Go Back and Get It by Dionne Ford

Author:Dionne Ford [Ford, Dionne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

GOOD AS COUSINS

In the winter of imperfect archives, our daughters sledded down hills and built cardboard forts in our basement, and wore out The Princess and the Frog DVD while Monique and I kept searching.

Monique posted on AfriGeneas (“Looking for Tempy Burton”) and enlisted a Find a Grave volunteer to locate her great-great-grandfather Alfred Burton Stuart’s resting place. I joined a local Daughters of the Confederacy email list. I thought of Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the biracial daughter of staunch segregationist Strom Thurmond, who applied to the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 2004 “not to honor the soldiers that fought for a Southern way of life dependent on slavery, but to explore her genealogy and heritage.”1 I thought of historian Saidiya Hartman “straining against the limits of the archive.”2 I thought of the Black women artists who had reached into the more problematic and sometimes racist narratives gathered by the Federal Writers’ Project, reimagined them, and offered up their own stories—like Daughters of the Dust and Beloved.

The Federal Writers’ Project was one of the programs of the Works Progress Administration, which put about eight million Americans to work during the Depression doing everything from building bridges and roads to painting murals and collecting ex-slaves’ narratives. One WPA worker in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, interviewed formerly enslaved Nat Plummer.

“See dat house over yonder? Dat’s de old W. R. Stewart house. Well, de Yankees went dere and got a man wiz hidin’ dere. Dey called him a conscript.” Plummer went on to say how his old master was good to him, that when he died, the old master’s son took over and was good too. Plummer was ninety-six when he gave the interview. He knew my great-great-grandfather’s house, so he must have known Tempy. I wondered if the interviewer was White or with the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Some of their members had joined the Federal Writers’ Project to propagate a story about slaves loving their masters. If Zora Neale Hurston or another Black WPA employee had been asking the questions, maybe Plummer would have given more details about his life, trusted more, spoken freely.

As I continued transcribing Big Will’s papers, I paid close attention to any mention of the Howcotts, McCauleys, and Handys, the Stuarts’ in-laws. Members of an enslaved family were often dispersed among their captors’ extended family. These in-laws could lead to the rest of Tempy’s relatives. As Hurston put it in Their Eyes Were Watching God, “Us colored folk is branches without roots and it makes things come round in queer ways.”

This is the queer way we finally found the in-laws: through a photograph on a Howcott genealogy website in England—a picture of a Confederate monument in Canton, Mississippi, erected by William Hill Howcott to a boy his family had enslaved, Willis. William Hill Howcott and Elizabeth McCauley Stuart were cousins. They grew up together in Canton. William Hill would become the executor of Elizabeth’s estate and make sure she had a proper tombstone next to her husband’s in Evergreen Cemetery.

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