My "drop" of colour celebrates Black History Month

My mother and the generations before her preferred to emphasize their English ancestry, and then their Scottish.  There's plenty of both.

My mother herself was a brilliant woman and constant reader, but without what I would call an education in "critical thinking." She read historical novels and believed she knew history by piecing together facts from here and there, not infrequently mixing fact with fiction.

Perhaps unfortunately for her, I inherited her mind, yet I had the opportunity to go to university where I was taught to think more rationally.

Mom told me often when I was a child that the reason her Grandmother Sarah's skin was brown was because the Spanish Armada were shipwrecked off the coast of Devon.  Now, wait a minute, I would think.  Why is she bothering to even bring this up and then to give me a reason?  I wasn't asking.

As an adult I learned that this famous shipwreck happened in 1588.  As an explanation for my Great-grandmother's brown skin colour, it's far-fetched, to say the least.  But long before this time, I was putting 2 and 2 together whenever I found facts concerning the Underground Railroad to Canada.  The people I've met, the books I've read are too many to talk about here.  But below is a picture of my Great-grandmother with my Grandmother's eldest child,


and this is the black cameo she is wearing in her formal portrait.  I wear it today.  My great-grandmother was clearly marrying white, although she had to choose an alcoholic husband to do it.














The telling details of who she was are to be found without much difficulty by reading between the lines of my mother's family ancestry document.  Sarah's father, Arthur Parsons, arrived in Port Hope, Ontario with his wife and 8 children in 1847.  The Parsons came from Devon, England.  (Remember the Armada story?)   If Arthur's English wife were really Sarah's mother - and she looks not a bit like her, but instead has the stern, tight-lipped look of an Englishwoman - then she would have given birth to Sarah at the age of 48.  Highly dubious, I should say.

But most telling of all is the Probate of Arthur Parsons where he leaves everything he has to his 8 English children, but nothing at all to Sarah.

The will shows that Sarah was not seen as legitimate.

Sarah was very skilled at needlework, and I like to think that her work tells a tale.  Sarah favoured the more African zigzag in her early work, each monogrammed with a family last name initial.

But she also sewed a most delicately-lace-trimmed handkerchief for herself when she became a young bride, perhaps legitimizing her English status as the wife of blue-eyed Englishman, Richard Bellamy.

 

This geometric cut-work linen tablecloth is my favourite piece of all that I have that has survived.  It has a different aesthetic altogether.

 

 

 

Yet here is a delicate lace trimmed handkerchief embroidered by Sarah with African violets, as they were called.  You don't see these tiny, furry-leafed flowering plants much these days, but in my Grandmother's day their small purple blooms provided welcome winter colour.

 

 

Finally, here is Sarah's family portrait with her English husband and 5 surviving children.  Sarah, the Mother, takes pride of place in the centre of this formal group.  On the right-hand side are the 2 boys, the younger girls are to the left.  Each child has some trait she or he clearly inherits from Sarah.  Just in case you're wondering about my own tale, since you have seen how Celtic I look, my grandmother is the little girl in the middle, the most English-looking of them all. 

 

 

This photo is just a black-and-white reproduction, and so the original sepia tones have been lost.

 

"Doesn't it make sense that after 400 years of living on the same continent, in the same cities, in the same neighbourhoods...that we're all having children that are ...both one thing and "the other?"