Why all this chatter about the little room or the china closet? It is only a fictional tale of two spinster aunts, Hannah and Maria, who would rather burn their own house to the ground than to yield their personal secrets to the prying eyes and ears of some distant cousins to whom those secrets never did belong in the first place; Hiram being the black servant who somehow considers himself part and parcel of the Keys land even though the Civil War ended slavery long ago, Jane Peebles the woman whose delicious huckleberry pies finally won Hiram as her husband. All this from just a short story by Madelene Yale Wynne, daughter of the inventor of Yale locks, who died in Chicago.
It is only coincidence, I suppose, that we have a box of grandma's china stored in the attic.
Coincidentally, when I did my genealogy research on Ancestry.com a few years ago I noticed that someone else had already blazed the trails before me so that the story of the Burry family was already laid out and easily attached to ours. That research was done by Candice Peebles.
Coincidentally, while working in Miami I once was introduced to a Mr. and Mrs. Peebles, a black couple, but whether they are related to Candice I really wouldn't be able to say. Whether the Burry family has a black branch of its family I really have no idea. No one ever mentioned this to me, nor do I wish to trouble myself over these points of trivia especially given that the Burry connection is so distant from us as to have almost no bearing on my personal life. I just have no idea.
I do hope that these black people exploring their white connections won't be too disappointed when they learn that they are actually not related to the royalty or aristocracy of Europe. They may be finding just a string of white trash cousins who really would prefer not to be reminded of this point and whose ancestors moved to America often for precisely such reasons, because the opportunities of Europe were often closed doors to them. America was a place where they could work their way up from the bottom without the disadvantages of Europe.
