Minnie Riperton’s daughter, actress Maya Rudolph, recently found out some specific details about Minnie’s side of the family and the enslavement of her ancestors. Maya is the daughter of Minnie and her husband/music producer, Richard Rudolph. Maya’s biracial- her mother is African American and her father is Jewish. Although Maya always had the general understanding that we all have about slavery -that our ancestors were slaves in America just a few hundred years ago, she never really got to dig into the cruel details of her family’s history in slavery.
Maya was raised by her Dad after Minnie sadly passed away from breast cancer at the age of 31, just 15 days before Maya’s 7th birthday.
Maya and her brother, Marc, grew up within a loving household, and were raised by their Dad, who did the best that he could as a single parent. But they were obviously mostly familiar with their father’s heritage and culture, since that is who they lived in the house with.
That could have contributed to Maya feeling “orphaned,” as she explained it to People.com, when it came to her biracial heritage. She admitted that she didn’t always feel like she belonged with one particular group. So when she appeared on Finding Your Roots, the ancestry TV show that is hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Maya was finally able to learn a huge chunk of her African American history.
The show traced her roots back to 1827, when she was introduced, on paper, to two of her ancestors on her mother’s side who were born into slavery: her great-great-great grandparents, Manuel Grigsby and Mary Thurman. It wasn’t until Maya learned of some of the details about how the slave owner, James Warren Grigsby, owned her ancestors, that she truly began to break down. The thing that really broke her heart was seeing the actual slave census, which listed her great-great-great grandfather, Manuel Grigsby (the slaves oftentimes had the same last name as their owners), as one of the enslaved when he was just 5 years old. Manuel was only listed by gender and age on a list of 32 slaves that his slave master owned.
Maya just couldn’t believe what she was seeing and here is what she said after seeing her relatives on the slave census:
“Oh my god, I cannot believe I’m looking at this. That breaks my hear. I just think of my kids. That’s really hard to see. Wow, I just can’t believe what I’m looking at. That poor little boy. That’s insane…you just don’t think of details, because you don’t have them. And then I see five and I think of my daughter. How can you imagine anything like that?”
Below is the video clip of Maya tearing up after she learned of her family’s history…
The clarity Maya received, by getting some factual data about her ancestors, is something that we wish all African Americans were able to experience, just to get a true understanding of where we all come from and what our ancestors fought through, so that we no longer have to.
Much respect to Maya for sharing her quest for knowledge about her heritage with the world. I’m sure her mother, Minnie, would be beaming with pride right about now, just as much as her Pops already is.
Old School Fun Fact:
Minnie Riperton wrote “Loving You” in 1974 (it was released in ’79) for Maya, who was only two years old at the time. If you listen to the song closely, at the end you can hear Minnie singing “Maya, Maya, Maya, Maya, Maya, Maya, Maya, Maya.”
