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I don’t really know who I am. I try to make it up everyday.
My last name is my mother’s, not my father’s. That is the name I carry and the one I have to live up to.
My name goes back to the slave masters who owned our family. The Forts. And from that plantation came the Fort, the Forte, the Forté and the Ford families. There “original” Forts are long gone from where I grew up.
When I helped cut the grass and rake the leaves in our family cemetery I saw all of those names there.
The oldest family member who lived during my lifetime is my great-great grandfather, John Henry Forte. He fought in WWI. There used to be picture of him all doughboyed-up, hat broke rakish, stone-faced, looking like my uncle P.
I know my family tree from those summer Saturdays and the grim task of tending our ancestral burial ground. It sits on what used to be the a part of the Old Fort Plantation. My grandparents, aunts and uncles would be out there with me. They had stories about the people who were buried there. I rarely asked questions. They just shared the stories. Many of the same stories over and over again.
