“When Victoria was twelve, Dolley told her she could no longer be around boys, especially slave boys, like Jim.
“In 1809, when Madison became president, he brought Coreen and Jim to Washington. Dolley directed the other house slaves to make sure her niece was not around when Jim was working. But Victoria was hardheaded; she hid in the armoires in the Madison family bedrooms, where they shared their deepest thoughts and feelings. It didn’t take long for Jim and Victoria to fall in love.
“One of the maids found out and suggested they stay away from each other. Jim was worried the maid would report them to Dolley, so he went to his mother. She burst into tears when he disclosed how he felt about Victoria. Coreen knew her boy could be sold or killed. She persuaded the steward to let Jim work in the kitchen, where it would be easier to keep the young lovers apart. But Victoria followed him there. One of the chefs, a slave, warned her that if she didn’t stop sneaking into the kitchen, he would have to tell the mistress.
“In 1812,” Mom continued, “the United States declared war on Great Britain, and on August twenty-fourth, 1814, British soldiers and slaves who had been freed and recruited to fight with them advanced on Washington. Dolley told Jim to save the American flag. He folded it, secured it under his shirt, then ran to hide in the woods with the other slaves.
“Years after the war,” Mom said, “Jim told his children how worried he was that lightning and flames from the burning city would reveal his hiding place.
“In December 1814, two months after Britain and the United States negotiated a peace treaty, Dolley gave a party to celebrate. She ordered the male slaves, including Jim, to stand along the walls holding rushlights.
“A decade later, he told his children how sore his arms became, but he would never forget the music, the dancing, and the ladies and gentlemen in their finery. Standing there like a statue, he must have looked like the hero he truly was.
“A few days after the party, Victoria sneaked into the kitchen again. The chef promptly carried out his threat. Dolley was furious. She had assumed that Victoria and Jim knew better than to fall in love. Dolley arranged to sell Jim immediately, and the president made only weak objections.
“Just before Jim stepped onto the wagon that would take him away, Coreen held him tight and wept bitter tears. Her only hope was that the Madison name might serve as a tool to help them find each other someday.”
I knew what was next. I could hear Coreen whisper to her son: “Always remember—you’re a Madison.”
“Jim was sold twice,” Mom went on. “The first time, he was sold to a nearby plantation, but Victoria drove herself there on a wagon to see him. The plantation owner sent her back and informed Dolley, who begged the new owner to sell Jim to someone far away.
“He ended up in Tennessee and never saw Victoria or Coreen again. But he remembered he was a Madison.”
Jim, I would learn when I tried to find him, was one of the countless slaves who was not valued by those who created America’s written record. Much of his story is lost to history.
There were more stories for my mother to tell me, but the hour had grown late, and Mom and I were tired. I accompanied her upstairs, kissed her good night, then returned to the living room. I have always been very private and reserved by nature, but I knew the source of my reluctance to accept this new role was about something more. For my mother, being the griotte meant being proud of descending from a U.S. president. She was not ashamed of having slaves in her family tree, yet, although most black Americans had enslaved ancestors in their genealogies, few had presidents. And she believed that President Madison was a great and good man.
I did not question Madison’s greatness, but I did question his goodness. James Jr. inherited more than fortune and power. He also inherited the southern way of thinking and behaving. Madison was a Founding Father who was reputed to have been kind to the human beings listed among his possessions, but I knew that he, like his father and many other plantation owners, sexually assaulted or coerced the women he owned. In my eyes, the griots before me had glossed over the less than admirable behavior that had given James Madison Jr. a place of honor in my family tree.
I had to remind myself that Mom’s view of the world was very different from mine. In fact, hers was only moderately different from that of women before the Civil War. Even white women from well-to-do families were supposed to be subservient to their husbands. Years earlier, I’d cringed when she told me she had attended college to study home economics in order to become a good wife. She had been working as a nutritionist when she met my father. After they married, she stayed home to take care of me and then my brother. Once we were off to school, she taught home ec in one of Oakland’s public high schools, but Mom’s raison d’être was tending to her home, her children, and her husband.
Mom entered womanhood during the Jim Crow era, when the effects of slavery were still in full force and when most black women were afforded little opportunity to become something other than a maid in someone else’s house and a homemaker in her own. Mom was one of the relatively few black women able to obtain a college education and have a professional career, but she remained comfortable with some of the long-held beliefs on the limitations of being a woman.
I, however, had entered womanhood during the turbulent sixties, when America’s young women challenged the status quo. We attended anti–Vietnam War rallies, burned our bras, and took The Pill, eager to step beyond the traditional roles for American women. We demanded to be taken seriously, to be respected, to be independent, and to be counted.
The moment my mother entered the kitchen the next morning, I asked, “Do you remember how you tortured me when I was a little girl?”
Mom looked bright and energetic in her purple pantsuit and matching shawl. The sunlight glowing beyond the window lit up wispy filaments of her silvery hair. I was still in my faded nightgown. My graying brown hair lay tangled and flat against my head. I had not slept well, worried about what I would do with the box, the most important item my family owned. I was unsure whether I should store the heirlooms safely away so that they would not be lost again or share them whenever and wherever I could in order to bring to light all they represented.
“Tortured you?” Mom asked, an amused expression on her face as she sat down across from me at the kitchen table.
“Yes. You kept me imprisoned beside your sewing machine for hours at a time.”
“Oh, that. Well, the results were worth the trouble. At the recital, you played the piano nicely, and you looked adorable. No one had the slightest idea what I had to go through.”
“What you had to go through?”
“Yes, Dolly, what I had to go through. You would practice your recital piece without much fuss; just a little reminding did the trick. But when it came to the dress, you were too much.”
“The only good part, as far as I was concerned, was that I got to hear the stories.”
“I understood how you felt about the stories. When I was a child, I would follow Daddy when he went into his library to get some reading done or correct school papers. I knew he wouldn’t turn me away if I asked to hear our stories.”
Mom started from where she had left off the previous night. She told me about Jim and the generations of his descendants, including her own. By that night, I thought she was done with the handing-down. I thought I had heard all the stories. I was surprised when she said, “I have something to tell you before I go back to Oakland tomorrow. I’ve never told you before. Your father is the only person I’ve ever mentioned it to.
“Your grandmother never sewed for me, and she hated to cook. She thought sewing and cooking wasted her time. Always said she had better things to do, like prepare lessons for her students or mark papers. Every evening before she sat down to do that, she checked my homework and my brothers’ too. A smudge or a single mistake meant trouble. And every morning, she inspected our clothes for the slightest wrinkle and our hair for a crooked part because, as she reminded us
each and every day, we represented the whole colored race. So much was at stake, she said over and over. The white folks in town were doing everything they could to hold us back, to make us feel we didn’t deserve to be free. Slavery ended some fifty-five years before I was born, but what those people really wanted was to turn back the clock and make us slaves again. It seemed like Jim Crow—‘Ol’ Jim,’ Daddy called him—lived right in our house.”
“I knew Grandmuddy was strict, but I didn’t realize she was that extreme.”
“You haven’t heard the half of it,” Mom continued. “Bringing up John, Mack, and me couldn’t have been easy, especially for Mother. She loved us, I’m sure, but sometimes it seemed she was trying to break us by enforcing a list of rules that was as long as her arm. She was hardest on me, claiming I was the most disobedient, and she was afraid to spank the boys. John’s nose would bleed, and he had some kind of allergy that made sores open up on his legs every spring and summer. And Mack had a hernia. The doctors said to keep him still—which was impossible. So John and Mack got away with murder. I even got punished for things they had done.
“The worst offenses were using bad language and telling a lie. Even lie was a bad word. We were supposed to say so-and-so ‘told a story.’ When we said a bad word or got caught in a ‘story,’ Mother would take a bar of soap and scrub out our mouths.
“When I was the one caught, I got more than a mouthful of soap. Mother would push me face-down on the floor, sit on my back, and beat my behind with a belt. The more I screamed, the harder she hit me, and she did it until she got tired. By then, my backside was swollen and covered with red welts. And I was angry.”
“Did Gramps ever intervene?”
“Daddy was never around when Mother hit me like that. What hurt even more than the beatings was that when I told him, he did nothing. The only way I could express my anger and grief was to refuse to address her as Mother. And I wouldn’t even look at Daddy. But also, I think, to be honest with both you and myself, I was afraid I would see indifference in Daddy’s eyes.
“I cannot justify her abusive actions to anyone, especially myself. I can only suppose Mother loved me in her way and was trying her best to direct me. I was a girl, so maybe she singled me out for punishment because she was afraid some man might try to hurt me if I didn’t follow her rules carefully. Maybe Daddy understood her reasons and accepted her methods. A little misstep on my part could have cost everything they worked for and put me in danger. They were only one generation removed from being slaves themselves. They knew what had happened to many slave women. But John, Mack, and I were just kids. We had never seen a slave. We didn’t understand what it meant to be somebody’s property. We didn’t know what that meant for the women.
“What happened to Mandy was much worse than what happened to me. I tried to be strong like her. And Daddy had told me I was President Madison’s great-great-great-granddaughter. I was proud of that. Even Mother couldn’t beat that pride out of me. Mandy and the president got me through those beatings.”
Mom never forgave my grandmother, and she never learned why my grandfather did not protect her. She had not mentioned the beatings to me before, and the box held no evidence of the abuse she had suffered. That narrative was a personal pain she had finally decided to reveal to me. She wanted her story to be complete, but I knew she would never talk about the beatings again. I wanted to say something that would take away that long-lasting hurt, but nothing seemed adequate. Mom blinked away tears. The beatings and Mom’s anger and pain would now be part of the family saga.
4
Footsteps
Over the next two years, I went through the box again and again. I studied maps of West Africa and researched the history of slavery in America. I read biographies of James and Dolley Madison and historical studies on the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. And I tried to figure out the message the directive should impart to the current and future generations of African-American Madisons.
My mother, like the ancient storytellers of West Africa, retold the family history that had been passed from generation to generation faithfully and accurately. She added her own stories and messages but never challenged any part of the saga. However, unlike the ancients, who relied strictly on oral tradition, my mother embraced a new tradition started by my great-grandfather Mack. To make the stories tangible and support them, he had gathered up letters, documents, and photographs. He wanted his children and grandchildren to see their ancestors, read their words, and hold in their hands evidence of what they had accomplished once they were no longer in bondage.
I, the newest griotte, would be the first to write it all down, and I began to realize I would be the first to explore the discomforting parts of our story. I had many questions. Who were these slaves and slave owners I had heard so much about? How had they influenced who I was? I wanted my ancestors to become real to me. In addition to Mack, Emanuel, Jim, Coreen, and Mandy, there were other enslaved ancestors living in my mind. I knew other names—Shelby, Henry, Charles, Young, John, James, Giles, Manda, Elizabeth, Lily, Katie, and Toby. I needed to visualize all of them and understand their sorrows, joys, and passions. I needed to know how Mandy had survived the Middle Passage and life in bondage and how generations of her descendants had endured unrelenting, sometimes life-threatening, racism. And I had to try to understand how James Madison could own some one hundred human beings while knowing that the widespread institution of slavery spat on the moral principles underlying the nation he had helped create. To know my ancestors and find myself in their stories, I had to walk in their footsteps. Virginia, I decided, would be the best place to begin.
My first visit to Montpelier, where James Madison had lived for most of his life, was in June 1992. I packed a suitcase, grabbed a couple of notepads and a handful of pens, and headed to the place where Coreen uttered the words that had guided my family for eight generations. I landed in Richmond, rented a car, and drove straight to the Virginia State Library.
A librarian sat at a table a few feet behind the waist-high counter. Thin and primly attired, with tightly curled brown hair, she faced me but kept her eyes on the piles of file cards she was organizing in a metal box.
I stood there a few moments and then said, “Excuse me. I’m looking for any documents and books you might have on Montpelier, President Madison’s former—”
“I know what Montpelier is,” the librarian said in a thick southern accent. She did not look up.
“I came down here from Boston to do some research on the plantation,” I persisted.
Her back stiffened. Still without looking up, she said, “Really? Well, you’ll have to come back some other time.”
Although thirty years had passed since the civil rights movement, I had come of age in that era and knew that resentment and prejudices die hard. This is the South, I reminded myself. To this woman, I was an invader, and the counter was her fortress wall.
I heard a voice behind me. “Hello. I’m Alice. I have a minute or two to help you if you’d like.” A second librarian, just as white and with a drawl that was just as thick as the first librarian’s, stepped out from the stacks. The first librarian finally glanced up. She rolled her eyes.
Alice, in her late forties or early fifties, was pleasantly round and very blond. She wore black-rimmed cat’s-eye glasses and a yellow shirtwaist dress.
“Yes, I’d like some help,” I said. “My ancestors were slaves at Montpelier.”
“Figured as much,” the first librarian mumbled.
“Have a seat, please,” Alice said, directing me to a thickly varnished table and chair near her scratched-up desk. She vanished into the stacks and returned several minutes later pushing a clattering cart loaded with books and binders.
“This should get you started,” she said, unloading everything in front of me.
“Thank you,” I replied, then hunkered down to peruse records on the Madisons and on slavery in Orange County and other parts of
Virginia. Time passed quickly as I became engrossed in dusty church documents, portions of Dolley Madison’s letters to her niece Anna, and narratives by slaves and former slaves.
I read accounts of thousands of acres of tobacco cultivated by tens of thousands of slaves. I examined photographs of mansions and slave shacks, deciphered personal letters written by public figures and everyday citizens, and stared at notices of slave auctions. The Orange County of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came alive. It was clear that life in pre–Civil War Virginia was either grand or shabby, filled with optimism or devoid of hope, comfortable or desperate, depending primarily on the color of one’s skin. White citizens, no matter how destitute, had freedom, had never had to fear shackles, chains, and whips. Blacks with “free papers” had freedom as fragile as the documents themselves. For slaves, freedom was an improbable dream.
I was beginning to understand how slavery shaped the lives of my ancestors, both slaves and slaveholders. It spawned the vulnerability of the former and the ironic combination of dependence and power of the latter. Antebellum Virginia was a place where masters treated their slaves as chattel, controlling what they ate, when they worked, when they slept, where they could go, and whom they could love. Yet the powerful were dependent on the vulnerable to cook and clean, take care of their children, work their fields, bathe, dress, and groom them, and, most important, keep them wealthy and secure.
Though I had much more to learn, I left the library with a sense of accomplishment. I drove westward, about seventy-five miles, to Orange County. I had reserved a room in a bed-and-breakfast and looked forward to the antique canopy bed, handmade quilts, a loft filled with nineteenth-century toys, and the seven acres of secluded lawns and trees described in the brochure. But I worried how my hosts would respond to me. From time to time throughout my adulthood, I had surprised more than a few folks by allowing my professional credentials to precede the arrival of my brown face.
The Other Madisons Page 4