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.