The Other Madisons
Page 20
Image Credits
All photos are courtesy of the author, with the exception of: “Henry Green Madison (1840–1912)” and “Henry Green Madison’s cabin in Rosewood Park, Austin, Texas,” which are used courtesy of Sean Harley; “Jesse Billingsley (1810–1880),” which is used with permission by the San Jacinto Museum of History; and “Portrait of James Madison, Sr. (oil on canvas, 1799)” by Charles Peal Polk used with permission by Belle Grove Plantation, Middletown, Virginia.
Resources
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Appiah, Kwame Anthony, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999.
Barr, Alwin. Black Texans: A History of African Americans in Texas, 1528–1995. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.
Bence, Evelyn, ed. James Madison’s Montpelier: Home of the Father of the Constitution. Orange County, VA: Montpelier Foundation, 2008.
Bergman, Peter. The Chronological History of the Negro in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.
Blesser, Carol, ed. In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830–1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Blumrosen, Alfred W., and Ruth G. Blumrosen. Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2005.
Bryant, Linda Allen. I Cannot Tell a Lie: The True Story of George Washington’s African American Descendants. New York: iUniverse, 2004.
Chambers, Douglas B. Murder at Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
Clark, Kenneth M. “James Madison and Slavery.” James Madison Museum, 2000.
Cohn, Paul D. São Tomé. Bozeman, MT: Burns-Cole, 2005.
Cumbo-Floyd, Andi. The Slaves Have Names: Ancestors of My Home. Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace, 2013.
Du Bois, W.E.B. Voices from Within the Veil. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1920.
Ellis, Joseph J. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Random House, 1996.
Galland, China. Love Cemetery: Unburying the Secret History of Slaves. New York: Harper One, 2007.
Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Random House, 1971.
Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
Hale, Thomas A. Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.
Hall, B. C., and C. T. Wood. The South. New York: Scribner, 1995.
Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Horton, James Oliver, and Lois E. Horton. Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory. New York: New Press, 2006.
Johnson, Charles, Patricia Smith, and the WGBH Research Team. Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1998.
Jordan, Winthrop D. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.
Kelley, Robin D. G., and Earl Lewis, eds. To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Ketcham, Ralph. James Madison: A Biography. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1971.
Madden, T. O., Jr., with Ann L. Miller. We Were Always Free: The Maddens of Culpeper County, Virginia. New York: Vintage, 1992.
Miller, Ann. The Short Life and Strange Death of Ambrose Madison. Orange County, VA: Orange County Historical Society, 2003.
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Nelson, Alondra. The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome. Boston: Beacon Press, 2016.
Nooter, Mary H. Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals. New York: Museum for African Art, 1993.
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Rainville, Lynn. Hidden History: African American Cemeteries in Central Virginia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014.
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Thompson, Robert Farris, and Joseph Cornet. The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1981.
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Vlach, John Michael. Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.
Wilkins, Roger. Jefferson’s Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001.
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Discussion Questions
Bettye Kearse introduces us to her family’s credo: “Always remember—you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president” (12). These words, as Kearse writes, guided her family for nine generations, especially in the antebellum years when her enslaved ancestors used James Madison’s name as a tool to help them find family members who had been sold and sent away. Discuss the importance of a name. Can names be used as tool of imprisonment or linking or both?
Discuss what it means to be a griot or griotte. How does Kearse react when she learns that she’ll be the next griotte in her family? What does she foresee as the greatest challenges?
What is the significance of the cotillion scene (13–15)? What does in foreshadow?
Discuss the role of community in this memoir—both in Kearse’s own life and in the lives of her ancestors. What has community offered them?
Kearse writes, “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” (38). Discuss the importance of oral history. What does it provide that written history cannot?
Gramps says, “Our white ancestors laid the foundation for this country, but our dark-skinned ancestors built it” (94). Kearse embarks on her own journey in an effort to better understand her ancestry and her family’s regard toward it. How might you imagine confronting this reality when some ancestors oppressed and tried to erase others? What are some of the struggles Kearse experiences on her journey?
Discuss the significance of the Mandy sections. What insight do Kearse’s imaginings of Mandy offer us? What do these sections bring to the book? Why was it important to Kearse to trace Mandy’s footsteps?
Kearse writes, “‘If you shake any family tree, a chain will rattle’” (143). Discuss what she means by this, especially within the context of Chapter 11, “Visiting.”
In Chapter 13, “In Search of the President’s Son,” Kearse describes her archival and scientific research. How has technology played a role in linking family histories? What are its blind spots?
Discuss the realizations that Kearse has after attending a workshop at the American Civil War Center (232–36). What does the inclusion of the words “other persons” in the Constitution signify?
Was there a particular person from Kearse’s family history who captured your attention and whom you wished you knew more about? What about their story has been lost to time? What would a fuller sense of their story offer to your understanding of history?
Why do you think it was important to Kearse to write this book? What message(s) did you take away?
About the Author
© Eduardo Montes-Bradley
Bettye Kearse is a retired pediatrician and geneticist. Her writing has appeared in the Boston Herald, River Teeth, and Black Lives Have Always Mattered and was listed as notable in The Best American Essays 2014. She lives in New Mexico.
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Footnotes
* Harry Alexander Davis’s The Billingsleys of America attributes the cry “Remember the Alamo” to Jesse Billingsley, but other sources attribute it to General Sam Houston.
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