Homecoming.

This Christmas will actually be the first one I spend with my east coast fam since I was at least 7 years old. I'm excited, but I think I'm also a little sad. My childhood friends like to say, "You're so east coast!" whenever I come back from DC. Sometimes I wonder if it's because I've been away for that long or if it's really that I've "adapted" to life in the DC Metro. Have I REALLY traded my flip flops for timbs and hightops? Nah, not really. I'm still a Cali girl at heart. I miss the Chuck Taylors with the fat white laces. I get hype when they play old school Snoop in the clubs out here. I like my latte with soy milk. I still get slightly irritated when it's below 60 degrees outside. And sometimes I am still amused with how many people don't drive out here. As comfortable as I am with Washington, I find that I miss home a lot, even when I don't want to admit it. I miss Los Angeles "staples"--Venice, In and Out, Coffee Bean, Roscoes, Poetry and jazz sessions in Leimert, Watts Towers, stilettos and cellphones in Beverly Hills. I miss palm trees in the middle of December. I even miss the long bus ride on the 210 to my high school sometimes.

But the more I think about it, it may have been easier to adjust to DC since much of my family's roots are here. My mother grew up in Southeast, my father in Northwest. I mentioned in my last entry that I was contacted by my cousin, who has been researching his family history for ten years. I learned some things I hadn't known about before, and a few things I had wondered about but hadn't gotten answers about. For instance, it was confirmed that my father's side of the family had migrated to DC from the Carolinas and Virginia, respectively. Talking with my grandmother and with my cousin about our family history, I learned we can trace our family as far as Frances Simmons, who was a sharecropper like many Blacks after the Civil War.

Some of my relatives live in a house in Northeast Washington DC. When I was there for a small family gathering in April, it was mentioned that the house had been in the family since the 1890s. My great-great grandmother owned that house in during those years; she was a stenographer, while her husband was an insurance broker.

All of this begs the question--knowing that my great-great grandmother moved to Washington circa 1919-1920 (the tail end of the Great Migration)...knowing that my fam has roots in Virginia and the Carolinas...knowing that some of us got to the Carolinas by way of Haiti...where were we before then? The easiest answer is Africa, but I can't help but wonder where in Africa. It's one thing to guess or hypothesize, it's completely different to really know.

When I spoke with my cousin, I asked about if he had been able to research past the late 1800s. He said that the hardest part is the disconnect caused by slavery--before Reconstruction, most Black folks were recorded as "property" so birth records and Census data would not have accounted for that. Family units were divided again and again as slaves were bought, sold and sometimes killed. As a result, the familial bond was oftentimes broken. "It's possible though," he said in a more hopeful tone. "It would take more work, but if your Grandmother and I keep talking and researching--and if you keep doing the same and keep learning more--maybe we can get more questions answered."

For Black families, researching family history can be both frustrating and painful. Frustrating because our history of slavery and opporession makes it even harder to reach conclusions about where our roots really begin. Painful because--as with any family of any race--there will always be questions that some family members would rather be left unanswered. But just beginning to talk about things as simple as when your grandmother moved into her house or where your aunt went to college can spark a conversation about why your family is the way they are. Taking the time to talk about things that are not-so-pleasant as well as the good memories and anecdotes is just part of the "healing process" if you will. It's one of the first steps in strengthening the familial bond that we've lost in our past.