{"id":36504,"date":"2014-05-24T22:32:14","date_gmt":"2014-05-24T22:32:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=36504"},"modified":"2014-05-24T22:32:14","modified_gmt":"2014-05-24T22:32:14","slug":"go-stand-upon-the-rock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=36504","title":{"rendered":"Go Stand Upon the Rock"},"content":{"rendered":"

Go Stand Upon the Rock<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

CreateSpace
\n2014-05-20
\n300 pages
\n9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
\nPaperback ISBN-10: 1494211564; ISBN-13: 978-1494211561<\/p>\n

Samuel Michael Lemon<\/strong><\/a>, Program Director
\nContinuing Adult and Professional Studies
\nNeumann University, Aston, Pennsylvania<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

From stories handed down by my grandmother about how our ancestors fought to be free.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go Stand Upon the Rock<\/em> is a deeply moving story based on real people and events in the lives of a runaway slave and his family, who witness some of the most compelling moments in antebellum American history<\/a>. It is a tale of unsettling plantation life, courageous women, dramatic Civil War<\/a> battles, heroes and hoodoo, and the indomitable strength of the human spirit. This novel is based on the family history handed down to me by my maternal grandmother, Maud Ray Ridley Ortiga\u2014the granddaughter of former runaway slaves. Fiercely proud of our ancestors, I spent countless hours at my grandmother’s table, committing this history to memory as we poured over a trove of antique family photographs. I grew to love these forebears who died long before I was born, and I eventually became the family historian. This made me determined to achieve two lifelong goals. The first was to see that my ancestors no longer rested in unmarked graves. The second was to solve the mysteries of who we were, where we came from and how we came to be. After my ancestors escaped from slavery in the mid-1860s, no one in my family had ever returned to our places of origin\u2014in fact, no one even knew where they were.<\/p>\n

What began as a noble quest to uncover my roots became a cultural detective story, with only the names of the plantations and slave quarters serving as paltry clues. As I grew into adulthood, I discovered the remarkable accuracy of the age-old family tradition of oral history, and everything my beloved grandmother told me proved to be true. I added to this body of knowledge through historical and genealogical research at the National Archives, the U.S. Census, and countless books and websites, all of which enabled me to turn my love of family history into a doctoral dissertation at one of the most distinguished academic institutions in America\u2014the University of Pennsylvania\u2014where I earned a doctorate in Education, Culture, and Society in 2007.<\/p>\n

The story begins on the Bonnie Doon plantation in Southampton County, Virginia<\/a>, where my ancestor Cornelius Ridley\u2014the mulatto<\/a> son of his wealthy, slavemaster\/father\u2014was born in 1839\u2014eight years after Nat Turner\u2019s Rebellion<\/a>. But no rosy or revisionist retrospective on genteel plantation society, this book examines the historical events and complex social and sometimes biological relationships between masters and slaves. Go Stand Upon the Rock<\/em> is a tapestry of interwoven stories of a remarkable family\u2019s journey through history that began with my great-great grandfather Cornelius Ridley\u2019s epic 300 mile walk to freedom in the North to escape from bondage on his putative father’s plantation.<\/p>\n

It also follows his wife Martha Jane Parham, as she strives to escape her horrible fate as a breeding woman on the neighboring Fortsville Plantation. Learning what she endured made an indelible impact on me. Unlike her husband who was able to pass<\/a> for white, they were forced to escape separately. And the story follows her perilous flight with two young children, to the safety of a company of U.S. Colored Troops<\/a>, where she meets a young black soldier from Pennsylvania<\/a> who is wounded during one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War\u2014the Battle of New Market Heights<\/a>\u2014who has an unexpected role in her life half a century later.<\/p>\n

This first part of the Ridley family saga draws to a close with Cornelius and Martha Jane\u2019s brilliant son William\u2014a pioneering African American law student\u2014who miraculously survives a hail of bullets in the midst of a dangerous political dispute in Chester, Pennsylvania<\/a>, that nearly ends his life and legal career captured in detail in local contemporary newspaper accounts just one month before his marriage to an elegant, mysterious clairvoyant woman from the Danish West Indies<\/a> in October 1889. Telling the story of my ancestors is a debt I have longed owed them, because they are giants upon whose shoulders I stand today. And there is much more of their saga to tell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Go Stand Upon the Rock CreateSpace 2014-05-20 300 pages 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches Paperback ISBN-10: 1494211564; ISBN-13: 978-1494211561 Samuel Michael Lemon, Program Director Continuing Adult and Professional Studies Neumann University, Aston, Pennsylvania From stories handed down by my grandmother about how our ancestors fought to be free. Go Stand Upon the Rock is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,459,8,15,6940,20],"tags":[17375,17374,17376,5903,5902,5905],"class_list":["post-36504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","category-media-archive","category-novels","category-slavery","category-usa","tag-cornelius-ridley","tag-createspace","tag-martha-jane-parham","tag-samuel-lemon","tag-samuel-m-lemon","tag-samuel-michael-lemon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36504"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36504\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}