November 2011

My paternal grandfather, Edward St. Lawrence Gates, was buried on July 2, 1960. After the burial, my father showed my brother and me scrapbooks that his father had kept. Within the pages of those scrapbooks was an obituary of my great-great-grandmother, a slave named Jane Gates. It was dated January 6, 1888. And then he showed us her photograph. The next day, I bought a composition book, came home, interviewed my mother and father, and began what I later learned is called a family tree. I was nine years old.

Perhaps because I grew up surrounded by my mother's relations, I was far more intrigued with the Gates branch of my family than with the Coleman side. But my father often reminded me that my mother's family was actually more distinguished than his. I thought he was just being polite. "We come from people," my mother liked to say, but it wasn't clear to me what she meant.