Barging into the Present - Part I

"Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black
faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grand
fathers (both dead), brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts,
cousins (1st & 2nd), nieces, and nephews. They stare
across the space at me sprawling on my bunk. I know
their dark eyes, they know mine. I know their style,
they know mine. I am all of them, they are all of me;
they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee."

Etheridge Knight - The Idea of Ancestry

The Shoulders We Stand On

Faulkner's quip that "the past isn't dead.  It's not even past" always seemed right.  But for African Americans, the past is an inexhaustible, hardly explored resource--despite years of Negro, Black, and African American history observances.  For understandable reasons, we have used those occasions to practice "Great Man" (and Great Woman) history--heroic exploits, legions of "firsts," and whatever we could find that disproved the racist accumulation of beliefs that attacked our humanity. By the time social science got around to cataloging the effects of hundreds of years of what Ta-Nehesi Coates aptly called "plunder," Great Man//Woman history was more necessary still.  Anti-stereotypes were all we had, since the culture and the "science" converged on the idea that we were worthless, helpless, and hopeless.

But that focus came at a cost.  We lost sight of ordinary people who, under the circumstances, were doing extraordinary things.  The last three decades have seen the painstaking recovery of thousands of accounts of ordinary people throughout our history.  A torrent of scholarly works appeared--The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, Been in the Storm So Long, a series of books by Eric Foner on Reconstruction.  More recently, ordinary people began to make their mark on popular history --Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters and Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns come to mind.  Novels--both the recovery of older works such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, as well as more recent work by authors t0o numerous to name--have swelled the material available about ordinary black folk. And finally, the art:  musicians, singers, composers, painters and others have all helped to reconstruct our past. 

But the past six months have convinced me that the hunt for ordinary people really must begin in our own backyard.  Every black person in America--from kids through the elderly--should take a walk down what we've called the Ancestry Trail.  It's one thing to learn about what extraordinary individuals did to push our struggle along.  It's another thing entirely to discover where you, yourself, came from.  It is powerful; it is humanizing; it is humbling.  It causes the past to barge into the present in ways that are unexpected, joyous, curious.  You feel connected and responsible.  You dig into the shoulders you are standing on with your own two feet. 

Origins:  Dodsons, Lees, Jones, Clarkes, Traylors, Ramseys, Shaws, Graves, and Baskervilles-- Oh My!  

 Crumbling pictures, snatches of partially told stories and remembrances, the prospect of losing the last links to a generation--all of these contributed to the feeling of a reality slipping away.  Over the past five years, my sister Marion Hatten and I began lamenting the loss of family memory with the death of our mother (Dolores Dodson Jones Clarke), father (Wayne Sylvester Clarke Sr.), 92-year old second cousin (Margarette Townes Rudd), as well as the imminent passing of our mother's only sister (Betty Jones Darrell).     In the last years of my mother's life, she often described our family as having grown very small--a judgment we took for granted as true.   Taped interviews with our cousin;  partial, handwritten family trees, filled mostly with people we didn't know; and a collection of old pictures were our passports onto the Ancestry Trail.  After our aunt died in the summer of 2013, my sister took what little we knew and plunged into ancestry.com, which offered a relatively easy entry into ancestry research. 

At about the same time, my daughters went to work on their father's side of the family.  The death of an older cousin in Detroit (Grace Burke b. 1931), whose relationship to the Traylor clan had always been close but shrouded in mystery, led to a draft family tree scribbled on a paper napkin at her funeral repast.  Our daughter Ayanna Traylor promised to put it into tree shape via ancestry.com and to get it back out to family members.  She subsequently married and moved to Maryland, and only found the napkin and remembered the promise when unpacking one of the myriad boxes that accompanied the move.  She began to fill in the Traylor family tree on ancestry.com and ran across a distant relative, a descendent of her great grandmother's sister,  who was also researching family history on ancestry.  They compared notes. By Thanksgiving 2013, her father told her that as he approached his 80th birthday, one of his greatest regrets was that he didn't know the names of his great grandparents on either his mother's or father's side of the family. And because it became clear that family research is labor-intensive and intellectually challenging, her sister Faridha Traylor jumped into the fray.

Everything is Not a Google Away

Because the internet has made possible connections and lines of inquiry that in the past would require a life's work, there is a tendency to think that everything is just a google away. Family research demolishes that expectation with a vengeance, especially for black folk.  The bare outlines of a life can sometimes be found in official documents available through ancestry.com or similar sites (census, draft records, marriage and birth records).  But prior to the end of the Civil War, records of the important life events of slaves were kept in slave schedules, submitted as addenda to census schedules but most often without names, birthdates, or other crucial information about the slaves themselves.  In most cases, in order to search for information about slaves, you have to search under the name of the slave owner.

In the case of the Dodsons, one of the many blank walls encountered by my sister was in getting any information at all about the father of our great grandfather, Amos Andrew Dodson, born in 1878 in Clarksville, VA.  into a family of seven brothers and sisters. Amos' father, Richard Dodson, married Harriet F. Hebron Dodson, but no other information about them has so far turned up, other than that Amos' mother, Harriet Dodson, outlived her husband and eventually went to live until her death with her son Amos in his home in Montclair, NJ. Somewhere along the way, Amos married Margarette Lee and had three children, including my grandmother, Marion. But other than these few scarce, bare facts, we could find little on the internet. 

His picture was given to me by my mother.  The photograph, old and yellowed, was obviously taken in studio and presented him as quite the gentleman.  I never knew my great grandfather; he died before I was born.  Why did he leave Virginia?  What happened to his siblings and their descendants?

Amos Andrew Dodson

My husband's people were, if anything, more opaque. Eight Traylor brothers and one sister were born to Elijah C. Traylor Sr. and Melinda Shaw Traylor, including Mjenzi"s father, Joseph Henderson Traylor.  Enlarged photographic portraits of some of the brothers and their mother and father hang in our dining room.  Melinda and Elijah show the stern countenance of a black American Gothic--Elijah, brownskinned, with a broad nose and thick lips, seemed to have married a nearly white woman with straight black hair and a heavy-set frame.  Who were these people?  Who were their parents?  What kinds of lives had they lived in Covington, GA before, during, and after the Civil War?

Elijah C. Traylor Sr.

Melinda Shaw Traylor

When the search began, less was known about Mjenzi's mother's people than any of the other ancestors.  We are not sure where or when Mjenzi's maternal grandparents married (Alvin R. Ramsey b. 1862 in OH, and Betty Lee Baskerville b. 1863 in VA). Their picture, a black and white studio photograph, hangs in our dining room too. They seemed the epitome of middle-class propriety--he, in a starched white shirt with  rounded collar and tie, and her, with wire-rimmed glasses and neatly pressed lace-collared dress.  Their image seems constructed as a determined refutation of the idea of African Americans as uncouth and uncultured. 

Alvin R. Ramsey and Betty Lee Baskerville Ramsey

These images and the story fragments that accompanied them came to haunt us.  We needed, wanted to find out more about their lives. We decided that we would have to go where they started out in hopes that some remnant of their lives would have remained for us to find.  And so was born our trip down The Ancestry Trail, an 11-day excursion through Clarksville, VA; Middleburg, NC; Atlanta, GA, and the small country town of Covington, GA..