Smoky Ordinary - Penn Quakers and Queen Sugar in Brunswick County Virginia

I came across this marker about a year ago after taking a detour off of my normal route to get to my father's hometown of Lawrenceville VA.  On this particular trip I was going to meet a forester to sell about 30 acres of timber from the land that my father left me when he passed.   My aunt Nell used to talk about Smoky Ordinary from time to time, especially to mention that the police were pretty strict along the stretch of US 58 between Emporia and Lawrenceville, but I had never seen any roadsigns for the place.

The ordinary that stood on this site catered to travelers on the north-south stage road as early as 1750. During the American Revolution local warehouses were burned by British Colonel Tarleton, and legend says that it was from that occurrence that the ordinary derived its name. During the Civil War the post office (1832-1964) and inn were spared when a Union officer recognized the inn's owner, Dr. George M. Raney, as being a former classmate at the University of Pennsylvania

After a few miles I was surprised to see that there was a historical road marker.  It explained the origin of why the place was called Smoky - having absorbed the odor from nearby warehouses when they were burned down during the Revolutionary War.   (I had to look up the definition of an Ordinary - which was simply an "ordinary" house licensed to operate as a tavern and/or inn). I was more surprised to find that during the Civil War the, post office and inn were spared from being burned down because a Union officer recognized the owner "as being a former classmate at the University of Pennsylvania," which happens to be the same school I graduated from almost 30 years ago.   Imagine two Penn Quakers meeting up this far away from West Philadelphia.

Charlie Hope 2016

Continuing on my way, I didn't know the exact location of the land and  I needed help finding it.  I had been there only once before - about 35 years prior.  When I got there I was struck by its simple beauty.  Standing on the ground looking upwards, the trees looked like outstretched arms reaching for the heavens.  

From time to time my father would say that he heard that there was a lot more than 30 acres but figured it was sold or lost or simply taken away over the years.  He didn't know much about the origin of the land other than it came from his paternal grandmother Sarah Morris Jones.  She died in 1901 shortly after her first and only child, my grandfather Thomas Jones Sr., was born.  He in turn died in 1931 when my father was only 7, leaving my father with very little connection to that side of his family. But now having been there and having walked in their footsteps, I was determined to find out more about it.

After digging through numerous online records and making a couple of visits to the Brunswick County Courthouse, I came to learn that a man named Benjamin Green owned a tobacco plantation of about 650 acres that he passed on to his son Thomas A. Green.

1860 Census for Thomas A. Green - Post Office Smoky Ordinary

Thomas had several children by a woman named Elizabeth Ann Gordon. Based upon census records and the 1850 and 1860 slave schedules, she and her children appear to have been slaves on the same plantation.   It's not unusual to see mixed race children borne of master-slave relationships, but what does not appear to be as common is that in his will, Thomas Green left all of his land to those children.  One of them was Victoria Green Morris, Sarah's Morris Jones' mother. So it appears that like the family depicted in the T.V. series Queen Sugar, that I own some of the same land on which my ancestors were once owned.

I came across one other document that piqued my interest.  It is an 1864 map of Brunswick County which shows the names of property owners on or near their land.   Seeing the name TA Green right where my land is today seemed to validate all that I had found.  The full name of the road labeled Boydton was and is Boydton Plank Road which is now US-1.  The road running NW to SE from Boydton Plan Road through Pleasant Grove is now named Grandy Road which is the location of the plot. 

1864 Map of Brunswick Co Va from CSA Army of No VA Dept of Engineering

So it turns out my father was right.  There was a lot more land than the 30 acres.   It also turns out that my aunt was right about the police in Smoky Ordinary.  She was in the car with me heading to the church on the day of my father's funeral, and as always she warned me to slow down. But it was to no avail, I was pulled over by a county policeman and given a speeding ticket. To add insult to injury, the officers last name was Jones..... I could only wonder if he was a distant cousin.

Aunt Molly and the Slave Narratives The WPA Federal Writers Project

Millie Markham

"From 1936 to 1938, over 2,300 former slaves from across the American South were interviewed by writers and journalists under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) . These former slaves, most born in the last years of the slave regime or during the Civil War, provided first-hand accounts of their experiences on plantations, in cities, and on small farms. Their narratives remain a peerless resource for understanding the lives of America's four m
illion slaves. What makes the WPA narratives so rich is that they capture the very voices of American slavery, revealing the texture of life as it was experienced and remembered. Each narrative taken alone offers a fragmentary, microcosmic representation of slave life. Read together, they offer a sweeping composite view of slavery in North America, allowing us to explore some of the most compelling themes of nineteenth-century slavery, including labor, resistance and flight, family life, relations with masters, and religious belief."¹

One of the people interviewed was Millie (Molly) Markham, my Great-Great Grandmother’s sister.

"Molly Walden Markham, as an elderly woman, told a tale to the WPA Writer's Project how her mother Tempy was a white woman and her father Squire Walden was a slave on her grandfather's plantation. Tempy fell in love with Squire, her father found out about it, and sold Squire to another slave owner in another state. Tempy bought Squire's freedom and then drank the blood from a cut in his finger so she could honestly tell the Justice of the Peace that she had Negro blood in her [WPA Project vol. XI, part 2, 106-8]. Tempy was actually the daughter of Benjamin James, a light-skinned free African American who lived in Halifax County, North Carolina."²

Click Here for the full Transcript

The entire collection of narratives can be found in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972-79).

Understanding the context of the narratives.

Bruce Fort wrote a good piece about reading the narratives that helps set the context interpreting them. 

"The narratives ... are transcribed verbatim from the interview transcripts collected by writers of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the late 1930s. The narratives can be quite challenging to read. The dialect can be difficult to understand; the interviewers usually made an effort to transcribe what they heard the narrators saying, but there is little consistency from interview to interview. One solution is to try to imagine what the language might have sounded like, perhaps by reading the narratives out loud.It is worthwhile to read the narratives closely, watching and listening for unexpected details, unspoken feelings, and hidden meanings. Often the full meanings of the narratives will remain unclear, but the ambiguities themselves bear careful consideration. When Emma Crockett spoke about whippings, she said that "All I knowed, 'twas bad times and folks got whupped, but I kain't say who was to blame; some was good and some was bad." We might discern a number of reasons for her inability or unwillingness to name names, to be more specific about brutalities suffered under slavery. She admitted that her memory was failing her, not unreasonable for an eighty-year-old. She also told her interviewer that under slavery she lived on the "plantation right over yander,"and it is likely that the children or grandchildren of her former masters, or her former overseers, still lived nearby; the threat of retribution could have made her hold her tongue. Or, perhaps in her old age she had come to view her life as a slave with equanimity and forgiveness. It is impossible to know why she reserved judgment, but it is worth considering the possibilities.

Readers will notice lapses, inconsistencies, and repetitions in these narratives. The interviewers were assigned to ask a series of questions about labor, diet, marriage, punishment, and relations with masters. Some interviewers followed this list of questions more faithfully than others. Most of those interviewed were in their eighties and nineties; their recollection of childhood is often remarkably detailed, but readers will detect the difficulty of remembering exact chronologies over a period of seventy or eighty years.

Modern readers will also note in some narratives the patronizing tone of the interviewers and the seeming deference of the subjects. While the racial language can be offensive to modern readers, it is important to remember that these narratives were conducted sixty years ago in the Jim Crow South; just as these former slaves had survived into the twentieth century, so had the ideology of white supremacy that underpinned the slave society of the American South.”³

We are all equal but not the same.

Being enslaved is almost inconceivable to anyone living today,  150 years after the end of slavery, The reality of one person owning another, the unfettered ability to inflict punishment on another human being, and forcing people to live on barely subsistence level food, clothing and shelter, is something this country has tried to distance itself from for a long time.   As one reads these first hand accounts of life during and after slavery, it may come as a surprise that not all of the recollections are of the horrors of slave life.  African Americans have always had more than one perspective no different than seen between Malcolm and Martin, or WEB Dubois and Booker T. Washington.

Carry Me Back to Ol' Virginny

The lyrics to this popular folk song written by James A. Bland, an African American, in 1878.  This was a time after the end of reconstruction when many former slaves were finding it difficult to survive.  The lyrics, controversial now, expressed a nostalgic view of life as a slave...

There's where I labored so hard for old Massa,Day after day in the field of yellow corn;No place on earth do I love more sincerelyThan old Virginny, the state where I was born.

Massa and missis have long gone before me,Soon we will meet on that bright and golden shore,There we'll be happy and free from all sorrow,There's where we'll meet and we'll never part no more.

Sixty years later there were former slaves who echoed the sentiments of the song in their recollections of slavery and their experiences in the years after.   William Sykes, a former slave in North Carolina compared his generation to the current generation of blacks.

William Sykes

“Dar’s one thing, we ole niggers wus raised right an’

de young niggers ain’t.  Iffen I had my say-so dey’d burn

down de nigger school, give dem pickanninies a good span-kin’ an’ put ‘em in de patch ter wuk, ain’t no nigger got no business wid no edgercation nohow.”⁴

Jane Lassiter’s interview shows a positive memory of their former owners.

“No slaves ever run away from our plantationcause marster wus good to us.  I never herd of his bein’‘bout to whup any of his niggers.  Mother loved her whitefolks as long as she lived an’ I loved ‘em too.  No mister,we wus not mistreated.”⁵

Amy Penny also interviewed in North Carolina could be the spokesperson for Bland's song.  She was born near Boydton VA, in Mecklenberg County Va.

 “We lived in log houses.  Yes, indeed, we had plenty to eat.  I never suffered for sumptin’ to eat till I come to Raleigh.  On de plantation we got plenty allowance.  We had good clothes on de plantation.  I am more naked now den I ever been before in my life." 

"I had de worse time of my life since de surrender."

“Slavery wus better den it is now.  Shore it wus.  I don’t know much ‘bout de war but my first life in Virginia was better den it is now.  I never did have any mean white folks."⁶

Beyond the differences in the way people were treated from plantation to plantation owner to owner, one must remember that many of the people interviewed were small children when they were freed.   In general children in the south did not go into the fields until they were between 8 and 12 years old, so some may not have experienced the same hardships under slavery as their older relatives did.  The later reactions can also be seen in "institutionalized" ex-convicts who find it difficult to function outside of prison.

In addition, the idea of preferring life in bondage expressed by some were not much different than those expressed in the books of Exodus and Numbers by some of the newly liberated Hebrews. There were several challenges to Moses and Aaron, with complaints of being hungry and thirsty in the Wilderness vs the relative bounty they had back in Egypt.  It is arguable that the challenges faced by many of the  freed African American slaves was greater  than those of the Hebrews for a couple of key reasons.  First, there was no exodus for a good number of ex-slaves, they continued to live in relative close proximity to their old masters if not on the same plantation.  Second, by the 70 year post freedom mark, the Hebrews had been in the promised land for some 30 years.  No such place existed for the former slaves.

Give me liberty of give me death

On the other hand, there is Fountain Hughes, whose grandfather was owned by Thomas Jefferson.  His views are far more representative of what people felt about the bondage.

Fountain Hughes

If I thought, had any idea, that I’d ever be a slave again, I’d take a gun an’ jus end it all right away.  Because you’re nothing but a dog.  You’re not a thing but a dog.⁸

Slave Narratives on TV and Film

Found Voices

In addition to the written transcripts, a handful of interviews  (including Fountain Hughes’)  were recorded.   The story of these audio recordings was captured in a segment of ABC’s Nightline called Found Voices. 

Click Here to View Found Voices

 "This ... brings to life actual voices and memories of slaves through now digitally remastered tapes originally recorded in the 1930s and 1940s. Thousands of interviews with ex-slaves were conducted by John Henry Falke, Zora Neale Hurston, and other folklorists. Most of them were written down and published in pamphlets and some were recorded by phonographs. These tapes have been cleaned up with the newest computer technology, which results in remarkable audibility. One of the voices belongs to 101-year-old Fountain Hugh who was born in 1848 into slavery and was a grandson of a slave owned by Thomas Jefferson. Slave narratives like his describe treacherous and harsh living conditions under bondage and after emancipation. For the study of history instruction, gaining the knowledge of primary sources is valuable. Slave narratives serve as rich primary source material. This program does an excellent job of informing the viewers of the possibilities of using narrative as a primary source. However, this short program does not and cannot possibly provide sufficient accounts of slavery. Viewers will benefit from reading printed slave narratives in addition to watching this program."—Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education⁹

Unchained Memories

Click the image to view the entire episode

“Unchained Memories, is a riveting compilation of more than forty narratives drawn from interviews with former slaves conducted in the 1930s by the government's Works Progress Administration…  From slave auctions to emancipation, the narratives trace the extraordinary experiences of lives spent in slavery.”¹⁰ In the film, actors including Angela Basset, Samuel L. Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee read excerpts from the slave narratives.  It won the Literacy in Media Award for Outstanding Television Special/Film/Documentary.

Conclusions

As with every other aspect of the black experience in America, the story told by these slave narratives is full of complexities and a wide spectrum of perspectives, as numerous as there are people.  The value goes beyond giving a view of what slave live was like, it helps to set the context of how the black experience in America evolved in the decades between the end of the civil war, and the dark days of the great depression.   

Alexis Jones

Citations

1.     (Fort, American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology, 1996)

2.     (Heinegg, 2016)

3.     (Fort, American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology, 1998)

4.    (Library of Congress, pp. https://northcarolinaslavenarratives.wordpress.com/north-carolina-slave-narratives-2/sykes-william/)

5.    (Library of Congress, pp. https://northcarolinaslavenarratives.wordpress.com/north-carolina-slave-narratives-2/lassiter-jane/)

6.    (Library of Congress, pp. https://northcarolinaslavenarratives.wordpress.com/north-carolina-slave-narratives-2/penny-amy/)

7.    (Mintz, n.d.)

8.    (Fort, American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology, 1998, p. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/hughes1.html)

9.    (Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education, n.d.)

10. (Amazon, n.d.)

Works Cited

Amazon. (n.d.). Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives. Retrieved Jan 7, 2017, from Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0821228420?_encoding=UTF8&isInIframe=0&n=283155&ref_=dp_proddesc_0&s=books&showDetailProductDesc=1#product-description_feature_div

Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education. (n.d.). Found Voices: The Slave Narratives. Retrieved from Films Media Group: http://www.films.com/id/11092

Fort, B. (1996). American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology. Retrieved from American Studies at the university of Virginia: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/wpa/wpahome.html

Fort, B. (1998, November 1). American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology. Retrieved from American Studies at the University of Virginia: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/reading.html

Heinegg, P. (2016, September 30). Walden-Webster. Retrieved from Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland and Delaware: http://freeafricanamericans.com/Walden_Webster.htm

Library of Congress. (n.d.). William Sykes. Retrieved from North Carolina Slave Narratives Volume XI Part II: https://northcarolinaslavenarratives.wordpress.com/north-carolina-slave-narratives-2/sykes-william/

Mintz, S. (n.d.). Childhood and Transatlantic Slavery. Retrieved January 11, 2017, from Children and Youth in History: https://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/case-studies/57