No Easy Answers: Untangling My Ancestral Web | TaRessa Stovall
When I honor my Ancestors with shoutouts and praisesongs, I always begin with my mother. Then I honor her mother, my Baubie. Move on to Baubie’s mother and father. Then on to Baubie’s father’s mother and father and that’s as far as I know the names to call on that side. Names of Jews (maybe Ashkenazi, maybe Sephardim, maybe a mixture) who fled the pogroms of Russia as children to the frozen state of Minnesota, where they put down roots on the northern side of the Mississippi, learned English and carved out a living in North Minneapolis where the Black people lived. Where my mother grew up with a crush on her elder’s brother’s good-looking tap-dancing Black friend who became my father. When I shout out my father and his parents, whose stories I don’t much know, I ask them to come through my dreams, plant seeds of their journeys so I can better understand the swirl of African, German, and Native American that they contributed to my DNA. My mother was the middle of …