My website’s getting an overdue overhaul and it’s been challenging to find a “look” that represents who I am as a writer. There will be purple, of course, but I originally wanted a “plantation ruins” aesthetic that proved hard to achieve. My designer asked for a quote for the site and I was initially stumped but finally went with a line uttered by Genna in A Wish After Midnight: “I don’t know which matters more—where the seed comes from, or where it takes root and grows.” I realized that I wanted my ancestor photos to appear on the site because they are my source—folks from Canada, Nevis, and the US. I just tidied up the ancestor wall in my apartment and framed a “new” photo that my uncle gave me a couple of years ago; Ellen Gowland (above) married my great-great-grandfather James Henry Allen, and one of her sisters married one of his brothers. Ellen’s white family was so appalled at her marriage to a Black man that they moved and changed their surname (to Golden, I think). Unreal. James wouldn’t allow himself to be photographed because he didn’t want his descendants to be ashamed…what I wouldn’t give to see his face! That tells you just how racist Canada was (is); it was so hard being Black that he decided the family would gradually leave their blackness behind and “pass” for white. Some of James’ and Ellen’s kids could pass for white but some could not; my great-grandfather Richard Allen fell into the latter category. I don’t know if he’d be proud of me—I don’t know if he hated blackness or just the way Blacks were disadvantaged throughout Canadian society. I wish I had more photographs of my Caribbean family. My mother took me and my sister to a professional portrait studio when I was about 6 months old; apparently I was sensitive to bright light even back then because the photographer’s flash left me wide-eyed for hours…
In other news, here’s the cover for my latest book:
Leave a comment