Thirty years ago, Doubleday published a book written by Alex Haley called ROOTS. Nearly everyone read the book and watched the TV mini-series. African Americans from the Pacific to the Atlantic and all points in between revisited their own “roots”: interviewing great-aunts; poring over microfilm (no ancestry.com then!) and squinting to make out spidery handwriting on 19th century documents. We wanted to know. Who are we? Where did we come from? On whose shoulders do we stand?

When I was a child, my great-grandfather presided over the Thanksgiving table, assisted by my grandfather, who carved the turkey, and served by my father and mother. If I behaved myself (which I often didn’t), I was allowed to stay up past my bedtime and listen to the grown folks’ conversation. It was the late fifties and we were colored then. They talked about the NAACP and discussed articles in The Crisis and what Mrs. So-and-So down the street was doing. And later, if I was still awake, I heard family stories, too: the “mountain man” grandfather who smoked a cheroot pipe; the grandmother who gathered herbs and plants to make medicines. I wish I’d asked more questions but I didn’t.

(more…)

The pictures of Jim and Sarah (Sally) Stallworth hung on our family room wall along with all of the other family members in our bi-racial family.  Jim’s picture was especially intriguing to our visitors as they could not tell whether he belonged to my family or to my African-American husband’s family.  Sally was very dark with Negroid features so there was no doubt as to her ancestry but Jim could have been English or Scottish with his straight hair and light eyes.  Family oral history was not clear so there was no agreement.

As time went on I became more and more obsessed with the answer to this question.  Was he white?  Was he the son of a white slaveholder? Since there was no agreement in the family, I became determined to find the answer.

One of the known facts was that Jim had been born into slavery in South Carolina in 1842.  Also known was that he had purchased land in 1895 in Alabama–land which remains in the family today. It was while visiting the property in Alabama that I began to identify with this man who had come from the depths of slavery to being a small land owner and the progenitor of eight children and numerous descendants.

(more…)

ACT I

In the 1950’s when I was a boy growing up in Cincinnati, my mother, sister and I traveled to the family farm in Marion Junction, Alabama. Every summer, like migrating birds returning to their place of birth, we also returned to the homestead. In my mind, the farm was where the maternal side of my family began. As I grew older, the farm became an incubator for questions about the past.

The farmhouse had a fireplace in the living room, and over it hung portraits of two “old people.” I knew that they were important because of the premium location that their portraits occupied. I learned that they were my maternal great-grandfather Amos Roscoe, and great-grandmother Amanda Toodle Roscoe. I would often look up at them as I walked over the creaky floor, wondering what they were like.

(more…)