A couple of weeks ago, I received an unexpected email from a student at an area high school.
I wrote back and suggested that she send the questions and that we set up a Zoom meeting to chat.
We were finally able to meet yesterday. There are levels to my motivation for curating Black Wide-Awake, but highlighting and preserving history for the benefit of young people is close to the surface. I was honored by E.C.’s interest in the why of my work and deeply impressed by her preparation and thoughtful communication.
Thank you, E., for the opportunity to talk about the importance of researching local history and genealogy. I wish you the best as you complete your high school studies and go on to make your mark in the world!
Short-time reader, but captivated by the several above posts—so many questions, so many losses, so many tears. The deed caught my eye first, and my secretarial mind puzzled, “How did they use a typewriter IN a DEED BOOK?” Such an arcane, silly thought toward inconsequential bits, when there is such serious history and grimfact to face.
THEN I came to the prosperity lists—the who and how many of such sad chattel—simply heartbreaking—My own Mississippi Delta raising had taught me such a lot about those travesties, and that “PLANTERS” and their children had oddly rich, literary educations, with Latin and French in those small, exclusive schools. The “slave list” reads like Faulkner novels— those literary names reeled out there like the roster at a Brit boarding school. And seeing all those parents and children listed and linked in that paper chain more chafing than the iron links—that still, these decades away from my Fifties childhood, makes me want to grind my teeth and spit the way I did after I was forced to call the “colored” elders “Auntie” and “Uncle”—it just felt as disrespectful as when I, a chunky, grubby little girl, standing in the store line to get my Mother’s pack of Pall Malls, would be waved and called to the front ahead of our friend Savannah, holding her new baby and a knee baby at her skirt, waited patiently for them to weigh out her flour and lard. Why, they were shopkeepers and land-owners themselves, prospering through all those hot, dusty days in “Their Quarter” of town, and as little thought of as a mule with no plow.
The Aycock Will—I thought our own forebear’s instructions for one child to have everything and all the rest a shilling each was a shame, but for that patriarch to instruct blindly that the three were to be sold when the next owner died, like bits of dreck at a yard sale, with no thought or regret for kinship or separation—I cannot reach my mind around that.
I apologize for the length of this—just little thoughts from the dreadful part of my past. My Sis does our genealogy and I tell the stories.
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts! A quick response: deed books are comprised of copies of original documents. Clerks typed up the copies — earlier, they’d handcopied them — that were bound into volumes.