Rebels and Sunflowers
A 500-Year-Long Journey Back to Africa
by
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Writing this story reminds me of the 1962 Broadway Musical "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum." I began this story by teasing a question I have asked myself since I was a boy: How was it that two very different families came together to bring about the Howard marriage? Another way to pose the dilemma is to ask why I am here? But as I continued to write, my more micro question assumed a broader perspective. I began to uncover a deeper, broader approach to understanding my family's origins and modes of survival. As Africans in America, I was facinated to learn the polar opposite strategies generations of my mother's and father's families negotiated to pave their way through colonialism, slavery, Jim Crow, and the passage of time. For each, survival meant more than mere existence from one day to the next. To our ancestors, their own survival goal was to to ensure that over time their descendants reach the right forum -- the forum that would enable a return to our first home. But a prerequisite for returning home was the need to remember the place where the journey started. Upon learning that, we had to figure out how to get there. My paternal ancestors' strategy for their self-survival was to fight. Such a strategy did not often allow for putting down roots that would enable a stay in one place too long. Too often the struggle called for a preparedness to pick up and move at a moment's notice. For centuries, this was the strategy of my father's people. This struggle, this fight is a strategy of the rebel. My maternal ancestors' survival strategy was the opposite. They aimed to survive in place, to stay together. They developed the skills of the diplomat. On the surface, they were often the conformists, the ones who established strong roots and stayed in place to face each morning's sunrise. If truth be told, they perfomed the double entendre with acrobatic precision. As slaves, not one of them was sold away from the family. They were the sunflowers. That the rebels and the sunflowers crossed paths and joined in marriage was necessary if the oldest of our ancestors were to have their way. For, in doing so, these ancestors would one day rejoice in once again seeing the soul, the essence of the one who was taken from them hundreds of years ago. To the ancestors, the trials and tribulations of the union I questioned for so long were worth the joy of the return. To the ancestors, that is what the marriage was for.
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In "Rebels and Sunflowers," author William D. Howard begins with a description of eye-opening vacation trips to explore the Africa and to generally learn more about his African origins. But ever cognizant of the differences between his paternal and maternal lineages, his travels and reading turned into a research project which sought answers to the question: How did two people who love each other join in marriage and unite two very different family orientations to form the family he has know and loved all his life? Along the way to forming answers, Bill's research project took him not only to various parts of Africa he had no intention of visiting at the beginning of his project, but also to places and cultures in parts of Europe, The Moluccas, Indonesia, New Guinea, The Philippines, and elsewhere. Starting with the stories his paternal grandfather shared since his youth, and continuing with memories of childhood visits with his mother's large family in South Carolina, the author realized that the root of the differences he sought to explain go as far back as Yoruba ancestors 12th-century Obalufon II and Dada and continue through Angola's Nzinga and even the 19thcentury "Howard v Howard" North Carolina Supreme Court decision. The two sides of the author's family formed two very different survival strategies to plow through the ages. The strategies formed behaviors that are as aggressive as the rebel and as conciliatory as the sunflower.