The Vermont Folklife Center presents “From Life in West Africa, to Enslavement in Virginia, to Freedom in Vermont: an African American Saga” by Dr. Jane Beck
Please join us from 6:00 – 8:00 PM on Thursday evening, September 10^th , in celebration of Jane Beck’s recent publication,/Daisy Turner’s Kin: An African American Family Saga./ Refreshments and informal conversation with the author will be followed by a multimedia presentation, discussion, and book signing.
This event will be presented at the Vermont Folklife Center’s headquarters at 88 Main Street in Middlebury, VT. With many thanks to our loyal supporters this event is free and open to the public.
In 1983 Jane Beck, Founding Director of the Vermont Folklife Center, was introduced to Daisy Turner, the centenarian daughter of freed slaves who settled in Grafton, Vermont, in the years following the American Civil War. What began as a short meeting blossomed into a friendship that lasted the remainder of Turner’s life.During that period, Jane recorded almost 100 hours of interviews with Daisy, produced the film, /On My Own: The Traditions of Daisy Turner/ and the Peabody-award winning audio documentary, /Journeys End: The Memories and Traditions of Daisy Turner and Her Family. /In June of 2015 the University of Illinois Press published the capstone of Jane’s research on the Turners, her book, /Daisy Turner’s Kin: An African American Family Saga./
From life in West Africa to enslavement on a Virginia plantation, through the Civil War and ultimately to Vermont where Alec Turner and his wife, Sally, raised 16 children on a hilltop farm, the story of Daisy’s family provides important insight into the African American experience over an enormous arc of time. And Daisy’s own accounts of growing up in Grafton in the 1880s provide us with a rare first person window into African American life in rural New England in the post-Civil War years.
In large part thanks to Jane’s work recording and presenting Daisy’s family heritage, the land on which the Turner family homestead once stood is now recognized as a significant site marking African American presence in Vermont.
The Vermont Folklife Center Archive preserves Jane’s original recordings with Daisy and a wealth of photographs taken by Jane and donated by members of the Turner family. The archival collection created through her work and the audio and video documentaries produced by Jane continue to allow the Vermont Folklife Center to share the story of Daisy with a wide, international audience.
The Vermont Folklife Center's mission is to broaden, strengthen, and deepen our understanding of Vermont and the surrounding region; to assure a repository for our collective cultural memory; and to strengthen communities by building connections among the diverse peoples of Vermont.
Bob Hooker
Administrative/Development Assistant
Vermont Folklife Center
802-388-4964
bhooker@vermontfolklifecenter.org
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