An essay for the Loss/Capture Project by Sixty Inches From Center
October 2020

“There used to be a house here...and [my] dad bought the house next door to put my grandparents in–my mom’s and my dad’s parents,” Mom explained while standing at the edge of two empty, grassy lots in the middle of a block on the south end of my hometown, Peoria, Illinois. “And [your uncle] Arthur used to live there,” she continued, pointing to another empty lot across the street. As she said this, I added three houses to my growing mental list of homes that were once owned and occupied by members of my family. So far, the list totaled six that spread across Peoria, Chicago, and also parts of Tennessee where my sister recently found out, through some rediscovered family records, that her maternal grandparents once owned a home and land. My mother had no idea that the three homes had been torn down and it’s not clear what happened to them in the decades between now and when her parents left the homes and after she and all of her siblings moved out.

While standing in the middle of the lots, I tried to soak up all of the people, personal landmarks, and the sparks from her million memories that made it to the front of her mind. I attempted to visualize, from her descriptions, what Smith Street looked like for Mom in the 50s and 60s: “There were hedges right there, we would play volleyball over them.” “[Dad kept] the dogs, the chickens, and the garden over here.” “The garage used to be here with the two refrigerator-freezers in them—one for the fish, and one for the other meat that dad hunted and processed.” “We had so much fun here…”

Watching my mother remake her home through fragmented recollections in a now vacant space felt like a familiar practice for those of us who, like my family, have stories with many fractures and points where the details begin to disappear. There are often abrupt stops and gaps in family and community lineages because those stories weren’t always documented or easily circulated. Those stories, objects, and records are also sometimes tangled in precariousness due to a combination of difficult circumstances. Elders who construct memory bridges and provide the details that fill the fissures of photographs and records sometimes pass away before that knowledge is captured. Or, family and community histories succumb to conflicting stories and mystery around what happened to the keepsakes that were in long-cleared closets, basements, or storage trunks, and were lost over time during family migratons and formal or ad hoc estate transitions.

Talking with my mother about her history was also a potent reminder of who and what the original repositories of Black legacies are: the people through which histories and traditions are housed and carried forward, and the private or community spaces where collections were intentionally or naturally accumulated.

These repositories, including the now institutionally-housed ones that still endure today, often feel like nothing short of miracles when remembering that they exist within a country that has consistently prevented and actively resisted the formation, maintenance, and accessibility of autonomous and thriving Black histories and spaces. Despite everything working to convince us otherwise, these collections still stand as evidence that an unquantifiable and, in some cases, unrecoverable Black cultural richness exists and that Black people have always been aware of the need to document and carry on our stories ourselves. And through tireless and relatively quiet maneuvers, these repositories and people have withstood within a country whose founders saw the erasure of Black and Indigenous culture, language, and history as something as critical to the making of the United States as creating an exclusive, distorted, and self-serving version of freedom and democracy.

What we are fortunate enough to know now, which counters any claim that we have no significant history, and what some from past generations didn’t have readily available, is the research and evidence that addresses gaps in Black history, and a deeper understanding around approaches to preservation that were inherent to our ancestors. As Dorothy Porter Wesley described back in 1957, the “anthropologists, linguists, and historians have gone far to correct this ignorant opinion [and] have proved that many African people of high culture have possessed an historical sense, and further, that their trained memories and prodigious fund of legend have served as the actual conservators of their history.”1 She goes on to reference Maurice Delafosse’s use of the term “living books” when talking about Africa’s earliest libraries that were, in fact, people: court historians, artists, storytellers, poets, musicians, and others who carried the responsibility of being “walking encyclopedias” and passing on tribal stories, proverbs, mythologies, genealogies, beliefs, and root traditions. It is a form of history-keeping that is still practiced today.

Alongside these history-making traditions, many of the collections used to anchor and establish the Black research institutions that are beloved today can be traced back to individuals who also knew the importance of collecting and preserving Black histories and memories and who took it upon themselves to make sure these collections were complex, nuanced, thorough, and placed in good hands. Dorothy Porter Wesley was one of those individuals. A foremother of decolonizing libraries and their classification systems as well as a defining force in the valuation of library materials authored by Black people, Porter was one of the main librarians and curators responsible for developing the collections that would help to establish the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University in 1973. Starting with the private collections and libraries of Jesse E. Moorland and Arthur B. Spingarn, the center’s holdings were established on abolitionist texts, narratives of enslaved peoples, and the global Black experience and diaspora.

Read the full essay here….

Photo Credits:
[1] Collage by Kiki Lechuga-Dupont.

[2] A crowd of people walking up the stairs and into the front door of the Michigan Avenue location of the DuSable Museum of African American History, circa 1969. Black Chicago Directory, 1969. Carol Adams Collection. Photographer: Unknown.

[3] Women's reading group at Hall Branch, 1940. In this photograph, Vivian Harsh, the first African American branch head of the Chicago Public Library, is at the back on the left, children's literature writer, librarian, and advocate, Charlemae Hill Rollins, is at the back on the right They are standing behind a table where 26 other people are sitting, books and papers in front of them, most looking at the camera. Hall Branch Archives. Photographer: Unknown.

[4] Photograph of Dorothy Porter Wesley instructing Howard University manuscript staff: Thomas Battle, Evelyn Brooks-Barnett and Denise Glelin, July 1974. Beinecke Library, Box 101, Folder: 1974 D.P. M. F. Photographer: Unknown.