Monday, May 10, 2021

While Miz Kittling Knits: Finding Your Roots

Now that Denis has been retired for a while, I seem to have gotten my knitting mojo back. I'm happily working away on #4 of the Afghans of 2021, and I've already ordered the yarn for three more. It's always interesting for me to see how my Facebook friends react to the photos I post of my knitting. Most of the time, I think they react most strongly to the color, not the pattern. 

Most of the patterns I choose aren't very flamboyant because the most important criteria for me with regard to afghans is that they be soft and warm with few places for fingers and toes to stick through. I'll be graduating to a new stage of afghan making in the future (patterns with finger and toe holes), but that certainly can't be said for the afghan I'm going to show you today. Nope, today's afghan was made to be completely functional, to blend in, and let other textiles do all the talking. Let me show you.


This one is very plain, isn't it? It's done in a simple knit five, purl five pattern, and the special thing about it is the yarn I used. This is the first time I used Lion Brand Yarn's Feel Like Butta, a 100% polyester yarn in a shade of soft sage which happens to be only slightly darker than the color of our bedroom walls. It is incredibly soft-- like chenille without the fuzz and other challenges of chenille. 

The afghan is laying on the foot of our bed, and now you can undoubtedly see why I wanted a toned-down afghan-- that quilt is definitely doing all the talking!
 


What was I watching while I was knitting? One of my favorite programs which I admit to discovering only within the past couple of years. On Finding Your Roots, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and a staff of incredibly talented genealogists research the family trees of various celebrities. Several times, their discoveries have been astounding, and I love the work they've done to uncover as much information as they possibly can on the family trees of Black celebrities.

In fact, one of the episodes affected me so deeply that I just sat there with tears streaming down my face. When a white person hits a brick wall in researching their family tree, many times the culprit is a courthouse burning down with all the records inside, or a family who did a complete name change when they came to America, which is what seems to have happened with one of the families on my own tree. But for almost all Black Americans, it's entirely different. They're listed on property rolls along with the cattle, sheep, and pigs, and-- like cattle, sheep, and pigs-- they are not listed by name. When that Black actress looked at a document and Gates asked her, "What do you see?" Her eyes filled with tears, and she replied, "They have names!" I've never felt so ashamed of being white in my life.

One white actor found out that he had slave owners in his family tree and wanted Gates to leave that out during the filming of the episode. Gates refused. Good for him! The earliest of my ancestors came to Virginia (in 1626) and North Carolina. Several of them were slave owners. That's absolutely nothing to be proud of, quite the opposite in fact. My grandmother was so happy when she found the will in which one of our ancestors freed his slaves. I wasn't so impressed. Evidently, I was a skeptic at a young age because the thoughts that ran through my mind were, "How nice that he made sure that he didn't have to do without their labor while he was alive," and "I wonder if his heirs found a way to avoid freeing them?" I don't know. What I do know is that, I'm not going to excuse what those slave-owning ancestors of mine did. It was wrong, no if's, and's, or but's.

As far as I'm concerned, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is doing some amazing and very important work that should help remove the scales from many people's eyes. White privilege is an ugly thing, and those of us who have benefited from it all our lives need to put ourselves in others' shoes. We need to understand the roads our families have traveled through the centuries to get to where we are today. It will only help us to improve our futures. Thank you, Mr. Gates. I hope your series runs for a good long time.
 
Do any of you watch this series?

13 comments:

  1. Yes, Henry Louis Gates is doing a great job in Finding Your Roots. I have watched some episodes which were heartbreaking. I saw a video clip of Don Lemon finding out some of his ancestors, whose first names were written down, were enslaved people who were "sold" for $1800. He was stunned, but vowed to do something in their memory.
    And I saw a few episodes where a white celebrity found out an ancestor was an enslaver.
    And also, I saw one episode where Peggy Lipton found out some of her relatives died in a concentration camp. She and her daughter visited it, which was shown.
    You are so right in outing your ancestors who profited from enslaved people's labor. That was criminal and inhumane in the worst way. And I wish everyone in the South who is still fighting the Civil War and cheering the defeated Confederacy, would stop it right now. And that the racism that stemmed from it would just end. Every white person should just shed themselves of that horrible attitude. It is inhumane and dangerous and harmful. And it continues to poison this society.

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    1. I wonder if any of them would learn-- and understand-- the truth if they had to actually spend time as slaves? Walking a mile in someone else's moccasins, as it were.

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  2. Plain or not, that afghan is beautiful, Cathy. I'm glad you're finding joy in knitting again. It's always nice to be lifted up with things like that. And thanks for mentioning Finding Your Roots. My husband really likes that show, and I think it's very well done. I'm always impressed by the work that goes into finding out some fascinating things about families.

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    1. It's one of the best ways to become a real life Sherlock Holmes. I ought to know; my mother was one!

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  3. And the afghan is lovely, color and pattern.

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  4. Acknowledging your ancestors calmly and straightforwardly, as in this post, is the best approach (in my not-so-humble opinion) - good for you! Trying to deny, hide, obfuscate, etc., only makes things worse. I've heard about the show, and sm glad to see a positive review of it. I have an interest in genealogy, but only seem to do anything in occasional spurts. Oh, and my ancestors were coming over from The Auld Sod as a result of the famine, so I'm not likely to find any slave owners as close connections.

    And you're right that I react to the color of an afghan 1st, and then notice the pattern :)

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    1. It's likely but not impossible. You never know what's to be found buried in a family tree. I really know nothing about my father's family. My maternal grandmother's family contained the slave owners because they came across the pond with money and the desire to make a lot more. My maternal grandfather's family came across with very little, and even when they did accumulate some savings, they didn't "invest" it in human beings, thank goodness.

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  5. I enjoy working on the various branches of my family tree, and have only recently had a breakthrough on one of the branches that had me stumped for years. It's amazing what one "missing link" can so quickly lead to. Turns out that one of my Texas ancestors (a German) was one of only 780 men from Texas who fought in the Union Army. He was a Sgt. in a calvary unit manned by German immigrants from central Texas. The Louisiana side of the family contributed men to the Confederate side but, as far as I can tell, they never met in battle. I don't know if the Louisiana side were ever slave owners or not, but because they got to Louisiana fairly early on after being expelled by the British from Canada, I would not be at all surprised that they did.

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    1. As one of only 780 Texans who fought for the Union, that ancestor of yours must have put up with a great deal, and I'm not just talking about trash talk, there had to be a lot of danger involved. He sounds like a man to admire.

      Humans have owned other humans for thousands of years, and I've never been able to understand why we ever thought that was right.

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  6. I had Jewish Eastern European grandparents who fled tsarist antisemitic pogroms in 1907. My grandmother worked in garment factories then,notably Triangle, and was sick the day of the fire. My grandfather was a cigar maker, later had his own cigar store in the Newark train station.
    My Irish great grandparents fled poverty and famine in the late 1800s. There's an English great grandfather who had been a groomsman across the pond.
    Inlaws of a relative lived in the South in the 1800s and I think were on the side of the Confederacy. I've said nothing.

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    1. There's really nothing to say since you're not certain what they did. It does point out the fact that we ALL have a Heinz-57 mixture of good and bad on our family trees. ALL of us.

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  7. Well, I don't speak to the racist second cousins, whom my father would have taken to task. And I avoid them at family events, two in the last 20 years.

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