Over the years that followed, Lonnie and Darlene would
add another daughter to their family. He would go on to join the United States
Army and be stationed at Fort Wainwright, Alaska. That assignment would
eventually lead him to bring Darlene and the girls to Fairbanks via the Alaskan
Highway and experience America’s “last frontier” up close and personal.
2 And Lonnie’s military service wasn’t the end of the
family’s participation in defending America. A brother from his mother’s second
marriage served twenty years in the United States Marine Corps. Later still,
Steven’s son would also join the U.S. Army and be sent to Iraq. In short, the
family’s participation in the story of America continued.
3 Lonnie’s understanding of his many familial
connections to America’s story would also continue to expand and become even
more complex over the years that followed. For instance, he would eventually
discover that his mother-in-law’s first husband, Roscoe York, was his cousin.
Hence, his wife’s beloved half-sister had also turned out to be his cousin.
4 Lonnie’s oldest daughter would eventually attend
college in Illinois and meet and marry there a direct descendant of Andrew
Ellicott (the man who had given his support to Fitch over her own ancestor,
James Rumsey, in the contest to produce a steamboat). Likewise, his youngest
daughter would eventually marry a direct descendant of Martin Salazar (the man
who had flitted across her Great Grand Uncle’s field of vision on his way back
to Alabama to die).
5 Doodle’s death had brought home to Lonnie the fact
that THE STORY NEVER ENDS! And the years since that event had only served to
reinforce that conviction.
6 “It’s like the Bible,” he thought. “A bunch of
stories that were told first around campfires and kitchen tables. Stories that
had been told, retold, embellished, written down and rearranged by many
different people across the centuries. And they somehow all came together to
tell one story. The story of one people and their quest for something better.”
7 For many years, they had been a bunch of disparate
strands scattered all over an ill-defined surface. Now, however, they had been
gathered together and united in one person. Lonnie was the product of all those
scattered strands.
8 He was like a rope that bound all of them together
and reached so far down into the past that you couldn’t see the end of it.
Moreover, his children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews provided strands that
would reach into a future that he would never personally experience.
9 Those varied strands also told a story. And it
wasn’t just the story of one man, one family or one tribe. It was the story of
a whole nation: The United States of America.
10 Another Henry Howland descendant named Ralph Waldo
Emerson had concluded in 1841 that the essence of being able to understand and
appreciate history was being able to personalize the story and see one’s self
in it. Emerson wrote of the student of history that “he should see that he can
live all history in his own person.”
11 Likewise, another Edward Ketcham descendant named
Walt Whitman had written about the “varied carols” he had heard as an observer
of the American chorale. For Whitman, America was the blending of many
different voices and songs.
12 Like his cousins before him, Lonnie had reached
similar conclusions about America, and what it meant to be an American. All of
the individual stories were part of a much bigger narrative. It was a narrative
that stretched into the distant past and continued into an unknown future.
13 And it wasn’t a narrative about things dead and
buried. It was the story of living, breathing people. William Faulkner had once
observed that “The past is never dead – It’s not even past.” And, long before
him, Cicero had written: “The life of the dead is placed on the memories of the
living.” “This is my mission,” Lonnie thought.
14 It wasn’t one strand or one story that made him an
American. It wasn’t his Pilgrim ancestry (or any of his European ancestry for
that matter). It also wasn’t his African ancestry (or his ties to the narrative
about slavery). It wasn’t even his Native American heritage (or his connections
to the wars against them) that made him an American. It was all of them
together.
15 Nevertheless, Lonnie knew that the impetus for
compartmentalization and special identity was strong in the America that had
produced him. There would be those who would deny his right to claim parts of
his heritage because of their unwillingness to imagine themselves as being part
of a whole. They would argue that some of his connections were too distant or
too tenuous. Some would say that he didn’t have enough blood to claim parts of
his heritage, while others would claim that one drop of that blood made him
somehow less than a full American.
16 “It’s all part of my DNA,” Lonnie thought to
himself as he contemplated the project before him. “I am the product of all of
those people. Take any ONE of them away, and I wouldn’t be here. Take away any
ONE of these stories, and America would be something other than what it is.”
17 Although many would continue to challenge the
notion, America really was a “melting pot.” E
pluribus unum was a reality in the person of Lonnie and his kinfolk.
18 Admittedly, there wasn’t much to be proud of in
some of the stories that were part of his heritage. Indeed, many of the strands
which made up that rope were downright ugly and dark. Lonnie knew that there
would also be a few folks who would prefer that some of those strands had not
been included in the larger narrative. He also realized, however, that removing
them would paint an inaccurate portrait of what it meant to be an American and
weaken the rope.
19 He knew that some people viewed America as a chain
of stories about continuous and unbroken success, but he also knew that this
view was very flawed. In fact, most of the stories which he had collected over
the years were stories of almost continuous hardship, suffering,
disappointment, cruelty and failure.
20 America’s story, much like the story of his own
family, was not one of continuous and unbroken success! On the contrary, the
real nature of America’s “success” as a nation lay in the persistence and
endurance of its people in the face of many sore trials and much turmoil.
21 Indeed, the story of his family and the nation
which they had helped to create reminded him more of something that the Apostle
Paul had written to the saints at Corinth almost two millennia ago. He wrote:
“We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not
in despair; Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed…” (II
Corinthians 4:9) And, just as Paul preached, Lonnie’s Americans believed that
their endurance of those trials would someday result in a better world for them
and their descendants.
22 And, just as the people in those stories
represented many different ethnicities, the geography which they had traversed
was wide and varied. Americans had always been on the move, and “home” was as
complex a notion as the folks who had lived the stories. To his Northern kin,
home was the place which they were currently living. To his Southern kin, home
would always be the place where they had begun their lives.
23 This land had been home to the buffalo and to the
dinosaurs before them. The Principal People and their kinfolk had settled here,
and the Pale-skinned ones had taken it away from them. Those same Europeans had
fought bloody wars over it and had enslaved their African brethren to work it.
24 Hence, just as he came to accept the reality of the
diversity of his ethnic heritage and all that that entailed, Lonnie’s attitude
toward the places where his family’s stories had unfolded was shaped by their
experiences. Home was not a single place. Home was all of it. The United States
of America was home.
25 Like the Israelites before them, Lonnie’s kinfolk
were storytellers. And, over many years of listening and researching, Lonnie
had collected many stories about his family. That made him the storyteller of
his family. He could now see that it was his destiny to retell the stories
which his grandmother, kinfolk and his own research had revealed.
26 Lonnie would do this for his ancestors, for himself
and for all of the future generations that he would never see. He would use a
pen name to do it, and there was only one name that would suffice. He would
tell his story as Miller Jones.
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