About - I See My Light Shining

My mother died suddenly at age of 68 alone in her home in Brooklyn. She had been a part of the Great Migration – moving my siblings and I to Brooklyn from Greenville, South Carolina.

Her past was a silent, painful memory that she rarely shared. Like so many coming of age during Jim Crow, the horrors of the south were filled with stories that were ‘left' in the south; too painful to bring to this new and promising world of the north.  But I believe in genetic memory and that trauma gets passed down until there is resolution. When my mother died, I went back to the place she always called ‘Home’ – Greenville. There I found so many stories I would have never known had I not gone searching for them. These were the stories of seemingly ‘ordinary’ people like my mom. And like my mom, they were heroes who had survived something. Like my mom, they had a light. A light that had always shone inside of them. I wanted to bring that light to the outside world. I wanted them to live to see it in its glory. And although so many of these stories are only shared in my memoir, I wanted this project to be bigger. Hence, I SEE MY LIGHT SHINING: The Baldwin-Emerson Elders Project. With this project, so many elders are bringing the wonder of their survival to the bigger world. For some of them, this is a scary thing. For many, it is a great joy. I often wonder how my mother would have felt about her own story in the world. I don’t know all of it. I never will. But the greatness of it lives inside of me. With I See My Light Shining, we’re spreading the greatness of many. Long may they live. 

— Jacqueline Woodson