A Hard Fight for Me

I'm not sure if I've ever written of this here, but one of my many favorite history books is Leslie Schwalm's A Hard Fight For We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom In South Carolina. I was introduced to this book in a graduate course and it is just such a great example of well-written recovery work and meaningful history. Schwalm captures the voices and experiences of African slave women through the Civil War--women who were not even considered women and definitely were not considered having a voice worth remembering. It is an immensely impressive project. There are a lot of reasons I enjoy this book, personally and academically, and one reason is simply the title--A Hard Fight For We. The struggle that these women went through, and their ability to find personal power during their struggle is amazing to me. And today it puts into perspective my struggle with this dissertation, which becomes so insignificant in comparison and is only even possible because of the hard fight of my ancestors who are represented vividly in this work.

This dissertation is a hard fight for me--today the fight was just to write 500 words. It was a hard fight, and I made it. Every day of finishing this diss is a hard fight to gain this crazy contested thing called academic freedom--but more importantly it is a hard fight of self-preservation, endurance, and determination to just be able to say I made it, I am alive, and I am whole. It is a hard fight to be able to say I've crossed the line to freedom and I don't have to carry this weight any longer. I'm looking forward to my emancipation from this project, but I'm even more grateful to the real fight that has gone on before me to even make my education a reality. I love knowing that these degrees I've earned were never meant for me. I love knowing that the essence of self-preservation, endurance, and determination runs through my veins--passed down from unnamed slave women, to Harriett Tubman, to Maria Stewart, to Ida B. Wells and Mary McLeod Bethune, to Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King and so many many others--to me. With such a strong heritage how can I not fight on. I fight on, I press on, I move on, because I must. It is the legacy I have gratefully inherited--I must continue this hard fight for me.