Had she known he would come?
Did she recoil, or was she resigned?
What was on his face? Power? Craziness? A smile?
Did he say her name just once, to label her as his possession? Or did he say it over and over, mocking her servitude, her weakness, her helplessness? Did he say her name at all?
Did she say, “Massa,” the first syllable pushing from the back of her throat, the second erupting in a hiss?
Did she scream, or did she clench her teeth?
Did he slap her, or did he engulf her in his arms?
Did her mind flee to some safer place, some sweet memory, some pleasant dream?
But . . . what was in his face would not matter.
Whether or how he said her name would not matter.
Whether he broke her fingers or kissed them would not matter.
Whether she screamed and resisted or silently succumbed would not matter.
Whether her mind fled or stayed, aware of his hands on her body, would not matter.
She was his slave.
Mandy
I cried when I saw you. You, my baby girl, were streaked with my blood, the blood of an enslaved woman. You were beautiful, like my mother, though your skin was lighter and more golden, evidence that you would never see the plains surrounding my village back home. Evidence that your father was not the husband I’d dreamed of after my woman-to-be parts had been prepared for him. Evidence that there had been no bridal ceremony and wedding night, only pain that screamed loud in helplessness and louder in hopelessness. When you writhed in my reluctant arms, your back and legs felt rigid, like the trunk and limbs of the tree that had betrayed me. Slick with the water from my womb, your hair burned red, as if the sun had set you on fire in order to cremate your father’s sin, and mine. When I tried to kiss your balled-up little cheek, my tears washed over you, salty like the ocean I had lost. You cried, and your scream was terrifying, charged with the battle against life’s struggles to come. And I remembered the evening I arrived in this place and the singing I heard in the distance. The melody, I now knew, was a futile lullaby for an enslaved child. Knowing I had brought a slave into the world and that I could not protect you, I bowed my head and cried bitter tears.
12
Sanctuaries
Mandy and the other slaves who survived the Middle Passage—not a few of them raped aboard the ships—must have dug deep into themselves to hold on to their humanity. But a solitary strength would likely falter in a place that was determined to destroy it. So slaves drew toward each other. They built communities and created a rich and vibrant culture that was uniquely African, uniquely American, and uniquely southern.
Through reading Life in Black and White by Brenda Stevenson, I learned that both the African village and the American slave community, each with a strong sense of kinship, were extended families. Women sat together, chatting and weaving traditional textiles and baskets and cooking yams, gourds, and other West African foods. The women honored childbirth, menarche, courtship, marriage, and death with rituals of joy or solemnity. Everyone, male and female, old and young, stole time to dance to the banjo. Even under the plantation owner’s final authority, a couple wanting to marry had to consult their parents, other kin, and other authority figures in the quarters.
Men and women worked together to build shacks that appeared to be little more than cells and transformed them into homes. Dirt floors were swept and walls scrubbed, for this was where a family ate and slept together and where they might find something to think of as their own, no matter how tenuous and transient. While the mansion symbolized wealth and power and a slave cabin poverty and servitude, both structures were homes that offered sanctuary and solidarity.
John Michael Vlach in Back of the Big House clarified for me that no matter what their religious tenets were in Africa, most slaves came to believe that the death of Jesus Christ on the cross had saved all of mankind, not just those who were free and white. Otherwise, how could slaves have accepted Christianity so wholeheartedly, and how could the master’s religion have become a sustaining force for them?
Slave owners, even those who did not want their slaves to hold meetings of any sort, believed that letting them celebrate Sundays and Christmas was the Christian thing to do. Vlach states: “Religion, in the hands of many slave owners, was an instrument of social control.” Some masters hired ministers to preach meekness and submission. I loved the part in Vlach’s book about how, after the clergymen left, the slaves held their own services, and “real preachin’” began. “Slaves,” Vlach writes, “turned Christian doctrine to their own purposes and created a ritual means by which they could find a spiritual release to compensate for their lack of personal liberty.”
As a Christian myself, I was pleased to learn that by adopting and adapting Christianity, slaves found solace and hope in a world that abused them. They accepted Christ not only as their Savior but also as their true master. They celebrated Christ with shouting, jumping, singing, and dancing in ways that expressed their African roots and reminded them that, through faith in God, they could never be truly conquered. They prayed and sang about hope for a better life in this world and the promise of a better life in the next.
As a child, I did not realize that Christianity, along with my family’s directive, would guide me through life. During our visit to Texas in 1948, when I was five years old, Mom and I went to see an elderly family friend living on the border of a vast cotton field a few miles outside the town of Elgin. The old woman’s skin was dark and wrinkled, and pearly blue-white rims encircled the black irises of her watery eyes. Her shoulders were rounded, but she held her head high, looking intently and expectantly into our faces. She had been a childhood playmate of my grandparents’ and, later, an “auntie” to my mother and her brothers when they were children. Now she was alone and craved company. I wondered why the woman, again and again, placed her right hand into her apron pocket and patted it against her thigh.
The field behind her glowed white in the bright midday sun, and I recall thinking that the rows of cotton bushes, too many of them to count, were pretty. But the house was ugly. Laundry hung on the branches of a dead tree nearby. The entire cottage, made of gray, splintery wood, was about the size of my grandparents’ kitchen. To reach the sagging porch we had to climb onto a wooden crate, a high step for a five-year-old. A tattered curtain covered the doorway opening into a single, dim room. I do not know whether sharecroppers built this home after the Civil War or whether it once housed human chattel.
When we entered the cabin, I became frightened. It was small, hot, stuffy, and dark. It smelled of mold and bacon grease. A wood-burning stove, a cot, a table, four chairs, a huge tin basin, and a dresser filled the room. I was afraid a piece of ceiling would fall on me or that a mouse might crawl over my feet. The house creaked and groaned. Moths fluttered. In the faint light coming through the single window, I could make out dozens of photographs of dark-skinned people—babies propped up on wooden chairs, boys of varied heights lined up side by side in front of a white church, an old man, the woman’s deceased husband, perhaps, standing near a cotton field and grinning at the camera for all his worth. These unframed photos leaned against empty Coca-Cola bottles, vases stuffed with plastic carnations, chipped ceramic cups, a sugar canister, and a small sack of flour. The only picture hanging on the wall was a framed color print of a painting of Christ. His pale face surrounded by flowing, light brown hair, Christ gazed far beyond the room in which He was revered.
The visit seemed long to me but probably lasted less than an hour. I sat silent, but I remember lots of warm, gentle laughter shared between my mother and her former caregiver. Before we departed, the woman loaded us with biscuits, wildberry jam, candied yams, and pickled green beans. As my mother and I were about to step into the car we had borrowed from Gramps, the woman took me by the hand and led me to the back of her house. At first I thought she was leading me to the outhouse, which scared me more than the cabin, but
we continued a few yards beyond it. There, in the midst of gray fissured soil, a small garden flourished. Half was green with neat rows of beans, cabbages, collards, peppers, and lettuce. The other half was a chaos of color—purple pansies, orange poppies, yellow marigolds, red petunias, pink zinnias, and more.
While chickens paraded and cackled and hogs rooted and snorted close by, the woman reached into the pocket of her blue gingham apron. She held her hand there for several moments, smiling with pride at her garden. Slowly, she lifted an old Bible from her pocket and reached for me. With the arm holding the Bible, she held me against her thin breasts. With her other hand, she gently took both of my hands and rubbed them back and forth over the surface of her beloved tome. She looked at me and said, “Jesus saved all us. He protected me an’ my chil’ren an’ my home, even made this garden grow. Without Him I wouldn’t have nothin’, wouldn’t be nothin’.”
The woman returned the Bible to its place in her apron, gave it a couple of quick pats, and then slowly bent forward to gather a small bouquet. Handing the flowers to me, she said, “Your roots is in the South. You come down here from California, your mommy say, but this is your home. I know’d your gran’ma and gran’pa since I was only a girl. They folk knew my folk—all us just like family. All us knew Jesus. God brought you down here now, go’n bring you back someday. Go’n bring you back home. You’ll see.”
I did return from time to time, and my grandparents took me to church services that were loud and spirited. Singing and shouting, foot stomping, hand clapping, drum banging, and tambourine rattling could be heard well before the Lord’s house, as Gramps called it, came into view. On a rare visit to Texas, when I was ten years old, he woke me up before sunrise so that he could take me to an Easter service. It was being held in a remote woods miles from any town. He did not tell me why we were attending service there. After we’d been driving for two hours, the sky began to turn the pinkish lavender of early morning. Gramps parked the car along a dirt road, and we walked, hand in hand, about half a mile to a small shady knoll. It was an outdoor chapel. The surrounding tall, dense, leafy trees—a mute choir with outspread arms—obscured heaven above, but patches of light played among the broad trunks. Except for the high-pitched drone of insects and birds, the clearing was hushed. Gramps and I found two seats in the wide circle of folding chairs and joined the other worshipers, heads bowed in prayer.
After several moments, without summons, men and women stood up, walked to the center of the circle, and came together in groups of two, three, or four, joining hands or wrapping arms around one another’s shoulders to share heartfelt words of advice, consolation, or encouragement. Their voices, ranging from treble to bass, began in sporadic bursts, breaking long moments of silence. But soon, words started to fire off ever more rapidly until they fused and swelled into a symphony of tones, thunderous yet captive inside the thick woods. From within the unbroken chords, joyous “Hallelujah”s, high-pitched wails of sadness, resolute “Amen, brothers; amen, sisters,” and screams of “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” sprang up and faded into the trees. Then a resonant baritone voice rose from deep within the hum, beginning as a part of the whole but becoming louder and more separate, an epicenter pressing the crying murmur around it into silence.
When everyone was seated again, the preacher told us that when we let Jesus be our source of strength, today’s hardship, pain, sorrow, and disappointment would give way to peace and joy tomorrow, if not in this world, then in heaven, our Promised Land. Christ, our Savior, would show us the way. This was how the slaves used to worship, Gramps explained to me.
Later, as an adult, not having grown up in the South made me feel deprived. Though I did not regret missing the terror of living under Jim Crow laws, I was sad that I hadn’t had the nurturing environment of a southern black community.
I recall a middle-aged friend telling me about her recent return to rural Alabama: “We went to church every Sunday morning and every Wednesday night. Tuesday, we had prayer meeting, and Saturday morning was Bible-study time. In between, I went visiting family and friends,” she said, glowing. “And everywhere I went, someone brought me a plate of food. I ate barbecued ribs, fried chicken, smothered steak, potato salad, macaroni salad, macaroni and cheese, yams, black-eyed peas, corn bread, corn on the cob, collard greens, mustard greens, and turnip greens cooked with onions and ham hocks. Then, when I couldn’t eat any more, they brought me pie and cake, every kind you can imagine, under hunks of homemade vanilla ice cream. And full as I was, I ate that too,” she added, patting her stomach.
Like the slave fraternity it had once been, the black community in the rural South was an extended family. Food brought neighbors together to comfort the mind and sustain the body. God brought the worshipers together to comfort and sustain the soul.
I had grown up in a strong community of my own, but the closeness of the large, black middle-class society in the San Francisco Bay Area was different from what my friend had experienced in Alabama. The cohesiveness of my California community stemmed from its members’ shared desire to keep moving ahead and assure that their children would grow up to preserve and build upon what their parents had achieved. It was assumed we children would attend college and earn our place in middle-class America. Our parents’ generation encouraged us to become role models for the next generation, another reason why, in our household, my brother and I heard, again and again, “Always remember—you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president.”
Now, decades later, I had returned to the South, just as the elderly family friend had predicted. I recognized that she had risen from my subconscious and appeared in my imagination as the old slave who had bathed Mandy. Each introduced a black girl to the American South, a terrifying place filled with terrifying things, but a place that was not without sanctuary.
Mandy
I cried when I saw you. You, my baby girl, were streaked with my blood, the blood of an African woman. You were beautiful, like my mother, though your skin was lighter and more golden, glistening like the morning sun on the plains surrounding my village back home. When you wiggled in my eager arms, your back and legs felt strong, like the trunk and limbs of the tree standing watch over the village where I was loved. Slick with the water from my womb, your hair glowed red as if the sun had set in it. When I kissed your smooth little cheek, it tasted salty, like the ocean that had embraced me. You cried, and the music of your voice rang out, announcing the life inside you. And I remembered the evening I arrived in this place and the singing I heard in the distance. The melody, I now knew, was a soothing lullaby for a beloved child. I threw back my head and cried happy tears.
13
In Search of the President’s Son
Historians trying to substantiate past events and genealogists seeking to make family connections and confirm family histories often contend with the accidental or deliberate destruction of documents. Moreover, African Americans combing through archives in search of evidence of their enslaved ancestors have discovered that slave masters often recorded their human property only in inventories and only by number, gender, and approximate age. Slaves owned nothing, not even their names. Because there are no names to search for in many of the surviving records, descendants must find other ways to piece together evidence that a long-deceased relative, though very much alive in family stories, actually existed.
Most devastating to slaves and to the descendants hoping to trace them was that slave owners often tore apart enslaved families. Slaves were expendable property, and selling them was lucrative or, sometimes, expedient. President Madison, who condemned slavery as “a sad blot on our free country” and “a deep-rooted and widespread evil,” sold slaves himself. And he allowed his wife to sell his own son, Jim, about whom no records can be found.
But surely there was something somewhere, or so I told myself. In addition to retracing my mother’s path to Montpelier, the Orange County Courthouse, and Salt Lake City’s Mormon Family History Library, I
searched the internet, subscribed to online ancestry databases, called genealogical societies in Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. And I hired a genealogist.
No one could find Jim.
I knew I would not be able to uncover a direct link to his father; Madison had no acknowledged offspring. But he had many nieces and nephews. Maybe, I thought, their descendants could lead me to Jim, and maybe from Jim I could find Coreen and Mandy. I asked Dr. Bruce Jackson, a preeminent geneticist who focused on African-American ancestry, to analyze Y-chromosome DNA from cheek swabs from three of my male cousins. I then approached the National Society of Madison Family Descendants about authenticating my family’s DNA. We needed Y-chromosome DNA from the acknowledged Madison line. Only one man, I was told, was a direct descendant of any of President Madison’s brothers. He agreed to participate in a comparative DNA study, but just then, in June 2007, the Washington Post published an article about my quest, “African American Seeks to Prove a Genetic Link to James Madison.” Wary of media attention, the man the society had identified changed his mind. I never learned his name.
Dr. Jackson proposed another solution. He was planning a trip to England for his own research, and he offered to hire British genealogist Ian Marson to locate a descendant of John Maddison, the president’s great-great-grandfather. The hope was to find an English successor who, not stigmatized by the history of slavery in America, would be willing to allow his DNA to be compared with my cousins’.
However, Marson was not able to find a living male in Maddison’s family line.
I put my search for a genetic connection on hold and went back to the archives. I started looking for clues that might tell me something about Jim’s life after he was sold. I hoped to find out who had bought him from Dolley or who had taken him to Tennessee. But the obstacles continued to pile up. Many records, if they’d ever existed, had been lost in a surprising number of courthouse fires.
The Other Madisons Page 13