The Other Madisons

by Bettye Kearse

  Ann phoned T.O.—as Mr. Madden preferred to be called—the following day. He was an African-American descendant of indentured servants who’d been at Montpelier during the latter half of the eighteenth century. His book was the story of six generations of his ancestors, and that included Irish immigrants, African slaves, and their descendants.

  His great-great-great-grandmother Mary Madden was a poor Irishwoman who had came to Spotsylvania County, Virginia, in the 1750s. With no money and no resources, she became a charge of the state. In 1758, Mary gave birth to a “bastard mulatto,” Sarah. Mary could not pay the pauper’s penalty for producing a child, so when Sarah was not quite two years old, she was taken from her mother and bound as an indentured servant to George Fraser in Fredericksburg. A few years later, she would begin service; her servitude would last until she reached the age of thirty-one.

  It is not known whether Sarah ever saw her mother again, but in 1767, when Fraser failed to pay a debt, Colonel Madison, as James Madison Sr. was called by his admirers, took over Sarah’s contract. She was free, and her indentured status protected her from enslavement, but this nine-year-old child was poor and black and therefore nothing more than currency.

  En route to visiting Madden, distracted by dense forests of towering trees along the winding, hilly road, I drove almost a hundred miles in the wrong direction. As the sun went down, the way back seemed more winding and narrow. I found myself leaning forward and gripping the wheel. By the time I arrived at Madden’s home, the sky was pitch-black. I was drenched by a sudden summer storm as I dashed from the car to the front door.

  The rambling structure was a historic landmark, once a busy tavern owned and operated by Willis Madden, T.O.’s Irish-African great-grandfather, before and during the Civil War. A labyrinth of dim rooms with low ceilings and uneven floors, the house was cluttered with aging furniture, books, and photographs. The former tavern felt cloistered and protective.

  T.O., with his fair skin, straight hair, and hazel eyes, could have passed for white, and he looked far too youthful to be almost ninety. He greeted me in long johns and baggy pants held up by suspenders, just like my grandfather wore. Earlier that day, I had spoken with one of T.O.’s grandsons, and he’d told me that T.O. had recently been taken to the hospital because a car had backed into his legs. I was surprised he was so spry.

  “I told my grandkids I was fine, but they dragged me to the hospital anyway. Now I’m using this cane to make the doctor feel better,” he explained with a playful wink.

  His sense of humor, in addition to his attire, reminded me so much of Gramps that I felt at ease right away, and T.O. gave me a big hug, as if I were a long-lost daughter. I was excited to be in his presence. His ancestors and mine might have stood face to face the way we were doing now.

  The rain pounded the roof like a cascade of pebbles, and the wind rattled the ancient windows, but T.O.’s voice held steady above the din. “I’d lived here most of my life,” he said, “but I’d never thought about seeing what was in the attic. A few years ago, I got curious and climbed up. The air was real stuffy and hot, so I didn’t stay long. Just as I was about to leave, I saw a beat-up leather chest over in a corner. I dusted off the chest and carried it downstairs to this here bench. It took me a few days to go through everything, but I found my great-great-grandmother Sarah’s letters, bills, receipts, and account books. There were also property records that included ‘one old red cow.’ A few birth records too.”

  Sarah, a skilled laundress and seamstress by the time her indenture ended in 1789, had saved these items, now more than two centuries old. Her small trunk sat like a symbol of the fortitude and survival of not only the Maddens but also the Other Madisons and countless other African-American families.

  T.O. and I sat at a rough wooden table beside the chest. It was covered with peeling rawhide, and the lid gaped open. Though I was within arm’s length of it, I could not bring myself to touch the chest. I knew all that it represented. When Sarah learned that her third owner, Francis Madison, one of Colonel Madison’s sons, planned to sell her indenture and those of her four children, she decided to defy the conditions of her service and leave the grounds of Prospect Hill, Francis Madison’s plantation. She went to Fredericksburg to plead her case to a judge. The judge granted her request that she not be separated from her children, but when she returned to the plantation a few days later, Sarah discovered she was too late. Three of her four children were gone.

  As T.O. told the story, Sarah’s strength hovered in the tavern. Her trunk was intimate and sacred, bulging with tangible evidence of the life she had built for herself despite uncertainties, hardships, and tragedies. The chest, I felt, was the place where she had sequestered her sorrows. Though Sarah went on to have many more children, she probably never knew the fate of the three who had been given away under the legal norms of the time. They might have become free after serving out the terms of their indentures, or, if their indenture papers were lost or destroyed, the children might have become enslaved for life.

  Just as Coreen had lost Jim, and Mary had lost Sarah, Sarah had lost Rachel, Violet, and David.

  History, I realized that night in T.O.’s home, is not just facts and dates. It is how people place themselves in the world. It is enslaved people who, in every moment of their quiet, invisible lives, stole pieces of themselves from their masters in order to say, “I am.” History is in names that could not or would not be written down. It is in thoughts, feelings, and memories. It is a proud elderly man living in his great-grandfather’s tavern along the back roads of rural Virginia. History is a thirty-one-year-old mulatto woman making a living for herself and her children and believing evidence of her life to be worth saving. Sarah’s bundles of yellowing letters and piles of papers with curling edges reminded me of the box now in my care. Her trunk held stories and messages, and T.O. was its spokesman. He, too, was a griot.

  I put nearly a thousand miles on my rental car getting a sense of the land, its meandering roads, red soil, thick forests, picturesque vineyards, rolling tobacco fields, and vast mountains. Whenever I spotted something of interest, I pulled over and climbed out of the air-conditioned automobile. I breathed deeply, enjoying the warm, humid air heavy with the smells of pine and wildflowers, animals and manure, and listening to the sounds of trucks whizzing down asphalt, horses clopping on sod, chickens clucking, and pigs grunting in yards. I watched tractors roll across fields where generations of slaves had worked centuries earlier. I saw airplanes zoom overhead, their passengers oblivious to the old and new ways of life woven together in many dynamic ways on what, from so high above, must have seemed a static red-and-green mosaic.

  Nights at the B and B, I walked barefoot across the cool lawn as hundreds of flickering fireflies tried to compete with the thousands of steadfast stars in the amethyst sky. The air was noisy with nighttime. I imagined Mandy, Coreen, and Jim walking on similar soft, cool grass, amazed by the sparkle of fireflies and stars and the crickets singing in the dark. I felt as though I were sharing a moment with my ancestors.

  During the day, as I drove through small towns, explored shops that sold everything from fishing lures to quilts, rested on park benches, or sat in restaurants where I developed a craving for meatloaf doused with a sweet sauce, I watched the citizens of Virginia as they walked from place to place, worked, ate, and chatted together. In public locations, Virginians, white and black, practiced the art of friendly aloofness. Their voices were cheerful, their facial expressions pleasant, but after a smile and brief eye contact, they looked away, back to business, back to their thoughts. The Virginians I watched were never rushed or rude, as people so often were in the North, but it seemed to me that in Virginia, after the hellos and how-are-yous, a wall of social hierarchy went up. Men in business suits and women wearing pearls seemed to maintain a tolerant disregard of anyone in overalls or an apron.

  In private homes, however, southern hospitality was no myth. I joined an inclusive kindred. Some of us were wh
ite, others black. Some of our ancestors had been historic figures; some had been indentured servants or slaves. Some were seasoned archaeologists, genealogists, or historians, and some—like me—were new to it all. But we all shared the same thirst to know Virginia’s past and how we fit into our land of the free and home of the brave. I realized that I belonged among these adventurers, and they took care to include me.

  Years ago, a black southerner told me that in the South, whites do not care how close blacks get as long as they do not get too high, but in the North, she said, whites do not care how high blacks get as long as they do not get too close. So far in Virginia, with the exception of my brief encounter with the first librarian, I had not had to confront racism. But that would change.

  6

  Destination Jim Crow

  Of course, I had been to the South before. Forty-four years earlier, in the summer of 1948, my mother decided that a trip to see my grandparents was long overdue. I was going to ride in a train for the first time!

  Mom’s decision to set out from Northern California and take me to Texas was not made lightly. The South held too many persistent memories and haunting associations. Since her departure from there in her early twenties, she’d gone back from time to time, but she had had her way: Her child would not grow up in a place where black people were lynched.

  One of the stories my mom told me again and again, and one I, too, would pass down, was about her own first train ride. Mom had been born in 1918 on the “colored” side of Elgin, a small town near Austin, Texas. Ruby and her two brothers, John Jr. and Mack, grew up in a two-bedroom, white-frame house. Fewer than twenty feet separated the back door from the back fence. At least a dozen chickens strutted about the yard, and three huge hogs lolled beside a weather-beaten feeding trough. The Blackland Prairie soil was always velvety and dusty, even minutes after a rain, and littered with weeds and chicken feed. Hoes, shovels, picks, rakes, pitchforks, and hatchets leaned against the house, the fence, and the trough. A railroad track stretched behind the back fence. Past the front porch, two rows of nearly identical homes, separated from each other by narrow strips of dry grass, flanked the dirt road.

  Located less than a mile away from the colored neighborhood, Elgin Union Depot was a switching point for two railroad lines that crisscrossed and linked the southern states. The Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railway ran north and south and exchanged cars with the Southern Pacific line, running east and west. Yanking and pounding the heavy steel links and pins, the station crew uncoupled cars from one train and then, in a matter of minutes, coupled them to a different locomotive heading out. About twenty trains a day stopped at Elgin, and many of these switched cars. The little country town was truly an American crossroads.

  From their backyard, my mother and my uncles could watch the MKT line pass by. Whenever a train thundered down the track and blew the smell of hog-corn-chicken-slop-dust through all five rooms of their home, the three curly-haired, golden-brown siblings would shout, “There goes Katy!”

  Their father, my Gramps, lived in Elgin for most of his life, but his dreams encompassed the globe. In his early childhood, he fell in love with trains, sensing, even then, that the massive steam engines and railroad cars could carry him wherever his curiosity and imagination led him. For him, trains were both physical and symbolic links to the alluring world beyond a small southern town. He subscribed to National Geographic magazine and saved every issue for nearly thirty years. A teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, he taught the colored children, including his own, not only reading, writing, arithmetic, and American history, but also world geography and culture. He agreed with the intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois that “it is the trained, living human soul, cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.” But Gramps also agreed with pragmatist Booker T. Washington’s statements that one should “dignify and glorify common labor. It is at the bottom of life that we must begin, not at the top” and that “no race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.” Therefore, Gramps’s older students learned planting and harvesting, selling and accounting, in addition to their academic subjects. A scholar who dressed like a farmer, Gramps loaned his students books and magazines from the bulging shelves in his library and farm tools from his cluttered backyard.

  When Ruby, John Jr., and Mack were toddlers, Gramps taught them to identify colors by practicing with the painted freight cars. Later, he used the cars to teach them the alphabet and then words—Texas, Kansas, Southern, Railroad. He described the attributes of locations he had seen or read about—the steep hills and rolling fog of San Francisco, the excitement and energy of Harlem, the music and riverboats of New Orleans—places where a train could take them someday.

  Still, Gramps cherished Elgin. The colored side of town was a close-knit community. Women in families with abundant food “fixed up” plates and carried them down the road to those in want. Men with cars gave rides to anyone needing to travel farther than walking distance because buses were few, and seldom was there room at the back.

  Every adult was responsible for every child and tried to protect them all from the hatred that seeped in from the other side of the railroad track, and every child was answerable to every grownup. Failure to stay close to home was sure to provoke adult wrath. Home was the only place where the older members of the colored community could shield the younger ones from white children who, with impunity, called them names, yanked their hair, pelted them with rocks, and smeared them with mud or animal feces. Anywhere in the South, including Elgin, colored teenagers and young men who ventured too far from home could be arrested and imprisoned or shackled to chain gangs, often for five years or longer, for misdemeanors as minor as “laziness” or “impudence.” My grandfather learned this lesson well. When Gramps was fifteen, two policemen arrested him for sitting on the step behind the train station. He stayed in jail for two nights. He was lucky.

  But Gramps knew that the luck of his youth would wane and that he could not keep his children safe forever. He saw that life in Elgin, on either side of the track, was restrictive. Social and educational options depended on the churches (one white, one black) and on the schools (one white, one black). And employment opportunities were limited, especially for the colored citizens. Men were sharecroppers or laborers in the cotton-oil mills, the slaughterhouse, or the brick factories. Women were maids or took in laundry. Everyone picked cotton. Gramps picked cotton throughout his life. Even after becoming a teacher, he returned to the cotton field to work side by side with his children when they wanted to earn spending money.

  Gramps wanted more for his sons and daughter than Elgin could offer and was determined to send all three to college, but he realized that once they graduated, his children would probably not return. He would stay in Elgin because he was dedicated to the community, especially his students. Moreover, his parents lived just a few miles down the same railroad track. Gramps loved Elgin, but he loved his children more. And each, with his blessings, would find a way out.

  For Ruby, my mother, the way out was to study home economics. Well before setting off for Prairie View College, she promised herself she would never be anyone’s mammy. She would never cook in someone else’s kitchen, scrub someone else’s floors, or raise someone else’s children. In her early teens, as she did her homework on the front porch, she saw neighborhood women trudge home dressed in maids’ uniforms, exhausted after a day of housework and childcare on the other side of town. In Ruby’s eyes, the women were trapped. She mapped out a different life. Like her aunt Ruth, the younger of Gramps’s two sisters, she would study home economics in college and become a home ec teacher in a big-city high school. Ruby would choose a college-educated husband and rear their children far from the South. She would order the most fashionable clothes from the Sears, Roebuck catalog: sleek silk dresses, suits with fitted
waists and squared shoulders, felt hats, sheer stockings, and two-toned spectator pumps. Best of all, Ruby was certain, she would be a passenger in one of the Pullman cars that rolled by her backyard.

  Working as a maid, she felt, was a fate, but teaching home ec—scientific and focused on efficiency and propriety—was a career. Her first teaching position was in a lumber-mill town in Texas mere steps from Arkansas. Four years later, she found work in Kansas City, Missouri. Ruby was finally out of Texas. Though once a slave state, Missouri was farther north than she had ever lived. When she was twenty-four, she went to St. Louis to visit her brother John, a physician in training at Homer G. Phillips Hospital, and her aunt Estelle, the superintendent of nurses there. By divine providence, Ruby met a man who could ensure she would never have to live in the South again.

  For the first ten years of his life, Clay Morgan Wilson III enjoyed a comfortable existence in Shreveport, Louisiana. His father, Dr. William Douglas Wilson, had a successful medical practice, and his mother, the former Ellen Guesnon, taught music in their home, an elegant Victorian with wide porches and awnings. Clay had two “tolerable” older brothers, W.D. and Eddie.

  One hot summer afternoon in 1921, a group of white boys chased Clay’s brothers the several blocks from the local ice cream parlor to their home. Gasping for breath, W.D. and Eddie leaped up the steps and ran into the house. As soon as the door slammed behind them, their father ran out onto the porch wielding a shotgun and threatened to shoot anyone who dared to bother his sons again. The white youths ran away, but when Dr. Wilson calmed down, he remembered that Louisiana was not a place for any black person to confront any white person for any reason. Moments later, employing his usual flat humor and still holding the shotgun, he turned to his family and said: “Now it’s just about time to leave here.” He rented a freight car and loaded it with nearly everything they owned, including his convertible-top automobile. In less than a month, they were on their way to Oakland, California.