Helena Smith-Barrington is a sixty-year-old woman originally from the City of Birmingham, Alabama, who moved to the City of Ottawa, Ontario, during the real estate craze affecting the Capital of Canada. Far from her southern comfort zone, Helena had to adapt to a brand new environment. Fed up with the direction the economy in Alabama was going in, Helena decided to give Canada a try, and found pleasures both old and new in her new northern domain...
The death of Helena Barrington's former husband, Lincoln Barrington, in the summer of 2017 definitely took her by surprise. The two of them met while studying at the University of Alabama in the Fall of 1975. Back then, Helena Smith was the precocious daughter of wealthy Alabama farmers Luther and Nicole Smith, giving the whole university thing a try. Lincoln Barrington was the handsome young man who took her breath away, one fine day in the school gym.
At the time, Lincoln Barrington was the undisputed king of the University of Alabama campus. A six-foot-two, lean and athletic, dark-skinned young African American athlete originally from the City of Brockton, Massachusetts. With his New England accent, his good looks and his cocky, prideful demeanor, Lincoln Barrington was a big hit with the local ladies, but he had his sights set on the lovely, shy cheerleader known as Helena Smith...
Lincoln Barrington decided to come to study civil engineering at the University of Alabama on a football scholarship. He'd fallen in love with the Dirty South while visiting it the previous summer with his parents, Louis and Beulah Barrington of Brockton, Massachusetts. Lincoln's parents emigrated to Massachusetts from their hometown of Kingston, Jamaica, at a time when the Civil Rights Movement was at the height of its power and influence. The Jamaican-American couple raised their son Lincoln to be strong, proud and fearless...
To say that Lincoln Barrington and Helena Smith came from different worlds would have been a sheer understatement. In the rather conservative realm of Alabama, even in 1975, it was uncommon to see Black men with White women, even though one saw White men with Asian women, Latin women and Black women everywhere one looked. Helena and Lincoln fell in love, and refused to let anyone stand in their way. People stared, and sometimes said hateful things to them, but Lincoln and Helena would not let anyone or anything stop their love.
Graduating from the University of Alabama in the summer of 1979, Lincoln Barrington and his fiancée Helena Smith decided to do some traveling. They left the U.S. and went to Ontario, Canada. While visiting major cities like Toronto and Ottawa, they saw that Canada had a lot of racial diversity, and that it wasn't as overtly hostile to minorities as America was. They got married in a quiet little Anglican church in the City of Ottawa, and had their honeymoon there. It was six months before they returned to the City of Birmingham, Alabama...
Lincoln Barrington and his new bride Helena Smith-Barrington didn't have it easy as an interracial couple in Alabama, but they were hard-working, educated and determined. They bought a nice townhouse in the west end of Birmingham, and had two sons, Trevor and Wyatt Barrington, and a daughter, Leanne Barrington. The Barrington family raised their sons and daughter to be smart, strong and capable. They knew that as mulattoes in America, they were going to get flack from all sides.
