I wanted to go inside, but no one was around to unlock the door. While trying to peek through a crack in one of the crude wooden shutters Henry had made, I felt the rough texture of the logs he had cut and hauled and that had remained in place for more than a century. I walked around the cabin, touching and stroking the wood Henry had cut, the coarse mortar he had mixed, the thick nails he had pounded to build a home for his family. I felt his strength and determination against my hands. That power had not diminished over the decades or with the passing generations or under the pressures of an ever-changing world. That power was right there—under my fingertips.
Henry Green Madison’s cabin in Rosewood Park, Austin, Texas
Mom often talked about Henry’s brother Mack, my great-grandfather. When emancipation came, he was twenty-five and married to Martha, the mulatto daughter of Mahala Murchison Strain, the first Negro in Austin.
Mahala Murchison (1824–1912)
Mack, too, had a plan for his freedom. He wanted to remain near his aging parents, and Cedar Creek, he decided, was not a bad place to live, even though the soil was dry and gravelly and the weather hot and humid. He liked the rolling hills and the thick groves of giant cedars that grew along the creek. Choctaw, Tonkawa, Delaware, and Comanche Indians still roamed the country, but they had suffered massive defeats, so raids and battles with settlers were much less frequent.
Another reason Mack stayed was that he had become Jesse Billingsley’s right-hand man. Neighbors were shocked when Billingsley made Mack his business manager. Mack took cotton to the gin, negotiated deals, and even handled the money. Mom often exclaimed, “Imagine that, a colored man touching a white man’s money!” What outraged the neighbors was that Jesse advocated for slave literacy. This outrage was at least one of the reasons that Billingsley, though a war hero, did not get reelected to Congress.
Mack and Giles were tenant farmers, “halvers,” under an agreement to give half of their income from the farm to Billingsley. Little by little, Mack put away money, and after nine years, in 1874, he had $192 in gold, enough to buy a ninety-six-acre farm. For the first time in his life, Mack owned something, and not just anything—he owned land. Security, survival, and true independence were within reach. Once the deed was in his hands, he left Billingsley. The very next year Mack sold the farm for $394 and purchased two hundred acres for $400. Copies of the deeds to both properties are among the treasures in the box.
Mom enjoyed describing how proud her father looked whenever he entered his sister Laura’s living room. He went there frequently and spent hours looking at photographs of his parents. Mack and Martha had been slaves, but they were Gramps’s king and queen. To express his pride in descending not just from a president but from slaves as well, Gramps was the one who added two crucial words to the family credo: African slaves. Since then, we say: “Always remember—you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president.”
Coreen’s words were vital to my family both when they were listed as someone’s possessions and, later, when they could take a name and then make a name for themselves. For my freed ancestors, the admonition was an inspiration for pride and achievement—for themselves and for the generations to come.
16
Gramps
During Reconstruction, life was tense for everyone in Texas, and dangerous for African Americans. Local governments parceled off plantations. Railroad lines carved up the landscape. In Cedar Creek, after General Granger’s troops arrived to enforce Lincoln’s proclamation in Texas, some forty black men formed the Negro Loyal League. Its purpose was to protect the fragile status of the African-American community. Every Saturday night, the men met at the Cedar Creek Store and performed drills up and down the road, carrying whatever weapons, including sticks and rocks, they could get their hands on.
One evening as Mack was on his way to a league meeting, Peter Murchison, Mack’s white cousin through his marriage to Martha, stopped him on a bridge, pointed a gun at his chest, and refused to let him pass. Peter and Mack had been friends for many years, but that evening, Mack, like every other black man in town, was seen as a threat to the white stronghold. The South had lost the war, and now there were thousands of freed slaves everywhere, all of them trying to live the same way white people had thought was exclusively theirs. White Americans were enraged that in 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment granted black people the right to call themselves Americans, too, and that after the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, black men could join white men at the voting polls.
Though Mack missed that league meeting, he vowed he would not miss another. But urged on by Jesse Billingsley, Governor Edmund Davis broke up the Negro Loyal League. Hostility between blacks and whites grew.
Jesse was a complex man. He had made sure his slaves learned to read, and he trusted Mack to negotiate his business dealings, but he seems not to have viewed black people as his equals. Though Jesse argued that Texas should not become a member of the Confederacy, he had not wanted to give up his slaves.
Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, black citizens stood up against the oppressive practices of embittered white citizens and garnered more and more power and influence, culminating in the elections of 1888. In Cedar Creek, the results were explosive: Two African Americans were elected to office. Orange Weeks was the new justice of the peace, Ike Wilson the new constable.
In June 1889, a few months after the new officials took office, a complaint was filed, likely by a black townsperson, against Frank Litton, son of one of Cedar Creek’s leading white citizens. Ike Wilson arrived at Litton’s house to deliver the summons, but Litton would not accept the papers unless a white officer served them. Wilson sent the deputy sheriff.
A few days later, when the trial convened in a residence near Cedar Creek Store, there were so many armed black men around the makeshift courthouse that the prosecuting attorney asked Justice of the Peace Weeks to postpone the trial. Weeks replied, “The white folks have had their day at running this court, and some of the rest of us will have ours now. The case will proceed.”
Litton entered and sat down. His supporters stood behind him. All of the assembled, blacks and whites, clutched rifles and guns. The court clerk read the indictment and then Weeks asked the defendant to stand. Litton stood up, stated that he wanted a drink of water, and turned to walk outside (I think he was defying the black man’s authority). Constable Wilson called out to him to halt. Litton kept walking. A gun was fired, and a bullet grazed Litton’s head. Everyone began running and shooting. Weeks barricaded himself in a room; Wilson escaped through a window. Two whites and two blacks died at the scene.
Gramps was seven at the time. Excited and frightened by the sounds of chaos, he and a friend climbed to the top of the smokehouse. From their vantage point, they saw Mack scrambling and firing a pistol. They watched as he finally reached safety. When night fell and most of the gunfire had stopped, the children crept down from the rooftop and hurried home. As they burst through their doors, their parents grabbed and hugged them, relieved that the boys were unharmed.
White townsmen swore revenge on every Negro in Cedar Creek. Not only had they used their right to vote to elect former slaves into office, they also had firearms. Both ballot power and gun power were threats to the well-entrenched status quo. The sheriff ordered every citizen, regardless of color, to his home. Many black citizens fled town. Disobeying the sheriff, armed white men trawled the streets, broke into houses, and murdered black people at will. Cedar Creek did not calm down until the arrest and imprisonment of Orange Weeks and Ike Wilson in Austin. When news of the uprising spread, race riots broke out all over Texas. Several white people died. Many more black men, women, and children were murdered, though the numbers were not documented. Over the next few months, Billingsley, despite his displeasure about losing control over his former slaves, gave refuge to the Madison family.
Mack was literate, but it’s not clear if he ever taught Martha to read. Both were likely too busy providing for and wat
ching over their growing family. Between 1862 and 1884, my great-grandparents had ten children; only five—Charlie, Moody, Laura, Ruth, and John Chester, my grandfather—lived to adulthood.
The deaths, Mom told me, devastated Mack and Martha, but they had five children to bring up. And they had to stay strong in order to endure Jim Crow, which followed hard on the heels of Reconstruction. To keep their children and themselves uplifted, Mack and Martha repeated the family directive again and again. And they were free.
It seems that Charlie, the oldest, was not quite certain about how the saying could help him make his way through life as a black man in the South. He was the maverick. One evening, as he and a group of companions were leaving their jobs in the stockyard, several white men confronted him, accusing him of stealing a horse. A scuffle broke out, and one of the accusers died. Though no one knew who was responsible for the death, Charlie and his friends, fearing they would be jailed—or lynched—hurried out of town. That night, Charlie fled to Denison, about two hundred miles north. He hid in a friend’s house for several weeks, changed his name to John Miller, and found work in railroad construction. White citizens harassed Mack and Martha for several months but finally gave up on learning Charlie’s whereabouts. He kept in touch with his family but never went near Cedar Creek again.
While Charlie was adjusting to a new name and a new life, Moody found a steady job as a janitor at the State House in Austin. Laura, Ruth, and John Chester attended college—a rare accomplishment for black people in the early twentieth century. All three became teachers.
John Chester, my Gramps, the youngest of the surviving children, was born in 1882. Coreen’s admonition echoed loud in his mind and heart until his death in 1960. As a teenager, Gramps dreamed of becoming a doctor. Mack offered him money for school, but Gramps didn’t want to take money from his father, who had been a slave and worked hard to be able to buy his own piece of land, so he refused. Gramps had a plan—while picking cotton and doing odd jobs, he would earn a teaching degree, save every penny, then attend medical school. He did not foresee that jobs would be so limited and the pay so meager it would take nearly twenty years for him to earn his bachelor’s degree in agriculture. He did not get to medical school.
After two years of teaching, Gramps became the principal of the Booker T. Washington School in Elgin, thirty miles north of Cedar Creek. It was the only school for black children in the town and surrounding area, and, as in many other southern schools of that era, there were only a handful of teachers for all twelve grades. During my grandfather’s first year as principal, a young woman named Ruby Massey joined his teaching staff.
“Daddy and Mother met in a sad way,” Mom began. I hadn’t seen my grandparents often, and she wanted me to know them intimately. Gazing at the antique ring on her finger, she explained, “He’d been in love with my mother’s sister Ruby, and they planned to get married, but a few months after their engagement, she died.”
The box held several photographs of Gramps taken decades before I had known him. In his youth, he was a man with erect posture, golden skin, wavy black hair, and a thick mustache. His face was serious . . . or so it seemed. Ruby, a small picture revealed, was a petite, full-bosomed woman with high cheekbones, brown skin, neatly groomed hair, and sparkling dark eyes.
I envisioned Gramps taking Ruby by the hand, walking with her, courting her, watching the way her eyes crinkled when he made her laugh. She accepted his marriage proposal and a ring. He likely foresaw Ruby holding and nursing their child and knew that any baby born of a love as strong as theirs would be a fine child. Then her appendix ruptured and took her life. Mom told me that, at first, he refused to believe she was gone. Then, finally, he grieved.
Years later, Gramps described his pain to his daughter and sons, and Mom always looked sad when she told me about it. “Daddy would stare out the window and say so softly I almost couldn’t hear him, ‘My clothes fell right off my body.’
“At Ruby’s funeral,” Mom would continue, “Daddy was so distraught that one of her sisters, Birdie Jo, went over to console him, even though they hadn’t met before. At the time, she was living and teaching in another town. After the funeral, they got together on several occasions, mostly to reminisce about Ruby. Daddy was struggling to deal with her death, and Mother was someone who would listen to him and share his grief. They had two things in common—both loved to teach, and both loved Ruby. One year after the funeral, to everyone’s surprise, including their own, most likely, they were married. Soon, they were teaching together in Elgin.
“So Ruby brought them together, even though they were two people who could scarcely be more different from each other. Daddy was full of hugs and kisses and couldn’t resist any opportunity to be funny, especially when it came to playing around with words. Mother was standoffish and downright grim. Unfortunately for her, she was often the butt of Daddy’s humor.” Mother would smile. “Are you ready for one of your favorite stories?”
“The Ink Eraser!”
“Here it goes: One day when I was nine or ten, Mother sent Mack and John to Daddy’s library to get some liquid ink eraser. The boys returned empty-handed. Twitching and stomping, they were trying so hard not to laugh I thought they would explode. Somehow, they managed to pass on Daddy’s message: He had told them to ask their mother why she was so greedy. She looked perplexed. Mack and John explained, ‘Look at us! You already have two inky racers!’
“They fell out on the parlor floor, rolling, giggling, clapping hands, slapping knees, clutching their bellies. Meanwhile, Daddy and I were hiding in the library, trying to muffle our laughter. Our cheeks were bursting, and tears rolled down our faces. When I peeked into the parlor, I saw Mother. She was livid. She had not gotten the ink eraser, and worse, far worse, the decorum of her home had been undermined yet again.”
I never tired of this story, and it always made me laugh. Even more than Gramps’s clever play on words, I loved knowing that his sense of humor had overturned Grandmuddy’s somber rules. I wondered whether her rigidity and crankiness came from loving a man who would forever love her deceased sister. And maybe his humor was, in part, a way of getting by with a stand-in for the woman he truly loved.
Gramps and his family, circa 1935
I had just turned nine when Mom took my two-year-old brother, Biff, and me to visit my grandparents in Navasota. We had come by train, but I knew the rules. We stayed in our compartment most of the time and ate in the dining car after all the white passengers had been served and departed. We did not eat behind a curtain, and I did not see any girls to play with, only boys, whom I wanted nothing to do with. The trip was really boring.
One afternoon during that visit, I was lying across my grandmother’s bed, reading a book. My brother was taking a nap on the living-room sofa. Grandmuddy’s bedroom was behind the front porch. She referred to the room as hers, and when I peeked into the closets and drawers, I saw that they were filled with her things only. There was no sign of Gramps there. I did not know where he slept. Through the open window, I heard him talking to my uncle Mack. Only the backs of their shoulders and heads—Gramps in a frayed straw hat, Uncle Mack in a baseball cap—were visible to me. I could just make out a word here and there as Gramps confided in the younger of his two sons. He was talking about my grandmother. She was stingy, Gramps said. The sorrow in his voice told me that he was referring to more than her miserly ways with money. I cried into the nubby fabric of the bedspread. I knew my grandmother was humorless and rigid, and I felt sad that my beloved Gramps did not receive the love he deserved. Years later, after hearing the story about Gramps and Ruby many times, I came to realize that though Gramps probably learned to love my grandmother, Ruby never left his heart.
“Daddy hardly ever mentioned Ruby,” Mom said, “but on my graduation day from college, he gave me this ring. All he said was ‘Here’s something I want you to have.’ It was Ruby’s engagement ring. I knew how much Mother and Daddy had loved Ruby. The ring and my name made me f
eel special.”
17
New York Memorial
Before returning to Montpelier, I went to Manhattan to see the African Burial Ground National Monument. The cemetery had been discovered in October 1991 when the excavation crew for a new federal building unearthed several human skeletons. A search through the city’s archives revealed that those bones were the remains of a fraction of the thousands of Africans slaves who had lived there.
The visitors’ center was a cramped, sparsely furnished office on the lower level of the World Trade Center. The staff was just beginning to define its relationship with New York City’s black community and the people, like myself, who were pouring in from all over the country and around the world.
A pleasant full-figured young woman with dreadlocks hanging to her shoulders handed me a pamphlet. According to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century land surveys, the site had been part of a 6.6-acre slave cemetery. More than fifteen thousand bodies had been interred there. When planning the new building, the U.S. General Services Administration assumed that time, climate, and two hundred years of urban development since the cemetery closed in 1794 had destroyed the human remains.
In 1697, three centuries before the excavation, Trinity Church banned the burial of “Negro’s [sic]” in its graveyard, thereby forcing the enslaved to find another place to inter their deceased. It was over this second site that the new federal building would be constructed. Early in 1992, when they learned of the discovery and the further damage to skeletal remains during the excavation, the city’s African Americans formed the Descendant Community, mobilized, and chose that very church to be the venue for a televised meeting.
The Other Madisons Page 16