My Long Journey Home
My journey home is somewhat metaphorical since there is no physical structure remaining of my family to return to nor are any of my Klan birth family alive. Rather, it is a journey of the heart and soul and a search for redemption for the ones I love and for myself. For years, I blocked out and didn’t push myself to research the details about who exactly my maternal family really were before I was born, due to my grandfather’s lifelong leadership roles in the original national Ku Klux Klan. As a result of writing this story, I came to see them and to some extent myself for the first time in ways that were equally fascinating and tragic. I also now understand my grandmother and mother’s feeling of isolation after my grandfather’s sudden death, and how having lived for decades in the innermost sanctity of a closed society they felt isolated and negatively judged, if and when they revealed their backgrounds. Regardless of how the story is received and by whom, for me, I am finally free. I’m closer to “home” than ever. I feel them close to me especially as I write. Home is a knowing. It is cliché but it is where the soul feels at peace. My goal was to emotionally embrace and try to understand my Second Klan birth family and the events that had impacted their lives and my own.