The 66-year arc of Wilson’s beloved Monitors postdates Black Wide-Awake ‘s focus, but I don’t need an excuse to recommend John Harris’ brand-new history of this legendary band. The Monitors have been a constant my entire life, and I knew their basic story, but every other page — especially in the narrative of their early years and Sam Lathan‘s tidbits about East Wilson in the 1940s — was a delightful reveal.
I recently was gifted a copy of Phoebe Ann Pollitt’s African American Hospitals in North Carolina: 39 Institutional Histories, 1880-1967. Reading the Wilson entry made me realize I have not adequately set out here the ownership timeline of the hospital commonly thought of just as “Mercy Hospital.” What we think of as a single institution actually comprised three separate hospitals that operated on the same site and mostly in the same building.
(1) In 1905, Dr. Frank S. Hargrave opened a private hospital in a 16-room house on East Green Street.
(2) In 1913, Dr. Hargrave partnered with Samuel H. Vick and J.D. Reid to establish Wilson Hospital and Tubercular Home in a brand-new, purpose-built brick building on the site of the old wooden house. In 1915, Wilson’s Board of Aldermen voted to contribute a small monthly amount to the hospital’s budget. The hospital — the tubercular home was never built — struggled financially and went into foreclosure in 1924. Pollitt’s timeline and facts are a little off concerning this phase of the hospital’s history. She says Commercial Bank failed in the late 1920s “due to the nationwide financial hardships of the Great Depression” and that Dr. Hargrave left Wilson for New Jersey in 1924 after losing the hospital. Hargrave did leave Wilson in 1924, but Commercial Bank did not fail until J.D. Reid and Henry S. Stanback severely and criminally mismanaged its deposits in 1929. Contemporary news accounts say the hospital J.D. Reid had kept the bank afloat with loan from the Commercial Bank secured by the hospital itself. When the bank collapsed, it dragged the hospital down, too.
(3) In 1930, white businessman Wade H. Gardner bought the hospital at auction, and a group of white doctors and businessmen, plus William Hines, set themselves up as trustees and administrators. They renamed it Mercy and commenced operation with city, county, and philanthropic support. Though the hospital’s ownership shifted a couple of times between private and public owners to render it eligible for major grants, Mercy operated continuously until 1964, when it was shuttered for good with the opening of a federally-funded, integrated hospital, Wilson Memorial. (I was born there just a few months before it closed.)
I added Bailey and Bailey’s Sandy Level Cemetery Burial Records to my little local history set yesterday. Sandy Level is in Nash County, but this is a valuable Black Wide-Awake resource for many reasons.
(1) Sandy Level Cemetery is on present-day Stoney Hill Church Road at Bailey Road, less than three miles from the Wilson County line. Extended families often straddled the line between Nash County’s Bailey and Jackson townships and Wilson County’s Old Fields township.
(2) Sandy Level A.M.E. Church established the cemetery circa 1900. (The church itself was formed before 1875, and Willis Cone was an early trustee.) Mount Carmel A.M.E. of Bailey, which is still active (and my mama’s church!), was more or less its successor. Dozens of church members are buried in Sandy Level, but the cemetery also seems to have become a community burial ground by mid-twentieth century.
(3) Many who left the Bailey area for different opportunities returned to Sandy Level for burial. Some only migrated 15 miles east to Wilson. Others joined the Great Migration North. And Mercy Hospital was the closest African-American hospital during the Jim Crow era, so many Nash County residents buried in Sandy Level actually died in Wilson.
(4) The Baileys’ book is an exemplar for recording and preserving African-American church and cemetery history. The 154 known burials are presented alphabetically, with a brief description drawn from obituaries or death certificates.
If you’re interested in ordering a copy of Sandy Level Cemetery Burial Records, please contact Margaret Bailey at baileym@uncw.edu. The book costs $25, shipping is $5, and the order turn-around time is impressive.
I am a champion of oral histories and memoirs as sources of information that adds texture and nuance to the dry data of documents. In Crossroads: Stories of the Rural South, Montress Greene has published her recollection of growing up in Pender’s Crossroads, a community anchored around Bridgers Grocery and Farm Supply, her family’s country store, in the 1940s and ’50s. Though Greene’s focuses her memories largely though the prism of family life, she offers invaluable granular detail for our imagining of the world through which the men and women of this blog moved. Though that world was legally segregated, whites and African-Americans interacted closely and regularly, and Greene addresses race relations forthrightly, if through the eyes of a child. “Much of this will revolve around the strength of women and especially black women,” she writes. Beyond these personal stories, however, Crossroads reveals the country store as public space vital to all in the community.
Montress Greene in the early 1940s outside Bridgers Store. An older African-American man is seated on a box behind her.
I’ve posted several excerpts from Cecil L. Spellman‘s Elm City: A Negro Community in Action, but you don’t need to wait for me if you want to know more. (And, if you have any link to Toisnot township, you should.) Forgotten Books has published the book in its Classic Reprint Series, and it’s available via Amazon.
One of my cousins, 20 years older than I, published a memoir a few years ago. The early pages of Sherrod Village are set on streets I’ve walked and peopled by folks I knew in East Wilson. Barbara Williams Lewis’ grandmother Josephine Artis Sherrod was my great-great-grandmother’s sister; they were two of the “innumerable” children of Adam T. Artis. (Barbara’s mother, in fact, is who described them to me that way.) I thought I would recognize so much in Barbara’s book. And I did. But I didn’t.
Children are shielded from so much ugliness — if they’re lucky, as I was — and understand so little of what they see. The ragged past of sweet old people is not always apparent in their mild present. Nonetheless, though my own family’s story involved poverty and insecurity and pain, I have believed that my recollected truth was true. I have, perhaps, counted on it.
I’ve spoken often about viewing East Wilson as a palimpsest. However, for too long I processed little beneath the surface of my own Polaroid-tinted memories of crepe myrtles, corner stores, and swimming lessons at Reid Street Community Center. I knew the history of the place, but not the often bitter stories of its people. Fifteen pages into Sherrod Village, I wrote to Barbara that I was “staggered.” I finished the book in the same state of astonishment.
I thank Barbara for her honesty and bravery. I thank her also for pushing me toward deeper and more empathic consideration as I continue to build space for our community’s stories.
I’m not an archaeologist or an anthropologist or a preservationist, and I’ve studied history, but only recently begun to engage in public history. Thus, I need to get my game up as Lane Street Project moves from dreamy rumination to real work.
I’m reading Lynn Rainville’s Hidden History: African American Cemeteries in Central Virginia to start. Though the landscape, material culture, and history of the Charlottesville area are quite different than those of Wilson County, Rainville’s work illustrates best practices for assessing, cataloguing, and preserving historic Black cemeteries, and I’m both taking notes and brainstorming as I read.
“Gravestones can teach us lessons in American civics as told through portraits of individuals and their communities, depicted in the details found on their headstones. The storylines in these mortuary museums illustrate national values: the worth of the individual, the primacy of the family, the depth of religious beliefs, the importance of patriotism. … They can also demonstrate some of the darker aspects of our shared past, the legacies of slavery and segregation. Cemeteries are instructional spaces that, if read correctly, have much to teach us about our social and moral values and about our shared history.”
“Every place writes its own elegy before it is founded. Each beginning is an end to what has preceded it; something has always come before. So excavate your own cellar, then the ruins on top of which it was laid, and the bones beneath the ruins. Then dig some more. I may be a sentimental fool, but I can’t deny this particular truth, that it is not so simple as I would like it: paradise is ending on our watch. Then again, it is possible that this is finally true; we shall see, soon. Anyway, I am not fool enough that I would cede my right to complain loudly about what has been stolen from me and no one but me. I take my role as custodian of my nostalgia with a mortal seriousness. Life has supplied me with only these eyes, only this bizarre sensibility composed solely of this accretion of embarrassingly personal, minor events that has solidified into the unshapely mass called ‘me.’ None of us lives in the same world. Seven billion planets, not one, currently revolve around the sun in the third place of the solar system. They told you wrong in school. …”
“… These things that happened years ago and don’t matter to anyone are long-gone wind and rain. Ephemeral, meaningless. But they amount to forces that shaped the rocky earth and waterways (the buildings and institutions and beliefs and histories) that made me. Guard against its theft, the past of the place that made you. At least notice it, if you cannot save it.”
Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Place You Love Is Gone: Progress Hits Home (2006).
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I happened upon my old Tumblr account this morning, which I basically abandoned about five years ago. I posted the passage above in maybe 2011, years before I created Black Wide-Awake, and it just kind of waited for me to step into my purpose.