Wilhelmina: An Imagined Memoir

Wilhelmina Johnson Hamlin died in 1930, shortly after the birth of her 6th child. She was 26 years old, remarkably unknown, and ordinary. Yet in her “ordinariness,” she was an extraordinary human being. A woman of color, living at a tenuous, often harsh, time for African-Americans, she created a legacy of love in her brief life.

Chancing upon her, the historical framework of her life was clothed by the imagined workings of a mind that bequeathed loving memories. Her story unfolds as a series of linked chapters in which she explores the events that have shaped her life. Through the prism of memory, moment, and thought, she cherishes the good, willing herself to ponder but not dwell upon the less than memorable. The majority of her formative years spent in an orphanage, she weighs its effects upon the primary issues that color her life including family, loss, the mysteries of the world, her mechanisms for sustaining happiness, and, shadowing everything, racism. Yet insistent as it is, she never allows racism, as it probes her thoughts, to appropriate them or her ample spirit.