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Sometime after midnight on a starlit evening in the autumn of 1931, my mother and her siblings were awakened by loud knocks on the front door of their house, the snorting of horses, and the shouts of white men demanding that my grandfather come out. Holding a lamp before her like Lady Liberty’s flame, my grandmother opened the door and told the men, who were not hooded, that my grandfather was not there. “My churren are sleeping,” she told them. “Please don’t wake them up.” Two of the men came in and looked around the three-room house. They carried lanterns, which shone upon my mother and her sisters in one bed and her brothers in the other. They looked under the beds, in the kitchen; there was no place to hide inside the house. And my grandfather, warned by a sympathetic white man an hour earlier of his impending lynching, had flown into the night, mysteriously lifted, as it seemed, above woods, swamp, and river never to contact his wife or children again. The weather turned cold early that year. There was deep snow. My grandmother had work cooking for teachers at the white people’s school. She would wrap burlap sacks—or inner tubes from car tires when she could get them— around her feet as protection against the snowdrifts covering the fields and pathways to and from work. My mother missed almost the whole year of school because she had no shoes. She never got beyond fifth grade, and although she could read children’s stories and the Bible, she was functionally illiterate. Yet she had an unquenchable love and respect for education. As a mother she imparted that love of learning to her five children, all of whom went to college. My sisters, my brother, and I are college-educated members of the middle class basically due to my parents’ great desire that we make a better living for ourselves than they had been able to do. They made tremendous personal sacrifices to ensure our future. I remember that my mother wore the same coat for ten winters when I was growing up. She would go north to the city during the four months after Christmas to work as a live-in maid for rich white 1 Freedom’s Genesis 2 Freedom’s Genesis people in order to help my father pay college tuition. From the perspective of our own comfortable stations in life, my siblings and I see clearly that our mother’s sacrifices on our behalf, along with those of our father, were nothing short of phenomenal. Interestingly enough, within the context of her familial background, my mother’s aspiration that her children become college educated was an exhibition of deviant behavior. Her own education had not been encouraged, and none of her siblings had urged their children to aspire to earn a college degree. In fact, some of her nieces and nephews did not complete high school. Even as a child I wondered admiringly how my mother could be so vastly different from other members of her family. As an adult my thoughts more often have turned to what my mother could have become if her opportunities had been different. My parents were giants upon whose shoulders my siblings and I stand. Our children stand there, too, as will their children. My mother was an agent of total change in her ancestral line. She left the long-worn rails of recent generations and imagined a new way over unfamiliar land. She “switched the track,” and her children took off in a different direction. Her grandchildren are now on the course that she set so many years ago. Her eldest grandchild attended Illinois State University and North Central College. One of her granddaughters earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in three years from Harvard University and graduated from medical school at Columbia University’s School of Physicians and Surgeons where she is doing her residency. Another granddaughter recently graduated from the Johns Hopkins University with a bachelor’s degree in biology. Yet another granddaughter is a graduate of Chicago’s Columbia College with a bachelor’s degree in advertising, and a grandson is in his junior year as a business major at Temple University. The youngest grandchild, a college freshman, attends a community college near his home. My family’s bright present and future are the result of unflagging sacrifice and beloved intention. My mother and father lifted their descendants by...

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