Word: ancestors
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...family history. In the small Virginia town where his grandfather was born, Milkman hears a group of children sing a song that provides the key to his past. The refrain, "Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone/ Solomon cut across the sky, Solomon gone home,"tells the story of an ancestor's mythical escape from slavery. For the reader, the song unlocks the richness of the novel. It is a book in which Morrison achieves her fifth stage- an artistic vision that encompasses both a private and a national heritage...
...Langley, a quaint Hertfordshire village that is now a commuter suburb, 18 miles north of London. The prospering yeoman family at one time owned Jefferies farm in nearby Chipperfield (the Chip Carter connection?), and the King's Langley church has a brass plaque in memory of Ancestor John Carter, departed this world in 1588. Another Carter, also named John, made it to London and, in Dick Whittington fashion, became a prosperous wine merchant. As befitted a new gentleman, he applied for a coat of arms in 1612; Carter Lane, off Fleet Street, still bears his name...
...Vintner John's armigeral sons emigrated to the American colonies aboard the good ship Safety in 1635. Jimmy's 11th generation ancestor Thomas became a well-to-do Virginia planter, while his elder brother John acquired an even richer swath of Old Dominion farm land. It was John's son, Robert ("King") Carter, who became the first American millionaire. According to Harold Brooks-Baker, Debrett's managing director, hustling King Carter owned 300,000 acres, more than 1,000 slaves and perhaps the largest collection of books in the colonies -at a time, notes Brooks-Baker...
...artist, but a world figure. He is not an avant-gardist either, and his work keeps alluding to its sources: the color to Bonnard and Matisse, the strong, fractionally unstable drawing to Mondrian and Matisse again. Diebenkorn's best paintings mediate between the moral duty to acknowledge the ancestor and the desire to claim one's own experience as unique, unrepeatable. In short, he is a thoroughly traditional artist, for whose work the words "high seriousness" might have been invented...
...looked on, Elizabeth ignited a 35-ft.-high bonfire atop a hill near the ancient castle. Within minutes, 101 more hilltop fires were flaring from one end of the British Isles to the other. It was a reminder of a difficult moment in the reign of her namesake and ancestor, Elizabeth I; similar fires had been set in 1588 to warn the country of the approaching Spanish Armada...