BY 1986, I spent most Wednesday evenings with Aunt Nellie. She shared details of the Stanley family’s intergenerational illness with me. Amazingly, she was not ashamed of her family’s history of mania and depression. Though she had suffered bouts of despair, she had never suffered full-blown clinical depression.

My aunt wanted me to understand how my grandmother’s illness affected my mother. She shared an incident that occurred while my mother was a teenager. During a manic episode, Granny Ruth disappeared from the residence she and my mother, her only child, shared, abandoning my mom. Mama hid my grandmother’s absence for several days. When Aunt Nellie discovered her sister was gone, she brought her niece to live with her and her youngest sibling, Theodore, in the family home on Caroline Street. By this time, both of my great-grandparents were deceased. My mother never talked to her children about Granny Ruth’s mental health history; I think it was too painful—and personally shameful—to discuss. As an adult, I mentioned inheriting bipolar disorder from the Stanley side of my family to my mom. She countered with, “Your father’s sister was mentally ill.” I corrected her, “Auntie was mentally challenged. That’s not the same thing.”

“Hmmph,” she responded, shrugging her shoulders, thereby ending the conversation.

Because I was suffering the generational impact of the disease, Grandma Aunt Nellie—as I affectionately called her—thought it important for me to know how manic-depressive illness had affected the Stanleys. She told me how smart my grandmother had been, graduating from high school at age sixteen. My grandmother had told my older sisters and me she accelerated high school completion because she didn’t like school, and dropping out was not a Stanley family option. Aunt Nellie remembered my grandmother’s mania beginning as early as age seventeen. She also recalled my grandmother attracted “pretty” men. My maternal grandfather fit that category.

Other than my Great-Uncle Henry who suffered a head injury as a young child, my grandparents insisted the nine remaining children receive high school educations. Some pursued higher education. Great-Uncle Charles graduated from the school of music at Cornell University. Great-Uncle Theodore was a chemist who graduated from Morgan State University. This was an impressive family record for colored children raised in the early twentieth century.

Great-Uncle Edgar suffered from bipolar disorder as well. My sister Karen and I remember Uncle Edgar well. When he visited my mom, he always brought a half-gallon container of what we know and love as “cheap vanilla ice cream,” our favorite. Aunt Nellie described him as a brilliant man whose jobs included being a normal school principal. In her words, “Edgar’s life would fall apart and he’d have to put it back together again.” His manias began around age twenty. At that time, there was no medication for those suffering with bipolar illness. The afflicted would be institutionalized until the doctors at the facility thought they were ready to go home. When my aunt was eighteen, she managed to care for her youngest brother, Theodore, as well as her mentally ill older siblings in the family home. My grandmother and Uncle Edgar were twenty-four and thirty-four, respectively. Their parents were deceased.

Aunt Nellie never expressed resentment over the challenges of caring for her family members, although she sacrificed her personal freedom and sometimes safety to do so. Uncle Edgar was known to bring random strangers into the house during his manic phases. She served her family, which included me. Given her experience as a caregiver, Aunt Nellie often reminded me, “God blessed you. When your grandmother was sick, there was no medicine available to treat her. Your body responds positively to the medication that treats your illness.” She also knew lithium treatments didn’t work for everybody.

Thanks to my cousin James Stanley’s genealogical research, I’ve come to understand how our family tree developed so many disease affected branches. In a phone conversation, he shared that he was able to trace our family back to 1705.

That year, Mary Stanley, a white woman, conceived a child with a black man through a consensual relationship. The Stanley family, a pocket of free blacks, intermarried and created their own community in Cambridge, Dorchester County, Maryland—the same Maryland County where Harriet Tubman, née Araminta Ross, was born on a plantation in 1822 and then escaped to freedom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1849. She was the famed conductor of the Underground Railroad, a secret network of places and routes created by abolitionists to safely transport slaves across the Maryland line to freedom in the northern bordering state of Pennsylvania. Tubman returned to Dorchester County more than one dozen times, alluding slave poachers and sheriffs.

By remaining in a tight-knit community, the Stanleys protected their status as free blacks. This desire to remain free forced them to intermarry, incubating certain strains of DNA. In our case, the Stanley descendants, including me, became more susceptible to clinical depression and bipolar disorder. Although this is akin to a generational curse, I owe my existence to their instinct for self-preservation.

In 2013, Dorchester County established the 11,000-acre Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument, part of the National Park Service. For easier accessibility to important sites from Harriet’s time, the Park Service created the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway, a driving tour that allows visitors to stop at significant landscapes related to that invisible railroad. Site number six on the tour, The Stanley Institute, was named in honor of my great-great-great-grandfather, Ezekiel Stanley. Hidden in the woods during the time of African-American enslavement, this one-room schoolhouse was moved, intact, to its present location in 1867—three years after slavery was abolished in Maryland.

Students were educated there until 1962. The school is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. I believe this is where my great-grandfather George, received his early education. This school is a testament to the community’s determination to educate their offspring in a time when colored people were refused the privilege of learning to read and write.

Conducting my own research at the Enoch Pratt Library, I located information about my great-grandfather George Stanley, whose race was recorded as mulatto on the 1910 United States Census. Digging through old newspaper records, I found documentation naming him the first African-American to serve as a Maryland customs inspector. He also became the first African-American letter carrier in Baltimore. Shortly before marrying my great-grandmother Rosa King in 1895, he became an original stockholder and bookkeeper for The Lexington Savings Bank, an institution managed by prominent African-American men. The Morning Herald reported that the bank “was the only one of it’s kind in Baltimore. It was supported entirely by colored people . . . [and] the institution catered entirely to the poorer classes.” The business enterprise, lauded by Baltimore’s Afro-American newspaper, folded in 1897 after a major scandal erupted surrounding the bank president’s alleged embezzlement of its funds. The Afro included a sketch of my great-grandfather, a man who could have passed for white, if he had desired. Mama described him as a blue eyed red-head.

My great-aunt Polly passed first-hand information to her son, Jimmy. A close friend of Aunt Nellie’s, she met and married my great-uncle George Stanley Jr. According to Jimmy, Granny Ruth’s sibling group was stigmatized and taunted openly. Although Aunt Polly didn’t share specific descriptions of the family’s behavior, Jimmy recounted his mother’s memory of neighbors calling my grandmother and her siblings the Crazy Stanleys.

I have endured being called crazy at different times in my life. I understand witnesses to my off-kilter behavior lacked the understanding and language necessary to process what they were seeing. With limited understanding, they reached conclusions similar to those I formulated as a nine-year-old child after my visit to Springfield State Hospital.

Now that I have achieved a largely asymptomatic, even mood, people who know nothing about my mental health history sometimes speak quite pejoratively in my presence about those who suffer with bipolar disorder. Some people expect those suffering with bipolar disorder to swing from chandeliers and exhibit all manner of outrageous behavior, continually. I have remained silent, never attempting to correct their unlearned notions.

I now understand the truest motivation for my silence. I did not want anyone who had no idea to know I was one of the crazies of whom they spoke.