Grady continues quest to understand his complex past
In 1995, Wayne Grady visited his hometown of Windsor, Ont., to research his Irish roots. The Kingston-based science writer and translator hoped to learn where in Ireland his paternal family originated from, with the intention of taking his dad overseas for a surprise 70th birthday trip.
But what started as a loving gift turned to shock when Grady uncovered a lifealtering secret. As the records revealed, Grady’s great-grandfather was born in the U.S., and identified on the 1890 Windsor census as Black.
Throughout his adult life, Grady’s dad had “passed” as white and kept the truth from his family, including his wife, though Grady says she always suspected. Despite the evidence Grady presented, his father denied his racial identity until his death.
“Everything became inexplicable, then everything became explicable within a split second,” says Grady, who is now 70 himself. “I had no idea who I was, or where I was from. Then it all fell into place. All the questions I had about the way we were raised and why we were not in touch with my father’s side of the family made sense.”
As a writer, Grady’s natural next thought was “this is a book.” Nearly two decades later, he published his first novel, Emancipation Day, as a “way of trying to understand what was going through my father’s mind and heart at the time.”
For 15 years before he began working on Emancipation Day — which won the 2013 Amazon.ca First Novel Award — Grady struggled through drafts of a dis- carded family memoir. It was his wife, fellow author Merilyn Simonds, who told him “to get over it,” and to tell his personal story through fiction.
Writing his followup, Up from Freedom, was a smoother process. Grady’s new novel continues exploring his family history, traversing back another 100 years to the 1850s.
Up from Freedom is told from the perspective of Virgil Moody, a young Savannah man who vehemently claims he will never own slaves like his father. When he leaves the plantation for New Orleans, Moody brings Annie, a pregnant slave, with him, mistakenly believing he is rescuing her from a terrible fate and that she accompanied him of her own free will.
Years later when tragedy strikes, Moody treks north searching for Annie’s son, Lucas, and attempts to help Tansey, a former slave, and her family get to Canada.
The end of the book features an Indianapolis court trial in which Tansey’s son, Leason, and her daughter-in-law, Sarah, are tried for “fornication” because of the belief that Sarah is white. The incident is based on an actual event involving his great-great grandparents.
“I’m half Black and half white and at a certain level, half of me is Moody and half is Tansey. A lot of what’s going on in the novel is those two sides of myself talking to each other,” Grady says. “But I was raised white, and I don’t know how I identity anymore, but I do know I look white and if I walk down the street, I am often identified as a white person. I didn’t feel comfortable getting inside Tansey’s head as a writer.”
Despite the fact that Up from Freedom takes place in the 1850s with its roots embedded in one family’s history, the novel feels contemporary given how deeply implanted issues surrounding self-identity, racism, allyship and privilege remain today.
“Just getting out of the location where slavery is legal doesn’t mean that you’re free,” Grady says. “There’s a difference between being free and being safe.”