Esphur and Harold Foster - Nothing Without Our History (clip)
Interviewed by Hudson Vaughan on April 1, 2010
Esphur Foster (EF): If you don’t know where you came from, you won’t know where you’re going.
Harold Foster (HF): Mhm-mm [in agreement]
EF: You gotta know where you came from.
Hudson Vaughan (HV): And Mrs. Jackson’s quote is “If you don’t know --Without the past, we have no future.”
EF: Future! That’s right, that’s right. And Charlie, [laughs] Charlie, these young people come up here, she’ll say to them “And now who is your people?”
[laughter]
EF: And we see a lot of favor, you know we’ll see family favor. And so, we’ll start asking—we’ll ask them questions until they come up with a name, and then we’d say “Oh, okay. We know…” and then we’ll tell them about their family, you know so yeah.
HV: If you had a… If you had a message for youth who were coming through and listening to oral histories and trying to learn about the community in St. Joseph’s, and this Pottersfield and Sunset or just have advice from folks who…
EF: We’re nothing without our history, we’re nothing. That is so… What is so incredible to me, and I love Maya who says “And yet we rise, like cream to the top.”. Because we were stripped of everything. You know, babies were taken from their mothers’ chests, you know. And we don’t know what tribes we came from. We don’t know where our --some of our people were sent. I mean just basic stuff that a lot of people take for granted. And just, we are nothing without our history, so. And that’s [why] I have begun with children, and I started with Douglas and so they have a new grandson. But by the time Douglas was two, he knew all his alphabets and the phonetic sounds. Because reading is so important to me, and I always say “If you think reading is not important, why do you think that people were killed for teaching slaves to read?”. Because not only were they enslaving our bodies but they were trying to enslave our minds too. So, when you learn to read, that’s a shackle that you have discarded.
