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...
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