Category: Family Roots

My City’s Secret Shame

Published on by Martha Mattingly PayneLeave a comment

TRIGGER ALERT: This piece includes descriptions of racial violence that took place in the early 20th century.

Atlanta’s 1897 Flatiron Building sits at the corner of Auburn Avenue, long a center of Black culture and business, and Peachtree Street, hub of the city’s bustling commercial district for over a century and a half. On this block in 1906, an angry mob with violence on their minds gathered .

I love Atlanta, my home city. I love her bustle, her thick canopy of green, her long blossoming springs, her baseball team. She’s the beating heart of the Deep South, the region’s transportation and arts hub, a place noteworthy for her diversity and progressive ways. But Atlanta is still the South. I love this perhaps most of all. Our citizens tend to smile at strangers and speak to neighbors. They bring cakes and casseroles to the grieving and host Sip and See’s for newborns and brides-to-be. Even most of our unhoused citizens will ask God to bless you as you pass, whether or not you’ve sported them a dollar. And though the metro area is famously congested at six million strong, drive less than an hour outside the city limits and you’ll find yourself surrounded by wide open spaces—dry flatlands that were once cotton country to the south and east, and to the north and west, the rolling green foothills of lower Appalachia, where lake-fed breezes offer cool relief from summer heat and hand-painted signs advertise peaches and boiled peanuts even as others warn that the gates of hell gape wide for all who fail to repent.

Atlanta, like the greater South, is a place of contradictions. This, too, I love.

What don’t I love? Feeling hoodwinked.

A decade or so ago, I began researching a historical novel set primarily in Atlanta during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As expected, one acclaimed article and text after another lamented the devastation the city suffered during the Civil War and the struggles she experienced throughout the Reconstruction era. Most boasted of Atlanta’s unlikely triumph, of her determination to brush away the ashes of defeat and rise again, Phoenix-like, on the wings of her zest for commerce. In March of 1874, Henry Grady, editor of The Atlanta Constitution, famously dubbed Atlanta the fulcrum of a “New South,” a region of opportunity whose citizens, chastened by war, were ready to move past notions of secession and set aside their prejudices so they might work with Northern business leaders and industrialists. The economy was diversifying. Atlanta’s leaders were eager to draw outside investors by promoting her as a center of trade and commerce open to one and all and free of old divisive antebellum ways.

Pretense perhaps, yet during the last third of the 19th century, many bought it. The city’s diverse population quadrupled as the down-and-out swept in from rural areas throughout the South. Swanky hotels like the Kimball House and the Majestic lured visitors downtown. A streetcar system connected new neighborhoods to the city center. Institutions of higher learning sprouted up, among them Georgia Tech, Oglethorpe, and HBCU’s like Morehouse and Spelman. In response, white laborers and farmers and rural Black sons and daughters of the formerly enslaved alike—all weary of trying to milk land exhausted by a century of cotton farming—streamed into town alongside eager immigrants from Ireland, eastern Europe, you name it. Atlanta became a sanctuary, a place down-on-their-luck families might thrive.

Little of this was news to me, nothing I hadn’t learned from oral family history or grade school social studies classes. When I found a couple sources that mentioned a “race riot” in the year 1906, I was surprised, but reports were so cursory I figured this must have been a skirmish, a minor uprising that fizzled out without long-term effect. As a fifth-generation Georgian, third-generation Atlantan born in 1960, I felt sure that had this riot been an event of major significance, I would have heard about it.

Still, it nagged at me. My novel’s cast of characters is diverse and I wanted—needed—to be true to them as well as historically accurate. I kept digging, and in time I discovered several texts, all of them written after 1995, that gave a different, more Dickensian version of early 20th century Atlanta. Yes, she was a place of progress and opportunity, but her rapid growth came at a price. The city couldn’t house much less offer employment to all of the thousands of desperate people, white and otherwise, who came knocking at her door. As a result, many of the new arrivals remained unemployed, or worse. They’d abandoned their land and their previous lives and now had nothing, nowhere to live, no way to feed themselves or their children in a city plagued by sanitation issues and overcrowding.

As for the so-called riot that city leaders and historians had glossed over for nearly a century? Turns out it raged on for four stifling September days, four days of violence, bloodshed and death that changed my city forever.

While visiting Atlanta in September, 1906, one J. A. Butler pens a disturbingly dispassionate message on a postcard of an idyllic city park scene: “There is a Race Riot going on here. There ha[s] been about 40 people killed since Saturday. Thought your card was very interesting.” (Photo courtesy of Atlanta History Center)

September 22nd, 1906, summer’s swansong, but downtown boiled like it was July. Merchants and streetcar drivers, blacksmiths and bellboys worked on. Along Decatur Street in south downtown, crowded dance halls and saloons flung their doors open wide in hopes of catching currents of cooler air. By late afternoon, as the bricks of Peachtree Street baked in the sun, a mob of white men and boys gathered near Five Points, the heart of the city’s business district. Around them, newsboys hawked “special edition” papers bearing sordid headlines based on false accusations of assault and rape against Black men. A gubernatorial election was on the horizon. Both candidates had used yellow journalism to stoke resentment and anger among white males toward Atlanta’s Black community, especially Black men who had found some economic success, sometimes more success than their white counterparts.

Some of the newspaper headlines that circulated on September 22, 1906

Around sundown, its numbers having risen into the high thousands, the mob thundered through the streets wielding clubs and iron pipes, knives and axes and pistols. They derailed streetcars, smashed storefront windows, ransacked homes. While law enforcement stood idly by, they yanked Black men through the doors of the emporiums and hotels and barber shops that employed them, wrenched men, women and children off of streetcars to beat, stab, and shoot them. They kept their victims’ hats and caps, severed the fingers and toes of others, and hung these so-called souvenirs from telegraph poles on iron hooks. They tossed lifeless bodies out of hotel windows, dragged others to Henry Grady’s statue at the corner of Forsyth and Marietta Streets, where in a show of disdain for his New South ideas, they dropped them at his stony feet.

Members of Georgia’s state militia arrive at Five Points the day after the massacre began, September, 1906. (Courtesy of Atlanta History Center)

At midnight, the governor called in the state militia, but only a driving two a.m. thunderstorm was up to the task of clearing the streets. After a few hours rest, the mob simply divided to conquer and set out again. With law enforcement still largely ignoring their actions, they moved beyond downtown to wreak havoc in and out of primarily Black neighborhoods, ebbing and flowing for two more nights and three days. Many residents of these neighborhoods armed themselves in self-defense. The violence continued. Skirmishes ensued. This mob attacked small business owners, laundresses, bootblacks, teenagers. Most of their victims had never been accused of a crime, never set foot in the seedy Decatur Street establishments that city leaders would later blame for instigating the riot.

By nightfall, September 25th, scores of Black homes had been burned to ash. One white man and over two dozen (the official number) Black citizens lay dead. It’s believed many more lost Black lives went unreported. Hundreds lay injured in their homes or in Grady hospital’s segregated wing, and thousands of Black families, working class and well-to-do alike, fled the city, many bearing along their injured or dead, never to return.

This was not a riot. It was a massacre, one so brutal it caught the attention of journals across the country and as far afield as Paris. Yet locally, city leadership moved rapidly to quash reports of the mayhem and bloodshed. Best not to harp on such a thing, they suggested, one that would harm the city’s progressive image and stunt the growth and opportunity that benefitted everyone, regardless of race or creed. The mayor brought in members of the new Black elite, mostly clergy and successful businessmen, to persuade them to go along with efforts to scrub the city’s consciousness of what had passed. In exchange, Black leaders asked for protection by local law enforcement should mobs form again. City leaders agreed, as long as certain conditions were met: Black-owned saloons and dance halls would be shut down. Black businesses that had before thrived alongside white ones in Atlanta’s Five Points area would relocate to Auburn Avenue, already becoming known as a Black business mecca. Perhaps most significantly, Atlanta’s Black citizenry would agree to obey stricter segregation laws than before—separate restrooms and seating on public transportation and in movie theaters, segregated schools, hotels, hospitals and restaurants, and restrictions on where Black families could build homes and settle. Within months, Georgia’s new governor, Hoke Smith, drove through poll taxes and literacy laws that disenfranchised all but the tiniest slice of the state’s Black population while grandfathering in illiterate whites. Atlanta, a mingled melting pot in the years after the Civil War, was now fully segregated. Jim Crow’s icy grip had tightened. It would not begin to thaw for nearly sixty years. Though the city today boasts a healthy Black middle and upper class population, most neighborhoods have been painfully slow to integrate since.

One of two French journals that devoted their cover stories to the Atlanta Massacre

I recently discovered that in 1904, the man who would become my paternal grandfather left his father’s tobacco farm in Lebanon, Kentucky, to work in a cousin’s Atlanta shoe business. He was nineteen. A year later, his future sister-in-law, my great aunt Louise, came to the city from Greensboro, Georgia, to attend stenography school. My research has shown that they were both in Atlanta on that September weekend of 1906. Might my grandfather have been part of the mob? I shudder to think of it. His apartment was over a mile north of downtown, but it’s possible. We’ll never know. Great Aunt Louise lived in a boarding house four blocks southwest of Five Points. If she didn’t witness the carnage and chaos, she would certainly have heard it. She too was nineteen years old—an age of possibility and promise, an age often remembered with a clarity hard to summon for other, less shimmery junctures of life. Though it was nothing compared to what the massacre’s victims experienced, the trauma of that week for her must have been immense. Aunt Louise was an independent thinker, rational and tolerant, and yet like my grandfather, she locked her massacre memories deep in her heart. She never spoke of that horrific week in September, not to me nor any of my relatives. City leadership’s ploy had worked, and all too well.

Over the past twenty years, or one hundred plus years after the fact, word has at last begun to spread about the Massacre and its repercussions. Organizations like the Equal Justice Initiative and the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition hold symposiums each year. They’ve produced films and succeeded in having historical markers erected. The Atlanta History Center includes a section on the Massacre as part of its “Gatheround. Stories of Atlanta” exhibit, and the Auburn Avenue Research Library hosts a permanent exhibit on its first floor called “Stories From the Soil.” Haunting in its simplicity, this exhibit features jars of soil collected from the sites of thirty-six lynchings that occurred in Fulton County between 1889 and 1936. Twenty-five of these took place during the Atlanta Massacre of 1906.

Every September, I read over the names of those lost during the Massacre. I share them here as a way of honoring them, and remembering. May we always remember.

Milton Brown Frank Fambro James Fletcher Zeb Long Leola Maddox Sam Magruder Will Marion Will Moreland Clem Rhodes Sam Robinson Annie Shepherd Frank Smith William Henry Welch George Wilder Marshall Carter Stinson Ferguson

Nine (plus) Unknown Victims

James Heard, a white Atlanta police officer

“Stories from the Soil” at the Auburn Avenue Research Library

Thank you for reading. If you’d like to learn more about this historic event, the sources below offer a good start. This year’s special events devoted to remembrance of the event are included in the first link. (My apologies that some of these opportunities have passed. I attended the Southview Cemetery Tour and Remembrance last year, well-done and very moving.)

Remembrance Exposition Week

Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906

(re)Defining History: Uncovering the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre

Bauerlein, Mark, Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2001).

Burns, Rebecca, Rage in the Gate City: The Story of the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2009).

Du Bois, W. E. B., “A Litany of Atlanta.” Johnson, James Weldon, ed., The Book of American Negro Poetry (New York, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922).

Godshalk, David Fort, Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Kuhn, Clifford M., Joye, Harlon E, and West, E. Bernard, Living Atlanta: An Oral History of the City, 1914-1948 (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1990).

Pomeranz, Gary, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn: A Saga of Race and Family (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 1997).

Afternoons with Mary: Sharecropper’s Daughter

Published on by Martha Mattingly PayneLeave a comment

Life on the farm in Depression-era Alabama

In memory, my first few visits with Mary Darian are fresh and bathed in light. It was spring, 2017. From where we gathered in her daughter’s living room, we could see Lou’s back yard, the lawn greening and her plantings touched with early spring color. Yes, Mary was still grieving the loss of her oldest son and recovering from a fall. Her speech was sometimes halting, especially when she grew tired, in the wake of her last stroke, but for the most part, she was upbeat, both determined to do her therapy exercises to regain her strength and eager to share the story of her childhood. Her Alabama family was cash-poor when she was growing up—she made no bones about that—but when she described her young parents and her grandmother and great-grandmother, her expression warmed. Sometimes, her voice was tinged with longing, a longing for the simple life her family built out of next to nothing.

Which is not to say Mary romanticized that rural mid-20th century life. She’d lived in Atlanta since she was fourteen. She’d experienced unrest, boycotts, and violence just to earn for herself and her loved ones basic rights she lacked as a child—the right to sit where she pleased in a theatre, to use a public restroom, to vote. Like other Black tenant farming families in the Deep South, during her childhood the Walkers and Cochrans were trapped in a dead-end economic system. The threats and humiliations of Jim Crow hung over them like a shroud. “You couldn’t make a living in Hurtsboro,” she liked to say. “Hurts to stay there and hurts to leave.”

But Mary was the walking example of the old adage that the key to happiness is to want what you have, not in the sense of surrender but in making the best of what’s given you in any particular moment. I’ve been pretty bad at this most of my life, always striving for something or other just out of reach. Maybe that’s why being with Mary in Lou’s sunny home, just being with her and listening to her stories, no matter how surprising some of them were, was such a comfort.

When Mary Lue Cochran was born on November 11, 1935, her father, Jimmie Lee, was twenty. Her mother, Lue Milla James Cochran, was seventeen. Mary’s brother Leroy came along a year later. I asked Mary one afternoon whether her mother had to join her father in the cotton fields to meet the quota that paid their rent.

“My daddy …” she said, shaking her head. “Also worked at the Perlmans’ store. That extra money he made kept my mama out of the fields after I was born. She stayed in the house working and taking care of Leroy and me.”

The Perlmans, an immigrant Jewish family, owned a dry goods store in Hurtsboro. Strange. I knew that as Atlanta’s population boomed in the late 1800s, the city began to attract immigrants from all over Europe, but Hurtsboro? A town that grew up around a sawmill in the 1850s situated in remote eastern Alabama, in 1900 it had just over 400 residents, most of them farm laborers or mill workers. I decided to do a little research. Turns out that of the influx of Jewish immigrants fleeing the pogroms and economic hardship of Eastern Europe around the turn of the 20th century, many wound up in small Southern towns working as merchants or peddlers. So the Perlmans’ store wasn’t strange at all. I checked out the store owner Sol Perlman on Ancestry.com and managed to locate his son. Sam Perlman, who spoke affectionately of growing up in Hurtsboro, shared that his grandfather Henry had immigrated to Montgomery from Lithuania in 1891. A few years later he took out a loan to open a store sixty miles southeast in—you got it—Hurtsboro. Henry Perlman was a smart cookie. Two railways served by a shared depot had just been extended through the middle of town, and though one Ben Goldstein, originally of Poland, already ran a general store there, they both wagered there’d be business enough for another. They were right. A golden age followed. By 1914, a year before Mary’s father was born, the sawmill town boasted an inn, a cafe, those two general stores and a couple of banks. By the time Mary was born, the population had more than doubled and two hardware stores, a library and a movie theatre had sprouted up. Henry Perlman, and later his son Sol, much like Ben Goldstein and his son Abe, did good business, not only with rail passengers passing through but with tenant farmers, providing them with fuel, feed, kitchen staples and other goods. Southern landowners generally preferred it this way. By sending their tenants into town for supplies, they could leave unpleasant matters such as late payments or poor credit to the shopkeepers.

Another smart cookie, Jimmie Lee Cochran was also a hard worker. Not only did he do maintenance work for Sol Perlman, he became a chauffeur for both Sol and Abe Goldstein, whose store was a short walk up Main Street. When his work was done in town, Mary’s father walked back to his family’s rental property a few miles outside of town, a two-room clapboard house with straw mattresses, “a big fireplace for heat,” windows that had shutters “you could close at night or when it rained,” but no glass panes. And an outhouse out back.

“We had a well for water,” Mary said. “That was the best water, just as cool as it could be. And Grandma Ca-line had a little garden of her own …” she added, full of pride. “She grew lettuce, carrots, corn, cucumbers, plums … Mm—mmm.” She smiled and smacked her lips. “Ma Sweet had a little store by the side of the house and folks would come by and pay her a little to go pick whatever was in season straight from the garden. They knew it was fresh that way. Ca-line raised chickens, too, and sold eggs. That’s how we had income.”

“Ma Sweet” was Mary’s father’s mother, the younger Ellen in Mary’s family tree who had attended a few years of school and was the entrepreneur of the household. She earned her nickname not only by baking sugary concoctions like tea cakes for the white family she worked for but also stocking in her store penny candy, RC cola and Nehi (“from the icebox”), goodies she bought from a traveling peddler.

A kitchen corner, with woodstove, in an Alabama tenant farmer’s home. Photo by Walker Evans, 1936

“Ma Sweet and Ca-line used lard. Everything tastes better with lard,” Mary laughed. “Ooooh, those biscuits! I get hungry just thinking about them. And you know, all we had was a pot-bellied woodstove with two eyes—how’d they cook all that and make our meals, too? And honey, Ma Sweet bought lemons from that peddler. She had us roll and roll them until they got soft. Then we’d squeeze out the juice and she’d sweeten it up with sugar or honey—I never knew which I liked best. She sold that lemonade and mint tea in Mason jars.” Mary paused, her gaze turning inward as she drifted back in time. “Mint tea was a good thing.”

“Oh! And blackberries!” She snapped back to attention, her soft brown eyes bright. “I almost forgot about blackberries. We picked them to eat and Ma Sweet sold them. That’s the other sticky thing I didn’t like.”

The other sticky thing … And the first? Maybe I was naive, but that first sticky thing had surprised me.

“You picked cotton?” I’d asked, struggling to mask the shock in my voice. The Mary I’d known was a spunky young city woman, clever and streetwise with a sophisticated wit. A city girl myself, I’d never known anyone who worked a farm—well, that’s not altogether true. A cousin of mine owns a ranch in Colorado, but managing horses and livestock, brutal as I’m sure it can be, seems different from manually tending a crop. When I pictured the child Mary bent over a row of cotton beneath the punishing summer sun, I could conjure only something distant and unreal, a downtrodden character in a movie or novel. But Mary’s experience was as real as it gets.

“Yes, I picked cotton as soon as I was able. We kids started, oh I guess we were seven or eight years old. It was the dog days, all summer right up through Labor Day. The boys had to pick after school, but we girls didn’t.”

I was rapt.

“We had a sack we carried over our shoulder,” she went on. “You picked off the hard brown bolls, they were like a little hard flower with a thick husk and the end of it was sharp and sticky. You had to take off the boll and pull out the little seeds before you dropped the cotton in your sack. Once your sack was full, you brought it so they could weigh and bale it up.”

How much cotton was expected from each of these second and third graders?

“The owner of our patch liked us to pick a hundred pounds a day.”

Quite the taskmaster, King Cotton.

Mary’s story continues in “The Good Doctor,” to be posted soon. Until then, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment box below, and thanks always for reading “Afternoons with Mary.”

Afternoons with Mary: Strong Roots and Brittle Branches

Published on by Martha Mattingly PayneLeave a comment

In which I explore my beloved friend’s family tree and confirm a painful truth

Mary Darian’s great-grandparents, Georgia and Thomas Cochran, circa 1890

“When my mamma and daddy started their family,” Mary began. “They didn’t have anything, so they had to work the farm.”

Mary, my childhood caregiver, and I were sitting together in her daughter’s home just south of Atlanta studying the notes Mary had spent days preparing. By “the farm” she meant a cotton farm owned by a white family who by the time Mary’s parents married employed her paternal grandmother as a laundress and her great-grandmother as a cook.

“Were they sharecroppers?” I asked. I was presuming, I suppose, but with good reason. It was 1935. Mary’s parents lived in Hurtsboro, a tiny town in a county pushed up against the Georgia border in Alabama’s “Black Belt,” so named for both its rich soil and its historic dependence on the labor of African Americans, originally as enslaved workers and later, as tenant farmers. These tenants, who during the Great Depression accounted for well over half of all farmers in Alabama, “shared” profits earned from the cotton and other crops they harvested for the farm’s owner.

Or that was the theory.

“Humph …” Mary said with a smirk. “Sharecropper? I don’t know about that. They didn’t share nothing.”

With this she let go a sharp laugh. I smiled, marveling at her sassy wit and how it had survived the years. She was spot on, too. The bits landowners shared were most often so meager that tenant farmers struggled to break even after each year’s harvest. Sharecroppers who tried to save enough to move on to some other life would labor years, decades even, before they felt secure enough to leave. Even then they rarely had the means to purchase land of their own.

“My grandmother Ellen Walker had married a Cochran,” Mary went on. “But it didn’t work out, so my daddy was the man of the house. He had to work in the fields even when he was just a boy, to help support the women.”

Mary’s women, strong women who would end up raising her, were her grandmother Ellen, Ellen’s mother Caroline—“but everybody called her Ca-line,” Mary added with a broad smile—and Caroline’s mother, also named Ellen Walker. I asked, but Mary wasn’t sure exactly where or when the first Ellen or Caroline were born. Hmmm. Perking up, I slid to the literal edge of the couch we shared. I tinker a bit with genealogy (ok, it’s my favorite rabbit hole), and with tingling fingers I asked Mary’s permission to do a little research into the Walkers.

“Why sure,” she said after a pause. There was a touch of something in her soft features, unease, maybe even worry, but I brushed it off.

Parsing out birth places and hidden relationships and surprising connections is a lot like solving a puzzle. Though following a hunch through the generations can take weeks, I love the warm and fuzzy feeling that a successful search brings. I fired up my Ancestry account later that day, and dug in. The 1930 census suggested that the older Ellen Walker, Mary’s great-great-grandmother, was 106 years old that year. 106!!! Alas, this detail is likely exaggerated … Ellen was alive when Mary was a young child in the late 1930s. Her actual birth year is reported in a different census as 1840, in another as 1835, and on and on. But no doubt, Ellen Walker the elder was at least in her nineties in 1930 and was born, in rural Alabama, decades before the Emancipation Proclamation. Ellen first shows up in public records, along with three daughters and a son, in the Census of 1880 as a farm laborer in a community called Glennville. A ghost town now, Glennville sat about twenty miles south of Hurtsboro at the northern tip of what was then Alabama’s most prosperous cotton producing region.

In spite of Ellen Walker the elder having been born in 1840 or before, she is not listed in the censuses of 1840, 1850, or 1860. Although free people of color are listed in these censuses, enslaved men and women show up as anonymous tick marks in separate “slave censuses” reported by landowners and identified only by race, age and gender. Odds are high, then, that in the antebellum years, Ellen’s existence was noted by one of these tick marks and that she worked as an enslaved laborer in the cotton fields of a Glenville plantation. At the end of the Civil War, she likely stuck around Glenville, as many of the formerly enslaved did, to work the same or another farm nearby with her young family, which included her second child, Mary’s Ca-line, listed in that 1880 Census as ten years old.

I kept burrowing, hoping to find a reference to the elder Ellen’s husband, or her parents or siblings, but came up empty. No census listings, no birth or death certificates, no marriage license. Feeling anything but warm and fuzzy, I paused my search. A deep loneliness filled me to think of Mary’s second great-grandmother, a woman who lived such a long, brave, rich life, perched alone atop the Walker branch of Mary’s family tree as if she’d self-birthed when in reality she had ancestors dating back hundreds of years, ancestors who had survived the cruelties of slavery, the unfamiliar environment and diseases of a new world, the brutality of the Middle Passage, but died unnamed and unheralded.

I thought of Mary’s hesitance about my search and sensed she wouldn’t be surprised to hear that members of her family were brought to this country against their will, forced into backbreaking labor, among other things, and treated as less than human. When we next met, we chatted a little about her great-great-grandmother. She confirmed the names of Ellen’s other children that show up in that 1880 Census. I probed her a bit to see if she might remember any other Walker ancestors. She didn’t and I left it at that. She knew where Ellen’s branch led and to dwell on it could only bring pain. A little at loose ends, I opened my phone and zoomed in on a few other things my search had turned up—a photo of her mother’s mother, Bettie Lou Tyner James. Born in 1879, she lived to 91. ”Why that’s Ma Bettie!” Mary exclaimed. Then a pic of her Cochran great-grandparents, Elias and Georgia, on their wedding day, and copies of several marriage certificates, her parents’ and grandparents’ and even one for Elias and Georgia, married in September of 1890.

Bettie Lou Tyner James, Mary’s maternal grandmother

Holding the phone close to her face, Mary thanked me, her voice filled anew with her characteristic joy. I told her it was nothing. I liked genealogy and hoped to discover more. We both felt better for having looked over these images together, a little less lonely to think of Ellen Walker and her lost parents and grandparents, and of Mary’s many other unnamed ancestors, those whose blood she shared and whose strength and courage live on in her children and grandchildren.

A Tale of Two Cousins

Published on by Martha Mattingly Payne24 Comments

During a late sweep through the dark corners of my mother’s attic, I stumbled upon a moldering shrine to one of my paternal great-aunts. Louise Bickers, a.k.a “Weezer,” was a feisty single woman whom I loved like a grandmother. With affectionate if drowsy interest, I dragged over a rickety wooden stool and dusted off her leftovers—stacks of limp letters, photos with curled edges, family trees scribbled on yellowed paper, and a decomposing shoebox of daguerreotypes.

Stumped? So was I. An early form of photograph produced by “fuming” mercury vapor onto silver-plated copper, the daguerreotype was introduced in 1839 and became obsolete by the 1860s. The 1860s! And there I sat, a hundred and fifty-plus years later, with several in passable shape. I ran my finger along the hammered tin frames, eyed the elaborate clothing, the formal, sometimes severe gazes. Where did these people—certainly family—live? What did they do? My curiosity piqued, I tucked the least fusty samples into a fresh plastic bin beside far too many of Weezer’s letters and photos and family trees, and moved on.

During the pandemic’s endless, vacant shut-in hours, I fetched up those family trees, rebooted my Ancestry.com membership, and typed in name after name. It was fun, by 2020 standards, learning how to create profiles for my long-lost blood kin and search for relevant documents and photos. When a grainy image of one of my great-great grandfathers popped up, I knew immediately it was—you got it—a daguerreotype. I fished out Weezer’s frames to compare and contrast. None of the faces matched exactly, but they favored, as my mother would say.

At once piercing and playful, my second great grandfather’s gaze seems especially, hauntingly, familiar. Born in 1825, Thomas Blake Bourne descended from a long line of tobacco planters in Calvert County, Maryland, a leg of land that kicks out into the Chesapeake Bay. The Census of 1850 valued his property at $2,500, equivalent to about $150,000 today, making his a healthy if small farm for its time. I can’t pinpoint the farm’s exact location, but odds are it was on or near Eltonhead, a tobacco manor along the instep of the county’s watery foot, tracts of which had belonged to Bournes since the late 17th century.

Thomas Blake Bourne, Lieutenant of the “CSA” and my second great grandfather

A city girl, I smiled to picture my great-great grandparents, Thomas and Margaret Louisa, living their quaint, rural 19th century lives. Soon a marriage record surfaced from May of 1848, a photo of Thomas’s gravestone, the inscription honoring him as “… a devoted husband and father, true to his friends and his country,” and a certificate proving that his maternal grandfather, Colonel Joseph Blake, fought in the American Revolution. Cool. I’m a DAR. I felt all rosy with pride. Then something else, less than quaint, caught my eye—a Slave Schedule, an appendix to the 1850 Census in which enslavers identified their “human property,” not by name but according to age, sex and color. I blanched, my ancestral pride dissolving as I counted the tick marks beside Thomas’s name: an even ten, six black males and four black females between the ages of six and forty-five.

I attached the Slave Schedule to Thomas’s profile and clicked back to his daguerreotype. That playful grin … might it be more a cunning smirk? My forehead heavy in my palm, I called my daughter in New York.

“We are from the South, Mom,” she said, unsurprised.

“But your grandfather came from humble roots,” I argued. “And Maryland’s hardly the South …”

“I know, Mom,” she said gently, knowingly. “But even small farmers enslaved workers back then.”

Which I knew, but this was our family, a whole different ballgame. I hung up and returned, dull eyed, to my laptop screen. Lined up in the right margin, I noticed tiny circular photos I’d missed before, profiles of other genealogists who’d saved Thomas Bourne’s image. I hovered over one, then another and another, and a pattern emerged—many belonged to people of color. What’s more, the family tree associated with each profile included a common ancestor, a man named Louis H. Bourne.

With clammy fingers, I typed Louis’s information into the Ancestry search engine. My first hit was the Census of 1860, which lists Louis H. Bourne, born 1830, as a “mulatto” head of household and farm laborer in Calvert County. More hits revealed that by 1880, Louis and his wife, Margaret, had purchased over thirty acres of land and settled down to farm tobacco in Island Creek, a breezy community along the Patuxent River that lies about fifteen miles from where Thomas Blake Bourne lived with his family. 

Calvert County in the Colonial Era

Or used to live. In 1855, amid rumblings of the war to come, Thomas had moved his household—including three children and at least nine enslaved persons—across four rivers and the Mason-Dixon line to a manor house near the James River in Virginia, a state he surely wagered would prove friendlier to his future as a planter. Eight years and three children later, Thomas enlisted to fight for the confederate states. He was thirty-eight. Around the same time, Louis H. Bourne, thirty-two, signed on with the Union Army. And so it was that second cousins, as I believe they were, took up arms against each other in a war rooted in misconceptions and greed. Were Thomas and Louis aware of this? I suspect so. It was a much smaller world then and Thomas still had family aplenty in Calvert County. Both men survived, though my great-great grandfather would die suddenly ten years later, the youngest of his nine children only eleven years old.

As intrigued as I was conflicted, I reached out to a few folks whose trees included Louis Bourne. Responses were scarce, but eventually I heard from Florencetine “Tina” Bourne Jasmin of Baltimore County. I hesitated–what right did I have to barge into her life?–then dove in and wrote to her that we could be related, somehow, through Louis Bourne.

“Oh my gosh,” Tina responded. “I’ve been hoping to find someone who might know something about my great grandfather!!!” Smiling again, I shared a little about my family. Tina sent photos of her son and daughter and grandchildren. She told me Louis Bourne had remained—thrived—in Island Creek until his death at seventy, as did many of his children, and some of theirs, and theirs and theirs right up to the present. Louis and Margaret had eleven children, among them trailblazers who stared down the fetters and hostilities of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras. One of their sons, Ulysses Grant Bourne, was among the first black physicians to practice in Frederick, Maryland. A grandson, James Franklyn Bourne, Jr, was the first black judge to serve on the district court for Prince George’s County. Quite a legacy, an improbable triumph in fact, and this was only the beginning.

Louis H. Bourne, 1830-1900

At some point, I told Tina I regretted the unspeakable abuses my ancestors had visited on hers. “This history is beyond our control,” she mused. “I want to believe our ancestors are pleased with us for trying to reconcile our past.” Awed by her tolerance and wisdom, I thanked her and we dug in, working to make sense of our family ties. Tina quickly shared her best clue–a digital copy of Louis’s death certificate which names his mother as “Gracey Mason,” and his father as “James Bourne.” James Bourne? Thomas’s father, my third great grandfather, was named James. But then so was his oldest son, and his first cousin, James Jacob Bourne. Which James fathered Louis? And did he enslave Gracey Mason and the son they shared? Hard to know. A pair of 19th century Calvert County courthouse fires destroyed wills and bills of sale that might have given us proof.

We called in help. Tiffinney Green of Baltimore, Delma Bourne-Parran and Patrice Evans of Prince Frederick, and another cousin in California, all descendants of Louis Bourne, joined our search. The emails flew. We shared trees, unpacked oral history. Hoping to discover shared DNA, we spit in vials, waited, and waited some more.

From the will of Jacob Bourne, my 5th great grandfather.

The results: Delma, Patrice and Tiffinney each match with at least one of my distant white Bourne cousins. And the kicker–Patrice’s sister and I share DNA. Heartened by this proof of our kinship, we analyzed and drew charts and at last wagered that James Jacob Bourne (1791-1850), an enslaver of twenty-two, most likely fathered Louis H. Bourne. This means our common direct ancestor is my fifth great-grandfather, Jacob Bourne (1721-1771), whose will survives with a full inventory attached. In the same figurative breath as a tea kettle, three old sickles, and the spinning wheel in the corner, Jacob names Grace, age forty-five, as one of several enslaved people to be “gifted” to his sons. Might this Grace have had a granddaughter who was passed down the line to James Jacob? It was common after all for baby girls to be named for a grandmother.

My ethnicity compared with that of a person of color who shares DNA with both Patrice Evans and me.

Due to those courthouse fires, for months we had little else to go on. Then Tiffinney found a Grace Mason, born 1807, listed in a Calvert County registry of Free African-Americans in 1832. She lived with a Hannah Mason, age forty. A Louis Mason, age two (just Louis Bourne’s age), also appears in the registry and seems to have been part of Grace’s household. Grace and Louis Mason then disappear. Free people of color were often servants in households that enslaved others, and our hunch is that Grace Mason worked for James Jacob Bourne. Maybe at some point, say when Louis was a child, James took in Grace and their son, maybe even enslaved them in some sort of twisted effort to control them. Did Louis Mason then become known as Louis Bourne? Did James Jacob later free his son who should have been free all along?

We’ll likely never know the full truth. The fact that Louis shows up in the 1860 Census means he was a free man well before Maryland officially emancipated its enslaved. Hannah Mason, the woman listed alongside Grace in the 1832 Registry, provides another clue. Louis’s 1860 household included a Hannah Mason, age seventy-four. Though the years don’t quite match up, they’re close enough for that era to suggest that Hannah was Louis’s grandmother, and that her daughter–Louis’s mother, Grace–died young.

Unless James Bourne sold Grace off.

“I pray that was not the case,” Tiffinney wrote to me.

I pray so, too.

Much work remains. Most of my family lines run back to the colonial era, where other fraught relationships lie in wait. Tiffinney and I have DNA matches in common that suggest we may also be kin through my Mattingly side, and I’m in touch with another young woman directly descended from Colonel Joseph Blake. Looks like the Colonel’s son had his violent way with her third great grandmother.

Broome’s Island at the mouth of Island Creek, not far from where Louis Bourne farmed tobacco and raised his eleven children.

In May, my sister, JoJo, and I visited Calvert County. We researched alongside Tina and Tiffinney, and after, the four of us gathered for dinner with Patrice, Delma, and Marietta Bourne Morris, who still lives in Island Creek. We bored each other with family stories. We laughed over wine and margaritas. Humbled, JoJo and I accepted the kindnesses these women offered. Strong one and all, they overlook with seeming ease the troubled origins of our relationship and accept us as family. I’m proud to call them cousins, hopeful that Louis and James Jacob, Thomas and Grace Mason and my great aunt Weezer are indeed pleased.

Moving forward, I’m not naïve enough to expect from others the open-hearted welcome I’ve received from the Bournes. It’s nothing I deserve. One thing seems certain—this is not a tale of two cousins. It’s a tale of hundreds, thousands—dark-eyed and green and blue; blonde, red-haired, brunette; Irish and Bantu and Latin, Nigerian and Welsh and Congolese. Our skin shines ebony and alabaster and every hue between, and our cells quiver with the tangled threads of those who came before us, our human race.

Family

Postscript: If this sort of research project interests you, message me below or through Facebook. I’m happy to share tips and links to resources. There are many!