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Breathe into Believing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2021

LeConté J. Dill Open the ORCID record for LeConté J. Dill [Opens in a new window]
LeConté J. Dill*
Affiliation:
Department of African American and African Studies, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA
*
Corresponding author. Email: LDill@msu.edu
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Extract

This begins before 1896. This begins before Arkansas. But “this can't be right grandmother. who are our Ancestors! she said, shit gal, i don't know” (Bridgforth 2012). One of my ancestors walks toward me. She be Gertrude. Gertrude Grant. I have no pictures of her. I have no living memories of her. Yet I remember. Her. My Nana's mama, born around 1890 in the lumber town of Canfield in southern Arkansas.

      Canfield, Arkansas, 1896
      We're children
      Babies really
      when the fires start
      A mob is always ready to take
      our wages
      Run us away
      Always ready to lynch us
      When a volley of shots
      be my lullabies
      I won't live to see 36
I learn about the Canfield Race War of 1896 through online searches, old newspaper clippings, doctoral dissertations. Great-Grandma Gertrude would have been around six when the rioting happened, when white laborers became jealous of Black laborers and tried to push them, beat them, burn them out of town. Free library access to census documents and land deeds tells me that Gertrude's daddy, James W. Grant, purchased eighty acres of land in Canfield on February 1, 1893, perhaps thanks to the Southern Homestead Act, which made millions of acres of land available to homesteaders, including migrating and free Negroes. James and his wife, Susie A. Lewis, raised their children on their land in Canfield. How did the riots affect them, their land, their kin, their safety, their daily lives? I ask all the questions. I was raised with the permission to ask all the questions. I ask all the questions before I'm trained in the academy to ask all the questions.

Type
Musing
Information
Hypatia , Volume 36 , Special Issue 3: Conjure Feminism: Tracing the Genealogy of a Black Women's Intellectual Tradition, Summer 2021 , Summer 2021 , pp. 555 - 565
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Hypatia, a Nonprofit Corporation

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