Learning My History While Finding Ashley 10/22/2009
When I was in third grade, my teacher assigned a family heritage project. The task? Talk to your parents, grandparents, aunts, cousins- essentially any relative you had available to you- and find about about your ancestry. Then, in classic ‘you really learn by creating glitter posters’ style (and oh, I could create a poster and diorama like you have never seen) we had to create a visual to share with the class while presenting our family histories. Now if you haven’t picked up by now, I was afflicted as a child with a condition I like to think of as ‘the paranoia-ed overachiever complex.’ If I believed the next best kid in the class would turn in a diorama for a book project, for example, made with found objectives in nature… I would recreate nature by figuring out how to have running water in my shoe box to depict the stream in Bridge to Terabithia. True story. If the teacher asked us to pen a scene from a play to illustrate our understanding of the historical setting of a book, I wrote the scene… and then held my friends captive practicing the script so that my project was a live production of a semi-full length play. So you can imagine, the moment the heritage project was a assigned, I was figuring out just how I would create The Best Glitter Poster On Family Heritage Known to the Third Grade Land. I went home with a list of questions to grill my parents on floating in my head. My dad delivered. I barely got out the words “family history” and he stacked in my bony arms four hardcover, embossed books. The Complete Peek Family History dating back to the early 1600s. The glossy pages depicted the manor the Peek Family resided at in Great Britain, the family’s coat of arms… the entire family history and migration to present. Seriously, the last page in the back had my siblings and my birthdates printed in the back. It was a goldmine of information for my glitter poster. I had visions of painting the coat of arms on the ‘paternal heritage’ side of my poster, and creating elaborate flow charts depicting how the family migrated and settled in new areas. Then I went to my mom. I smothered her with questions and she asked to see the assignment sheet. Annoyed, I handed it over and she signed. “Well I grew up in Lowell, and Grandma is from Mississippi.” I waited. If I’m patient, she’ll hand over her hardcover glossy books. I stared at her. I had a disarming way of staring at adults. I knew I could make them squirm. My mom stared back. “I’m sorry, honey, we don’t know much else.” I couldn’t believe it. My father could trace back hundreds of years and had the documentation on his bookshelf, and my mom is telling me the best she can do is trace back to… Grandma?! I was furious. I could not make an A+ worthy glitter poster with just a cut out of the state of Mississippi. Seriously?! This is my academic future at stake, mom! Can’t you do any better than that?!! I kept pushing and she elaborated that Grandpa was from Louisiana. Uh huh… annnnnd? And that was it. I started having a panic attack. I was going to have a lopsided poster. It took me a few years to understand why my mom couldn’t articulate our family history. Only when I started learning about slavery, sharecropping, “separate but equal,” and civil rights did I start to comprehend why my mom couldn’t trace back more than a generation. Her parents, and others like them, were denied proper education, were often not recorded and tracked. My grandmother to this day doesn’t know her true birthday since birth records were so spotty in her town of birth. She estimates it – and changes it year to year. I can’t ever get it right. As an adolescent, trying to figure out my place in the world, trying to decide what my identity was , I took the historic denial of rights to African-Americans hard. It’s hard to figure out who you are, when you don’t really know where you came from. So I’ve pieced together comments from my uncles when they were still alive, my grandmother when she could be pushed to share, trying to get a sense of my maternal heritage. I’ve made do… but the picture has never been complete. As many of you know, this past weekend started a slew of emails as A Wish for Ashley has gained more publicity. Leads from kind strangers, stories from people all over the country who have experienced similar situations and separations to the one my family now must conquer, and offers of support. What I did not expect were the emails that have helped me paint a fuller picture of who I am, where I come from, and what those people stood for. People who saw the story and emailed me because they grew up next door to my mom, Will and Dave. They shared with me amusing anecdotes about the three of them, reflected on how kind all of them always were. Well except for you, mom, one guy did confirm that you took a swing at someone with your metal lunchbox. J They shared with me the deep pain they now feel to know that Will and Dave are gone. They made me feel like I have other- non blood related, but heart related- relatives who will support me until this search comes to its end. They made me understand better who I am. What I stand for. Where I come from and the values my predecessors held dear. My identity is always changing, but a few things I can tell you for sure. I am Audra; Doreane’s daughter, Will’s niece, Dave’s fan and Ashley’s cousin. None of them are perfect, but they are real. Whether on this earth or the other side, they are with me. And I love them. And want to see them all again. I’ll make you a glitter poster to prove it. With love (and a shoutout to third grade teachers dealing with obnoxious compulsive children like me. Hint? Just give ‘em the A+ and they’ll start breathing again), Audra CommentsLeave a Reply | AuthorAudra is a 26-year-old who now believes in wishes, after her greatest wish was granted and she was reunited with her long-lost cousin, Ashley, after a nationwide search. ArchivesDecember 2010 Categories |
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