When author and writer Brianna Wheeler was a child, she rejected her grandmother’s birthday gift of a Black Barbie, and in doing so, rejected her own biracial identity. After her grandmother’s death more than 30 years later, Brianna inherited shares of a family trust and her family matriarch’s extensive genealogy research. While Brianna organized her grandmother’s work, other inheritors fought amongst themselves to fortify their own inheritances. Brianna braids her grandmother’s research into a timeline that travels between the battles that preceded the civil war, and her own family’s battles with legacy, entitlement, and heritage.
“My grandmother was the family historian, as well as its matriarch,” says Brianna in a press statement. “When she passed away, her death devastated our family, most of whom had taken residence in her suburban Los Angeles home in the years preceding her death. Those family members would fight over her modest estate while I watched from Portland, unable to manage their implosion. This coincided with the murder of George Floyd, during the subsequent protests I began organizing my grandmother’s research in earnest, as a way to reconnect with my Black identity, and share my grandmother’s life work with the world.”
Brianna’s book ‘Altogether Different’ (Korza Books) is a hybrid work of historical non-fiction, personal memoir, and diary illustration. This examination of biracial identity, inheritance, and ancestral duty reflects Brianna’s own narrative against the life story of her most esteemed ancestor, Dangerfield Newby. Newby was the first of John Brown’s raiders to die during the raid on Harpers Ferry, the historic battle that preceded the American Civil War.
Brianna reexamines her ancestor’s place in history through a biracial lens, rather than that of a white academic, and as such is able to draw emotional parallels that would be lost through a strictly academic approach. Her meditations on motherhood, Black womanhood, race, and culture are evergreen. ‘Altogether Different’ also explores sisterhood, death and grief, LGBTQ parenting, autism advocacy, cannabis advocacy, generational trauma, and civil unrest.
Told through a decidedly Black, interracial, femme voice, ‘Altogether Different’ untangles the complex connection between the stories we tell ourselves and the histories preserved for us. Below we are thrilled to share an excerpt from the book, giving readers a glimpse into the stories and lived experiences Brianna has included.
For most of my childhood, my grandmother worked as a supermarket clerk. Hers was the most popular checkout lane, and she often came home on holidays with armfuls of gifts and cards from her customers. My oldest cousin loves to tell the story of my grandmother seeing a young Black man’s job application in the trash can, retrieving it, and confronting her white boss about it. She stood her ground, kept her charm and cool, and convinced the boss he was acting in poor taste before ensuring the kid got his interview. That kid was hired and eventually became the store manager before being promoted to a corporate position.
I’d heard several stories from my grandmother about past generations, but she had never told me about 20 the resume she rescued from the wastebasket. A resume that was rejected on sight, simply because the applicant was Black. I don’t think she thought it was an example of exemplary behavior. She was doing what a lot of Black women do, and have always done, under circumstances and hardships that I can scarcely conceive – quietly caretaking her community, doing what she could when she could with what she had to make the next generation of Black people’s lives, hopefully, better.
My mother was a teacher with the Los Angeles United School District for more than 20 years. During that time she was passed over for promotions yearly, despite the fact that her contributions to the art, drama, and history departments included vibrant street-facing murals, community arts and crafts festivals, and even therapy-based after school programs. In her spare time, she taught both children and adults how to draw mandalas at the local community college.
My mother became a legacy in our small town, an elementary school teacher who tracked exclusively in low-income, working-class neighborhoods. Generations of children touched by her vivacious brilliance and tender validation now stop me on the street or in the supermarket whenever I visit San Pedro to share their warmest memories of my mother.
She would keep my class picture in her wallet, and whenever her feistier male students would act up, she would promise to show them a picture of the most beautiful girl in the world as soon as they calmed down. When they got their act together, she would flash them my current class picture. It must have worked; it was a gimmick she used for years.
I wonder what those students would say if they could see how in my maturity, I look more and more like my mother, albeit much lighter skinned.
After she retired, she taught other retirees how to create their own mandalas with low-cost workshops she organized at the nearby technical school. The mandalas, she explained, were both a way to process trauma and to access a kind of primordial creativity, which she maintained existed in all of us.
I wonder, how does an upbringing peppered with stories like this result in an adulthood devoid of the same feelings of obligation? Or is freedom from these obligations the whole point of my existence? If I’m not a brilliant Black woman exhausting herself in a struggle to make a better world for our people, or at least my own family – if I’m not keeping this altruistic torch of my mother’s lit – then why am I here?
Are these burdens? Or is this legacy? Do I earn this mantle or inherit it? Or both?
Looking back at their lives, it’s as if every act was performed in the service of bettering the commonwealth: my mother teaching in working-class neighborhoods, thousands of lives left richer for her having contributed herself to them; my grandmother, gathering scraps of family history – battered library books and letters, newspaper clippings, even cousins lost to time and found through internet genealogy sites. She braided them together so that her granddaughter’s granddaughter’s granddaughter could have the extraordinary gift of her own history. Doing what Black women do, making the next generation of Black people’s lives, in this case, her own family, hopefully, better.
Brianna Wheeler is a writer in Portland, Oregon. She covers cannabis, culture, food, film, and local politics for print and web. She also hosts the Willamette Week news podcast, and is a frequent contributor to Portland City Cast. Her creative nonfiction work has appeared in The Nasiona, Midnight and Indigo, and has been featured in Medium’s Human Parts newsletter. In 2023 her first book, Altogether Different, was published by Korza Books. Its been nominated for an Eric Hoffer award, and has had a second, book club edition published as well. Altogether Different is a hybrid work of historical non-fiction that braids Brianna’s late grandmother’s genealogical research into an illustrated, contemporary memoir. Brianna lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and son. You can follow her on Instagram.
