Rebecca Dwight Bruff's Blog, page 2

re: mothers

Parenting is hard duty.

book music

Most of us hear and internalize music long before we read, and it can function canonically, shaping our understanding and feeding our spirits.

re: learning the truth

Like many, I’ve watched the extraordinary Henry Louis Gates Jr/ PBS series on Reconstruction, the brief shining moment following the Civil War and before the black codes and Jim Crow reigned supreme. You can see a great preview of it here:https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reconstr... Our history is devastating. I thought I knew about slavery, abolition, the American Civil …

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re: learning the truth

Like many, I’ve watched the extraordinary Henry Louis Gates Jr/ PBS series on Reconstruction, the brief shining moment following the Civil War and before the black codes and Jim Crow reigned supreme. You can see a great preview of it here:https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reconstr... Our history is devastating. I thought I knew about slavery, abolition, the American Civil …

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Diving In

Straight down; he plunges; he’s all in....

Happy birthday, Captain Smalls!

Robert Smalls’ 180th birthday is this week – April 5th. He was born enslaved (though the importation of persons for slavery had been prohibited since 1808) in a small building, called a dependency, behind his owner’s home. Lots of people were born in 1839– some famous (John Rockefeller, George Custer, Caroline Ingalls, Paul Cezanne) and …

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Reading Matters

“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”  Many people don’t know that enslaved people were prohibited by law from learning to read and write. Between 1829 and 1834 Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, North and South Carolina and Virginia all passed anti-literacy laws. https://www.encyclopedia.com/humaniti... South Carolina, where Robert Smalls was born and lived, via an …

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Spring, Misery, and Hope

Here in the South Carolina lowcountry, everything blooms and blossoms and explodes with pollen. So. Much. Pollen. It guilds the sidewalks and cars and other plants. It blows in the doors and windows and sprinkles gold dust on the floors, the furniture, the dog. It drifts – yes, like snow drifts! – on the edge …

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Birdsong

“Give me the scent of salt marsh and mud, and the tall grass shining gold in the early sun.”    From Trouble the Water “Give me the quiet of a morning, just birdsong and insects.” The caged bird singswith a fearful trillof things unknownbut longed for stilland his tune is heardon the distant hillfor the caged …

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Milestone

When we began this journey – and picked up everything and moved across the country – we couldn’t see far enough into the future to know what it would bring. We could only see the path immediately in front of us. Which can be a little scary. But sometimes you just have to take the …

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