Wandering in Strange Lands

by Morgan Jerkins

  I think about the manifestos, like the one the El Paso shooter wrote. I think about the one by Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black people in a historic black church: “Segregation was not a bad thing. It was a defensive measure. Segregation did not exist to hold back negros. It existed to protect us from them. . . . Not only did it protect us from having to interact with them, and from being physically harmed by them, but it protected us from being brought down to their level.”3

  In a sense, he was right. Jim Crow, the impetus for millions of black Americans to move from the South, was a defensive measure—to protect whites from their own irrational fears and from having to acknowledge their own inhumanity. We were never protected. We were physically harmed even when we created our own communities and tried our best not to interact with whites in any way. White people just could not leave black people alone, and their constant meddling in our lives is one of the biggest reasons why we continue to be displaced, disrespected, disenfranchised, and murdered. We migrate because we want something better. We migrate because we have no other choice. But no matter where we go, we’re victims of segregation, redlining, and racial discrimination. We’re separated from other family members, separated from our stories, separated from our belief systems, separated from our lineages and our very identity, because if we ever fully understood just how vast and interconnected we are—as most white people do—we would be even more formidable and less exploitable.

  As I thought about this and all that I had seen on my journey across America, I saw my identity shift, or enlarge rather, the more I transported my body over states and rivers. When I started this journey, I was just a New Jerseyan–turned–New Yorker who set out to learn more about my roots as a black woman and the migratory roots of black people in general. I wanted to understand my underlying misconceptions about water and rootwork and magic, which drew me to the Gullah Geechee people. I wanted to understand my father’s side of the family and what it meant to be Creole. I wanted to understand the connection between blacks and Indians, which led me to Oklahoma. And I wanted to know if there truly was a place in America where black people belonged, which led me to California, once my temporary home. As I came out on the other side of this journey, I realized that I was not just one thing. I was a New Jersey New York Creole African American California migrant with potential Cherokee freedmen ties. I was many things.

  Through conversation with all of my interviewees for this book, I realized that my story existed in other stories and that those stories were a call-and-response from my interviewees to me, and now from me to you.

  When I finally came back home, I felt . . . changed. My profession is to craft words, but words eluded me. At the time that the seeds of this project began to take root, my birth certificate changed. Now I had both parents listed. But I didn’t feel transformed. As a matter of fact, I was nonchalant about the amendment. The real transformation came a year and a half later, after I finished the prologue of this book and decided to show my parents what I had written, something I had never done in the past. I told myself that I shouldn’t hide all of the words I had written about my family or hide the inspiration for that work. Wouldn’t that be hypocritical of me, to document others’ stories without holding a mirror to my own parents and my family’s stories? The real reason I wanted to hide that was because I was afraid. My birth was not without controversy, as you might have guessed from reading the prologue. I don’t want to cast my parents or any of my interview subjects in some morality play, a strict right-or-wrong binary. They made choices, and I am one of them.

  For years, I carried around a feeling of shame that I was not meant to exist, because my family was multilayered, complicated, and often uneven. I thought that I really was the milkman’s baby, because as a child of a single mother, it wasn’t obvious who my father was. But I knew my father. I always knew my father. Yet this idea of the questionable lineage of a black child always intrigued me. Calling someone the milkman’s baby is supposed to be an insult, but I learned—in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, for example—that the word milkman connotes a wanderer who returns to his familial homes to recover his identity. In that sense, I am as much as Jon’s daughter as I am the milkman’s baby. We all are, in a sense, wandering and searching, covering and recovering pieces of ourselves lost along some journey.

  After my travels, I realized that questionable or knotty lineages don’t always have to do with fathers. Sometimes they’re about land rights, blood politics, or who or what is in control of your story. With this book, I hope to help black people to regain their narratives and recontextualize the shame that has been pressed upon our hearts from time immemorial. We are here because we are in perpetual motion, our migratory patterns rivaling those of birds. I do not believe that there is a promised land for us in America. I am disappointed that I could not find a happier ending for these pages. But you and I know that the promised land does not exist. Racism abides in all zip codes, on every migratory route.

  Mason Traveil, a black man whose family has been in California since emancipation, has said, “We are the promised land.”

  The terrains of our bodies, though weary or broken, are not ruined. They are alive and fertile with dreams and possibilities and beauty. If we are the promised land, then that means that you—yes, you—exist on a plane larger than your eyes can see. Home is wherever we decide to settle, but our truest base is one another.

  If we are the promised land, then what I want more than anything is for these oral histories to be the rain that awakens other people to bloom, to remember just how far our roots extend.

  Acknowledgments

  I WOULD LIKE to thank my editors, Amber Oliver and Emily Griffin, for stretching me further than I ever thought possible. There were so many moments where I thought that I was going to break and that I was ill-equipped to handle a project of this depth but you two never stopped believing in me, and I’m indebted to you for your encouragement and skill.

  Thank you to my agent, Monica Odom, for checking in with me not only for my pages but also on the minutiae of my life. I’m so thankful to have a business partner who cares about who I am as both a creative and human being.

  Thank you to Leah Sophia Dworkin for her transcriptions. You are a diamond in the rough. Thank you for assisting me with this journey and reaffirming to me that I need to let others help me to do what needs to be done.

  Thank you to Kim Racon for all the laughs in the Twitter DMs. Thank you to Hannah Wood, the editor who acquired my debut and brought me into the illustrious Harper family. Thank you to Sofia Groopman for acquiring this book.

  Thank you to all my friends who’ve been there for me throughout the creation of this book: Danny Vasquez, Michelle Pham, Jenn Baker, Brian Taitt, Brandon Zamudio, Angela Chen, Dion Robbins, Aric Jenkins, Maraiya Hakeem, Jade Jones, Liz Cook, Brigitte Malivert, Aditi Juneja, Maria and Juan Robles, Alex Orphanides, Alana Massey, T. J. Jarrett, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Sire Leo Lamar-Becker . . .

  Thank you to all the academics and scholars who both supported and challenged my thinking—Andrew Jolivétte, Antoine Hardy, Monnica Williams, Bridget Goosby, Eric Leiker, Tiya Miles, Arica L. Coleman, Gerald Horne, Angela Walton Raji, Cheylon Woods, Tananarive Due, Simon Gravel, Arlecia Simmons, Brenda Stevenson, Jenny Tung, Barry Jean Ancelet, Edda Fields Black, Kerri Greenidge, and Kendra Field.

  Thank you to all those who agreed to be interviewed—even those who couldn’t make it in the final draft of this book—Tiffany Young, Amy Roberts, JR Grovner, Griffin Lotson, the Gullah Geechee Shouters, Sallie Ann Robinson, the Jordan family, Ron Daise, Annette Holmes, the Colson family, Kelli, Ron Graham, Eli Grayson, the Harrison family, Marilyn Vann, Stopper, Happy, Butch, Char, LeEtta Osborne-Sampson, Sylvia Davis, Rodslen Brown, Susie Crittenden Chambers, the Riley family, Damario Solomon-Simmons, Hannibal Johnson, Verdie Triplett, Terry Ligon, Darnella Davis, Shonda Buchanan, Rhonda, Gina, Mason Traveil, James “Nocando” McCall, Lisa Pecot-Hébert, Jervey Tervalon, Tim Watkins, Aminah Bakeer
Abdul-Jabbaar, Ben Caldwell, Alice Harris, Skipp Townsend, Rachelle James, Regina Jones, Tyree Boyd Pates, Ted Soqui, and Carol Park.

  Thank you to all the descendants of migrants, both friends and strangers alike, who shared their family stories with me.

  Thank you to the Schomburg Institute for housing the world’s best collections on the Diaspora.

  Thank you to my mother and father, sisters, aunts and uncles, and other family members who kept me grounded and reminded me that I still have to live life while I’m working. Thank you especially to the elders, my grandparents, Gwen Wiggins, Sasha Lucas, and Colleen Winn for protecting our oral histories with all of your heart. This book would not have been as full if it weren’t for your memory and patience.

  Thank you to Zora Neale Hurston for showing me that African American life is both mythological and real, unwinding and knotting all at once. I’d never thought I’d do ethnographical work, and you’ve shown me how scintillating such an endeavor could be.

  Thank you to Medium and particularly my ZORA colleagues for giving me the space to continue my book as I edited others’ stories.

  Thank you to the Most High for the strength to see this through. Thank you to the ancestors who I undoubtedly know were watching over me each step of the way.

  Notes

  PROLOGUE: THE MILKMAN’S BABY

  1.W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Contentious and Collected: Memory’s Future in Southern History,” Journal of Southern History 75, no. 3 (August 2009): 757, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27779037.

  PART I: LOWCOUNTRY, GEORGIA, AND SOUTH CAROLINA

  1

  1.Sijie Li, “THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF THE FIRST MIGRATION,” 12, University of Pittsburgh, September, 25, 2019, http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/37312/7/Li_Dissertation_ETD_Final.pdf.

  2.James N. Gregory, “The Second Great Migration: An Historical Overview,” African American Urban History: The Dynamics of Race, Class and Gender since World War II, ed. Joe W. Trotter Jr. and Kenneth L. Kusmer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 22.

  3.Preston Smith, “Exploring the Great Migration,” Mount Holyoke College, February 13, 2019, www.mtholyoke.edu/media/exploring-great-migration.

  4.Sam Worley, “Where Soul Food Really Comes From,” Epicurious, June 29, 2016, www.epicurious.com/expert-advice/real-history-of-soul-food-article.

  5.Robert T. Dirks and Nancy Duran, “African American Dietary Patterns at the Beginning of the 20th Century,” Journal of Nutrition 131, no. 7 (July 2001): 1881–89, https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/131/7/1881/4686889.

  6.“History of the Chicago Defender,” Chicago Defender, http://chicagodefender.com/history-of-the-chicago-defender.

  7.Tracy N. Poe, “The Origins of Soul Food in Black Urban Identity: Chicago, 1915–1947,” American Studies International 37, no. 1 (February 1999): 4–33, JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/41279638.

  8.Ibid.

  9.Suzanne Bopp, “Road Trip: Low Country, South Carolina and Georgia,” National Geographic, September 14, 2010, www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/road-trips/low-country-south-carolina-georgia-road-trip.

  10.Philip D. Morgan, African American Life in the Georgia Lowcountry: The Atlantic World and the Gullah Geechee (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010).

  11.International African American Museum, “Slavery in The Lowcountry,” 2017, iaamuseum.org/history/slavery-in-charleston-and-the-lowcountry.

  12.William S. Pollitzer, The Gullah People and Their African Heritage (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999).

  13.Peter A. Coclanis, “Business & Economy: Agriculture,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/business-economy/rice.

  14.South Carolina Department of Agriculture, “History,” SCDA, agriculture.sc.gov/about.

  15.Libby Wiersema, “Southern, Lowcountry, Gullah or Soul—What’s the Difference Between These SC Cooking Styles?” SC Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism, discoversouthcarolina.com/articles/southern-low country-gullah-or-soul-whats-the-difference-between-these-sc-cooking-styles.

  16.J. Lorand Matory, “The Illusion of Isolation: The Gullah/Geechees and the Political Economy of African Culture in the Americas,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 4 (October 2008): 949–56, JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/27563714.

  17.Kim Severson, “Taxes Threaten an Island Culture in Georgia,” New York Times, September 25, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/09/26/us/on-an-island-in-georgia-geechees-fear-losing-land.html.

  18.“Darien, Georgia (GA) Poverty Rate Data,” City-Data.com, http://www.city-data.com/poverty/poverty-Darien-Georgia.html.

  19.William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, Prayers for Dark People (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 7.

  2

  1.Carson Bear, “Remembering Atlantic City’s Black History and Segregated Past,” Atlantic, CityLab, January 16, 2019, www.citylab.com/equity/2019/01/african-american-atlantic-city-segregation-northside-tourism/580576.

  2.Sitinga (Sitinga Kachipande), “Why Africans Don’t Swim,” Africa on the blog, March 21, 2013, www.africaontheblog.org/why-africans-dont-swim.

  3.Lincoln Anthony Blades, “Trauma from Slavery Can Actually Be Passed Down through Your Genes,” Teen Vogue, May 31, 2016, www.teenvogue.com/story/slavery-trauma-inherited-genetics.

  4.Carl Zimmer, “Tales of African-American History Found in DNA,” New York Times, May 27, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/05/28/science/african-american-dna.html.

  5.Anissa Janine Wardi, Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 3–37.

  6.Stephen Fastenau, “How the Weather Channel Is Using Beaufort County to Take a Stand on Climate Change,” Beaufort Gazette, January 26, 2018, www.islandpacket.com/news/local/community/beaufort-news/article196812 029.html.

  7.Elizabeth Brabec and Sharon Richardson, “A Clash of Cultures: The Landscape of the Sea Island Gullah,” Landscape Journal 26, no. 1 (2007): 151–67, JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/43323760.

  8.Juanita Jackson, Sabra Slaughter, and J. Herman Blake, “The Sea Islands as a Cultural Resource,” Black Scholar 5, no. 6 (March 1974): 32–39, JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/41065688.

  9.Bridget Boakye, “The Tragic Yet Resilient Story of Igbo slaves Who Committed Mass Suicide off U.S. coast in 1803,” Face2FaceAfrica, Babu Global, June 12, 2018, face2faceafrica.com/article/the-tragic-yet-resilient-story-of-igbo-slaves-who-committed-mass-suicide-off-u-s-coast-in-1803.

  10.Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), “The Weeping Time,” Africans in America, Part 1, 1450–1750, “The Terrible Transformation: From Indentured Servitude to Racial Slavery,” 1998, PBS Online, www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2918.html.

  11.Marquetta L. Goodwine, The Legacy of Ibo Landing: Gullah Roots of African American Culture (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 1998).

  12.Gay Wilentz, “If You Surrender to the Air: Folk Legends of Flight and Resistance in African American Literature,” MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) 16, no. 1 (Spring 1989–Spring 1990): 21–32, JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/467579.

  13.Jeff Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007): 106–7.

  14.Rachel Martin, “Racial History of American Swimming Pools,” National Public Radio, May 6, 2008, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90213675.

  15.Horace Cort (photographer), “Motel Manager Pouring Acid in the Water When Black People Swam in His Pool, 1964,” Rare Historical Photos, rarehistoricalphotos.com/motel-manager-pouring-acid-water-black-people-swam-pool-1964.

  16.Lindsay Mondick, “Why Are Black Youth at Highest Risk for Drowning?” YMCA, www.ymca.net/summer-buzz/highest-risk-for-drowning.

  17.James Hamblin, “A Racial History of Drowning,” Atlantic, June 11, 2013, www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/06/a-racial-history-of-drowning/276748.

  18.Thomas Brendler, “A Part of This Earth: The Story of the Sapelo Foundation,” Sapelo Island Foundation, 2015, sapelofoundatio
n.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/A-Part-of-This-Earth-2015.pdf.

  19.Chris Dixon, “The Heart of Sapelo,” Garden & Gun, June–July 2015, garden andgun.com/feature/the-heart-of-sapelo.

  20.Alexis Diao, “Remembering Cornelia Walker Bailey, a Giant of Gullah Geechee Culture,” National Public Radio, October 25, 2017, www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/10/25/560093667/remembering-cornelia-walker-bailey-a-giant-of-gullah-geechee-culture.

  21.United States District Court, Northern District of Georgia, Atlanta Division, Drayton v. McIntosh County, Georgia, Second Amended Complaint, Relman, Dane & Colfax PLLC, December 9, 2015, https://www.relmanlaw.com/cases-sapelo.

  22.Henry Leifermann, “Sanctuaries In the Sea Off Georgia,” New York Times, September 6, 1987, https://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/06/travel/sanctuaries-in-the-sea-off-georgia.html.

  23.Karen Rubin, “Discovering Sapelo Island, Georgia and the Gullah-Geechees of Hog Hammock,” Going Places, Far and Near, goingplacesfarandnear.com/discovering-sapelo-island-georgia-and-the-gullah-geechees-of-hog-hammock.

  24.Scott Bryant, “A Hidden Gem: Sapelo Island, Hog Hammock,” Savannah Morning News, Savannah Now, February 18, 2007, www.savannahnow.com/2007-02-18/hidden-gem-sapelo-island-hog-hammock.