I do not know as much about my family as I would like.

My father, Saunders Samuel King, was born in Staple, Louisiana, seventeen miles south of Shreveport, on March 13, 1909. His parents, Judge, L. and Sarah Anasilistine Mitchell King were born in Alexandria and Sabine, Louisiana, respectively. Grandfather worked in sawmills and traveled from town to town earning a top wage in his field. Grandmother was educated through the ninth grade, married and gave birth to five children, my father the baby.I began researching my genealogy when my first child, Salvador was born. I began with my father's family because I had an aching desire to understand the origins of my black ancestors. I had a bit more information about my mother, Jo Francis Willis King, of English and Irish descent, but I knew that the records of my father's birth would be more difficult to find because records for black Americans were not written down at the time of my father's birth.

My father's family moved from Louisiana to Oakland when dad was a young boy. He played piano, banjo and ukelele in the Pentecostal church his parents founded on the corner of Willow and Seventh Streets. I don't know if the church, with its rousing gospel singing and tambourine rhythms, gave dad his musical style or his elegant posture and gracious way of speaking, but he was a source of strength, beauty, and wisdom.

I saw my dad in Nelson Mandela's stride when Mr. Mandela walked into the auditorium of the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg and I was there, and I've heard dad's voice in the words of Archbishop Desmond Tutu's lilting speeches.

You see my father endured the racism of America, shot in the stomach by a white landlord who felt entitled to comment with a bullet on my father visiting with a white woman in his apartment, but dad chose to live above oppression with his own understanding and unshakable fortitude.

Dad became a professional musician during World War II, playing guitar in his eponymous sextet in Chicago, the South, and many San Francisco and Los Angeles nightclubs and theatres. His double-sided recording of 'S.K. Blues' became a million seller for the independent West Coast record company Rhythm. Dad's other popular recording, 'What's Your Story Morning Glory,' raised his popularity to equal other black musicians in post war years: T-Bone Walker, Ivory Joe Hunter, and Joe Turner. It was a privilege to grow up listening to my father's sweet tenor voice echoing through our San Francisco living room, transforming it into a sanctuary. His fingers moving over the frets of his Gibson guitar, played chord progressions with major and minor notes that were a balm to my life.

Dad's brothers were inventors, and we had a legend that Uncle Jay had created a formula for shoe polish that later became Shinola™. One night he got drunk and the formula was stolen from him. Other family stories included my aunt Daisy, a Hollywood actress, being courted by jazz trumpeter, Satchmo Louis Armstrong. A strikingly beautiful woman, she did not want to marry, and Louis married another. Dad's older brother Ulysses assumed the mantel of Bishop of the family church.

History contains power. When I researched my father's childhood, his parent's lives, his musical legacy, how deeply B.B. King loved the beautiful sound of his electric guitar, I grew with pride as I heard notes singing from the past into the present.

Saunders King's legacy is in his grandson Salvador's piano playing, in granddaughters' Stella's bright flashing mind, and Angelica's poetry. He and my mother broke barriers of segregation in 1948 when interracial marriage was still illegal in seventeen states, and they married anyway.

Like a cartographer, I have created a map of my history so that it cannot be ignored or denied, but celebrated every month in the multihued glory of America.


Deborah Santana is a philanthropist, a supporter of peace and social justice, and the author of the memoir 'Space Between The Stars: My Journey to an Open Heart.' Deborah founded Do a Little, a nonprofit whose mission is to support women in the areas of health, education and happiness. To find out more about her life and work, read her blog on Red Room.