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Posted June 23rd, 2011 by Thomas Norman DeWolf
When I was a child, many of my friends were recent arrivals from the South whose families came north during “The Great Migration.” Those of us who were born in Chicago sometimes laughed at their funny accents and country ways. There were also many children who disappeared every summer. When school let out for vacation, […]
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Posted June 16th, 2011 by Thomas Norman DeWolf
After posting Colonial Williamsburg: History on Steroids a few days ago, I received more comments on Facebook than for anything I’ve written in several months. In response to this statement, “it is often quite challenging to find people of color willing to act as interpreters for displays of enslaved people” one friend wrote: I would […]
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Posted June 12th, 2011 by Thomas Norman DeWolf
Tom and I just arrived back in NY state after a grueling 22 day journey of 5,867 miles through 21 states. I am SO HAPPY to be back to the place I call home these days. Upon arrival, I leapt out of my Jeep with joy! After making sure my key still fit in the […]
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Posted June 12th, 2011 by Thomas Norman DeWolf
Sharon and I decided to wrap up our three-week U.S. road trip with a visit to a couple of famous and significant sites that interpret the arrival of European and African people to the Virginia shore. We bought tickets ($35 each) to Colonial Williamsburg and intended to follow a day there with a visit to […]
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Posted June 7th, 2011 by Thomas Norman DeWolf
It isn’t often that I intone the name of present-day political figures when I blog. I find that names like Barack Obama or Sarah Palin tend to elicit such emotional reactions from readers that the actual intent of the post is often lost as readers react with their feelings about the lightning-rod figure instead. Today […]
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Posted June 4th, 2011 by Thomas Norman DeWolf
After traversing four states in one day, the odometer on my Jeep rolled past 3591. Thirty-three miles from our destination — Springfield, Illinois — I saw the red and blue flashers in the rear view mirror. BUSTED! I was willfully doing 80 in a 65 mph zone. My twenty years without a traffic violation record […]
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Posted June 2nd, 2011 by Thomas Norman DeWolf
Sometime around 1811, Sylvester Dunn relocated from South Carolina to Amite County Mississippi. He was one of the very first settlers of the new American territory carved out of the Choctaw nation. The fact that Sylvester had the benefit of a free land patent and free labor surely contributed immeasurably to his success on the […]
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Posted May 30th, 2011 by Thomas Norman DeWolf
The Amite County Courthouse in Liberty, Mississippi contains something I’ve not seen before: slave records. Reading accounts from the early 1800’s of the sale or transfer of ownership of black people among white people is profoundly startling. Knowing that some of these transactions involved people related to my writing partner Sharon Morgan compounds the impact […]
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Posted May 29th, 2011 by Thomas Norman DeWolf
We imbibed a long drink of history as we visited multiple relics of plantation life yesterday. My eyes opened in a frilly high rise canopied bed at Linden, the Conner family “town house” in Natchez, Mississippi. Fortunately, none of the ghosts who are said to inhabit the house made appearances during the night, which I […]
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Posted May 27th, 2011 by Thomas Norman DeWolf
Sharon and I didn’t plan the timing of our journey to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides. It was while watching the amazing film Freedom Riders on PBS (as of this writing you can still watch it online here) on May 16 that I realized the timing. Sharon and I drove from […]
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