AiR Honey Simone: You Don't Know Me & Neither Do I
I want you take a moment and find a physical image or bring up an image in your head of your parents or grandparent. Now I want you to think about a story you were told about your family or those that came before you. Hold on to that while I tell you a few things about me.
August 28th, 1994 I was born Kiara Simone Durham at 9am in the UNC Chapel Hill Hospital. I don’t know how much I weighed and I don’t have a photo of me before the age of 2 or 3. I do know that I came out the womb with ease & with a full head of hair which seems like a trivial thing to remember but for me, this is the only concrete thing I know about my birth story. I don’t know my first word; shit I didn’t know what time I was born until last year. For seven years of my childhood I was moved through multiple foster care homes. At the age of ten I was lucky enough to be adopted. I spent a majority of my life wondering about my place in the world.
Now let’s go back to the image that you found or thought of at the beginning. My image in my head is of my adoptive grandparents Lester & Ruth VanMiddlesworth. I grew up going to my grandparents house in Memphis. I remember the rotary phone on the wall in the dining room & a beautiful record player with a big horn on it. I remember my grandmother would lift her weights on a sheep fur rug in the living room. I would ask my dad how grandpa lost his three fingers on his left hand & he would tell me he blew them off in his makeshift science lab in his youth. If you don’t believe me, read it for yourself. I knew that my grandparents loved each other & worked together making incredible progress in the health & science world. I remember when my grandmother would press flowers in books & make bookmarks out of them.
These are memories that I will share with the children who come after me. I can show them the place added for me on their family tree
Most of my life I have struggled with my identity not because I don’t know who I am now but because I don’t know where I came from. Before I started this residency I was unaware that I had access to the NC Digital Collections or even that they existed. One of the first collections that caught my eye were the family records. I immediately scrolled down to find the letter H. I typed in the last name I was eager to know, but no records matched.
If there are archives documenting black families, and I’m sure there are, where are they? Why don’t I know about them? Why aren’t they digitally accessible to me? I hope to find out during the course of my residency. I understand the reasons why I might not find myself in these archives. I have & will continue to hold space for the absence of black families in history.
So I want you to think about that photo in your head again & now I want you to look at mine.
Keisha Shanique Durham is my mother
Louise Trudy Bowen is my grandmother.
Mary Elizabeth Harris is my great grandmother.
Granny is 98 & a North Carolina native.
I don’t know who came before her. My memories are faint but I hold tightly to them.
The Harris Family
