Heritage Essay
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My great grandparents are from Guinea. Guinea is a country in West Africa that was colonized by France. During the colonization of Guinea, they came to America, trying to escape from their colonizers’ harsh treatments. During the slaves’ shipments, my parents disguised themselves as slaves and were shipped here in America. They set to come here to America in the hope of finding better lives and a better job for them to be able to start a family. There is no telling what happened to the rest of the family members left in Guinea as they did not get in touch again.
When they left, the conditions in Guinea were very harsh for the Africans. They were beaten and forced to work in the French farms with low wages. They were brutally bitten to follow the French rules and to give up their belongings. After they had lost all they had, they set for the plan to escape to America. At that time, my great grandmother and grandfather were still youth, and they figured that they had had enough of the cruelty already. They planned to join the slaves’ shipment and come to America, where they planned to do a better paying job and start their lives here. They had heard stories about other Africans who had gone to America and had better experiences than them. They had already witnessed most of their friends lose their lives, and a lot of property was sophisticated as they were being colonized.
My great grandparents did not come here by choice. The situation at home forced them to find a way to relocate here to America. They hoped that they could join the other Africans when they reached America and find themselves a good job to be doing there, helping them build their lives. They had witnessed so many Africans being shipped to America. They concluded that since there were so many Africans in America, they will find them having made a community of their own, and they would flourish amongst them.
When they arrived, they found situations opposite to what they had expected. They found that conditions here were no better than that in Guinea. They, too, were forced to join the labor force as slaves. Being black, they were perceived to be lesser humans than whites. This came as an advantage and also as a disadvantage to them. The benefit was that as long as they blended well with the rest, they could have better lives than those in Guinea. The weaknesses were that they had to work for minimal wages and hard work, they had to learn English, and they also had to forget about Guinea’s family.
The advantage is that all they had to do was blend served them well. They were assigned to a white owner with a great piece of land. They followed the instructions well without showing any resistance. They had already seen what the Africans who had tried to resist had happened to them. As long as they followed what they were told, they got to live together without being the center of attention. They disguised themselves by all means that their presence was barely realized.
They were faced with labor hardship as they had to wake up very early and work until late in the evening. They barely found time to be together. During the first days, they lived with aching body parts of the hard work and the several whips they got in the fields. As time passed, they got used to the hard work, and within weeks they did not suffer a lot. They had to disguise themselves good enough to make sure that the white people did not look at their directions.
My great grandparents had not yet learned how to speak and write in English at their arrival time in America. It was hard for them to understand the instructions being given to them. Most of the time, they had to face great punishments for not doing what they were told. They learned how to speak English from the other Africans who lived in America for some time. They were still youths, so it was easy for them to learn English faster. Within weeks, they understood what was being said in English even though they could not correctly state the words. It took them months before they could be able to make a sentence in English on their own.
They also had to forget about their parents and family back in Guinea. They knew for them there was no going back to Guinea. This gave them sleepless nights thinking about the welfare of their families back in Guinea. As time went by, they were finally able to face the fact that they had to leave the past to the past and move on to a new life. There is little told about the experience they went back to Guinea. My parents say that it was too painful for them to remember, and they did not want to speak about it. All they wanted is for their children to have a better life than they ever could have and never allow themselves to be the cause of misery to other people’s lives.
When my grandparents had to serve as slaves, they faced a period of absolute deprivation. They could not be able to raise enough for their food to leave alone for their upkeep. They were forced sometimes to stay hungry or eat just a little and save the rest for another time. Getting the right clothes and living in decent homes was not in any of their vocabularies. They had to survive with the old clothes that they had relocated wearing. They also had to maintain them dirty to be unpleasing in the eyes of the whites. This was to protect my great-grandmother, who am told was impeccably beautiful. She had to stay away from the eyes of the white and black men who had a history of raping African women. My grandfather had to get into fights sometimes to protect her. The only thing that kept them going was the ongoing struggle against slavery in America.
After they had gained their slaves and set to settle and start new lives, they were also faced with a condition of absolute deprivation. They had to start from a place where all they had was each other. They had to survive together, working from hand to mouth until when one of them could get a decent job. Later on, my great grandfather was lucky to be employed on the railway stations. Although he was not paid a lot of money, it was enough to raise a family. At that time, my grandfather was a young teenager, struggling to help him get an education. They hoped that education would come to help raise the standards of our family.
My family’s experience has motivated me to work hard and work as a big company’s human resource manager. I want an experience where I will be working with people directly from all over the world. I want to be able to prove that it is no less human than the other. I want to serve all people with the same love and attention. I want to model a world where there are no discriminations of color, religion, or ethnicity. I also wish to have a profession that my kids will be motivated by it. That when they visit me at a job and witness how good I am working with all kinds of people, there will never be any thought of racism built in their ideas.