My Father’s Oral History Mystery: Lyles Station and the 1857 “Round House Battle”
[I first published this as a blog post in 2009, but reposting for Medium.com]
By 1977, Alex Haley’s Roots had swept the nation — and suddenly I was interested in knowing my family history. Had there been a Kunta Kinte in my family’s past? A Kizzy?
As a parent now, I can only imagine how happy my father was when his 11-year-old eldest daughter — whose biggest preoccupation was stealing his legal pads to write stories about kids on space ships and talking cats — approached him and said, “Dad, do you know any stories about our ancestors?”
My father’s face lit up. “Did I ever tell you about Lyles Station and the Battle of the Round House? It’s a story my grandmother told me, and her mother told her.”
The story she told my father about Lyles Station, Indiana, is recounted in the book I co-authored with my mother, Patricia Stephens Due: Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. (My great-grandmother in Indiana, Lydia Stewart Graham, died only three years later, in 1980, when she was 89.)
I was so enthralled by the story that I created a school project called “My Own Roots,” illustrated with my father’s drawings and family photographs, pictured above.
