FINDING ME

My Wild West/Grand Canyon trip coming up next Friday (yay!) has kept me between the library checking out books on the Gold Rush and Netflix.com putting Westerns like “How The West Was Won” in my queue. Yes, I love history and what more American history is there besides cowboys, Indians, emigrants, and free land as far as the pioneer eye could see. Except it wasn’t free. It cost many a bloody life and whole families, groups, and tribes of humans were wiped away in a puff of gun-smoke in the name of expansion. Then there were the slaves, people that history has all but erased, who built the towns from the sweat of their brows and broke backs to dig canals and dams to quench these dry desert towns- towns they lived in the outskirts of  in raggedy shacks because they were barred from buying homes or land like the whites. Even in Las Vegas, a new booming city that thrived on tourism, employed Jim Crow laws as fierce as any Deep South town. Black Vegas entertainers such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Lena Horne would do a thirty-minute stint on stage where an audience of whites tapped their toes and sang along, only to be shown the back door after the performance  because the front entrance was “for whites only“ and they were not allowed to rent a room at the casinos they performed at. After weeks of this kind of research, my only deduction is that nobody with any kind of sense can possibly be proud of our past. Obviously some were not  proud of the crimes all our ancestors have committed; the ones who wrote our history textbooks. Much has been left out of the average classroom, as if that might stop history from repeating itself. So in honor of  history and the people who helped make it, either for better or worse, I decided to research my own history. My family. My story. I went to ancestry.com and started from there. In a matter of days I had discovered that on my dad’s side I am a sixth generation North Carolinian derived from English slave-owners, Africans, and the Saponi Indian tribe- a tribe now extinct. (imagine that) I discovered that my 4th great-grandmother was named Rosetta Bridgers and like many of my ancestors, came from Eastern North Carolina near Tarboro. I found out which of my ancestors were slaves and who were not, who could read and write, and who could not. I found out that the men were all farmers and the women were all maids. I found out many details, but it still wasn’t enough. So I called my parents and told them of my discoveries. The next day we all packed a lunch and piled in my dad’s Volvo. We headed towards Tarboro to go grave-hunting. We discovered more family secrets to add to the colorful quilt that is our American history: headstones with matching dates, street signs with the name Bridgers, the river that my ancestors may have traded supplies on. I can’t explain in words the emotions that welled up inside of me that day, but it makes me feel more connected to the world in some way and I look even more forward to discovering new frontiers out West.