by Tonya Bolden
“How much is the globe?” I asked the little old man inside.
“Which? Terrestrial or celestial?”
I bit my lip. “Beg pardon?”
The man pointed to the globe in the window, one like we had in school. “Terrestrial. It maps the earth,” he said. “Four dollars.” Then he pointed to a shelf behind the counter, and to a smaller globe I hadn’t noticed. It was deep-sea blue with bright white stars and strange creatures in gold. “Celestial. Maps the heavens. Five dollars.”
“I’ll take the celestial,” I said.
While the man wrapped up my globe, I looked around at all the books on shelves that lined the room. I wondered if this bookshop was here when my mother was alive.
Then I noticed a rack of picture postcards. Most were scenes from Charleston.
Capitol Street. Kanawha Street. The depot across the river. Those were the ones I liked the most.
A postcard.
That’s what I’d send my father.
As for the message—
Dear Father,
Grandpa is no longer against you.
Plant a seed. See what grows. If my father wrote back and things seemed peaceable, then I’d send him my photograph.
As I left the bookshop with my globe and my postcards, I paused, caught up in Grandpa’s caution.
Don’t spend it on trifles.
Thump-thump.
I thought about my photographs I still had to pay for. I thought about my hat. My globe. The postcards. Though I still had several silver dollars and change on me, I wondered if I had done wrong.
Pshaw! a strong, sure voice exclaimed. These are not trifles. These are things dear to you!
I smiled. And on my way I went.
- - - - -
At Friedman’s, that same girl was in the window. When she saw me, she smiled and waved. I stopped, waved back.
She had made changes to that mannequin in the peach satin gown. Now she had on long black gloves and a broad-brimmed black satin hat, cocked to one side.
The girl was pinning something on the mannequin’s shoulder. When she stepped back, I did a double take, peered closer.
The pin was a dragonfly.
They are one of God’s joys to the world. Sign of a better day coming! Of new beginnings!
The way the sunlight hit the pin—copper body, red eyes, front wings green, back wings blue—I felt like shimmershine!
Then and there, I decided to stop being scared of dragonflies. So I’d always have a reminder, I went inside and purchased that pin.
After that, I had one more stop in mind. Over to Kanawha Street and down by the river. To guess which was Aunt Tilley’s welcoming tree.
Then, I thought better. Save that for another day.
Dusk was coming on. And after all, I no longer wondered about Aunt Tilley’s last wish. I knew.
I also knew Grandpa would be home by now. I could see him pacing the porch or in the sitting room playing checkers with himself, but looking at his pocket watch every other minute.
I didn’t want Grandpa to worry.
With a jumping-jack joy over my first on my own, I headed straight home. To my family.
Author’s Note
Over the years, I’ve come to collect old books, old newspapers and magazines, antique ink bottles, pre-1964 U.S. coins, and, yes, photographs, most of them well over one hundred years old. (And I wouldn’t put it past me to start collecting antique globes now.)
When I started collecting photographs, I wasn’t picky about much—often not even about condition. Ditto on type. I adored the little 2½×4-inch carte-de-visite (which Aunt Tilley calls “card visits”) as much as I did larger photographs mounted on card stock, such as the 4½×6½-inch cabinet card (so called because they were often displayed in cabinets). I also picked up images produced on metal—tintypes (also known as melainotypes and ferrotypes).
Whatever the condition, whatever the type or size, it was most always the faces that entranced me.
Did he have a love for the sea? I let myself guess about a very proud-looking man with derby and walking stick.
What was she thinking about? A loss? A longing? A secret? I wondered of an elderly woman wearing a hat with a white feather and seated in a chair that brought to my mind a throne.
What did she want out of life? I asked as I studied the gaze of a girl who had her photograph taken around the turn of the last century at Gates Art Gallery in Charleston, West Virginia.
Finding Family was born of my wonderings about the faces I collected over the years: people whose real identities are mysteries to me.
So, yes, the photographs in Finding Family are of people who once walked the earth, but their stories—names, personalities, kinships—all fiction. With one exception: Heroes of the Colored Race. Nothing fanciful here, and this 1881 lithograph isn’t from my collection, but from the Library of Congress.
Just as I created stories for the photographs, I took other liberties as well. For instance, Adena’s neighborhood, the Hollow, is real, but not as near to Delana’s home as I suggest. Two, while the postcards are from the early 1900s, their original messages have been changed.
Still, more often than not, in context and setting I have been faithful to history as much as possible. The quick sketch of Martin Delany’s life is no fabulation, but Aunt Tilley does have trouble with his sons’ names (“Alexander Doomas” should be Alexandre Dumas and “Two Cent” should be Toussaint L’Ouverture). In a similar vein, Aunt Tilley’s “Melungin” is another person’s “Melungeon,” a once-derogatory name for a people of mixed ethnicity who typically lived in northeast Tennessee, western Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and elsewhere in the South: a people about whom you can read in memoirs and history books.
As for other matters of history, in introducing Delana to another of my heroes, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, I used the 1891 edition of Harper’s book Sketches of Southern Life. And yes, the Honorable Blanche K. Bruce really used the word “dude.” His speech and everything else Delana learns about the Tri-State Emancipation Day celebration where her parents met are straight out of the September 23, 1891, Wheeling Intelligencer.
History inspired other aspects of the book, too. The interior of Delana’s home is based on that of Frederick Douglass’s last home, in Anacostia. Fascinated as I am by black strivers of the nineteenth century—especially those who came “up from slavery”—bits of Booker T. Washington’s life went into the making of Grandpa. My awareness of another once-enslaved high achiever, William Johnson, the “Barber of Natchez,” triggered my decision on Grandpa’s trade and that of his mentor/ liberator, Hannibal Watson. As for their relationship, that sprang from the knowledge that when it comes to actual cases of blacks holding other blacks in bondage, there’s often more than meets the eye.
On one last source of inspiration: when I sent Delana off to Gates’s place, in the forefront of my mind was an early 1900s photograph of the Washington, D.C., studio of the pioneering female photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston.
So in the making of Finding Family I had the great thrill of combining my passion for history with my wonderings about long-ago lives: the millions of everyday people from the past who experienced problems with peers, traumas, and dilemmas, and in the end lifelifting revelations like we do today; people who are footnotes in history books—or not in history books at all.
Thankfully, in museums and historical societies, in libraries and private collections, we have people’s diaries, family Bibles, handicrafts, letters, and other artifacts—like photographs. Such treasures not only give us insights into history but also allow our imaginations to take flight.
As for your life, I hope that you will take good care of artifacts from it, along with your family stories. A century into the future, what you have left behind may very well be prized by a writer working on a book of nonfiction. Or fiction.
Acknowledgments
I cannot thank you enough, my editor, Michelle H. Nagler: for embracing this proj
ect from the start; for your adept direction; for your superb sensibilities; and for all that terrific energy. Stay relentless.
To other wonderful people in the Bloomsbury family—in editorial, design, production, and postproduction—thank you so much for all your great work: Caroline Abbey, Diana Blough, Regina Castillo, Melanie Cecka, Jill Davis, Danielle Delaney, Beth Eller, Alexei Esikoff, Katie Fee, Beth Jordan, Melissa Kavonic, Donna Mark, Patricia McHugh, Vanessa Nuttry, and Deb Shapiro.
For your feedback on the manuscript, thank you: Sharon Franklin, librarian at Andrew Lewis Middle School, Salem, VA; Susan Hess, retired New York City public school librarian, and Bobby Thomas. For reading and for all your consultations and education on antique photographs, thank you, Greg French of Greg French Early Photography in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
Bless your heart, Joyce Hansen, for reading, too, and for that early support and encouragement when I called you up lost and in a panic. I’ll never forget your generosity and your wisdom words.
Thanks are also due to the good people at Omniterrum, in Lynchburg, Virginia, for the assist in my research on antique globes; to Eleanor Beckner at the McDowell Public Library in Welch, West Virginia, for help with Cucumber; to Amy Kastigar at Ohio County Public Library, in Wheeling, West Virginia, for clarifying some things about the Emancipation Day article in the Wheeling Intelligencer; to Richard “Casey” James for writing In the Hollow and Anthony Kinser, Sr., of the West Virginia Center for African American Art & Culture for making the connection.
And to my agent, Jennifer Lyons, thank you a thousand times for everything that you do.
The photographs used in this book are from the author’s private collection. Although the author and publisher have made extensive efforts to identify the photographers of these photos, they have been unable to do so beyond what is attributed here. They are historical photographs of real people, though their identities are unknown to the author or publisher. They bear no resemblance to characters in this book apart from physical descriptions. The characters are wholly imagined by the author. Should you recognize a photo—perhaps one of your own family!—we’d love to know about it. Please write to us through the author’s Web site, www.tonyaboldenbooks.com.
Copyright © 2010 by Tonya Bolden
All rights reserved You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
First published in the United States of America in September 2010 by Bloomsbury Books for Young Readers
Electronic edition published in October 2011
www.bloomsburykids.com
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Bloomsbury BFYR, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010
“I Thirst” taken from Sketches of Southern Life by Frances E. Watkins Harper, Philadelphia: Ferguson Bros. & Co., 1891
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bolden, Tonya.
Finding family / by Tonya Bolden. —1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Raised in Charleston, West Virginia, at the turn of the twentieth century by her grandfather and aunt on off-putting tales of family members she has never met, twelve-year-old Delana is shocked when, after Aunt Tilley dies, she learns the truth about her parents and some of her other relatives.
ISBN: 978-1-59990-865-6 (ebook)
[1. Families—Fiction. 2. Self-perception—Fiction. 3. Grandfathers—Fiction.
4. Aunts—Fiction. 5. Secrets—Fiction. 6. African Americans—Fiction. 7. West
Virginia—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.B635855Fi 2010 [Fic]—dc22 2010000535