Flight to Ohio: From Slavery to Passing to Freedom - Hardcover

AUTHOR'S NOTE:
1836 is the year my maternal great-great grandfather arrived in southern Ohio. The 1903 Atlas of Warren County reads at page 91: “Thomas Jones was born in Campbell County, Virginia, September 4, 1815 and died October 9, 1900, aged 85 years. When he was twenty-one years old he came to Ohio, a poor boy, with nothing but his hands and an honest purpose.”
My mother began telling me the rumors when I was eight, rumors she mostly denied. She did admit it was true her great-grandfather Thomas Jones walked up to Ohio from Virginia with a colored woman and “she didn’t understand what that was all about.” As a young schoolteacher in rural southern Ohio she received anonymous notes she called hate letters: “We know you have colored blood.” My sister, ten years older than I, later told me how distraught Mother was when she received the notes.
Several years ago, with both parents dead, I took a DNA test. I show two percent Subsaharan African and five percent East Asian blood. A slave ancestor from the West or East Indies? Am I the last of my family in whom the heritage with which I inwardly identified all my life is measurable?
Haunted by the fact I can find no history of Thomas Jones’ ancestors, by the rumors, by stories from my Jones cousins, but mostly by the pain I saw behind my mother’s eyes, I imagined a story that became this book.
(Mary Anderson Parks Flight to Ohio)

Mary Anderson Parks worked for twenty-two years as an attorney representing the foster care/adoption agencies of the Puyallup Indian Nation, the Seattle Indian Center, and United Indians of All Tribes Foundation. She is the author of two previous novels, They Called Me Bunny, Livingston Press, University of West Alabama (2006), and The Circle Leads Home, University Press of Colorado (1998). Her husband, a space physicist, is of Korean and Chinese ancestry. They had two daughters and live in Berkeley with their surviving daughter and her husband, a rock musician, and two granddaughters, 10 and 15. Grandson Zach, 24, lives in Boston. Mary was born in Ohio, grew up in San Francisco. (Mary Anderson Parks Flight to Ohio)