Reimagining Equality

by Anita Hill

  In 1973, however, I was a seventeen-year-old about to embark on an adventure. Having grown up in an era that promised new opportunities for young black women like me, I was off to claim them. In time, I would also begin to understand that my passage was not just my own; it also signified the most recent steps in a journey that had begun more than a hundred years earlier, when my ancestors, like so many blacks, set out in pursuit of the home that America had promised them with the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.

  A New York Times article published October 7, 2009, “In First Lady’s Roots, a Complex Path from Slavery,” detailed the ancestral origins of First Lady Michelle Obama. It confirmed that an extraordinary amount of detective work is required to unravel African American family history. It also provided a glimpse into how unaware many of us are about the details of our past; Mrs. Obama had no knowledge of some of the stories that were ultimately revealed. Long before the Times article appeared, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was receiving widespread acclaim for his project that traced the genetics and genealogy of prominent African Americans. Gates’s work, heralded as inspiring, has spawned courses at universities throughout the globe. “The desire to know who you are and where you come from is universal,” transcending geography, age, and race, said Professor Gates.1 Using public information and genetic technology, Gates set out to map the passages of black Americans from location to location within the United States as well as from regions in Africa.

  Informed and motivated by these stories and by a family legend, I began to retrace the path taken by my mother’s family, beginning with my only known maternal great-grandmother, Mary Elliott, from southwest Arkansas to eastern Oklahoma, where I was born. I wanted to know not only where they lived, but also—and more important to me—who they were and how they lived.

  Mollie (née Mary) Elliott Taylor: The Last Generation of Slaves

  Mary Elliott was born a slave in 1847, in one of the Elliott households in Oauchita County, Arkansas. The white Elliott family, whose ancestors could be traced to the Revolutionary War, were among the state’s political and economic elite planter class. Camden, the Oauchita County seat, was set on the Oauchita River and had become a busy trade center because of its steamship connections to New Orleans. As it did throughout the South, cotton drove much of the business that operated out of Camden. By the late 1850s whites in the county prospered, shipping as many as forty thousand bales of cotton annually from Camden and building fine homes to reflect the area’s wealth. As cotton output and prices rose, so did the number of slaves bought by whites in the region. Camden was booming by 1860, nearly tripling its population from the previous decade; it had two newspapers, numerous churches, manufacturing enterprises, and a number of lawyers. At the outset of the Civil War, more than half of the county’s twelve thousand inhabitants were slaves.

  It was in Oauchita County that Mary married Sam Elliott, also a slave, in 1863. They were both teenagers; she was sixteen years old. Like all other slaves who lived as wife and husband, their marriage was not recognized legally. Sam’s and Mary’s lives on the Elliott family farm were unremarkable, at least according to written records. Sam and Mary worked the land outside of Camden and lived together in slave quarters: a log cabin that likely had one or two rooms and a dirt floor. When Captain F. Heinemann of the Union army came to occupy Camden in 1864, he found “a small place, [whose] homes indicate a fairly well situated and intelligent population.”2

  Life in bustling Camden and Oauchita County, however, was about to change. In April 1864, during what became known as the Camden Expedition, Union troops advanced from Little Rock to occupy Camden as part of a push toward Shreveport, Louisiana. Brigadier General Frederick Salomon of the Union army established his headquarters in the home of James T. Elliott, a major in the Confederate army. Elliott family members were allowed to live on the second floor of the home. Troops camped out on properties throughout the area, taking over mills and raiding trains and steamships to commandeer food for the advancing army. The area was in turmoil as soldiers prepared for the battle of Poison Springs. The white inhabitants of Oauchita County, mostly Confederate sympathizers, were under siege and living in an enemy-occupied territory.

  Mary Elliott, pregnant with her first child, was put up for sale. A family in Sevier County, Arkansas, near the Texas and Oklahoma borders, purchased Mary just as slavery was about to end. A healthy woman in her late teens might have sold for as much as twelve hundred dollars, and Mary’s pregnancy added to her value; the prospect of an additional slave made her an even more attractive buy.

  Though not as wealthy as their Camden neighbors to the east, Sevier County’s planters were thriving. Cotton production, continually on the rise throughout Arkansas, was moving westward to the state’s far southwest corner. The high yields from Sevier’s rich bottom soil meant that more field hands were needed to keep up with the output. But purchasing slaves during the Civil War became an act of faith. Planters held out hope that the Confederate army would prevail, that Arkansas would remain a slave state, and that their way of life would endure.

  A battleground now stood between Mary and Sam. The war raged on, but nearly two years into it, in January 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet Mary, like many who would not learn until much later of their liberation, continued to live as a slave. And when she gave birth to a son, William Henry, in May 1864, her husband was a hundred miles away, still enslaved on the Elliott farm in Oauchita County, just as she continued in bondage.

  With Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s surrender to the Union’s Ulysses S. Grant in 1865, the war ended. With the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the chance for lives as free people came to nineteen-year-old Mary and her twenty-month-old son Henry, as it did for millions of black Americans throughout the country. Marriage took on added importance for the newly freed slaves. At the end of the Civil War, a black corporal in the U.S. Colored Troops rallied his command, saying: “The Marriage Covenant is at the foundation of all our rights. In slavery, we could not have legalised [sic] marriage: Now we have it . . . and we shall be established as a people.”3

  Like the corporal, early black Americans attached their ability to marry to their ability to establish a residence, a community, and a national home. The first Africans who would be called Americans—the largest group of immigrants in the country’s history—had to start from scratch, or worse, from bondage. So strong was slavery’s pull that the ability to establish a family outside of its influence did not fully materialize for almost a generation after the end of the Civil War. Yes, at the end of the war blacks could marry. Thanks to the efforts of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, better known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, they did. But many of the marriages performed by government officials involved individuals brought together by their owners. Yet some attempts were made to mend families that slavery had fractured. Government officials reunited hundreds of black families in Arkansas; army officials even performed wedding ceremonies.

  Mary and Sam’s family, however, was never restored. Why they were not among those taking vows is unclear. As a free man, Sam could have joined Mary in Sevier County. Or Mary, who had no longstanding ties to her new home, might have returned to Oauchita County. But it probably would have been difficult. After the Civil War ended, the Freedmen’s Bureau opened an office and refugee camp in Camden, most likely because of its proximity to river travel. Thousands of destitute, hungry, and ill-clothed freedmen and displaced whites flooded the area. By 1865 diseases like dysentery and rubella had spread through the overcrowded camp and surrounding areas.

  The horrific health situation endured for three years. An 1866 news story in the Ouachita and Union County Reports noted that “old and diseased freedmen and freedwomen are constantly turned away by their employers and former owners.” Those who were no longer able to work were unwelcome as tenants on plantation prop
erties. One historian has noted that “Mississippi and Arkansas river steamboats often dumped ailing black passengers at [the] nearest port.”4 By 1867 the vessels that had once hauled cotton and healthy, valuable enslaved blacks were now loaded with aged, infirm free blacks. Oauchita County was no place for Mary to return with her young son. The Arkansas Gazette Weekly reported in 1867 that, owing in part to an epidemic of cholera, the black population was rapidly disappearing. Just how Sam Elliott survived is unknown. What is known is that neither Sam nor Mary ventured to cross the hundred miles of dense cypress and pine groves to reunite their family.

  Mary Elliott remained in Sevier County, living in the shadow of her former slaveholder’s farm and most likely in one of his slave cabins. In 1867 Sevier County was partitioned by an act of the Arkansas legislature. Mary lived in the newly established portion, Little River County, but her situation remained the same. She was free, but she continued to work the land to make a home for herself and her son, Henry, in what was still a relatively new community. Conditions in Little River County for newly freed slaves were far from idyllic. Former Confederate soldiers bent on continuing the war, bandits, and Ku Klux Klansmen terrorized, beat, robbed, and even killed former slaves.

  Work in the fertile bottomland of the region was plentiful. Indeed, maintaining the agricultural economy in the wake of the Civil War was in the interest of both the North and the South. A Freedmen’s Bureau agent, Second Lieutenant Hiram F. Willis, set up his office near where Mary and Henry lived. Willis made it one of his primary responsibilities to enforce employment contracts for freed slaves. If his competence in acting on behalf of blacks was measured by the number of threats on his life and challenges to his authority he received, then he did his job well. The white farming population in Arkansas was so invested in the slavery system that the idea of paying blacks for work offended their very notion of race and class order.

  In the end, through violence, these “Lost Causers” prevailed. In October 1868, a group of six gunmen ambushed Lieutenant Willis while he was on his way to settle a dispute between a local farmer and black contract workers. Willis and two others were shot and killed. Shortly thereafter, as the political will for Reconstruction waned, the federal government closed the Arkansas Freedmen’s Bureau offices in 1869, leaving Mary and other former slaves in the area to negotiate with whites on their own. Although some had obtained basic literacy skills, Mary had not. Henry was nearly six years old, but the area had no school for black children. It did, however, have plenty of farm work.

  For the next five years, Mary raised her son alone on the subsistence wages she earned in the fields of Little River County. Henry worked at her side. In 1874, Mary married Charley Taylor, a widower alongside whom she had worked as a slave in Sevier County; they had been neighbors since their liberation. Marriage did little to change their housing situation. As if to say goodbye to her old life, Mary began to call herself Mollie and moved into Charley’s home, the cabin next to hers. Mollie, my great-grandmother, and Charley had three daughters together: Anna, Maria, and Bettie, the first known generation of freeborn children in my mother’s family. Over the years, Mollie’s household would include two adult daughters, one widowed and one separated; their children; and Charley’s mother. In time, her daughters moved to Missouri and Nebraska, but Mollie never lived far from Henry, my grandfather. Theirs was a bond forged by the cruelty of slavery that had separated Mollie from her husband and other family and left Mollie and Henry with only each other for the first ten years of his life. Their bond endured until his death, many years before hers. Mollie Taylor was 107 when she died in Oklahoma, where she had moved to be near Henry and his family.

  Ida (Crooks) and William Henry Elliott: An Uneasy Freedom

  Ida Crooks was born in 1874 in New Boston, Texas, just across Arkansas’s western border. When Ida was twelve, her brother, Danny, was killed by a white man in a dispute over land. Ida, her widowed father, and her older sister left New Boston soon after to start a new life in Little River County, Arkansas. There, in 1887, Ida met Henry Elliott, Mollie’s son.

  Three years later, Ida and Henry formed an unlikely union. She was the fifteen-year-old mother of a toddler; he was a twenty-four-year-old widower and father of three. She was known to be free-spirited; he was quite serious, even pious. But perhaps Henry saw something familiar in Ida. Henry had grown up witnessing the difficulties women and their children faced without men in their homes. Ida and Henry Elliott had one thing in common: they were the children of the last generation of slaves. As part of the first generation of African Americans who could begin to form families outside slavery’s sway, they represented the best chance to form “a people,” as the black corporal had imagined when he spoke to his troops at the end of the Civil War.

  The Emancipation Proclamation came of age through couples like Ida and Henry. Yet the freedom that Ida enjoyed, even decades after the Civil War, was fraught with uncertainty. Her ability to shape her own existence was premised on the institution of marriage and on a peaceful coexistence with the white population in Arkansas. Both factors were largely beyond her control.

  When she married Henry in 1890, Ida, who had never been on her own, was about to have her first home. To Ida and Henry’s generation, marriage may have been promoted as “the foundation of all our rights,” but Ida may not have been thinking of race or rights when she married. She was more likely thinking of her own good name and that of her son, Arthur, born out of wedlock. Even though he kept his biological father’s name (Newsome), Arthur became legitimate, in terms of the social norms, when Ida married. And by marrying Henry, an older widower, Ida regained whatever respectability she had lost. Socially, marriage helped establish Ida and Arthur as people—if not completely free, at least respectable. Yet her marriage to Henry was more than a formality. Over the years, they grew together as a couple and, with their children, as a family.

  By all accounts, Ida Crooks Elliott was confident and determined. But as a teenager, she could not have known how marriage, motherhood, and racial violence would come to overpower her ability to manage the home she lived in and her security within it. Indeed, what marriage meant for Ida was different from what it meant to the young Civil War corporal and his troops, or even to Henry. Along with her first home came the daunting responsibility of caring for three stepchildren, the oldest of whom was nine, in addition to her two-year-old son. Ida’s marriage legitimized her motherhood, and within that construct she proved to be incredibly prolific. After their marriage, every two years or so, Ida brought more Elliott babies into the world. By the turn of the century, five more children had joined the Elliott household. That meant more food to cook and clothes to wash and, invariably, sick children to care for. Two daughters and a son would die before the age of six.

  The Paradox of Black Motherhood

  In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt called on native-born women to prove their patriotism by bearing children; by then, Ida Elliott was giving birth to her seventh child. But at the turn of the twentieth century, black women, including Nannie Helen Burroughs, were also beginning to express a desire to free themselves from the limits on their lives. Angelina Weld Grimké’s 1916 play Rachel even suggested that women reject marriage altogether.

  Rachel is a coming-of-age play about a black woman in the early twentieth century whose experience is shaped by her emerging understanding of race and gender, and even class. Grimké, the great-niece of a noted abolitionist and suffragist, Angelina Emily Grimké, sought to show the brutality of lynching—not only the immediate horrors of the act, but also its repercussions for generations to come. Grimké chose a female protagonist as the play’s subject, even though men were typically the ones hunted and killed by lynch mobs. Though Rachel is not herself lynched, she is not immune from lynching’s harm. After she learns that her father and half brother had been lynched ten years earlier, Rachel is transformed from a woman who loves and longs for “brown and b
lack babies” into a woman who believes that they are best left unborn. Rather than risk bringing children into a world filled with violence and racism, Rachel ultimately chooses to break off her engagement. Grimké makes clear that Rachel’s decision costs her. By the play’s end, she is no longer her bright, vibrant, and hopeful self. Vacillating between near-hysterical laughter and deep remorse, Rachel struggles to make peace with her decision.

  Grimké’s drama sparked harsh criticism. The NAACP had commissioned Rachel, but critics rejected it as overly propagandist. The NAACP’s male leadership denounced Grimké’s message, claiming that her rejection of motherhood was a recipe for racial genocide, which the organization could not support. The play and its message for women sat dormant for decades, until it was presented in 1991 by students at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college in Atlanta.

  Roosevelt’s resistance to women’s use of birth control was not unlike the NAACP’s resistance to Grimké’s suggestion that black women reject motherhood. But the president, intent on balancing the impact of fertile immigrant populations, was directing his message at white women of English and Dutch descent, not black American women. The country’s population was changing to reflect the influx of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, namely Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, and Poles who were flooding into the country. They rendered futile Roosevelt’s efforts to shape the racial and ethnic image of the United States.