Author Speaks at a Panel on Narratives of Slavery – Experience

Regina Mason raises awareness about the empowerment of these stories.

Understanding multiple perspectives comes from more than just a textbook. With that goal in mind, history professors Courtney Goen and Patrick McCarter collaborated with several Los Medanos College programs to produce an event to share the stories of the marginalized voices that shaped America.

From what began as a pipe dream, Goen worked with McCarter and the history department to host a roundtable on October 6 to increase recognition and understanding of stories of slavery. In collaboration with the Office of Equity and Inclusion, Honors Program and Umoja Fellows, they brought in guest speaker Regina Mason to share her story, followed by a round table and book signing of the autobiography, “The Life of William Grimes”.

Written as a fugitive slave, Grimes’ autobiography was first published in 1825, capturing his raw experience as slave to freeman and the acts of injustice of slavery.

The original book detailed his journey from being owned by 10 masters to later escaping through the Underground Railroad from Georgia, to New York and finally to New Haven, Connecticut. He lost all his possessions when his master forced him to buy his freedom on pain of being returned to slavery. Despite his small success, he had to give up the life he was building.

Uncovering the story of his great, great, great-grandfather, buried and exhausted, Mason was able to bring Grimes’ story to life through genealogy and republish his work in 2008 with a new introduction, an afterword and notes.

Grimes’ story has also inspired her other work, including making a documentary film, “Gina’s Journey”, about uncovering parts of her past.

“Regina Mason is a very impactful person,” Goen said. “I think it’s not that his story makes a bad story positive, which is to say the kind of betrayal that people like William Grimes endured in their lifetime. But I think it shows our links and why it matters today in 2022.”

Preparations for this event were put in place in the space of three to four weeks and the event was inspired by the stories present in Goen’s and McCarter’s programs. These other autobigraphic narratives, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs and “Narratives of the Life of Douglass, an American Slave”, by Frederick Douglass also bring to the classroom the personal experiences of the authors enduring the harsh realities of slavery. slavery to shape history.

“African Americans have played a key role in American history. I just want to reaffirm its importance,” McCarter said, adding in class, “essentially talking about what these people went through, they were people. These are not just stories.

Regina Mason began her journey of discovering her family’s history during her childhood when she questioned her identity and her heritage. For a class assignment in fifth grade at a predominantly white school, Mason had to report on his origin and ancestry. When she asked her mother, she discovered that she was descended from slaves.

When faced with identifying her country of origin, 10-year-old Mason felt uncomfortable sharing with others that she was descended from slavery due to exaggerated stereotypes of the very common in Africa. However, Mason said she was determined to better understand where her family came from to teach her two children about their family origin, and after 15 years of research she discovered that her family roots stretched into many areas. from America.

Some of the information from generations ago “was brutally painful,” she said. “But I don’t dwell on that pain because if I did, I would lose sight of what I’ve achieved.” Instead, she focuses on accomplishments to keep herself going.

“It’s empowerment, because I realized I was reaching out to great people,” she said. “I extend from people who, despite their circumstances, strived to reach higher, even though they had so many setbacks, but they kept going and I realized that that resilience is in me.”

The event took place on October 6, 2022 in the student union where students, staff and community members were able to attend this free event. While the majority of the attendees of Goen and McCarter’s history classes, a few others attended and all were eager to hear about the stories of slavery and to meet one of the book’s authors.

Madison Fanucchi had read the three stories addressed at the event and said, “It humanized not only Grimes, but also Jacobs. He humanizes Douglass. We hear about them all the time in the story and it didn’t seem real until you saw someone related to them.

As Mason shares Grimes’ story as well as her own, she hopes to share the inspiration from these biographies to help others understand the story from multiple perspectives.

“If it weren’t for the scratches on my back that were made while I was a slave, I would bequeath my skin to the government, desiring that it could be removed and turned into parchment, and then bind the constitution of a glorious, happy, and free America,” wrote Grimes. “Let the skin of an American slave bind the charter of American freedom.”