Portrait of an Ex-Slave: My Great-Grandfather [View All]

Recently, I came across about 40 negative files of photos I had taken when I was between 12 and 14, when I was an avid amateur photographer. To see these pictures, I bought a negative scanner. Since beginning to scan these pictures, I have been fascinated by this window into daily life in the early 1970s.

One of the pictures, which I never had printed, was a photo of a photo (ie copy). From the context, my grandfather had probably asked if I could copy this portrait that hung on his wall. It was him and his brothers as very young men, next to their father.

In one part of my mind, I knew the story of my great grandfather having run away from slavery in Virginia to Brooklyn, but I never connected it with the picture that hung on my grandfather's wall until today.

The old man seated, surrounded by his sons, was John Henry Sykes. He is old in this photo, which probably was taken around 1915-1920, which would indeed place his birth date before 1865:



The young man standing just to the right of the seated man is my grandfather. Here is how I remember him so many years later, seated in his Brooklyn brownstone:


He died around 1979, during a snowstorm.

Time is so very strange, isn't it? We think of slavery as the distant past, but we are really only one degree of separation from those evil times.

<repost from AAIG>