Tracing her past, Bertice Berry finds world is not so black and white - Book Reviews: Entertainment for the Marine Corps - Marine Corps Times

Tracing her past, Bertice Berry finds world is not so black and white

She just didn’t believe her mother.

No matter how many times Bertice Berry’s mother, Beatrice, told her that the family was not descended from slaves, Bertice dismissed the statement.

“I thought she was having a slave fantasy,” Berry says. “It just did not jibe with what I thought I knew, what I believed about the history of African-Americans, and I knew that Delaware was a slave state.”

The sixth of seven children growing up poor in Wilmington, Del., Berry had her mind made up: The family had to be descended from slaves. All slave owners were evil. All slave owners were white. So, all white people of that time were evil.

It was simple, if flawed, logic to a black girl growing up in the sociological stew that was America in the 1960s.

Decades later, from the haven of her home in Savannah, Ga., Berry, a talk-show host and author, decided to research her family’s background as part of a memoir dealing with race.

Her findings left the 48-year-old stunned.

An abolitionist and the Underground Railroad

She discovered that her mother was correct — and that the man who owned the plantation on which her family lived near Odessa, Del., was actually the southernmost conductor of the Underground Railroad, operating in what was still, at least nominally, a slave state. He was the first person many slaves running from the South would see.

“This man, John Hunn, every child in Delaware should know his name,” Berry says. A farmer and Quaker minister, Hunn not only helped thousands of runaways through Delaware to Philadelphia and freedom, but, when offered a chance to save his farm if he promised to no longer help slaves, publicly refused. His land and home were sold at auction, and his family was left destitute.

“There was no way prior to this research that I could have thought a plantation owner a good man,” Berry says. “It just didn’t occur to me.”

Now her book, “The Ties That Bind: A Memoir of Race, Memory and Redemption” (Broadway, 2009, $23.95) has left her with different emotions.

“I came away with the feeling that the reason Americans haven’t dealt with that period of time properly is because we haven’t looked at it through the eyes of the abolitionists,” Berry says, and that gives her hope.

“If all you learn is slave and free, black and white, good and evil, you don’t really look for the stuff in between,” she says.

And it turns out that’s a lot of stuff in between.

A senator’s help

She’d already been exposed to some of the good stuff in the form of then-Sen. Joe Biden. While Berry was at Jacksonville (Fla.) State University, one of her sisters began struggling with diabetes and was unable to get disability. Her sister had some good days, but a lot of days she couldn’t function.

Berry was working at school, sending money home, and finally she got so frustrated over her sister’s problems that she wrote a letter to Biden.

“He called me every day for a week,” she says, “because you know those were the days when there was only one phone and everybody used it. You’d have to call back and call back. But he called every day until he got me, and then he said — and I’m trying not to tear up here — ‘I want you to know that I’m proud of you, and you’re going to be breaking the cycle of poverty and doing something with your life, but you’re not going to be able to succeed if you have to worry about your home and about your education. You worry about your education and I’ll worry about your sister.’ And that day, her disability went through.”

Berry went on to get a doctorate in sociology from Kent State University, where she taught for a while. She left to become an entertainer and had her own show, “The Bertice Berry Show,” on cable’s USA Network for four years. She’s written several books and now combines public appearances and writing with raising her sister’s four children.

A shared past

She began seriously researching her family eight years ago, gathering a little bit here and a little there because it was hard to find reliable information.

One reason was that when Hunn died, he asked his sons to destroy his journals, so that others who had helped in the Underground Railroad would not be found out, she says.

Hunn knew and helped Harriet Tubman, a runaway slave who brought 13 groups of slaves to freedom, with shelter, shoes and money.

Her book ties Delaware’s history into the history of her own family. Her family may not have been slaves, but they struggled with poverty, “which is another form of slavery,” Berry says.

“Poverty and ignorance are new forms of slavery,” she says. “While we hadn’t been slaves as far back as my great-great-great-great-grandmother, we had been enslaved by poverty, alcohol, drugs and all these things that have affected all of America.”

She hopes her book prompts people to discover more about their shared past.

“One of the things I’d like people to take away is that when there are times of despair of what is evil and bad and wrong, there is always good. There’s always good. I think that what we should do when we look back at history is look for the good.

“We have to come to peace with our past. We have to forgive and be forgiven. What I want people to do is have conversations about race that come from the place that starts with these people who did what was right.”