mom had been smart and she had been a tall, lanky redheaded girl who played basketball. She had gotten a scholarship and wanted to go to school. Grandma dismissed it. She didn't need to do that. Stay home and help me take care of your brothers, she told her. My Mom rebelled and left home. She went to Miami to live with relatives and then moved to Philadelphia and then to Brooklyn where she had gotten married to an abusive man.

She finally clobbered him and fearing she had killed him, fled to Chicago where she learned later that her ex was still alive. She divorced him and married my father.

I wonder what went through their minds when they had to leave their homes. I wonder if they were angry or just terrified. Did all of them make it out? I heard whispers that maybe two of them didn't, but I don't know for sure.

I recall in 1981, my Mom had bought a van and she piled my Grandma and 2 of my uncles and my brother and me with his son and our nephew and we drove up to Gainesville. Grandma directed us to a little dirt road right behind an apartment complex that had been built for University of Florida students and showed us a little old one room building that was rotting.

It was where she had gone to school for a while, she said. She got out and walked around the property and told us that the church they had attended had been near there as well. Then when we were leaving, the road turned into another larger street and I-95 was just across the way. She said that the cemetery where her family had been buried had been covered over by the Interstate. She was wiping away tears as she told us.

She directed us to another house and said that she had relatives living there. My uncle went to the door and sure enough, there was more family there. My uncles were surprised that Grandma had remembered as much as she did and we had a wonderful time that day.

I had always asked a lot of questions. I always have. It's why Mama bought a set of World Book Encyclopedias when I was 7. She said if I read them, I would learn about everything and wouldn't be asking her questions all the time. One of her friends had taught me to read when I was only 3 or 4 so I was more than able to tackle those books and I was overjoyed. I loved reading more than most folks did. I also enjoyed going to school and learning. The hard part for me was dealing with the other kids who had preconceived notions about me and folks like me.

Learning was never difficult or boring to me. I loved learning new things and I still do. I have an inquiring mind and I am curious about most things. It's why when I was hearing things about all these massacres and riots and lynchings that happened back in the day, I wanted to know more. I researched them and tried to find out more - because I wanted to know if my family had been affected. I knew in my heart that they had, but I didn't know for sure because no one wanted to talk about it. All those years later, they were still afraid.

My family didn't ask questions. They obeyed and listened and did what they had to do to survive. They didn't have the advantages that we have now. The last of my Mom's siblings died a couple of years ago. She had lived her whole live working as a domestic and she had never been curious or interested in much. She worked hard and raised her family and she was a good woman.

Researchers are saying now that for many of us Black folks, the miseries and pain of our ancestors has found its' way into our DNA. Their struggles have become ours and our health is often marred by it. Our life expectancy is less than that of white people and we are often crippled with illnesses in a disproportionate measure.

More of us have high blood pressure and often, as in my case, a stubborn resistant strain of HBP that resists medications. I have been on several different ones in my life and it took a cocktail of several drugs to get it in line. My doctor told me once that if Black patients don't also have a diuretic prescribed, the drug for HBP won't work.

My Grandmother and every one of her 9 children all had glaucoma. Two of my uncles lost their sight all together. My brother Eddie has an aggressive form that sneaked up on him one year and reduced his vision to nearly zero. He has had several surgeries to retain what little vision he has.

I lost the vision in the center of my left eye and I thought at first it was because of an injury. Several years ago, it turned red and was swollen and sore and I couldn't wear my contact lenses. I thought perhaps I had some kind of infection and went running to the optometrist that I trusted. It took 6 months for my eye to return to normal. What I had was twofold: a lot of nerve damage caused by glaucoma and one of those nasty nagging symptoms of lupus.

I've had myopia and astigmatism most of my life. I was born prematurely and back then, they put silver nitrate in preemies' eyes and then popped us in incubators which they discovered later, caused us to have eye problems later in life. I wore big thick glasses until I discovered contact lenses. But now, since I was in my 40's, I basically have full vision in only one of my eyes.

Diabetes runs in my family as does multiple myeloma, a form of bone marrow cancer. I wonder if this is inherited, part of the package passed on by living in fear and submission? Is it true that living a life being treated as less than human, with no one truly caring about you can somehow find its' way into our very DNA, affecting future generations, causing us to be more susceptible to health conditions that doctors cannot find a way to cure or even handle in some cases?

I didn't have to suffer the indignities that my relatives did. But that doesn't mean I don't share their pain. I look around me and find that I am less trusting and not open to people I don't know. I look at the people here and I wonder if they are walking around harboring hatred in their hearts or if their ancestors were involved in a lynching or a massacre. I wonder if it's a family secret that they don't talk about or if they are proud of what they might have done.

For those who did participate, how did they sleep at night? Did they ever realize what they did was wrong? Did they think about it?

Do they even understand that the best thing for us all is to bring all this out into the light and acknowledge it? We need for the truth to be taught so that the generations to come don't make the same mistakes and don't live with the same lies and illusions. We all need to know.

So what if it makes some folks uncomfortable?

How do you think my family felt?

How do you think I feel?