The stories that we found are not the sort found in textbooks, which tend either to recreate Black History through the narratives of great women and men, or else through broad social movements. We were able to find stirring stories of heretofore anonymous individuals who made heroic contributions against seemingly insurmountable odds. If the promise of America was the right to own land, very few blacks were able to do so before the middle of the 20th century. But some did.
Oprah Winfrey’s great-great-grandfather, Constantine Winfrey, a farm worker in Mississippi, had the audacity to approach a white man, John Watson, in 1876, and make a wager: If he picked 10 bales of cotton in one year, Watson would give Winfrey 80 acres of his land in return. (In 1870, a bale of cotton weighed 500 pounds.) On June 21, 1881, a property deed recorded the land exchange between the two. Constantine is listed in the 1870 census as illiterate; 10 years later, he had learned to read and write. And when, in 1906, the local “colored school” was slated for destruction, Constantine arranged to save it by having it moved to this property.
Chris Tucker’s great-great-grandfather, Theodore Arthur Bryant Sr., sold off parcels of his land to his black neighbors for below-market prices so that they would not join the Great Migration to the North, thereby saving the black community of Flat Rock, Ga.
Whoopi Goldberg’s great-great-grandparents, William and Eisa Washington, in 1878 received 104.5 acres in Alachua County, Fla., under the Southern Homestead Act of 1866. Less than 10% of black petitioners in Florida received land. “My country ’tis of thee,” Whoopi exclaimed, when she received this news. “My country.”
In the case of the astronaut Mae Jemison, we were able, incredibly, to trace three of her family lines deep into slavery, including discovering both a fourth great-grandmother and a fourth or fifth great-grandfather. Four of our subjects are descended from people who owned property in the 1800s, two well before the Civil War, and two more by 1881. The latter two, freed in 1865, in effect got their 40 acres, if not the mule.
Our genetic research also yielded a rich panoply of results, and a few surprises. My subjects share common ancestry with, among others, members of the Mbundu of Angola, the Kpelle of Liberia, the Tikar of Cameroon, the Igbo of Nigeria, the Mandinka and the Pepel of Guinea-Bissau, the Makua of Mozambique, and the Bamileke of Cameroon. I had expected the revelation of their African roots to form the dramatic climax of our research. But our subjects’ reactions to their putative genetic identities remained somewhat abstract.
What really stirred them was the light shed on their American heritage, their known world, as Edward Jones put it. It was a world they could touch and imagine, through the branches of their family trees. Genealogy trumped genetics. It was as if Africa, as the poet Langston Hughes wrote, was “so long, so far away.” Roots, like charity, start at home.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, and contrary to those who worry about “the geneticization of identity,” our sense of identity—in this case at least—seems to be more deeply rooted in the histories of family members we can name than in anonymous ancestors emerging out of the dense shadows of an African past, unveiled through a process admittedly still in its infancy. For my subjects, genealogy seems to have been a way of staking a claim on a richer American identity, an identity established through individual triumphs like the attainment of literacy and the purchasing of land.
What of my own case of “Roots” envy? We advertised for, and found, two male descendants of Samuel Brady, and compared their Y-DNA with mine. My haplotype, common in Western Ireland and the Netherlands, has as much in common genetically with Samuel Brady as it does, I suppose, with half of the males in Galway and Amsterdam. So much for that bit of family lore.
On the other hand, our genealogical research uncovered, to my astonishment, one of my fifth great-grandfathers and two fourth great-grandfathers, two born in the middle of the 18th century. I learned that one, John Redman, a Free Negro, even fought in the American Revolution. Despite the fact that we didn’t find Jane Gates’s children’s father, we believe that we have found her mother, a slave, born circa 1799.
As for my mitochondrial DNA, my mother’s mother’s mother’s lineage? Would it be Yoruba, as I fervently hoped? My Fela Ransome-Kuti fantasy was not exactly borne out. A number of exact matches turned up, leading straight back to that African Kingdom called Northern Europe, to the genes of (among others) a female Ashkenazi Jew. Maybe it was time to start listening to “My Yiddishe Mama.”
SOURCE: The Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2006.
NATIVE SONS OF LIBERTY
ON JUNE 11, 1823, a man named John Redman walked into the courtroom of Judge Charles Lobb in Hardy County, Virginia, to apply for a pension, claiming to be a veteran of the Revolutionary War. Redman, more than 60 years old, testified that he had been in the First Virginia Regiment of Light Dragoons from Christmas 1778 through 1782, serving initially as a waiter to Lt. Vincent Howell.
The Light Dragoons fought mainly on horseback, using sabers, pistols, and light carbines. They marched from Winchester, Va., to Georgia, where, in the fall of 1779, they laid siege to Savannah. The following year, they fought in Charleston, S.C., narrowly escaping capture in a rout by the British. Redman’s regiment fought the Creek Indians and the British early in 1782, ultimately triumphing over them in June at Sharon, Ga., near Savannah. After the war, Redman settled in Hardy County, where he and his wife kept a farm.
Four decades later, a neighbor and fellow veteran named John Jenkins affirmed Redman’s court testimony. A few weeks later, Redman was granted his Certificate of Pension, receiving the tidy sum of $8 a month until his death in 1836.
Yet standing before Judge Lobb in his courtroom that morning in 1823, John Redman had every reason to be nervous, for his appeal was anything but ordinary. Redman was the rarest of breeds: not just a patriot, but a black patriot—both a free Negro in a nation of slaves and a black man who had fought in a white man’s war.
In 1790, only 1.7 percent of Virginia’s population consisted of free people of color; in the 13 former colonies and the territories of Kentucky, Maine and Vermont, the combined figure was even smaller. Historians estimate that only 5,000 black men served in the Continental Army, whereas tens of thousands fled slavery to join the British.
The story of John Redman is illuminating because it opens a window on an aspect of the Revolutionary War that remains too little known: the contributions and sacrifices of a band of black patriots. But it is particularly fascinating to me because, as I learned just recently, John Redman was my ancestor.
I have been obsessed with my family tree since I was a boy. My grandfather, Edward Gates, died in 1960, when I was 9. After his burial at Rose Hill Cemetery in Cumberland, Md.—Gateses have been buried there since 1888—my father showed me my grandfather’s scrapbooks. There, buried in those yellowing pages of newsprint, was an obituary, the obituary, to my astonishment, of our matriarch, a midwife and former slave named Jane Gates. “An estimable colored woman,” the obituary said.
I wanted to know how I got here from there, from the mysterious and shadowy preserve of slavery in the depths of the black past, to my life as a 10-year-old Negro boy living blissfully in a stable, loving family in Piedmont, W. Va., circa 1960, in the middle of the civil rights movement.
I peppered my father with questions about the names and dates of my ancestors, both black and white, and dutifully recorded the details in a notebook. I wanted to see my white ancestors’ coat of arms. Eventually, I even allowed myself to dream of discovering which tribe we had come from in Africa.
More recently, in part to find my own roots, I started work on a documentary series on genetics and black genealogy. I especially wanted to find my white patriarch, the father of Jane Gates’s children. The genealogical research into my family tree uncovered, to my great wonder, three of my fourth great-grandfathers on my mother’s side: Isaac Clifford, Joe Bruce and John Redman.
All were black and born in the middle of the 18th century; two g
ained freedom by the beginning of the Revolutionary War. All three lived in the vicinity of Williamsport, a tiny town in the Potomac Valley in the Allegheny Mountains, in what is now West Virginia.
I am descended from these men through my maternal grandmother, Marguerite Howard, whom we affectionately called “Big Mom.” When Jane Ailes, a genealogist, revealed these discoveries to me, I could scarcely keep my composure. In searching for a white ancestor, I had found—improbably—a black patriot instead.
Frankly, it had never occurred to me that I, or anyone in the many branches of my family—Gateses, Colemans, Howards, Bruces, Cliffords, and Redmans—had even the remotest relationship to the American Revolution, or to anyone who had fought in it. If anyone had told me a year ago that this summer I would be inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution as the descendant of a black patriot—183 years almost to the day after John Redman proved his claim—I would have laughed. I had long supposed that slavery had robbed my ancestors of the privilege of fighting for the birth of this country.
Like most African-Americans of my generation, I had heard of the Daughters of the American Revolution, unfortunately, because of their refusal in 1939 to allow the great contralto, Marian Anderson, the right to perform at Constitution Hall. Anderson responded to the group’s racism with sonorous defiance, holding her Easter Sunday concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial instead.
In part to make amends for their treatment of Anderson, the Daughters of the American Revolution have begun counting the number of black patriots; so far they have documented about 3,000. Harvard’s Du Bois Institute and the Sons of the American Revolution are now researching the 80,000 pension and bounty land warrant applications of Revolutionary War veterans to compare these names to census records from 1790 to 1840.
Already, in just a few weeks, we have discovered almost a dozen African-Americans who served in the war and whose racial identity had been lost or undetected. With this systematic approach, we hope to expand substantially our knowledge of African-Americans who served in the Continental Army and, eventually, to reach a definitive number.
Once the research is completed, we will advertise for descendants of these individuals and encourage them to join the Sons or Daughters of the American Revolution, thus increasing the organizations’ black memberships beyond the meager few dozen or so the two groups have now. (If all of my aunts, uncles and cousins who are also descended from John Redman join, we will quadruple the number of black members in both organizations!)
We want to establish the exact number of descendants of African-Americans who served in the Continental Army, great American patriots, defenders of liberty to which they themselves were not entitled.
Of course, it is perfectly irrelevant, in one sense, what one’s ancestors did two centuries ago; but re-imagining our past, as Americans, can sometimes help us to re-imagine our future. In doing so, it may help to understand that the founding of this Republic was not only red, white and blue, it was also indelibly black.
SOURCE: The New York Times Week in Review, August 6, 2006.
IN THE KITCHEN
WE ALWAYS HAD a gas stove in the kitchen, though electric cooking became fashionable in Piedmont, like using Crest toothpaste rather than Colgate, or watching Huntley and Brinkley rather than Walter Cronkite. But for us it was gas, Colgate, and good ole Walter Cronkite, come what may. We used gas partly out of loyalty to Big Mom, Mama’s mama, because she was mostly blind and still loved to cook, and she could feel her way better with gas than with electric.
But the most important thing about our gas-equipped kitchen was that Mama used to do hair there. She had a “hot comb”—a fine-toothed iron instrument with a long wooden handle—and a pair of iron curlers that opened and closed like scissors: Mama would put them into the gas fire until they glowed. You could smell those prongs heating up.
I liked what that smell meant for the shape of my day. There was an intimate warmth in the women’s tones as they talked with my mama while she did their hair. I knew what the women had been through to get their hair ready to be “done,” because I would watch Mama do it to herself. How that scorched kink could be transformed through grease and fire into a magnificent head of wavy hair was a miracle to me. Still is.
Mama would wash her hair over the sink, a towel wrapped round her shoulders, wearing just her half-slip and her white bra. (We had no shower until we moved down Rat Tail Road into Doc Wolverton’s house, in 1954.) After she had dried it, she would grease her scalp thoroughly with blue Bergamot hair grease, which came in a short, fat jar with a picture of a beautiful colored lady on it. It’s important to grease your scalp real good, my mama would explain, to keep from burning yourself.
Of course, her hair would return to its natural kink almost as soon as the hot water and shampoo hit it. To me, it was another miracle how hair so “straight” would so quickly become kinky again once it even approached some water.
My mama had only a few “clients” whose heads she “did”—and did, I think, because she enjoyed it, rather than for the few dollars it brought in. They would sit on one of our red plastic kitchen chairs, the kind with the shiny metal legs, and brace themselves for the process. Mama would stroke that red-hot iron, which by this time had been in the gas fire for half an hour or more, slowly but firmly through their hair, from scalp to strand’s end. It made a scorching, crinkly sound, the hot iron did, as it burned its way through damp kink, leaving in its wake the straightest of hair strands, each of them standing up long and tall but drooping at the end, like the top of a heavy willow tree. Slowly, steadily, with deftness and grace, Mama’s hands would transform a round mound of Odetta kink into a darkened swamp of everglades. The Bergamot made the hair shiny; the heat of the hot iron gave it a brownish-red cast. Once all the hair was as straight as God allows kink to get, Mama would take the well-heated curling iron and twirl the straightened strands into more or less loosely wrapped curls. She claimed that she owed her strength and skill as a hairdresser to her wrists, and her little finger would poke out the way it did when she sipped tea. Mama was a southpaw, who wrote upside down and backwards to produce the cleanest, roundest letters you’ve ever seen.
The “kitchen” she would all but remove from sight with a pair of shears bought for this purpose. Now, the kitchen was the room in which we were sitting, the room where Mama did hair and washed clothes, and where each of us bathed in a galvanized tub. But the word has another meaning, and the “kitchen” I’m speaking of now is the very kinky bit of hair at the back of the head, where the neck meets the shirt collar. If there ever was one part of our African past that resisted assimilation, it was the kitchen. No matter how hot the iron, no matter how powerful the chemical, no matter how stringent the mashed-potatoes-and-lye formula of a man’s “process,” neither God nor woman nor Sammy Davis, Jr., could straighten the kitchen. The kitchen was permanent, irredeemable, invincible kink. Unassimilably African. No matter what you did, no matter how hard you tried, nothing could dekink a person’s kitchen. So you trimmed it off as best you could.
When hair had begun to “turn,” as they’d say, or return to its natural kinky glory, it was the kitchen that turned first. When the kitchen started creeping up the back of the neck, it was time to get your hair done again. The kitchen around the back, and nappy edges at the temples.
Sometimes, after dark, Mr. Charlie Carroll would come to have his hair done. Mr. Charlie Carroll was very light-complected and had a ruddy nose, the kind of nose that made me think of Edmund Gwenn playing Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street. At the beginning, they did it after Rocky and I had gone to sleep. It was only later that we found out he had come to our house so Mama could iron his hair—not with a hot comb and curling iron but with our very own Proctor-Silex steam iron. For some reason, Mr. Charlie would conceal his Frederick Douglass mane under a big white Stetson hat, which I never saw him take off. Except when he came to our house, late at night, to have his hair pressed.
(Later, Daddy
would tell us about Mr. Charlie’s most prized piece of knowledge, which the man would confide only after his hair had been pressed, as a token of intimacy. “Not many people know this,” he’d say in a tone of circumspection, “but George Washington was Abraham Lincoln’s daddy.” Nodding solemnly, he’d add the clincher: “A white man told me.” Though he was in dead earnest, this became a humorous refrain around the house—“a white man told me”—used to punctuate especially preposterous assertions.)
My mother furtively examined my daughters’ kitchens whenever we went home for a visit in the early eighties. It became a game between us. I had told her not to do it, because I didn’t like the politics it suggested of “good” and “bad” hair. “Good” hair was straight. “Bad” hair was kinky. Even in the late sixties, at the height of Black Power, most people could not bring themselves to say “bad” for “good” and “good” for “bad.” They still said that hair like white hair was “good,” even if they encapsulated it in a disclaimer like “what we used to call ‘good.’”
Maggie would be seated in her high chair, throwing food this way and that, and Mama would be cooing about how cute it all was, remembering how I used to do the same thing, and wondering whether Maggie’s flinging her food with her left hand meant that she was going to be a southpaw too. When my daughter was just about covered with Franco-American SpaghettiOs, Mama would seize the opportunity and wipe her clean, dipping her head, tilted to one side, down under the back of Maggie’s neck. Sometimes, if she could get away with it, she’d even rub a curl between her fingers, just to make sure that her bifocals had not deceived her. Then she’d sigh with satisfaction and relief, thankful that her prayers had been answered. No kink . . . yet. “Mama!” I’d shout, pretending to be angry. (Every once in a while, if no one was looking, I’d peek too.)
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader Page 3