Roots: The Saga of an American Family

  The family never let him finish in their wild excitement. As some went dashing off to boast to others on adjacent plantations, Tom began planning that afternoon how to alter a farm wagon into a covered “Rockaway,” of which about ten could move all of the units of the family to this new place. But by that sundown a dozen other heads of newly freed families had come—not asking, but demanding that their families, too, were going—they were black Holts, Fitzpatricks, Perms, Taylors, Wrights, Lakes, Mac-Gregors, and others, from local Alamance County plantations.

  Amid the next two months of feverish activity, the men built the “Rockaways.” “The women butchered, cooked, canned, and smoked foodstuffs for travel and selecting what other vital things to take. Old Chicken George strode about, supervising every activity, loving his hero role. Tom Murray was thronged with volunteered assistance from yet more newly freed families, and with assurances that they would swiftly obtain their own wagons to become their family’s “Rockaways.” Finally he announced that all who wished could go—but that there must be but one “Rockaway” per family unit. When at last twenty-eight wagons were packed and ready to roll on the following sunup, in a strange calm sense of sadness, the freed people went about gently touching the familiar things, washpots, the fenceposts, knowing that it was for the last time.

  For days, the black Murrays had caught only glimpses of the white Murrays. Matilda wept, “Lawd, I hates to think what dey’s goin’ through, I swears I does!”

  Tom Murray had retired for the night within his wagon when he heard the light knocking at the tailgate. Somehow he knew who was there even before he opened the end flap. Ol’ George Johnson stood there, his face working with emotion, his hands wringing his hat. “Tom—like a word with you, if you got time—”

  Climbing down from the wagon, Tom Murray followed Ol’ George Johnson off a way in the moonlight. When finally Ol’ George stopped, he was so choked with embarrassment and emotion that he could hardly talk. “Me and Martha been talkin’ ... jes’ seem like y’all the only folks we got. Tom, we been wonderin’ if y’all let us go along where you goin’?”

  It was awhile before Tom spoke. “If it was jes’ my family, I could tell you right now. But it’s a lot mo’. I jes’ have to talk it over wid’em all. I let you know—”

  Tom went to each other wagon, knocking gently, calling out the men. Gathering them, he told them what happened. There was a moment of heavy quiet. Tom Murray offered, “He was ’bout de bes’ oberseer for us I ever heard of ’cause he wasn’t no real oberseer at all, he worked wid us shoulder to shoulder.”

  There was sharp opposition from some, some of it antiwhite. But after a while someone spoke quietly, “He can’t help it if he white—” Finally, a vote was taken, and a majority said that the Johnsons could go.

  One day’s delay was necessary to build a “Rockaway” for Ol’ George and Martha. Then the next sunup, a single-file caravan of twenty-nine covered “Rockaways” went creaking and groaning off the Murray place into the dawn. Ahead of the wagons rode the derbied and scarfed sixty-seven-year-old Chicken George, carrying his old one-eyed fighting rooster atop his horse “Old Bob.” Behind him, Tom Murray drove the first wagon, with Irene beside him, and behind them, goggle-eyed in excitement, were their children, the youngest of them the two-year-old Cynthia. And after twenty-seven more wagons whose front seats held black or mulatto men and their wives, finally the anchor wagon’s seat held Ol’ George and Martha Johnson, who soon were peering to see clearly through the haze of dust raised by all the hoofs and wheels moving ahead of them toward what Chicken George had sworn would prove to be the promised land.

  CHAPTER 114

  “Dis it?” asked Tom.

  “De promised lan’?” asked Matilda.

  “Where dem pigs an’ watermelons poppin’ out’n de groun’?” asked one of the children, as Chicken George reined his horse to a halt.

  Ahead of them was a clearing in the woods with a few wooden storefronts at the intersection of the rutted road they were on and another one crossing it at right angles. Three white men—one sitting on a nail keg, another in a rocker, the third propped on the back legs of a stool with his back to a clapboard wall and his feet on a hitching post—nudged one another and nodded at the line of dusty wagons and their passengers. A couple of white boys rolling a hoop stopped in their tracks and stared, the hoop rolling on beyond them into the middle of the road, where it twirled a few times and fell. An elderly black man sweeping off a stoop looked at them impassively for a long moment and then broke into a small, slow smile. A large dog that was scratching himself beside a rain barrel paused, leg in the air, to cock his head at them, then went back to scratching.

  “I done tol’ y’all dis here a new settlement,” said Chicken George, talking fast. “Dey’s only a hundred or so white folks livin’ roun’ here yet, an’ even wid jes’ our fifteen wagons lef’ after all dem dat dropped off to settle on de way here, we’s jes’ ’bout gon’ double de pop’lation. We’s gittin’ in on de groun’ flo’ of a growin’ town.”

  “Well, ain’t nothin’ it can do but grow, dat’s sho’,” said L’il George without smiling.

  “Jes wait’ll y’all sees de prime farmlan’ dey got,” said his father brightly, rubbing his hands with anticipation.

  “Prob’ly swamp,” muttered Ashford, wisely not loud enough for Chicken George to hear.

  But it was prime—rich and loamy, thirty acres of it for every family, scattered on checkerboard plots from the outskirts of town all the way to the white-owned farms that already occupied the best land in Lauderdale County, on the banks of the Hatchie River six miles to the north. Many of the white farms were as large as all of their property put together, but thirty acres was thirty more than any of them had ever owned before, and they had their hands full with that.

  Still living in their cramped wagons, the families began grubbing up stumps and clearing brush the next morning. Soon the furrows had been plowed and their first crops planted—mostly cotton, some corn, with plots for vegetables and a patch for flowers. As they set about the next task of sawing down trees and splitting logs to build their cabins, Chicken George circulated from one farm to another on his horse, volunteering his advice on construction and trumpeting how he had changed their lives. Even among Henning’s white settlers he boasted about how those he had brought with him were going to help the town grow and prosper, not failing to mention that his middle son Tom would soon be opening the area’s first blacksmith shop.

  One day soon afterward, three white men rode up to Tom’s plot as he and his sons were mixing a load of mud with hog bristles to chink the walls of his half-built cabin.

  “Which one of you is the blacksmith?” one called from his horse.

  Sure that his first customers had arrived even before he could get set up for business, Tom stepped out proudly.

  “We hear you’re figurin’ to open a blacksmith shop here in town,” one said.

  “Yassuh. Been lookin’ fo’ de bes’ spot to build it. Was thinkin’ maybe dat empty lot nex’ to de sawmill if ’n nobody else got his eye on it.”

  The three men exchanged glances. “Well, boy,” the second man went on, “no need of wasting time, we’ll get right to the point. You can blacksmith, that’s fine. But if you want to do it in this town, you’ll have to work for a white man that owns the shop. Had you figured on that?”

  Such a rage flooded up in Tom that nearly a minute passed before he could trust himself to speak. “Nawsuh, I ain’t,” he said slowly. “Me an’ my family’s free peoples now, we’s jes’ lookin’ to make our livin’s like anybody else, by workin’ hard at what we knows to do.” He looked directly into the men’s eyes. “If I cain’t own what I do wid my own hands, den dis ain’t no place fo’ us.”

  The third white man said, “If that’s the way you feel, I ’speck you’re going to be ridin’ a long way in this state, boy.”

  “Well, we’s used to travelin’,” said Tom. “Ain’t wantin’ to
cause no trouble nowhere, but I got to be a man. I just wisht I could o’ knowed how y’all felt here so my family wouldn’t of troubled y’all by stoppin’ atall.”

  “Well, think about it, boy,” said the second white man. “It’s up to you.”

  “You people got to learn not to let all this freedom talk go to your heads,” said the first man.

  Turning their horses around without another word, they rode off.

  When the news went flashing among the farm plots, the heads of each family came hurrying to see Tom.

  “Son,” said Chicken George, “you’s knowed all yo’ life how white folks is. Cain’t you jes’ start out dey way? Den good as you blacksmiths, won’t take hardly no time to git ’em to turn roun’.”

  “All dat travelin’ an’ now pack up an’ go again!” exclaimed Matilda. “Don’t do dat to yo’ fam’ly, son!”

  Irene joined the chorus: “Tom, please! I’se jes’ tired! Tired!”

  But Tom’s face was grim. “Things don’t never git better less’n you makes ’em better!” he said. “Ain’t stayin’ nowhere I can’t do what a free man got a right to do. Ain’t axin’ nobody else to go wid us, but we packin’ our wagon an’ leavin’ tomorrow.”

  “I’m comin’, too!” said Ashford angrily.

  That night Tom went out walking by himself, weighed down by guilt at the new hardship he was imposing upon his family. He played back in his mind the ordeal they had all endured in the wagons, rolling for weeks on end . . . and he thought of something Matilda had said often: “You search hard enough in sump’n bad, you’s jes’ liable to find sump’n good.”

  When the idea struck him, he kept walking for another hour, letting the plan become a picture in his mind. Then he strode quickly back to the wagon where his family was sleeping and went to bed.

  In the morning, Tom told James and Lewis to build temporary lean-tos for Irene and the children to sleep in, for he would need the wagon. As the family stood around watching him in amazement—Ashford with rising disbelief and fury—he unloaded the heavy anvil with Virgil’s help, and mounted it atop a newly sawed stump. By noon he had set up a makeshift forge. With everyone still staring, he next removed the canvas top of the wagon, then its wooden sides, leaving the bare flatbed, on which he now went to work with his heaviest tools. Gradually they began to perceive the astounding idea that Tom was turning into a reality.

  By the end of that week, Tom drove right through town with his rolling blacksmith shop, and there wasn’t a man, woman, or child who didn’t stand there gaping at the anvil, forge, and cooling tub, with racks holding a neat array of blacksmithing tools, all mounted sturdily on a wagon bed reinforced with heavy timbers.

  Nodding politely at all the men he met—white and black—Tom asked if they had blacksmithing jobs he could do at reasonable rates. Within days, his services were being requested at more and more farms around the new settlement, for no one could think of a good reason why a black man shouldn’t do business from a wagon. By the time they realized that he was doing far better with his rolling shop than he ever could have done with a stationary one, Tom had made himself so indispensable around town that they couldn’t afford to raise any objections even if they’d wanted to. But they didn’t really want to, because Tom seemed to them the kind of man who did his job and minded his own business, and they couldn’t help respecting that. In fact, the whole family soon established themselves as decent Christian folk who paid their bills and kept to themselves—and “stayed in their place,” as Ol’ George Johnson said a group of white men had put it in a conversation he’d overheard down at the general store.

  But Ol’ George, too, was treated as one of “them”—shunned socially, kept waiting in stores till all the other white customers had been taken care of, even informed once by a merchant that he’d “bought” a hat that he’d tried on and put back on the shelf when he found it was too small. He told the family about it later, perching the hat atop his head for them, and everybody laughed as hard as he did. “I’se surprised dat hat don’t fit,” cracked L’il George, “dumb as you is to try it on in dat sto’.” Ashford, of course, got so angry that he threatened—emptily—to “go down dere an’ stuff it down dat peckerwood’s throat.”

  However little use the white community had for them—and vice versa—Tom and the others knew very well that the town’s tradesmen could hardly contain their elation at the brisk increase in business they’d been responsible for. Though they made most of their own clothes, raised most of their own food, and cut most of their own lumber, the quantities of nails, corrugated tin, and barbed wire they bought over the next couple of years testified to the rate at which their own community was growing.

  With all their houses, barns, sheds, and fences built by 1874, the family—led by Matilda—turned its attention to an enterprise they considered no less important to their welfare: the construction of a church to replace the makeshift bush arbors that had been serving as their place of worship. It took almost a year, and much of their savings, but when Tom, his brothers, and their boys had finished building the last pew and Irene’s beautiful white handwoven cloth—emblazoned with a purple cross—had been draped over the pulpit in front of the $250 stained-glass window they’d ordered from Sears, Roebuck, everyone agreed that the New Hope Colored Methodist Episcopal Church was well worth the time, effort, and expense it represented.

  So many people attended the service that first Sunday—just about every black person within twenty miles who could walk or be carried—that the crowd spilled out the doors and windows and across the lawn surrounding it. But nobody had any trouble hearing every word of the ringing sermon delivered by the Reverend Sylus Henning, a former slave of Dr. D. C. Henning, an Illinois Central Railroad executive with extensive land holdings around town. In the course of his oration, L’il George whispered to Virgil that the Reverend seemed to be under the impression that he was Dr. Henning, but no one within earshot would have dared to question the fervor of his preaching.

  After the last heartrending chorus of “The Old Rugged Cross,” again—led by Matilda, looking more radiant than Chicken George had ever seen her—the congregation dried their eyes and filed out past the preacher, pumping his hand and slapping him on the back. Retrieving their picnic baskets on the porch, they spread sheets on the lawn and proceeded to relish the fried chicken, pork chop sandwiches, deviled eggs, potato salad, cole slaw, pickles, cornbread, lemonade, and so many cakes and pickles that even L’il George was gasping for breath when he finished the last slice.

  As they all sat chatting, or strolled around—the men and boys in coat and tie, the older women all in white, the girls in bright-colored dresses with a ribbon at the waist—Matilda watched misty-eyed as her brood of grandchildren ran about tirelessly playing tag and catch. Turning finally to her husband and putting her hand on his, gnarled and scarred with gamecock scratches, she said quietly, “I won’t never forget dis day, George. We done come a long way since you first come courtin’ me wid dat derby hat o’ yours. Our fam’ly done growed up an’ had chilluns of dey own, an’ de Lawd seen fit to keep us all togedder. De onliest thing I wish is you Mammy Kizzy could be here to see it wid us.”

  Eyes brimming, Chicken George looked back at her. “She lookin’, baby. She sho’ is!”

  CHAPTER 115

  Promptly at the noon hour on Monday, during their break from the fields, the children started filing into church for their first day of school indoors. For the past two years, ever since she came to town after being one among the first graduating class from Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, Sister Carrie White had been teaching out under the bush arbors, and this use of the church was a great occasion. The New Hope CME stewards—Chicken George, Tom, and his brothers—had contributed the money to buy pencils, tablets, and primers on “readin’, writin’, an’ ’rithmetic.” Since she taught all the children of school age at the same time, in her six grades Sister Carrie had pupils ranging from five to fifteen, including Tom’s olde
st five: Maria Jane, who was twelve; Ellen; Viney; L’il Matilda; and Elizabeth, who was six. Young Tom, next in line, began the year after that, and then Cynthia, the youngest.

  By the time Cynthia was graduated in 1883, Maria Jane had dropped out, gotten married, and given birth to her first child; and Elizabeth, who was the best student in the family, had taught their father Tom Murray how to write his name and had even become his blacksmithing bookkeeper. He needed one, for by this time he had become so successful with his rolling blacksmith shop that he had also built a stationary one—without a murmur of objection—and was among the more prosperous men in town.

  About a year after Elizabeth went to work for her father, she fell in love with John Toland, a newcomer to Henning who had gone to work sharecropping on the six-hundred-acre farm of a white family out near the Hatchie River. She had met him in town one day at the general store and been impressed, she told her mother Irene, not only by his good looks and muscular build but also by his dignified manner and obvious intelligence. He could even write a little, she noticed, when he signed for a receipt. Over the next several weeks, during the walks she’d take with him in the woods once or twice each week, she also found out that he was a young man of fine reputation, a churchgoer, who had ambitions of saving up enough to start a farm of his own; and that he was as gentle as he was strong.

  It wasn’t until they’d seen each other regularly for almost two months—and had begun to talk secretly about marriage—that Tom Murray, who had known about them from the start, ordered her to stop skulking around and bring him home from church the following Sunday. Elizabeth did as she was told. John Toland couldn’t have been friendlier or more respectful when he was introduced to Tom Murray, who was even more taciturn than usual, and excused himself after only a few minutes of painful pleasantries. After John Toland left, Elizabeth was called by Tom Murray, who said sternly: “It’s plain to see from de way you act roun’ dat boy dat you’s stuck on ’im. You two got anythin’ in mind?”