His family sought independence through the plastering trade; hers, via the steel mills.   Parents’ and siblings’ names are rendered in wools dyed to represent the diverse skin colors in their families--in conspicuous contrast to the very white culture of Columbus and the very green color of money that still underpin life in even this modestly-sized northern city that they came to call home.

George Goodrich’s page traces the histories of two families in America--his wife’s and his own, from the flames of injustice, lynchings and brutal beatings in the Confederate South, through their ancestors’ taking up the call to “follow the drinking gourd” (the North Star in the Big Dipper) to freedom--only to find life still difficult in a hardly less racist North.

© 1991 The Public Book

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