I can still taste
The salty sweetness
Of that Brown Sugar Skin,
Cool and fresh against my lips,
That Brown Sugar Skin.
I can still feel
The satin smoothness
Of that Brown Sugar Skin,
when your body was close to mine
That Brown Sugar Skin.
My heart still jumps
From that Brown Sugar Skin,
Gone so long
My soul still held within,
Within that Brown Sugar Skin.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Saturday, August 21, 2010
From my book, Echoes and Whispers: The Chronicles of an African American Family in the South
Chapter 1 continued:
During one particular weekend as I spent hour after hour, after hour, searching internet sites and going over page after page, after page, of federal census reports for Greene County Alabama, I received a phone call from my mother. She inquired about what I was doing and I said,
“I’m off on one of my tangents mom, searching the census for daddy’s people. I don’t know why I’m doing this.”
In my heart and soul, I did know why, but trying to connect the past of an African American is a frustrating, emotional roller coaster ride that can make you question your sanity. But, I continued hearing the insistent echoes of my ancestors and I could not give it up.
My seemingly endless searches of the federal census finally began to reveal names that I had heard from my uncles and daddy all of my life—the Pippens, the Eatmans, the Fulghams, the Cockrells. Page after page of scanned images rolled across the computer monitor, at which I squinted and strained to see, to find a glimpse of my family. My persistence and the insistence of my ancestor’s echoes led me finally to find my family, the Spencers, and at last, I found our patriarch, my great-great-grandpa, John Underwood.
Five years after the end of the Civil War (or as some southerners-at least in Savannah, Georgia-still to this day call it, the War of Northern Aggression), 1870 found the southern states of Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia readmitted to the Union. Carpetbaggers and Scalawags were in their heyday in the south and issues of the war, such as the Constitutional rights of the Negro Freedmen and the disposition of the leaders of the Confederacy, had not been fully addressed. The government ratified the 15th Amendment of the Constitution giving blacks the right to vote regardless of their race or color and irrespective of their previous status as slaves.
In Alabama, former slaves came into a modicum of political power with the elections of the first three blacks to serve in the state’s government while others lived in abject poverty. They were barely eking out enough food for sustenance as sharecroppers and living in shacks while waiting on William Tecumseh Sherman’s promise of forty acres and a mule to spread through the Freedmen’s Bureau to the rolling hills of Alabama. A promise that after 147 years, remains unfulfilled.
The year 1870 was also the Federal Census year in which the Negro Freedmen, Chinese Americans, and Native Americans (not including those living in Indian Territory or on reservations) were enumerated for the first time. At least, some of the disenfranchised people who built these great United States of America were at last being counted in the population as a whole number rather than as a fraction of a man.
It was on the 1870 Federal Census where I found the earliest reference to John Underwood. As my father told me, listed with his name was his wife Lucinda, son George-my great grandpa, and daughters, Elvira, Martha, and Amanda. These names, written in elegant script, were my family. They were real. They were mine. They were me. Which was “Aunt Cuddy?” Which was “Aunt Martha?” Questions bubbled and boiled in my mind. “How did they come to Green County Alabama? What did they look like? Would I be able to find out more?” The more I questioned, the more I thought that I would probably never know with certainty, how, when, and why John Underwood came to be in Greene County Alabama from Virginia.
Between remembering his life on the family’s rural farm in the 1920s and the stories of his brothers and sisters, Daddy recalled:
“Grandpa George told it that his daddy, John Underwood, was taking some fence posts on a wagon one day, going to fix a fence out in the pasture. The wagon was being pulled by two big oxen and when he left the house, you could hear him telling the ox to ‘Ha there! Get up there!’ And the wagon was rattling down the rutted trail. Not long after his voice faded in the distance, they heard loud screams from the direction of the pasture, ‘Ho there! Ho there!’ The oxen were bellowing and then there was the sound of wood crashing into the ground. Grandpa George found his daddy dead, crushed by the grey weathered and splintered boards of the wagon and the hooves of the oxen as they had run out of control.”
By the turn of the century, when the United States and the world began the 100 years in which it would see its greatest growth in technology and economics, I found my family on the 1900 census and indeed, there was no mention of John Underwood. His wife Lucinda (Grandma Cindy) was living in the household of my Great-grandpa, George Spencer.
To be continued...
During one particular weekend as I spent hour after hour, after hour, searching internet sites and going over page after page, after page, of federal census reports for Greene County Alabama, I received a phone call from my mother. She inquired about what I was doing and I said,
“I’m off on one of my tangents mom, searching the census for daddy’s people. I don’t know why I’m doing this.”
In my heart and soul, I did know why, but trying to connect the past of an African American is a frustrating, emotional roller coaster ride that can make you question your sanity. But, I continued hearing the insistent echoes of my ancestors and I could not give it up.
My seemingly endless searches of the federal census finally began to reveal names that I had heard from my uncles and daddy all of my life—the Pippens, the Eatmans, the Fulghams, the Cockrells. Page after page of scanned images rolled across the computer monitor, at which I squinted and strained to see, to find a glimpse of my family. My persistence and the insistence of my ancestor’s echoes led me finally to find my family, the Spencers, and at last, I found our patriarch, my great-great-grandpa, John Underwood.
Five years after the end of the Civil War (or as some southerners-at least in Savannah, Georgia-still to this day call it, the War of Northern Aggression), 1870 found the southern states of Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia readmitted to the Union. Carpetbaggers and Scalawags were in their heyday in the south and issues of the war, such as the Constitutional rights of the Negro Freedmen and the disposition of the leaders of the Confederacy, had not been fully addressed. The government ratified the 15th Amendment of the Constitution giving blacks the right to vote regardless of their race or color and irrespective of their previous status as slaves.
In Alabama, former slaves came into a modicum of political power with the elections of the first three blacks to serve in the state’s government while others lived in abject poverty. They were barely eking out enough food for sustenance as sharecroppers and living in shacks while waiting on William Tecumseh Sherman’s promise of forty acres and a mule to spread through the Freedmen’s Bureau to the rolling hills of Alabama. A promise that after 147 years, remains unfulfilled.
The year 1870 was also the Federal Census year in which the Negro Freedmen, Chinese Americans, and Native Americans (not including those living in Indian Territory or on reservations) were enumerated for the first time. At least, some of the disenfranchised people who built these great United States of America were at last being counted in the population as a whole number rather than as a fraction of a man.
It was on the 1870 Federal Census where I found the earliest reference to John Underwood. As my father told me, listed with his name was his wife Lucinda, son George-my great grandpa, and daughters, Elvira, Martha, and Amanda. These names, written in elegant script, were my family. They were real. They were mine. They were me. Which was “Aunt Cuddy?” Which was “Aunt Martha?” Questions bubbled and boiled in my mind. “How did they come to Green County Alabama? What did they look like? Would I be able to find out more?” The more I questioned, the more I thought that I would probably never know with certainty, how, when, and why John Underwood came to be in Greene County Alabama from Virginia.
Between remembering his life on the family’s rural farm in the 1920s and the stories of his brothers and sisters, Daddy recalled:
“Grandpa George told it that his daddy, John Underwood, was taking some fence posts on a wagon one day, going to fix a fence out in the pasture. The wagon was being pulled by two big oxen and when he left the house, you could hear him telling the ox to ‘Ha there! Get up there!’ And the wagon was rattling down the rutted trail. Not long after his voice faded in the distance, they heard loud screams from the direction of the pasture, ‘Ho there! Ho there!’ The oxen were bellowing and then there was the sound of wood crashing into the ground. Grandpa George found his daddy dead, crushed by the grey weathered and splintered boards of the wagon and the hooves of the oxen as they had run out of control.”
By the turn of the century, when the United States and the world began the 100 years in which it would see its greatest growth in technology and economics, I found my family on the 1900 census and indeed, there was no mention of John Underwood. His wife Lucinda (Grandma Cindy) was living in the household of my Great-grandpa, George Spencer.
To be continued...
Saturday, August 14, 2010
From my book, Echoes and Whispers: The Chronicles of an African American Family in the South
Chapter 1
From the Alabama Black Belt…
Echoes insistently whispered. They called to me from the red clay of Alabama; from the rolling hills, dirt roads, honey suckle-grape-magnolia scented air, and jade-hued Kudzu vine cloaking the lands of Greene County and Tuscaloosa, Alabama. They still sing a calling, constant song in my mind’s ear and invoke a restlessness that overcomes me with longing, a longing to find and know my history. These echoes are the ancestors I only know from my father’s stories. And, like needles pricking at my soul, they call and demand of me to find and tell their stories.
When my father, the Reverend Doctor John Herbert Spencer, began to approach his death, he started to share with me his family’s history. During summer visits and other times when I would travel to Tuscaloosa, he shared the stories that he remembered of his father, mother, brothers, sisters, Grandpa George, and Grandma Cindy, and his life in rural Greene County Alabama—a poor Negro farmer boy, raised with old fashioned country values and a call to serve the Lord as a preacher. I wrote all that he told me to record my family’s legacy and within me was born a passion to know more, to find out all the history that molded my daddy into the man that he was, the minister of the gospel, the chauvinistic and domineering husband of my mother—the daddy who loved me.
To be African American, Black, Negro—because I am all three and more—and to dare to explore your history in the U.S. is to eventually face the impenetrable wall of slavery; to struggle for glimpses beyond the tangled blinds of bigotry for a fleeting glance of the deep rich blood ties that echo in my veins, calling for just a moment in the light of remembering, truth, and revelation. For me, the truth of this story is in my father’s retelling of memory and stories passed to him by my ancestors that now breathe and whisper to me; voices and echoes that capture me for a journey through time—a journey of finding family.
Just when Alabama became a territory in the United States, somewhere in Virginia, a male child was born into slavery and it pains me that this is all that I know of the birth of my great-great-grandfather. The patriarch of my father’s family was a slave, one John Underwood, who was born approximately in 1817 in the state of Virginia. How he came to Greene County Alabama is left to theory, but it can be safely assumed that he was either sold to an Alabama owner or migrated to the state as chattel of a slave trader or a white family. Daddy remembered the story that his great-grandpa had been owned by a white Underwood who worked as a blacksmith in Greene County, and when he told me this story I began a long journey on twisting, turning, overlapping, rutted roads of rediscovering and exploring my family’s genealogy.
Limited by a lack of money, my journey along these roads consisted of many, many hours sitting at my computer and scouring the Internet for genealogy websites and information. With my appetite, whet by glimpses of my family’s names on Federal Census from the 1930s and 1920s, I continued to search backwards in time, trying to connect the past with my present existence, my reasons for being. Anger and frustration laced and interwoven with an impenetrable sadness, were constant companions as I read the records of slaves; “3 male slaves, 4 female slaves, male slave age 7 or 8, Negro boy sound body and teeth.” I continuously read how people of an entire race were reduced from African kings, queens, princes, and princesses, to items for sale to the highest bidder. Men, women, boys, and girls, stripped of their pride; stripped of the knowledge of their family; forced to forget their native languages, and denied the memories of their homeland; that black, ebony, chestnut, honey colored Africa, motherland of all people. How would I, could I, bridge the past with the present, connect my existence with the memories of family that echoed their being so strongly in my veins?
Daddy told the story of our family as,
“I’m not sure whether Grandpa George said our people came from North or South Carolina, but what I do know is that my great grandpa’s name was John Underwood, my Grandpa George’s daddy, and he was a slave owned by a blacksmith named Underwood in Greene County. We got the Spencer name when Grandpa George and his mother, Grandma Cindy, were sold to some Spencers. Grandpa told us that some of his brothers and sisters were sold off too. When the Civil War broke out, John Underwood made a vow to find all of his family and he did.”
I wanted to know their names and daddy could only remember the names from childhood memory, Grandma Cindy, the wife of John Underwood, and the children of their marriage, Aunt Martha, Aunt Cuddy, DeWarren, Sim, and George. I didn’t doubt my daddy’s stories, but I needed, I hungered, my soul and blood ached to know that these people, my people, really existed and were not the invention of memories passed down through generations of story telling and my family’s desire to connect with a history that was stolen from them by the chains of slavery.
From the Alabama Black Belt…
Echoes insistently whispered. They called to me from the red clay of Alabama; from the rolling hills, dirt roads, honey suckle-grape-magnolia scented air, and jade-hued Kudzu vine cloaking the lands of Greene County and Tuscaloosa, Alabama. They still sing a calling, constant song in my mind’s ear and invoke a restlessness that overcomes me with longing, a longing to find and know my history. These echoes are the ancestors I only know from my father’s stories. And, like needles pricking at my soul, they call and demand of me to find and tell their stories.
When my father, the Reverend Doctor John Herbert Spencer, began to approach his death, he started to share with me his family’s history. During summer visits and other times when I would travel to Tuscaloosa, he shared the stories that he remembered of his father, mother, brothers, sisters, Grandpa George, and Grandma Cindy, and his life in rural Greene County Alabama—a poor Negro farmer boy, raised with old fashioned country values and a call to serve the Lord as a preacher. I wrote all that he told me to record my family’s legacy and within me was born a passion to know more, to find out all the history that molded my daddy into the man that he was, the minister of the gospel, the chauvinistic and domineering husband of my mother—the daddy who loved me.
To be African American, Black, Negro—because I am all three and more—and to dare to explore your history in the U.S. is to eventually face the impenetrable wall of slavery; to struggle for glimpses beyond the tangled blinds of bigotry for a fleeting glance of the deep rich blood ties that echo in my veins, calling for just a moment in the light of remembering, truth, and revelation. For me, the truth of this story is in my father’s retelling of memory and stories passed to him by my ancestors that now breathe and whisper to me; voices and echoes that capture me for a journey through time—a journey of finding family.
Just when Alabama became a territory in the United States, somewhere in Virginia, a male child was born into slavery and it pains me that this is all that I know of the birth of my great-great-grandfather. The patriarch of my father’s family was a slave, one John Underwood, who was born approximately in 1817 in the state of Virginia. How he came to Greene County Alabama is left to theory, but it can be safely assumed that he was either sold to an Alabama owner or migrated to the state as chattel of a slave trader or a white family. Daddy remembered the story that his great-grandpa had been owned by a white Underwood who worked as a blacksmith in Greene County, and when he told me this story I began a long journey on twisting, turning, overlapping, rutted roads of rediscovering and exploring my family’s genealogy.
Limited by a lack of money, my journey along these roads consisted of many, many hours sitting at my computer and scouring the Internet for genealogy websites and information. With my appetite, whet by glimpses of my family’s names on Federal Census from the 1930s and 1920s, I continued to search backwards in time, trying to connect the past with my present existence, my reasons for being. Anger and frustration laced and interwoven with an impenetrable sadness, were constant companions as I read the records of slaves; “3 male slaves, 4 female slaves, male slave age 7 or 8, Negro boy sound body and teeth.” I continuously read how people of an entire race were reduced from African kings, queens, princes, and princesses, to items for sale to the highest bidder. Men, women, boys, and girls, stripped of their pride; stripped of the knowledge of their family; forced to forget their native languages, and denied the memories of their homeland; that black, ebony, chestnut, honey colored Africa, motherland of all people. How would I, could I, bridge the past with the present, connect my existence with the memories of family that echoed their being so strongly in my veins?
Daddy told the story of our family as,
“I’m not sure whether Grandpa George said our people came from North or South Carolina, but what I do know is that my great grandpa’s name was John Underwood, my Grandpa George’s daddy, and he was a slave owned by a blacksmith named Underwood in Greene County. We got the Spencer name when Grandpa George and his mother, Grandma Cindy, were sold to some Spencers. Grandpa told us that some of his brothers and sisters were sold off too. When the Civil War broke out, John Underwood made a vow to find all of his family and he did.”
I wanted to know their names and daddy could only remember the names from childhood memory, Grandma Cindy, the wife of John Underwood, and the children of their marriage, Aunt Martha, Aunt Cuddy, DeWarren, Sim, and George. I didn’t doubt my daddy’s stories, but I needed, I hungered, my soul and blood ached to know that these people, my people, really existed and were not the invention of memories passed down through generations of story telling and my family’s desire to connect with a history that was stolen from them by the chains of slavery.
Friday, August 13, 2010
From my book, Echoes and Whispers: The Chronicles of an African American Family in the South
FINDING FAMILY
Part I
What Slaves Have Trod
What Slaves have trod
The dusty trail
Or slipped a mossy veil
Across a silent, silty, stream
Beneath a whispering canopy
Traveling through time and space
To be Free?
What Slaves have trod
The steep and craggy hills
Or traced through grassy plains
Dark, brown, and jagged lines
The raised road map on his back
Escaping cat’s old lethal crack?
Though time advances
The years begin and end
The quest for my and kindred’s mind
Must be to seek and ask, and ask;
What Slaves have trod
This dusty trail
To Freedom’s Holy Grail?
© 2004
Part I
What Slaves Have Trod
What Slaves have trod
The dusty trail
Or slipped a mossy veil
Across a silent, silty, stream
Beneath a whispering canopy
Traveling through time and space
To be Free?
What Slaves have trod
The steep and craggy hills
Or traced through grassy plains
Dark, brown, and jagged lines
The raised road map on his back
Escaping cat’s old lethal crack?
Though time advances
The years begin and end
The quest for my and kindred’s mind
Must be to seek and ask, and ask;
What Slaves have trod
This dusty trail
To Freedom’s Holy Grail?
© 2004
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