Who Am I?
The boy holding my hand is Bryant E. Seay. I know what the "E" stands for, but I'm sworn to secrecy. Bryant is a boisterous man, but if you threaten him with his middle name, you can instantly calm him.
Same with Dennis L. Addison. "Guess my middle name," said he. We were at dinner. Might have been Top of the Tower. I used to date! He was a banker. Even his boisterousness was scheduled.
First (and youngest) black Senior VP in the history of Bank of America. He got tired of signing million dollar loan checks for people who wouldn't speak to him on the street, yo. "It ain't even their money!" Also, Hugh McColl's daughter was hot for Dennis. She ruined several other perfectly good brothers, and I know because I heard him and his bf on the phone about it. Now he teaches. I sometimes wonder if my lack of progress is her doing. It was worth it.
I used to date really well! Swing and a miss. I digress.
I despise guessing. "Lucifer," I hissed. The people at the next table burst out laughing. He told me out of disgust. It's Polish. His great-grandfather was a Pole from Poland. I should have shut my mouth and let him propose to me. If that's what he was thinking, I'll never know. Dennis is from a tiny town in South Carolina, and Bryant is from my hometown, Riverhead, NY. They know who they are. Their parents and their forebears kept that knowledge alive and available to them.
Most black folk are not so fortunate.
I was a teenager when I began undertaking to learn my family history. I realized right away that all the information about slaves (such as their names) had to be paid for, so I chose to concentrate on my European ancestors until times got better. It could happen.
I hit pay dirt with the Burwells and they have occupied my attention for many reasons, accessibility chief among them.
“My fate depends on αδνιλεβ’s present resolutions: by them I must stand or fall,” Jefferson writes. But the Greek characters are in fact an anagram for Rebecca Burwell, a 17-year-old from Yorktown he wanted to marry. Four days later, Jefferson decided that his earlier code was too obvious. “We must fall on some scheme of communicating our thoughts to each other, which shall be totally unintelligible to every one but to ourselves,” he told Page."
Thomas Jefferson had to settle for some Burwell slaves. He was sick with love for Rebecca Burwell, and made quite the fool of himself, by her accounting.
The Burwell clan, for all their white gentry-hood, would beat your ass. They had held off the British Fleet at Yorktown with twelve rifles, and nobody messed with them. Erased them from history instead. Burwell's Bay is what they were holding. King's Dominion amusement park is on Burwell land.
The Burwell family formed the Regulators to clap back against George III.
Rebecca's father and uncles had a little talk with Mister Jefferson, and the thing was quashed.
There is an accounting somewhere of my direct forebear William Henry (looking at you Ashton William-Henry!) beating Judge Leonard Henderson off the bench at Charlotte Courthouse.
Might have something to do with this here land dispute:
All these things explain a lot about me. There's more.
What it doesn't tell me is who I am exactly. My father is Stanley Bullock, Sr. If you see him, tell him his 'outside child' is still praying for him. He is the reason I can tell you that Quinocet was the youngest of five Huguenot brothers fleeing Catherine DiMedici. He intermingled with the Occonneechee and the surname became "Quinitchette." Some of the same folk crossed Niagra Falls and became Americans.
What I know about my father is:
He is mean.
He is frugal.
He completed the third grade. I also know he put all my brothers and sisters through college cutting grass. I'm sure someone's told him I'm just as mean, cheap, and can cut grass like a man. I don't ride, I push. Even my kids will tell you I'm the origin of that Salt N Pepa GEICO ad. They're our insurer, and we had a big LAWN. I always sang 'Push It' while I cut that half acre.
My mother was my father's housekeeper while his poor wife was off in the Quiet Home, where he had driven her. My sibs are not allowed to speak to their mother on the street, so perhaps I fared better than I know.
That's a lot.
I had to step away from that for a minute. So many of us live our lives without knowing our families. I have first cousins I have never met. The children of my mother's sisters and brothers. Why are we doing this to our offspring? I often wonder: Why was it done to me? I was walking down the street one day. I was about fifteen. I saw a pretty brownskinned lady walking toward me. There was something about her. She had an odd expression on her face. The woman let me pass her, and then she came back to me. "I'm your Aunt Frankie, your father's older sister," she said. "We never wanted to reject you--he made us do it." She died about two years later. It was the only time I ever spoke to her.
My father is an old man now. He has been on my mind the way someone you should know better than you do falls ill. It seems I will live my life and his without him ever acting as a father to me. This is so hurtful, but a person who would do this might not be the person I wanted as a father. Another thing I'll never know.
When we came to this place, now called McCallum More in Chase City, Virginia, I did not know it was the former Stoneland, a Burwell plantation where my enslaved ancestors were the cooks and carpenters.
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