Validation

I'm searching for an answer to a story that only I was told, or so I believe because no one else knows about it.  One day in the late 60's my grandmother told me story.  It wasn't a made-up before you go to bed story.  It was with wistfulness and cloudy eyes.  The kind that you share and it makes you happy and sad at the same time.  Why me and why that day, could it had been preordained that genealogy would be my forte?

She spoke about when she was little and how she and her brothers and sisters would all play together - then it came the other brothers and sisters.  The White ones. Going on she said her father never showed any favoritism between them and them....yes, I meant what I wrote.  Except she and her brothers were not allowed to learn how to read and write.  "My daddy loved us all the same except we weren't allowed to learn how to read and write."  "Whatever they got, we got."   She was born, depending on records in 1900/02 and not given the privilege to read and write, yet her father loved them.  He may have been her father but yet he seen them as they truly were - black. This was my first aha moment, but I stayed quiet, 'the father that I know you to have, can't be your father.'  Funny thing I must clear up, my grandmother and her two brothers looked White.  To eliminate racist comments or looks, she and my grandfather would sometimes walk on opposite sides of the street.

My grandmother also went on to say that in the rear of the house was a kitchen where the cooking and ironing was done.  There next to the fireplace, that continuously burned, was a woman, an Indian woman, who smoked a pipe. The Indian woman just sat in her chair, rocking, never speaking, but smoked her pipe as continuious as the fire that burned in the fireplace.  Who was this woman that no one knows but everyone knows of her?

One day a woman working in the kitchen, dark skinned, was ironing a black silk garment.  My grandmother said she wrinkled her nose and said that ""it stinks.  She said that woman said to her "course you would think that anything black would stink".  My grandmother to that day was still hurt that this woman would think she was referring to black stinking, when she was referring to the silk smelling when a hot iron is placed upon it.  Later in life I was ironing a black silk blouse, and yes, silk does have a peculiar smell when ironed.

Lastly, she said you could see The White House from her house. Drying her eyes with her apron she never spoke about this ever again.  Her own children said she spoke about the Indian woman, but never anything else.

I first find her in the 1910 Census record for Leesburg, Loudon County, VA at age eight.  Can you see The White House from there?  Next record would be the 1920 census and she is here in Columbus, Franklin County, Ohio, married and the mother of one. The census report for birthplace says "Washington, Warren Oc....not a misspelling on my part.  Her death certificate says Maryland and on Family Search USC 1920,  Washington is listed also.  I take this to mean Washington, DC.  

So who was this little girl who had other brothers and sisters, who found it necessary to say "my daddy loved us all the same except...."  I want to give her validation, because on that day I felt so sad.

Later in life when the Roots ministries was aired, I reviewed these questions with my grandmother and she said "the past is in the past, let it go."  Never did she answer anyone's inquiries about her past and you all know that Roots was a time period that opened the door to stories to be told.  Blackness was embraced with fury, proudness, and power. So in hitting brick walls, do I give validation to what I was told, or validation to her and "let it go?"