“When I don my foremother’s necklace, an oddly comforting conversation-piece, I am humbled. Its five faces have accompanied me down the red carpet and up the entrepreneurial ladder — steps they dared not ascend in their lifetimes. Their spirits, dangling around my neck, remind me that I am nothing without guidance from voices of the past.”
Sure, I love Balenciaga, Céline, David Yurman, Gucci, Michael Kors, Mikimoto and Tiffany & Co., as much as the next brand-absorbed diva.
When I don my Foremother’s Necklace, an oddly comforting conversation-piece, I am humbled. Its five faces have accompanied me down the red carpet and up the entrepreneurial ladder — steps they dared not ascend in their lifetimes. Their spirits, dangling around my neck, remind me that I am nothing without guidance from voices of the past.
As a publicist-cum-family history researcher, chronicling the untold stories of my ancestors and their colorful heritage (European, Sub-Saharan African, and Native American) has always been vital to me. Over the past three years, as I settled into semi-retired status (only representing select clients), my inventive itch prompted me to start my next project — gutting out vintage pocket watches, with the idea of collaborating with a jeweler to create a Foremother’s Necklace.
From rummaging through records of all types, to implementing a proposal that once won genetic DNA testing for family members, in 1999 I began chronicling the lives of my five overlapping tri-racial family lineages who originated throughout humble hamlets in Western North Carolina. My pictorial tributes had yielded a magnificent, full-color 420-page coffee table book, sold exclusively to family, depicting hundreds of restored black-and-white photographs, some dating back to the late 1800s. Other creations landed me on multiple episodes of Home & Garden Television before millions of viewers.
After a glamorous 25-year career that had access into the “all that glitters” environs of privilege and status, I realized that I not only wanted/needed to tell the stories of my forebears—but I yearned to wear a symbol of their strength and their struggles around my neck. My work had cast me jet-setting the globe and, of course, shopping for the now-insignificant baubles, gemstones, and beads, that collect dust in my jewelry box.
Not only am I one of few women that I know who can actually identify five generations of foremothers, but people are in awe that I can actually picture — look into the eyes of — five generations of maternal foremothers. I couldn’t allow the visual opportunity surrounding such a blessing to go to waste.
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