The History of a Race

In my American Revolution History class, we are required to find a soldier’s pension who served in the Revolutionary War and uncover details about his life and compare him to other men from his state. I decided to do some research on my family lineage and found that one of my relatives Tench Tilghman supported the war effort. Tench came from a wealthy family that owned a tobacco plantation on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. While Tench’s father and brothers were strong loyalists, Tench developed strong patriotic sentiments and decided to enlist. As I discovered details about Tench’s service, I unveiled very small pieces of my history.

The information that I gathered about Tench only filled in a couple holes in the mystery of my family history. I know little about my ancestor’s homes and occupations; I know nothing about their political perspectives, religious beliefs, and hardships. The small pieces of my family history that I knew only represented a small part of my complete history. I am the product of a larger history just like every modern human. Each person bound to a long strain of their religion’s history, their culture’s history, and their race’s history. While it seems self-evident, we often neglect the degree in which this long history has influenced the people we are today.

The memoir a Brown Girl Dreaming illustrates how a person is the product of their race’s experiences from the past. The first poem establishes the inseparability of Jaqueline current life from African American history. She describes her grandparents who “worked the deep rich land/ unfree” and how “the stories of South Carolina already run like rivers/ through [her] veins” (Woodson 2). Jacqueline notes from the start that her being is not separate from her relative’s experiences; they are a part of her and actively shape her life. As the memoir unfolds, Jacqueline makes it clear that the ripple effect of her race’s history has led to the events of the civil rights movement and will lead on to a future of hardship that the race will face.

Jacqueline provides images of the Civil Rights movement and strings them together with the past to show that the actions we take in the present are often retrospective. Jacqueline describes the actions of protestors, noting how she sees “teenagers walking into stores, sitting where brown people still aren’t allowed to sit and getting carried out, their bodies limp, their faces calm” (Woodson 72). Then she quotes her Grandfather’s explanation that “this is the way that brown people have to fight” because “more than a hundred years and we are still fighting for the free life we’re supposed to be living” (Woodson 74). Jaqueline often includes comments about the past when she speaks of the actions taken during the civil rights movement to show how current actions are fueled by past events. The history of the African American race “run like rivers” through everyone’s veins as they continue a struggle that has been going on for longer than a century. We often take action in the present with a retrospective mindset because we are so much a product of our past.