Tin retold
I was thinking about Tin’s genealogy as I was working on mine and Tatjana’s. I have some details of his background but not a lot. I thought of a study I read once that talked about how the influx of Africans came into the United States and there was some tracking someone had done about how tribes from this part of Africa had wound up one part of the U.S. and other tribes in other parts. Then I wondered about the Chicago area, where there was a great migration from the south a little after the turn of the century.
A neighbor was telling me that right around here on the bayou, on our side of it, there were free people of color who owned their own homes in record numbers compared to the rest of the U.S.
I was wondering about Tin, if his story was retold without adherence to fact, where his family was from the deep South, from New Orleans, perhaps a great great grandfather who had been a blacksmith and a mother who was a healer. Maybe they lived around here and the horseshoes that were unearthed during the remodel of the LaLa after one hundred years of the same family in this house had actually been wrought by him.
Maybe at the turn of the century, one of Tin’s ancestors left New Orleans to find work in Chicago. He was from a privileged background, the son of demanding middle-class parents, educated at Morehouse, the most prestigious black college in America, trained as a surgeon. Could be that in Chicago, he met a beautiful woman from Mississippi and they married and this now well established family fell in the swing of an orderly life of getting and spending, and their daughter, who was a beauty, was restless with a wild streak and had taken up with a foreigner and ended up pregnant as a teenager.
She wound up in Gary, Indiana, to escape the overbearing parents who demanded more of her than she could be, and she lost her way among a group with equally bereft inner compasses. The daughter of this woman came to be raised by a series of different families trying to fix what had broken, and she herself wound up a pregnant teenager and by the time she had her third child, a son, she was in a struggle.
But this boy’s fate was tied up in the land of his ancestors and an angel who was about to get her wings traversed the country and enlisted help from an earth angel, an aunt, who woke her partner out of a deep slumber and said, “Jesus told me to get that boy.”
And as women often do they form networks and webs that span so far beyond a single one’s reach that earth angels were notified all over this land, the call went out rom the midwest to the north east and bounced down to the gulf south and the angel, who was in her own struggle, tied as she was to her own blood, land, and kin, was being called away and as she struggled to hold onto what was familiar, for the third time she flew to where the boy was, and saw so clearly what we see now.
This boy’s life would soon be inextricably intertwined with her blood, her daughter, their land that coincidentally was his own by birth, and together they conceived of a world for him that would expand, with beings and nonbeings, with blood and imagined ties, in a land as magical and fertile as any part of this world, and there he would begin his life as Tin and begin crafting his own narrative unlike any other.
Why settle for the stories given to you?
September 9th, 2010 at 4:55 pm
Indeed! I liked yours far better than whatever they told you.