Lion Tales

I started blogging about my family research because the thought of writing a book was too daunting but I still needed a way to document who I am, where I come from. It seemed easier to tell the story in little pieces rather than sitting down and organizing documents and photos and presenting them in a way that would not bore me senseless.

It is important to tell the stories of my family. Important to me. And I hope important to those who come after. We are ordinary people who will not appear in history books. We may only be remembered by those who actually knew us as individuals. Our names may be passed down to new generations unaccompanied by the stories of our lives.

Who will tell our stories if we don't?

Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe spoke about the danger of not having your own stories in an interview with The Paris Review ...

"There is that great proverb - that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.  That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a write. I had to be that historian. It's not one man's job. It's not one person's job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail - the bravery, even, of the lions."

These are my lion tales.

UPDATE May 21, 2016
Yesterday when I was searching for my folks again online, I found my own self quoted in a book, Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas: New Perspectives by John A. Kirk, University of Arkansas Press, Dec 1, 2014. I was quoted from a long-forgotten 2011 interview I'd done with Jacqueline Froelich for KUAF Public Radio. Seeing part of our story through a third party encouraged me even more to write our story; to show the direct consequences that American racism had on my family. Our story is not unique I know but I have a strong need to reconcile the events that split us apart and scattered us far and wide, lost from each other for generations.