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Evelyn C. Fortson

African American Author of Women's Fiction

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Writer's picture: Evelyn FortsonEvelyn Fortson

I recently turned sixty-five, and the word courage kept popping into my head. This birthday and one other made me stop and ponder my life. When I turned thirty, I felt as if I should have been further along in life. Thirty, for me, was a rite of passage where I fully entered into adulthood. At thirty, I had a child, a good job, and a mortgage. However, I still didn’t feel like I had measured up to the standard of success I had set for my life because I didn’t have a husband. Looking back, I could see how silly it was to feel that way, but emotions have a way of crushing you and blinding you to all the wonderful things that you have. I can look back now and see how much I had accomplished on my own and how courageous I was.


A few days before my sixty-fifth birthday, the icy hand of fear touched my spine and remained in the background even after my birthday had passed. However, a word rose up in my spirit to combat the fear, Courage. One meaning of courage is “strength in the face of pain or grief.”


Pain and grief were exactly what I was afraid of. Sixty-five is a big number. One could say, “Your days are numbered.” I know I don’t have sixty-five more years ahead of me, so one has to face one's mortality and make peace with it. Fear comes with not knowing how and when it will come and whether it will be a lingering, painful death.


Getting older requires courage. It is not for the faint of heart because your heart will be broken every time someone you love leaves this world. You will need to be strong when you are no longer able to do the things you once did. You will need courage to face the uncertainty of life.


One day, I will look back at my sixty-fifth birthday and think how silly I was. Until then, I gather the courage needed to tap down my fear so that I can enjoy each day and make plans for the future.

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Writer's picture: Evelyn FortsonEvelyn Fortson

It’s funny how reparations to descendants of the enslaved are not discussed, even during Black History Month. America has paid reparations to Native Americans, Japanese Americans, and Holocaust survivors. America indirectly assisted Japan in rebuilding its economy after World War II. Every year, billions of dollars are spent on Humanitarian, Developmental, Military, and Economic Assistance to foreign countries. Still, America cannot bring itself to right a wrong that it embraced as an expedient means to birth a nation allegedly based on personal and religious freedom.


America would have been a failed ideology if it were not for the strength and knowledge that the enslaved brought with them from Africa.


Reparations would not be hard to do, but America does not have the will to do it. Paying reparations would be acknowledging all the lies that America has told itself. The truth about the founding fathers, the distortion of religion, how racism and classism work to maintain the status quo, etc.…. The U. S. Government used slaves to build the White House and other federal buildings. The government also used slaves for canal improvements. Every area of American life benefitted from slave labor. Banking, shipping, railroads, insurance, textiles, universities, etc.....


Reparations should be paid by the families that accumulated generational wealth from slavery but also from the government and institutions that made money off the broken bodies, hearts, and spirits of people torn from their homelands and worked to death on American plantations. Reparations to the descendants of the ones that survived the beatings, near starvation, rapes, separation once again from familial ties, and the denial of basic human dignity. These are the truths that reparations would acknowledge and begin to right a devastating wrong.

 

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Writer's picture: Evelyn FortsonEvelyn Fortson

There are pieces of us that others will never know, stories that will never be told, but each of us has an origin story.


My book, “Rolling in the Deep,” was written over a year ago. I have since written another book, with the working title of " Looking at Me.” I thought I would have self-published “Rolling in the Deep” or been fortunate enough to have had it traditionally published by now. I sent the manuscript away to be edited and worked on another book, and when I got it back, I queried a few agents to no avail. When I looked at the book again, ready to publish it myself, I reread it, and it spoke to me again. The book was incomplete; I needed to go deeper.


In my books, I leave pieces of myself and pieces of us, African American women, on the pages. My books are markers to remind the world that our stories are unique and unifying. I link the past with the present by including folklore, sayings, speech patterns, and words some of us may no longer use. I do that so we do not forget the people who came before us, what they went through, and how strong and wise they were.

I encourage you to tell your mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, and anyone you love to check out my blog and my books, Bittersweet and “Finally, Doing Me!” by Evelyn C. Fortson. My books are available on Amazon and www.store.bookbaby.com.


I’m so looking forward to announcing the publication date of “Rolling In The Deep,” but like momma used to say, “A watched pot never boils.”

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