The descendants of Randall and Winnie Wiggins. My bloodline is through Randall and Winnie Wiggins’s son Moses. Gwen Wiggins
Peggie also had a son, Lewis Poole, aged five, whom she tried to get on the rolls—unsuccessfully, as there are no records of him listed. One more Cherokee freedman erased from history, I thought. The rest that I could pull up about Peggie’s life was about fifty acres that she wanted to relinquish to her brother. In a legal document with regards to her land rights, another party listed was a member of the Vann family, Jesse Vann, who was also Cherokee. Maybe this Jesse Vann was related to Marilyn Vann.
I don’t know if I can ever 100 percent prove that I’m related to Peggie. But I do know that she shares the last name of the woman who was said to be a black Indian. Maybe two black Indian women married Wigginses men. I don’t know for sure. I do know that Peggie was a Cherokee woman and that Gwen, my mother, her aunt, and many other relatives have been said to have Cherokee ancestry. I began to think about similar stories that I heard from other black people from Georgia and Florida.
I posed a question on Twitter asking black people if they had heard about a possible native link in their family, and I was flooded with responses. One person who responded was Trudy Appling. Trudy has lived in New Jersey and New York for most of her adult life, but her family was a part of the Great Migration, moving to Cleveland from Georgia because of the promise of factory jobs in the North. Her paternal aunt always told her that her mother, Trudy’s grandmother, was part Creek. Trudy thought that might be true because her grandmother had high cheekbones and small eyes, and her recipes were unlike those from other African American families that she knew: oyster stew, and hemp, bark, and berries concocted in a pot to remedy an illness. Though Trudy’s grandmother died before Trudy got to meet her, her aunt’s words made her wonder if she was connected to the tribe, as a slave or a free woman.
“I had suspected that she was a servant or slave connected to the tribe, but at first, when my aunt told me that she was part Creek, I was like, ‘No, I don’t think so.’” But upon further research, Trudy realized that maybe her aunt was onto something. Trudy’s paternal side, the Appling family, is from Appling County of southwestern Georgia. With the exception of the Seminoles, in the 1800s, most white settlers classified the tribes up and around the Chattahoochee River as Creeks. In 1814, during the War of 1812, the Creek people were stripped of their tribal lands, which comprise the present-day counties of Irwin, Early, and Appling.2
Another Twitter connection was Sherese Robinson, a woman who lives in New York City like me, but her maternal side is from Lake City, in Columbia County, and from Alachua County, Florida. Both places were Seminole settlements, and the Seminole Nation in Oklahoma is derived from the Seminole Tribe of Florida, which still exists today. Its existence is due in part to the fact that Seminole Indians hid in the Everglades during the Seminole Wars and enforcement of the Indian Removal Act.3 Sherese’s family were farmers; her great-grandfather owned fifty acres of land in the early 1900s, where he raised pigs and cultivated tobacco and corn. When he died, he gave all of his children the land. Sherese made no mention of a will, and I wondered if this was a case of heirs property. Her grandmother eventually returned to the property to care for the land because the rest of her siblings left during the Great Migration and never came back.
Though Sherese regularly visits her family land, the history of their Seminole heritage has been hard to parse. Her great-aunt, who is eighty-seven, has a document that lists family members eligible to receive government assistance. There was an unrecognizable name on that document that no one else in the family paid attention to until Sherese told a relative that that was the name of the Seminole tribe. Before then, Sherese didn’t think she had any Seminole ties, because no one in her family spoke of any. Her great-grandfather couldn’t read, and whatever was written down on paper was so fragile that people in her family were afraid to touch it. Her great-grandfather’s oldest child, Sherese’s great-aunt, who passed away at ninety-six, never talked about their lineage, because she was ashamed of having light skin and blue eyes, so unlike the rest of her siblings. Sherese also didn’t think she had Seminole ties because her DNA test showed none.
After learning about Sherese’s and Trudy’s stories, I circled back around to my family, but on my paternal grandmother’s side, who comes from the Sandhills region of North Carolina. A man by the name of Floyd T. Jones created a database for the Sandhills Genealogical Society. Jones and his team got the idea for the group after gathering stories from elders and reviewing over a hundred thousand documents. The introductory page regarding the research states:
Like many families, we got answers to most of our questions and other family information from our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and all the local ancestral storytellers in our communities . . . of course, we heard the shocking phrase “things we don’t want to talk about.” These revelations caused our research efforts to grow well beyond the “so-so-many” people we thought we knew to awaken us to a multicultural and cross-ethnic heritage that includes Native American, European, African, and Asian ancestors.
The parentage of my grandmother Gladys, on my father’s side, was questionable. She was a very light-skinned black woman with gray eyes, whose features made her stand out among her siblings. Her “official” name is Gladys Dolores McIver, daughter of Marshall McIver and Mary McIver, née Capel. Family folklore suggests that she was actually the daughter of a Rockefeller who had a playground estate near Sandhills, called Foothills, where my great-grandparents worked and lived. On a census, I saw that her name was Gladys Dolores R. McIver, and this was prior to her being married and becoming a Regis, fueling my suspicion that that R came from someone else.
Because I wasn’t too confident about tracking Glady’s paternal side, I started with her mother and kept going backward through this website by clicking on the rungs of parents and grandparents before her, until I came upon a woman named Eliza Monroe, who would’ve been Gladys’s great-aunt. She’s listed as a sixteen-year-old domestic servant on an 1880 census. While her ethnicity is listed as American, there is an interrogative amendment: “American Indian????”—there really were four question marks. I asked Mr. Jones, the website administrator for the Sandhills Genealogical Society, about this possible native connection, and he told me that in spite of this open-ended ethnicity label, DNA testing had proven otherwise.
So I kept going back further, until I found Eliza Monroe’s grandmother, whose surname was Vann, though her first name is unknown. One of the biggest Cherokee slave owners was James Vann, son of a Scottish father and Cherokee mother. His ownership of enslaved black people and his fluency in English made him “civilized” in the eyes of white settlers, but he still demanded respect whenever whites visited his 137 acres. At the time of his death, at age forty-three, he was said to be one of the richest men in the Cherokee Nation as well as the eastern United States. Eliza’s grandmother must have been born about two decades before the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, after which James Vann’s son and family and their two thousand slaves marched to Indian Territory.4 The oldest Vann connected to my family with a disclosed first name was Samuel Vann Sr. Chief James Vann, as he was known in the Cherokee tribe, was Samuel’s second cousin. Marilyn Vann, my liaison for my Oklahoma trip, is a distant descendant of James Vann.
I asked myself if I should continue pursuing this Peggie Wiggins or Vann connection. To what end, I wondered. I don’t want a citizenship card. I’m not attached to Oklahoma in any way. The purpose was not to find an ancestor on the Dawes Roll, carry a membership card with me in my wallet, and receive benefits. I didn’t want them. And again, Oklahoma is not my home, though it may have been for some of those who came before me. Out of respect for those who are still in Oklahoma and fighting for their rights, I wouldn’t want to go through the process out of mere curiosity. All I wanted was to find a way to shift the narrative to demonstrate that not all of our grandparents
were lying.
For years, I had dismissed my relatives’ accounts of our Native American ancestry with the Seminole and Cherokee tribes, basically because I thought such accounts were antiblack. Not knowing that we had occupied the same lands as the Cherokees and Seminoles, I thought the claims were a way to exoticize our identities. The ancestors of millions of other black Americans lived in the same areas as the Five Civilized Tribes. Black Americans were enslaved by the Cherokees. We often found refuge with the Seminoles, as my great-grandfather once did. When the Five Civilized Tribes were forced to migrate west of the Mississippi River, black people accompanied them. At one time, in some places, as LeEtta said with regard to the Seminoles, blacks and indigenous tribes were one people. Discussions of American blackness should always include indigeneity, and not as an aside, for both peoples were connected through the plantation economy and the transatlantic slave trade. Actually, it’s a wonder that any stories of black-native relationships survived from this horrific system. It was because of this system that a man named Randall Wiggins, a slave, “fetched” a woman of Indian blood named Winnie over two hundred years ago and I, one of their descendants, pushed past my disbelief to find this union. Randall and Winnie are the earliest ancestors my family has been able to find. If I had continued in my disbelief, I would’ve never found Randall and Winnie, and I would’ve denied myself knowledge of the intricate layers of my parentage.
There is more potential in these black and native stories than one might think, but because of migration and the arbitrary, racist categorizations of laws and rolls, families have been separated. Our stories have become bifurcated as a result: one side is the official story, and the other is the one we whisper to our relatives for generations. Maybe I didn’t seek to prove my Indianness but to prove that the stories we have passed down from both sides of the Mississippi deserve just as much recognition as whatever a history textbook states as fact. These stories about our interrelated cultural identities circulate in our communities, ignore state borders, and mirror one another, proving that we are bound to one another in spite of the displacement. Whatever we’ve heard should serve as anchors to carry us into the future and ground us in a difficult but insightful semblance of the true past.
I found I couldn’t conclude my journey with the Midwest. Geographically, that wouldn’t make sense. A whole other region of the United States would’ve been ignored. There was still the wild, wild West. In 1970, often considered the last year of the Great Migration, California was one of the top three states, along with New York and Illinois, in total black population.5 But except for my late great-aunt Evelyn Jewell Regis Navarre, I didn’t know of any other relatives who had migrated to the West. I got stuck when I tried to think of any other relative who might have gone out west. I searched so far and wide that it took me a while to catch my breath and realize that there was one migrant I hadn’t yet considered: me.
Part IV
Los Angeles
1
AFTER ALL THAT my family had gone through to move to the North, fleeing Americus and settling in an Atlantic City project, you’d have thought they’d have been satisfied with their trajectory. South Jersey should’ve been the end. After all, my grandparents made a good life there for my mother and my siblings. But no, they were still hungry for more. My grandparents were still dreaming of another place, beyond the boardwalk games and Bible camps and Sunday dinners. In the Atlantic City projects, my family and their black neighbors were always talking about California, namely Los Angeles. It was, in my mother’s words, supposed to be “the land of milk and honey.” Every black person my mother knew mythologized California to some extent. Friends and strangers alike would exchange stories about such-and-such’s cousin who had gone out to Los Angeles, and then their voices would trail off, because every listener’s mind would start to imagine all kinds of possibilities. No one needed to explain what happened after so-and-so’s cousin went there, because just reaching Los Angeles meant that that person had made it. Television only intensified the California dream. Hollywood made Los Angeles seem a land of make-believe where you could be anyone you wanted to be. For a family like mine, the City of Angels seemed like the perfect goal for a family accustomed to take flight.
California was thought to be a promised land centuries before it became part of the United States. The name California first appeared in a Spanish novel in 1510. California was envisioned as a mythical utopia, “an earthly paradise, with unbounded productiveness without labor” and “handsome black women like Amazons.”1 When Sir Francis Drake became the second European (after Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo) to explore the area that we now know as California, he named it New Albion, which began a linguistic battle between the English and Spanish. The Spanish ultimately won, and Londoners in the 1850s began to use the name California as slang for money. This was during the gold rush, when settlers from many places converged on California after hearing of gold being found there. The Americans’ preoccupation with gold intensified the image of the state as paradise. According to Mark Juergensmeyer, the California myth signified freedom from guilt and obligation, as well as transformation from “the purifying powers of change.” What could be more enticing than that for a black American of the twentieth century?
A Louisiana Creole family, disillusioned by their loss of status or devastated by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, could board the Sunset Limited train from New Orleans to Los Angeles, where memories of Lake Pontchartrain, the red dirt, and the cemeteries where their ancestors slept would be exchanged for visions of manicured green lawns, bougainvillea, and drive-in movie theaters. They would settle in Leimert Park or Jefferson Park, where other Creole families awaited them. There their children and their children’s children would leave a cultural imprint on these sections of South Los Angeles with their Catholic churches and Creole restaurants. A Gullah man from Beaufort County, South Carolina, might have worked a number of years at the Philadelphia Transportation Company or as a Pullman porter in Chicago before the desire for warmer weather was too loud a siren call to ignore. He’d read the Chicago Defender’s daily train schedules and decide to take the chance. At least the Pacific Ocean wasn’t the Atlantic with its odor of slavery.
If that black man had the time and energy from his manufacturing job, he might leave his home near Central Avenue—one of the few places where he was allowed to live—to watch the azure ocean from the docks as it glistened before sunset. A Cherokee freedman from Oklahoma, stripped of his land and public recognition of his multiethnic identity, might leave by a car in the middle of the night. A neighbor up late might see this man from her front porch and, without saying a word, might press a copy of The Negro Motorist Green Book to the freedman’s chest so he’d know where to stop on Highway 66 if he wanted to stay alive to see the iconic HOLLYWOOD sign. Black people from Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Northern cities, Midwestern states, and all places in between swarmed into South Los Angeles with nothing else but a dream to be free, or at least freer—to finally be on land that could not be ripped out from underneath their feet, to finally breathe a little easier.
I “migrated” to Los Angeles when I was around six years old. My uncles, Rodney and Freddie, were emerging record producers who got their first big break by collaborating with Brandy (Norwood) on her Grammy Award–winning album, Never Say Never. The California dream manifested for them. For the most part, everyone we knew had been born, had lived, and had died in South Jersey. For these Jerkins brothers to go all the way to the other side of the country and end up with more money in their pockets than we had? Well, it would have been unfathomable if it hadn’t been the truth.
At the time, I was a budding child actress. Because I was talkative and effervescent, people told my mother to put me in commercials. After doing some research, she took me to my first audition in New York City. I was too young to realize what was going on, but knew I booked the gig. One Blue’s Clues commercial later, I was off to Los Angeles with a talent agent and several h
eadshots. My mother and I settled in the Woodland Apartments in Toluca Lake, in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles County. There many aspiring child actresses who migrated with their parents from the Midwest and East Coast communed with one another.
But my mom felt out of place. California felt entirely too different from her New Jersey upbringing. For one thing, she couldn’t get used to the different territories. “There were just certain places where you weren’t supposed to go,” she says. One of them was South Central. When my mother told friends that she was taking me out to Los Angeles, they warned her to stay away from South Central because of its extreme violence, because their only knowledge of that area came from John Singleton films, like Boyz n the Hood, and late-night crime shows on TV. This fissure, as I’d like to call it, makes all the difference. Yes, television and other media warped our conceptions about black neighborhoods, but were these characterizations of South Central unfair? If so, what could they illuminate about how and where black people could safely settle? What did these territories have to do with our movement? Did we ever get the dream? Could we rest at last?
Since part of my family had migrated westward in the 1990s, well after the official end of the Great Migration, I wanted to speak to some of the people who were a part of the waves of black people who sought the dream in previous decades. I had to use the internet again, and most older folks I knew were on Facebook rather than Twitter. That’s how I found Rachelle James. I sent her a message, and she responded within an hour. Before my plane from Oklahoma City took off for Los Angeles, I was on a call with her. It felt as though she’d been waiting for me all along.
Wandering in Strange Lands Page 20
