The Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls lived through events that defined America. They fought in the struggles of their times, great and small. Their histories reveal how the color line ran through the heart of the nation’s experience. From the colonial era well into the twentieth century, the idea of race—the notion that blood transmitted moral character and social fitness—provided a central reason why American democracy exalted some people at the enduring expense of others.
The journeys of the Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls are significant not for how they were classified and whether those categories accurately reflected their ancestry. Rather, they reveal how the very existence of racial categories altered people’s expectations and behavior—how these categories were at once undermined and strengthened by the steady stream of Americans migrating from black to white. The family histories reflect how blackness became a proxy for inequality. People could escape the category because it was not real, but the inequality persisted, growing only stronger with emancipation, as the promise of liberty bred new, potent forms of discrimination. The Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls embody fundamental tragedies of our past—the vexed relationship between liberty and equality, the possibility of tolerance alongside the choice to hate. At the same time their histories offer some reason for hope. They provide an occasion to understand race in a different way and an opportunity to acknowledge our enduring, if at times hidden, capacity to privilege the particular over the abstract, and everyday experience over what we have been told to believe.
TODAY’S DESCENDANTS OF THE Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls are spread out across the United States, north, south, east, and west. They are rich and poor and getting by. They live in the country and in the city, are more and less educated, healthy and ailing, Democrats and Republicans, devout and secular, happy and sad. Gibson descendants still live in and around Lexington, Kentucky—one lives a block away from the mansion that Randall Gibson’s father built before the Civil War, which still stands as a monument to classical plantation and New Orleans architecture. Many of Jordan Spencer’s descendants are a stone’s throw from the slopes that the old man tilled. The Walls are scattered throughout the country. Some descendants live with the same prominent status—and alternatively, the same anonymity—that their ancestors had one hundred years ago. Some have moved up in the world, and some down. They are indistinguishable from any number of Americans who regard themselves as white in the early twenty-first century.
Despite the passage of centuries and the accretion of new identities, most of the descendants interviewed for this book already knew the broad contours of their family histories by the time I contacted them. The secrets of prior generations, it seems, are no match for the Internet. In just the past decade, historical and genealogical databases have reduced searches that used to take years—scrolling frame by frame through entire volumes of newspapers on microfilm—to mere days or even hours. Popular ancestry Web sites and vast communities of online researchers have allowed millions of Americans to learn previously inconceivable truths about their roots. All it takes is one genealogy buff in the family. Far from big cities and major archives, people like Freda Spencer Goble have gone to their local public library to search census records. When Goble found her great-great-grandfather—Jordan Spencer—in the 1850 census, she slowly deciphered the handwriting on the census-taker’s original enumeration sheet. Then she called over the librarian to explain the meaning of the abbreviation scrawled by Spencer’s name: “mul,” for mulatto.5
If descendants of the Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls have uncovered their family histories with relative ease, their responses to evidence that their ancestors were people of color have been more complicated. Some have found it interesting but irrelevant to their lives—as meaningful, say, as finding out that a great-grandfather was a furrier—but many describe the discovery as a visceral experience and cause for soul searching, releasing a spectrum of emotions from elation to anguish. It can be a delicate matter, something to avoid in conversation with older relatives. While it has become increasingly common for white descendants of slaveowners to hold reunions with descendants of slaves and acknowledge and celebrate black kin, black ancestry is something different altogether, inverting rather than affirming old hierarchies and forcing people to examine hardwrought views of themselves, their families, and their worlds. Even in today’s “postracial” society, race still functions as a remarkably fixed set of rules and expectations. As in centuries past, however, today’s Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls have accommodated the rules to their own lived experience, pushing and shaping the meaning of race in the process.6
Denial is a common and understandable reaction. Members of these families have identified so closely with the mainstream of white America—and the line between black and white has appeared to be so solid—that an alternative account of their origins seems outlandish. Given the vagaries of the historical record and the well-documented shortcomings of DNA ancestry testing when it comes to measuring remote African ancestry, it is not difficult to conceive of other reasons that a family was categorized as black or reputed to be dark. After all, for centuries people migrating across the color line drew liberally on that same universe of explanations.7
Living descendants of the Gibsons, for example, have encountered public discussions of their family’s “extraordinary career” ever since a 1962 article by the historian Winthrop Jordan described Gideon Gibson’s “successful hurdling of the barrier” between black and white in colonial South Carolina. In the decades that have followed, Gibson genealogy hobbyists have spent countless hours attempting to prove that the family is not descended from African slaves. William LaBach, the great-great-grandson of Randall Gibson’s sister Sarah and an avid genealogist, has heard just about every account of why the Gibsons were regarded as people of color: they were Gypsies, Portuguese Huguenots, Seneca Indians, Sephardic Jews, Moroccans, Turks. “Then there’s the story where we [descended] from the Bishop of London,” said LaBach, a Kentucky lawyer with a Ph.D. in mathematics and a master’s degree in history. “It couldn’t all be right . . . There’s not a lot of certain answers in some genealogy. I tend to disbelieve all of it.”8
For others the discovery has been harder to explain away. When Thomas Murphy learned that his great-grandparents were O.S.B. and Amanda Wall, he said, he marched into the Atlanta airport rent-a-car where he was employed and told his black coworkers, “You can’t call me a racist because I is one of you.” As if to prove to himself that he could not be black, he started harboring and expressing more racist feelings than he had ever felt before. There was a time when he could barely sit in a restaurant near an African American. He approached his minister with the question “Am I black?” but found little solace in the answer he got: that according to the Bible, Murphy’s African ancestry was too remote to change how he classified himself. He loathed the way his grandparents and their children lied about their backgrounds. He attributed O.S.B. Wall’s success in the world to his white father, the plantation owner Stephen Wall. “The way I see it, I don’t descend from a black man,” Murphy said. “I descend from a white man who couldn’t keep his genes in his pants.”9
Yet Thomas has worked tirelessly to learn as much as he can about O.S.B. and Amanda Wall and their children, reveling in every new piece of information. In reconstructing his family tree, he has contacted distant cousins repeatedly and posted his findings on the Web for the world to see. As much as he resisted defining himself as black, his ancestry has given him a place in the world, a claim to some of the central events in American history. For most of his life, he had heard little about his father other than that Patrick Murphy terrorized his wife and had hanged for rape. In recent years Thomas’s research has given him a different, richer set of stories—preserved in newspaper articles, government records, and childhood pictures—about his ancestors and a father he never knew. Ultimately, the pull of family, the balm of knowing, drew him past the issue of race.
For some descendants, their fam
ily history provided answers to lifelong questions. When Freda Goble began researching her genealogy, her findings about Jordan Spencer became an occasion to reflect on her family’s hard-fought path to the middle class. Her father was one of ten children who grew up during the Depression on a small mountain farm in Johnson County. They lived much like Jordan Spencer had, sleeping in a two-room house, raising everything they ate, and sewing their own clothes and quilts. The children were worked too hard to stay in school past the eighth grade. Despite day after day of grueling labor and horizons bounded by their mountain hollow, “every one of them wanted to be somebody and do something with their lives,” Goble said. Several went north in the 1950s, got factory jobs, and educated themselves. Her father found religion and pastored a neighborhood church in Johnson County for decades.10
Goble, who started and owned a local candle-making business, grew up surrounded by Spencers who “had to be the strongest,” she said. “They worked harder, could lift more, could do more in a day than anyone else.” Though poor and uneducated, they always wanted to be recognized as “pillars of the community.” “They demanded respect was how they got it,” she said. “They just demanded respect. There was something about it. Even my father, when he walked, he walked with his shoulders back, head in the air, he had a proud look about him.” As Freda thought about how her family kept their heads up despite daunting odds, Jordan Spencer’s migration across the color line—his determination to make a place for himself and put down roots in Johnson County’s rocky soil—suggested an answer. “They were a very proud people—yes they were,” Freda said. “My grandfather was one of the proudest men I ever met in my life. And they said his father was the same way. So I assume they got this from somewhere. I don’t know how or where or why, but they were very, very proud.”11
What mattered most to Freda was not Jordan Spencer’s race. Rather, it was how racial categories—the rules of race—pushed the man and his descendants, and how they pushed back. In researching her genealogy, she learned that “you don’t have to be rich to pick up all of the Southern charm and ideas.” When she informed her mother about Jordan Spencer, the elderly woman got very upset. “She said, ‘Your daddy would roll over in his grave if he knew that you said something like that,’ ” Freda remembered. “Allegedly, someone in the neighborhood must have called him ‘negro’ or something like that, and I think he bloodied their nose for it.” As a boy, Freda’s father intuitively understood that the Spencers would always be accepted as white as long as they regarded any suggestion otherwise as an insult. Freda Goble has begun to understand the color line as it has always functioned—in terms of racism, not race; hierarchy as opposed to heredity; barriers instead of blood.12
Other descendants of the Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls have shared Goble’s insight, as revelations about African ancestry opened up a world that might have been. Isabel Wall Whittemore, Thomas Murphy’s first cousin, was sixty-five when her daughter called nearly ten years ago with exciting news about a genealogy project and a man named O.S.B. Wall. “My kids all thought it was cool—they were ecstatic,” Whittemore recalled, but she found herself inexplicably dumbstruck. “The only ancestry I knew supposedly came from England and Ireland and Scotland,” she said. She did not tell her husband because, in her words, “I thought he would lose love for me.” But almost immediately she asked herself, “What’s it to be ashamed about, Isabel?”13
It is a question that Isabel continues to ponder. Knowing full well that she had no reason to feel ashamed, she wondered instead why such feelings came so reflexively. Now in her mid-seventies, slowed by illness and the pain of her husband’s death, she has contemplated her life and family and everything her mother ever said about her childhood. “Most families have one skeleton in the closet. My family has more skeletons than they have living bodies,” Isabel said. “It’s amazing . . . I don’t know whether enigma is the correct [word], but there is mystery to it. There’s mystery, there’s lies, there’s violence . . . It’s a big, big, big, big thing to chew over and swallow and try to understand.”14
Isabel grew up on Cape Cod and speaks with a gentle Massachusetts accent. Until 2009 she lived in central New Hampshire in a white clapboard house, with a front room converted into a shop where a daughter sold tea to summer tourists who strayed from Lake Winnipesaukee. Sitting at her kitchen table in August 2008 and gazing out on the yard—regularly crossed by moose until a neighbor built a fence—she expressed pride in the accomplishments of O.S.B. and Amanda Wall, fascination with their world, and anguish about its rupture. For the first time in her life, Isabel felt pity for her mother, who was the little girl kicked out of the first grade in Washington, D.C., in 1909.
Isabel Whittemore also has thought about the lingering effects of her grandfather Stephen Wall’s decision to pass for white. Beyond the downward social mobility—his white descendants have lived with less money, education, and influence than their black ancestors did—Isabel focuses most on the loss of a large, close-knit family. In nineteenth-century Washington the Walls and the Langstons lived next door to each other, siblings and cousins growing up together in a community that they had built. By comparison, Isabel’s life has been marked by an abiding solitude. “When you’re an only child, you feel very much alone . . . When I was small, I played by myself. You get hurt a lot as you get older, because you want to have friends,” she said. “I’ve always wanted family. I always envied large families, and that’s why . . . I want to know more and more and more. I want to know all there is to know. I want to know I have a family back there. Wherever.”15
“Wherever” can feel very far away, and to Whittemore the past has at times seemed impossibly remote. If anything, though, her story reveals its proximity. Isabel Wall Whittemore’s name is not her only link to her family’s history. She has O.S.B. Wall’s strong chin as well as the same striking blue eyes, flair for the dramatic, and wry sense of humor as her forebears. She grew up with people who directly experienced the ordeal of passing for white. Her own mother could have explained what it was like to be expelled from school for being black, or to play with a doll on the witness stand while the District of Columbia school board scrutinized her appearance. As a young girl visiting Long Island in 1946, Isabel met her great-aunt, O.S.B. Wall’s daughter, a woman who had grown up in the heart of black Washington during and after Reconstruction, lived in a home where Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony called, and received words of wisdom and encouragement from her uncle John Mercer Langston. Ultimately what makes Whittemore’s family history so fascinating to her is not how alien it is to her experience but rather how tantalizingly close it is.
Other descendants have also felt history’s insistent reach. It speaks to them directly, through dozens upon dozens of letters by Randall Gibson, his parents, and siblings that have remained in family hands for generations, stuffed into manila folders and envelopes. It survives in memory. Freda Goble grew up listening to her grandfather talk about living as a young boy with Jordan and Malinda Spencer in their mountain cabin, and several other Spencer descendants and Johnson County residents still repeat stories from people who knew Old Jordan, a man who has been dead one hundred years. Though the past may appear to be long gone, it continues to echo and haunt, intruding into the present and subtly shaping how people see themselves, their families, and communities. But the Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls never entirely accepted what the past demanded for them. Their histories reveal constant questioning, acts of interpretation and reinterpretation, stubborn assertions of will, and outright escape. More than anything, this is their legacy. They help us understand the rules of the past while insisting that we make our own.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I started thinking about the issues at the heart of this book nearly twenty years ago, and expressing my gratitude to all of the friends, family, teachers, colleagues, mentors, and organizations that have contributed to this project during that time is almost like writing another work of history. This book began
with the aid of several generous fellowships. In 2003, when I was about to embark on a life of legal practice, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded me a fellowship to work on this project fulltime as an independent scholar. I thank Jane Aikin at the NEH for her support and the scholars who evaluated my fellowship application for changing the course of my life. The project was nurtured at crucial moments by the inaugural Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Fellowship in Legal History at Harvard Law School and the Samuel I. Golieb Fellowship in Legal History at New York University School of Law. I also benefited enormously from fellowships from the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, and Yale Law School. I presented portions of this book and received invaluable feedback at Vanderbilt, Boston University, NYU, Stanford, the American Bar Foundation/Illinois Legal History Seminar, and the annual conference of the American Society for Legal History.
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