“How are you?” I asked.
“Getting older, of course, but I’m okay . . . I decided to bring the box rather than call you to come get it because I didn’t want to worry you. I remember my father’s call all too well.”
“But why now?”
“I want to give you plenty of time to write the book.”
2
The Box
Before there was a box, there was a Bible stuffed full of family memorabilia. It was ordinary to look at, black except for the rough, tan leather showing through dry cracks along the edges of the binding and on the ridges around the faded gold letters that read Holy Bible. Gramps’s special feelings for the Holy Book had grown not just from devotion to Christian ideals, but from pride in the family documents he had painstakingly stored within its protective cover.
But he lost it. In 1940, he accepted an assignment to become principal of a new school, and Gramps moved, with his wife and three young children, from one small Texas town to another. Before leaving his old home, he wrapped the Bible in newspaper, tied it with string, and placed it on a bookshelf that was to be sent to his new home. The bookcase arrived at the new house. The Bible did not. Gramps was distraught. He assumed that his most cherished possession had been mistaken for trash, and he never forgave himself for not being more careful. He had lost part of who he was and felt he had failed as a griot. Gramps never forgot the family saying and continued to tell the stories. He purchased another Bible and planned to seek out keepsakes to save in it, but day-to-day responsibilities usurped his time, and time ran out too soon.
Seeing how devastating the loss was to her father, Ruby began gathering family mementos in a cardboard box. Gramps died in 1960. My mother, then forty-two, felt she should have done more. Gramps’s stories, his messages, his love for his ancestors, and the legacy he had sought to preserve had to be kept alive.
Sixteen years after Gramps’s death, the box was less than half full. That was 1976, the year Mom read Alex Haley’s novel Roots, the inspiration for the historic television miniseries that aired in 1977. Haley’s work helped many African Americans realize that their family histories were not only important but accessible. Mom decided to do something about recovering hers.
She left her home in Oakland, flew to Salt Lake City, and combed through genealogical archives at the Mormon Family History Library. The collection was vast, but Mom did not find what she was seeking—evidence that our enslaved ancestors had existed. From Utah, she traveled to Virginia and visited Montpelier, President James Madison’s home. At that time, the staff was meager and no one had begun exploring the roles slaves had played on the former plantation, so she spent hours at the Orange County Courthouse, searching rolls of microfiche. She did not find the names she was looking for. Several weeks later, after a brief stop back in Oakland, she was off again, this time to Bastrop County, Texas, where the black Madisons lived at the time of emancipation.
When she was not on the road, Mom spent hours in libraries, worked the telephone at home, and wrote relatives throughout the country. After five years, she had amassed scores of old letters, photographs, and copies of most of our lost documents. The only enslaved ancestors she had found records of were her great-grandparents Emanuel and Elizabeth and their eight sons, but my mother had become both griotte and archivist. She was satisfied that she had filled the cardboard box.
She created a slide presentation, and throughout the 1980s, she shared the stories and what she had found with family, friends, and historical and genealogical organizations in California, Texas, Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia. My brother and I teased her about “The Black Madisons’ Lecture Circuit,” but her commitment to keeping our family’s story alive was evident every time she carefully donned one of her colorful hats, waved to us from the car, then backed out of the driveway on her way to each speaking engagement.
I saw her presentation for the first time in the darkened living room of my parents’ home. With my ten-year-old daughter, Nicole, and a few other family members and close friends looking on, my mother stood next to the slide projector, advancing the slides one by one and telling the story behind each image as it appeared on the makeshift screen, a bed sheet taped to a wall.
The first slide showed a map of England. “The story of the Other Madisons began in the seventeenth century,” Mom said as she pointed to a small dot on the map. “This is where John Maddison—the name was spelled with two d’s then—grew up. He was the president’s great-great-grandfather.” The next slide displayed a map of Africa. Placing the pointer on the coast of an area that is now Ghana, she said, “And this is about where slave catchers found Mandy. She was the matriarch of our family.” A few slides later, a picture of a solemn, formally attired man appeared on the screen. “This,” Mom said proudly, “is President James Madison. And this,” she said, a slight edge to her voice as a slide of an elegantly dressed woman appeared, “is his wife, Dolley. If it had not been for Dolley, known for her fancy clothes, expensive tastes, and elaborate parties, Jim, Mandy’s grandson, might not have been sold and lost to us.”
Several images later, a tawny-skinned, white-haired man appeared on the screen. “This is my grandfather Mack Madison. So stately and handsome in his suit and vest—who would guess he had ever been a slave?”
Mack Madison (1837–1912)
Next was a picture of a fair-skinned woman wearing glasses and a lace-trimmed blouse. Mom said, “This is Mack’s wife, Grandmother Martha. Together they had ten children, but only five lived to adulthood.”
Martha Murchison Strain Madison (1842–1914)
The following slide was a composite. On the right was a studio portrait of four young adults, two men standing behind two seated women, all of them carefully groomed and wearing starched and pressed attire. On the left was an image of a man in a jaunty hat and a crumpled suit.
Mack and Martha’s surviving children. Left photo, Charlie; right photo, standing from left to right, Moody and John Chester (Gramps); seated, from left to right, Laura, and Ruth
Mom explained, “These are Mack and Martha’s surviving children. The four together are Laura, Ruth, Moody, and my father, John Chester. The man standing alone is their brother Charlie. A few years before these pictures were taken, Charlie got into trouble with some white men and had to leave town. He even had to change his name; John Miller is what he decided to call himself. He was afraid of getting lynched . . .
“Here is another picture of my father,” Mom said, displaying another slide. “Isn’t he good-looking! He wanted to be a doctor, but one thing after another got in the way, so he became a teacher and then a principal.”
John Chester Madison (Gramps) (1882–1960)
Many slides later, the show ended with a picture of Nicole when she was a coy two-year-old.
Mandy
By the time I was stolen, the pain of the cutting of my woman-to-be parts was only a memory. The ritual had prepared my body for the husband I would someday honor with children. I had become a proud young woman, tall, almost as tall as my father. Some girls didn’t like the scars the elders had made on their cheeks, but I liked the way mine felt whenever I smiled. My mother’s scars were similar, and the tightness in my face reminded me of how much I looked like her. I thought my mother was the prettiest woman in the village.
She knew how to make my hair beautiful. On the first morning after every full moon, I used to sit on the ground between my mother’s knees while she braided my hair. As the dusty plains to the east of our village awakened to the embracing morning light, my mother poured a gourd of water over my bowed head and then began the parting and braiding. She didn’t finish my braids until the lone tree at the top of the hill to the west had become a black and gold warrior that preened against the evening sky and saluted the ocean as it submerged the sun.
I remember the melody of my mother’s voice singing an ancient song or speaking the stories of our ancestors to help the time pass more quickly. I miss her voice, and I miss th
e feel of her fingers flying through my hair and the gentle tugs on my scalp as she made my hair beautiful. She had learned to make fancy braids from my grandmother, who had learned from my great-grandmother, who had learned from my great-great-grandmother, all the way back to the beginning of time, it seemed.
My mother could braid in straight rows like kernels on ears of corn or in spirals like snail shells. She could braid circles inside circles, and squares inside squares. But my favorite were the rows that curved up and down along my head, like the waves on the ocean I loved. My mother often wove in beads and attached several to the end of each braid. When I was a little girl, I liked to skip and jump just to hear them click and feel them bounce against my neck. As I grew up, I would sometimes toss my head to relive that memory. My favorite beads were red, and that never changed. And in my heart, I guarded the secret to the woman I am, and that never changed.
3
Family Stories
Though four inches taller than my mother, I felt small next to her. We sat on the sofa, the box between us. Mom leaned back into the pillows, her slender hands delicate, their joints and veins forming intricate angles and planes in her translucent skin. The woman at my side was much more than my mother: She was a woman of ancient times passing on a legacy for future generations. As she spoke, I reached for her hand and held on to it.
“Always remember—you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president,” she said. Her thin, high-pitched voice resonated through my living room, repeating the words I had heard so many times, each word lingering with a hint of a Texan drawl.
“Exactly thirty years ago,” she said, “when my daddy was very ill, he made me the griotte. It tired him out, but over three days, he told me all the stories, the ones passed down to him and the ones about his own life. Then, at the end of the third day, he reminded me that our history goes well beyond America’s boundaries. What we believe in and what is important to us come from the vastly different beliefs and values people hold in Europe and Africa. And this,” she said, searching my eyes, “is very important, Bettye: Each griot in our family has to understand that the Other Madisons might struggle sometimes to know how to live our lives, but when we share our stories, we build a sense of togetherness, and we learn who we are.”
Though many in our family have heard we descend from President Madison and his slaves, only the griots know the full account of our ancestors, white and black, in America. Gramps had told me many stories, but the detailed history was Mom’s responsibility to convey to me when I became the next griotte. That night, I understood for the first time why some of the details of our family history were passed only from the griot of one generation to that of the next. Not only were some of the stories intimate, but this tradition safeguarded their accuracy, truth, and longevity. I sank into the sofa with my mother and listened with a new awareness of the significance of her words and what they meant to me. She began.
“When your uncle John, your uncle Mack, and I were children, Daddy would call us to his library. He would spin the big globe that sat on his desk, then stop it to point to different continents and countries and teach us about ancestors who had lived there. When Daddy spun the globe and asked us, ‘Who was the first African in our family to come to America?’ John would stop the spinning globe, touch the outline of Africa, and shout, ‘Mandy! She was kidnapped in West Africa and put on a slave ship.’
“Then Mack would butt in. ‘They put chains on her, branded her arm, and shoved her down to the bottom of the ship!”
“‘I was going to say that,’ John always complained.” Mom smiled with the memory of the childhood rivalry between her now-deceased brothers.
“The learning became a game. Over time, the boys lost interest, but I didn’t. I can still see Africa and the different-colored shapes of countries on that old globe. Africa wasn’t divided into countries when Mandy lived there. There were kingdoms, some big, some small, but I can’t for the life of me remember the name of Mandy’s. I only know that it was about where Ghana is now. Where she lived was probably once part of the ancient kingdom of Ghana. Daddy also told us where her village was, but I’ve forgotten that too. Years ago, I asked my brothers, but they didn’t remember either.”
I was disappointed that no one in my family could recall where Mandy had been captured. My mother explained that her memory was beginning to fail. Although she had forgotten some details, other members of the family had intentionally forced the knowledge from their minds. Such valuable information had survived more than 250 years, only to be lost in one or two generations. We could no longer place our ancestors and our cultural heritage in the world that existed before the transatlantic slave trade displaced and redefined us. Writing down the stories would save details from being lost in the recesses of aging memories.
In order to find evidence that our family had lived on the American landscape for centuries, my grandfather and, later, my mother sought out and saved what documents and photographs they could. Yet history had tried to deny our existence. Faced with such erasures and with lost or rejected memories, I could foresee losing everything, fact by fact, until, finally, there was silence—nothing to know, nothing to say. With the box now in my hands, I prayed for the ability to prevent the loss of any more information, no matter how unsettling or seemingly trivial.
“John Maddison—that’s spelled with two d’s,” Mom said, beginning the saga of the Other Madisons, “was our first white ancestor in America. His son, John Jr., kept that spelling, but his grandsons, John the third, Henry, and Ambrose, spelled it with one d.
“John Sr. was a poor English boy with big plans. Shrewd too. He became skilled at making boats and saved up his money to buy passage to America. He had learned about the headright system. It began in Virginia as a way to deal with the labor shortage. Growing tobacco required lots of land and lots of people to work it. The plan granted fifty acres for each indentured servant brought from abroad. For a specified number of years, seven or so, these poverty-stricken men, and sometimes women and children, worked to repay the price of their transportation to America. John wanted to take advantage of the opportunities in the colonies, so, in addition to saving up money for his own fare, he also put aside around seventy-two British pounds, enough to bring twelve workers.
“When he arrived in Virginia in 1653, he received six hundred acres, not bad for a young man who had next to nothing back in England. Most likely, John kept a few of the indentured servants to work his own farm, but to get ready cash, he sold some of the contracts to other planters.”
As my mother retold John’s story, I pictured a young white man wearing a vest, fraying trousers, a crumpled cap, and a determined look on his face. In the end, President Madison’s great-great-grandfather might not have become as rich as he had dreamed of being, but he owned land, and landowners reaped respect and financial security. Selling and trading human beings for financial gain would continue in his family for generations to come. Those who profited from the headright system laid the groundwork for a way of life that relied on the enslavement of millions of black men, women, and children for nearly two and a half centuries.
“Mandy was our first black ancestor stolen from Africa. That happened sometime in the middle of the eighteenth century,” Mom said. “She was the mother of our family.”
I remembered listening to these tales as I stood beside my mother’s sewing machine and wondering what Mandy looked like. Each time I heard her story, I loved Mandy more. My heart broke for her. She had come to America alone. She didn’t know anybody, and everything was different. Mandy had no idea what was going to happen next or what she was supposed to do, and she couldn’t ask; nobody spoke her language. But she learned how to pick cotton and tobacco and to speak English.
I wondered how her voice sounded. Over the years since then, I began to feel so close to her that I sometimes imagined her speaking to me. And I envisioned a dark-skinned woman growing old laboring in the fields of Virginia, her muscles with
ering and weakening. I saw Mandy become a slave.
“Mandy and her master, President Madison’s father, had a daughter, Coreen,” Mom went on. “She was the first African-American Madison and the second of our family’s griots.” As a child, I’d identified with Coreen because my coffee-with-plenty-of-cream skin was only a little browner than I envisioned hers had been. She cooked meals and baked in the Madison kitchen. According to our family history, apple pie was her specialty.
“James Madison Jr., the future president, saw Coreen walking back and forth between the kitchen and the mansion. And he wanted her,” Mom stated simply. “As soon as she became pregnant with his child, she began to worry she would not be allowed to keep the baby for more than a few years. Coreen gave birth to a boy. She named him Jim. Raising him, Coreen lived in constant dread that he would be taken from her. She had heard of family members, even mothers and infants, being sold and separated by hundreds of miles, never to see each other again.
“In Jim’s teenage years, Coreen’s fear became reality. He had been born around 1792. A few weeks after his birth, Dolley’s sister-in-law died, leaving two daughters—Susan, a toddler, and Victoria, an infant. Dolley agreed to take care of them. When the children arrived at Montpelier, she assigned Coreen to be Victoria’s wet nurse. Coreen nursed Victoria on one breast and Jim on the other. The two children became inseparable.
“Many plantation owners believed that black people lacked the ability to read, write, or ‘figger.’ The slaves knew this was not true. As Jim grew up, he hid behind the door and listened in on Victoria and Susan’s lessons. His father saw him hiding there but did nothing. Allowing Jim to learn,” Mom speculated, “was Madison’s way of showing love for his son.
The Other Madisons Page 3