The Way We Are

This blog was born during a writing workshop which was originally to focus on different aspects of rural life. When I first came to the workshop, I was working on two pieces. One was a story about a potluck dinner (currently in a drawer but still staying out of the circular file), and the other was an idea for a story based on the life and marriage of Alice Little Fox, the girl in the picture above.

 

Alice Little Fox, a Mohawk, was the Big Guy's great-grandmother. She grew up in Wilmington, Vermont and eventually married Charles. He had a business in the town, and eventually they began raising Morgan horses together.

Alice's genealogy has always interested me, but not as much as the story of how she and the Big Guy's grandfather found each other. Interracial marriages did happen in the 1880s, but they were hardly common. The ancestry charts can tell you when and where they married, they leave out the most important story. Town records and headstones never reveal how two people from such different worlds built a bridge to each other and then a life together.

 

I'll admit to loving a good romance. I love the story of how my grandfather, still pulling himself up by his bootstraps, won my grandmother's heart (to the initial chagrin of her patrician parents). I love the story of an uncle who refused to let culture and an ocean prevent a marriage that's lasted over 50 years. But these aren't just romances. To me, every star-crossed union is a story, not only of how we came to be what we are as a family, but as a part of the culture we live in.