A Conversation with E. Dolores Johnson
Sponsored by Concord Museum and The Robbins House
Video available online https://concordmuseum.org/events/dolores-johnson-say-im-dead/ • 1 hr.
In this fascinating conversation, Concord Museum Executive Director Tom Putnam interviews his Kennedy Library colleague E. Dolores Johnson about her life facing racism and uncovering family secrets. As the daughter of an interracial couple, Johnson tells the story of her parents’ decision to flee Indianapolis and its strict anti-miscegenation laws in the 1940s to secretly marry and raise their daughter in upstate New York in her new book Say I’m Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love. As she researched her father’s black genealogy, she unearthed the remarkable story of her mother’s 36-year old secret that defined their family.
A Life of Racism
E. Dolores Johnson was born in Buffalo, NY. She earned degrees from Howard University and Harvard Graduate School of Business. After a career in tech, she took an MFA equivalent course to learn creative writing. Johnson is a published essayist focused on inter-racialism.
Say I’m Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love is available for in-store and curbside pickup as well as shipping via Media Mail thanks to the Concord Bookshop.
![Did you know that April is National Poetry Month? We have you covered with a little Robbins house trivia. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a poem entitled Peter’s Field. Peter’s Field most likely referenced Peter Hutchinson, who was the last African American owner of The Robbins House. Peter purchased the home in 1852 and lived with his wife, Nancy, and several of their children in the home until 1868. Emerson described Peter’s farm, and by extension the original area of farmland attached to The Robbins House out in the Great Field like this:
KNOWS he who tills this lonely field
To reap its scanty corn,
What mystic fruit his acres yield
At midnight and at morn?]
That field by spirits bad and good,
By Hell and Heaven is haunted,
And every rood in the hemlock wood
I know is ground enchanted.
[In the long sunny afternoon
The plain was full of ghosts:
I wandered up,
I wandered down,
Beset by pensive hosts.
For in those lonely grounds the sun
Shines not as on the town,
In nearer arcs his journeys run,
And nearer stoops the moon.
There in a moment I have seen
The buried Past arise;
The fields of Thessaly grew green,
Old gods forsook the skies.
Happy Reading!](https://robbinshouse.org/wp-content/plugins/instagram-feed/img/placeholder.png)