Ancella Bickley's Region

Lost Voices

My mother is Jamaican and my father was born here in Huntington and his father was a slave who, at the end of the Civil War, followed the railroad coming to West Virginia for work. And we lived in the home with my grandfather's widow. It was sort of a family compound in those days. My uncle lived next door and my Aunt lived in the house with us. I had three brothers, a grandmother, a father, a mother, aunts and uncles all together in my early years.

When I was growing up on 28th street, we had a big lot and we had a cow, so I can remember churning and my grandmother milking the cow. We had chickens. I can remember a hog and a man killed the hog. Those are experiences that many of my colleagues, my schoolmates, didn't have, because ours was sort of that country experience, where theirs were more city based.

Now coming from West Virginia, one thing that you could do as a black person... we could vote and we didn't have to sit on the back of public transportation.

--------- Dr. Ancella Bickley