the bedford bob

In my guise as girl reporter, I covered an event at the John Jay Homestead last evening on the topic of slavery. The speaker was Fergus Bordwich, author of "Bound For Canaan," a book about the Underground Railroad, and another, newer book called "Washington: The Making of the American Capital." It was a very entertaining and illuminating lecture and Bordwich is a good speaker, which helps, but I couldn't help be struck by the fact that he was giving this entire spiel to an audience full of white people. Very white people. 

He said that in the 1790's and for decades after, the Hudson Valley, the place where I live, was the largest region of slaveholders in the entire northern part of the newly formed United States. And no wonder, since this is where the farms were that supplied milk and other farm produced goods to New York City. I thought about the old cemeteries and the old illustrious family names and how proud old Bedfordites are to have families that go back so long here. Some of those families, especially the ones who owned acres and acres, must have been slave owners. Gee. 

Then I noticed how so many female heads in the audience looked the same. There is a hair do in Bedford I have grown to refer to as, "The Bedford Bob." It's a chin length cut, no layers, no bangs, wisps, no fringe; usually blond but often that funny, unemphatic shade of gray that blond goes when it's not blond any longer. It would be called Remembrance of Blond if anyone took the trouble to bottle it.  Half the women in the room, maybe more than half, were sporting the 'do. They were also wearing boxy little silk suits in pastel shades, bare legs, and kitten heels, tiny miniature heels that are easy to walk in but add a half inch to one's height. Dressed in white jeans, boots, and a sleeveless chocolate colored silk top from Banana Republic, my flat ironed collar bone grazing hair frizzing in the humidity, you might say I felt just a shade out of place. More like an octoroon, or one of the slaves who must at one time have lived in Bedford. Hopefully if I was a slave in a past life here, at least I was a house slave who got the special privilege of sleeping in the house.