The Greased Pig

In southeastern Virginia, where I was born and spent most of my growing-up years, history was never far away.  Or at least, history from the European settler colonialist point-of-view.  And later, that of the Confederate South.

I went on school field trips to Jamestown, Yorktown, and Colonial Williamsburg.  During the summers, my parents took us to plays, like “The Lost Colony,” about the early settlers who mysteriously disappeared from Roanoke Island and left no clues but the word Croatoan scratched into one of the palisades of the wooden fort.  Or “Unto These Hills,” depicting the tragic removal of the Cherokee from their homes and the dreadful march to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears.  It occurs to me now that in both of these, tragedy was the final word.  Indigenous peoples were extinct, artefacts of the past; not living, breathing contemporaries.  Their history was no more than an historical marker on the timeline of White progress.

In Richmond, where we lived for much of my childhood, Monument Avenue was a broad boulevard with medians large enough to picnic on and monuments to the fallen heroes of the “Lost Cause,” the Confederacy.  The one that sticks out in my mind—we passed it on the way to the eye doctor or piano lessons—was the statue of Robert E. Lee, on a grand stallion. It did not come down until after George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

Our parents took us on weekend day trips to the sites of famous Civil War battles.  The Battles of Bull Run, or Manassas.  Chancellorsville.  Fredericksburg.  We walked the trails and stood in the battlefields.  I looked out across the rolling green hills and tried to imagine the peaceful park as the scene of a violent, bloody struggle.  I thrilled as my father read to us, with dramatic flourish, the markers recounting heroic stories of brave generals.  Maybe the Yankee generals were mentioned, but mostly I remember stories about the Confederate generals.  For some reason, mostly stories about Stonewall Jackson.  How Jackson got his nickname (“There’s Jackson, standing like a stone wall.”)  How he was killed in the Battle of Chancellorsville, the victim of “friendly fire.”  How Robert E. Lee likened the death of Jackson to the loss of his right arm.

In school we were taught that the cause of the Civil War was something called “states’ rights.”  Which basically boiled down to the fact that the North tried to tell the South what to do, which interfered with their freedom to do as they saw fit.  

If anyone named the abolition of slavery as a cause, teachers would emphatically shut them down.  “No.  The issue was states’ rights.”  

No one pointed out that the right the Southern states were so eager to safeguard was the right to own human beings as property, to enslave Africans.  No one ever officially connected the dots for us.

By the time my father was born in 1932, the Shipp family had been firmly rooted in Princess Anne for generations.  Their presence is engraved onto maps in local place names: Shipps Bay lies just to the south of Virginia Beach, and Shipps Corner is not far from the Princess Anne Courthouse.  Their names sit alongside names co-opted from the Indigenous peoples who called this land their home, the Pamunkey, Piscataway, and Powhatan, not to mention the Chesepeians, an early tribe from whom Chesapeake Bay got its name.  The Shipp name adorns the map with all the unselfconscious lack of awareness that one might expect from colonizers.

Although not a prominent or particularly wealthy family, they were a settled and, after 1650, permanent part of the landscape, intermarrying with other old settler families in the area like the Murdens, who were my father’s maternal ancestors.  They farmed, using enslaved labor.  They enlisted in the Confederate Army and fought to secure their so-called “right” to the free labor of human beings who had been kidnapped from their homes on the continent of Africa and warehoused in huge sailing ships.  They elected political officials who guaranteed that every person of color would “know their place,” which meant in segregated schools and at the back of the bus.  At best, they did not challenge the Jim Crow legislation of the segregated South.  At worst, they actively enforced the status quo through terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and terrorizing actions like lynching.

It has taken me the better part of a century to come to terms with the part my ancestors played, not only in the Civil War, but in the practice of chattel slavery, which they thought was worth waging war over.

Whiteness is the thing that we White people never get around to talking about.  The thing that resists grasping.  Slippery as a greased pig.

Doing a search on the Ancestry website brought me face-to-face with the 1850 Slave Schedule.  And the name of my 3^rd great-grandfather, Nehemiah Shipp (1805-1867), with three unnamed Black females, ages 45, 8, and 3, listed as “property.”  

Nehemiah’s sons by different mothers, Simon and my 2^nd great-grandfather Andrew Wesley, joined up with the Confederate Army (CSA) in 1862.  After the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg in July of 1863, Andrew went AWOL, popping up again in Princess Anne to get married in September.  His half-brother Simon was captured at Falling Waters, MD, imprisoned for 6 months near Washington, D.C., and then released and “sent north.”  Later, he too found his way home.

On the Murden side, my 5^th great-grandfather arrived in Virginia in the late 1700s.  My 4^th great-grandfather John D. Murden, Sr. (1790-1880) claimed six enslaved Black persons, again all unnamed.  His grandson, John Francis, my 2^nd great-grandfather, lost a brother in the Battle of Chancellorsville, the same spot when Stonewall Jackson was killed.  John Francis rose to the rank of Sergeant and was wounded at the famous Battle of the Crater, near Petersburg, Virginia.

And these are only my direct relatives.

A Black friend in New York once wryly remarked to me, “You know, it’s curious, but none of the White people I’ve ever met come from ancestors who owned slaves.”  

I myself gasped when I found Nehemiah Shipp’s name in the 1850 Slave Schedule. Even though I knew what I would probably find.  No one in my family ever mentioned that our ancestors “owned slaves.”  Somehow, even in the 21^st century, I remained in complete ignorance.  Somehow I was allowed to maintain an attitude of passive denial.  Somehow—

That “somehow” is what I have come to understand as Whiteness.  Whiteness is the thing that we White people never get around to talking about.  The thing that surrounds us like the air we breathe, infuse us like the water we drink.  The thing that resists grasping.  Slippery as a greased pig.

Both of my parents were born into the Jim Crow South in the 1930s.  But my mother’s family ancestry follows a more itinerant and less clear path than that of the Shipps and Murdens.  

My mother’s paternal grandfather, Grandpa Bryant to us, was the son of sharecroppers and later worked as a sharecropper himself in North Carolina.  He and the landowner’s daughter, Kate, fell in love and married—for which offense her family promptly disowned her.  In 1912 Grandpa and Kate moved to Norfolk, where he became an electrician and worked in the Navy Yard at Oceana.  They had 6 children together before she died at the age of 33.

Grandpa’s original middle name was Lonzo, which he changed to Lawrence as soon as he came of age.  His ancestry is mysterious and cannot be surely trace beyond his parents’ names listed in the Bryant Family Bible.  No one has ever been able to explain the name Lonzo.  All I know is that, in his wedding photo, with an austere and very pale Kate by his side, he is darkly handsome, sporting a handlebar mustache.

The story handed down in the family goes that, one day, Grandpa came home to find Kate scrubbing the two oldest children vigorously with a scrub brush.  He said, “Kate, don’t scrub those children’s skin off!  They’re dark like me, not white like you!”  One of those children was my mother’s father, my PawPaw.

My mother’s mother, my Granny, descended from a line of French immigrants, farmers from Canada, named Denis (pronounced in French De-NEE).  Around 1860 they left Canada and came to Oswego, NY.   The Civil War began soon after, but they were not yet citizens, and in any case, in the Denis family there was no one of eligible age to fight.  Within two generations they had made their way down to Princess Anne, along the way anglicizing their name first to Dennis, and then to Denney.  Granny’s father was the first Denney to be born in Princess Anne County. 

Granny’s father and mother both died within just a few years of each other, and at the age of 14, she was sent away by her stepfather to Blackstone College for Girls, a boarding school, where she learned bookkeeping.  After she finished school, she moved to Norfolk in 1930 and, two years later, married PawPaw.

PawPaw’s appliance store, Bryant Electric, was a big open warehouse-like storefront on Colley Avenue in Norfolk.  Granny worked alongside him as bookkeeper.  He was as fastidious a businessman as he was in his personal appearance.  Known for his fair dealings with his customers, PawPaw also treated his Black employees in a fair and almost fatherly way.  Like Sam, one of the men who worked the stockroom.  My mother often told the story that, when PawPaw died, Sam “cried as if he had lost his father.”

Knowing what I know now about the paternalism of Whiteness, the story makes me cringe. It sounds too much like the love of the enslaved house workers for their “Massah.” The anecdote was usually told, however, as an example of how our family wasn’t “racist.”

A Black friend in New York once wryly remarked to me, “You know, it’s curious, but none of the White people I’ve ever met come from ancestors who owned slaves.”

For a time, Granddaddy Shipp, my father’s father, served as voting registrar for Princess Anne County.  One day the powers-that-be at the Courthouse handed him a test.  Told him to give the test to any “colored” person who came to vote.  

Now, Granddaddy had left school after 4^th grade to work on the farm.  And while he had a good head for numbers, he took one look at that test and thought, I could never pass this test.  He took it to a lawyer friend for his opinion.  After perusing it for a moment, the lawyer tossed it down on his desk.  “Man, the governor of Virginia couldn’t pass this test!”  Granddaddy went back to the Courthouse and informed his bosses, “Either I give this test to everyone, or I give it to no one.”

At which point they fired him.

Make no mistake, Granddaddy was a segregationist.  He believed like most other White people in Princess Anne that everybody should “know their place.”  Which for “colored” people was in a separate school, or at the back of the bus, or in a separate section of the movie theatre.  But he could not in good conscience give anybody a test that he knew he wouldn’t be able to pass himself.

After all, fair is fair.

Dad told me in later years that he, too, was a segregationist.  He believed in “separate, but equal.”

However, the lines don’t appear to have been as hard and fast for my family as for much of the Jim Crow South.  

Take Cleveland, for example, a young Black man who worked for my father when Mom and Dad were first married.  Dad and Cleveland worked together out in the field, and, wherever they ended up at lunchtime, they’d sit in the bed of the truck, turn a box on its end to make a table, and share some bread and meat that my mother sent out there with them.

One day they ended up close to the house around noon, and my father invited Cleveland to come into the house and eat with them.  He had already discussed it with my mother.

Cleveland understandably hesitated.  Eating together out in the field was one thing.  Eating together at the table was something else.  It might be acceptable with a White man—but eating together at the table with a 19-year-old White woman could get you lynched.

“Listen,” Dad reassured him, “this is just between you and us.  I’m not gonna go telling anybody—”

From that day on, whenever they were close to the house, Cleveland came inside to eat with them.

“It just didn’t make sense to me,” Mom said 50 years later.  “If they were out there in the field, they’d be eating lunch together in the truck, wouldn’t they?  So why should that be any different if they came back up to the house?”

After all, fair is fair.

MaMaw Shipp, my dad’s mother, sold Rawleigh Products on the side, the country equivalent of Avon.  Her customers were both White and Black, all up and down the country.  If someone invited her in to sit down and have a cup of coffee or a piece of pie, she did not refuse, regardless of color.  But, like Granddaddy and most White folks in Princess Anne, she would never have thought about inviting one of her Black customers in to her home. 

It just wasn’t done.

My mother said to me, “When your father and I look back on life—we didn’t realize it at the time—but why we had the opinions that we did and why things seemed so natural or unnatural to us, was because neither of us grew up in a home that taught anything but respect for everybody.”

“Respect for everybody.” But no matter how fairly they treated people of color, or how right-minded some of their actions might be, no one in my family thought to attack the fundamental injustice—and unfairness—of White supremacy.  None of them challenged the system of segregation.  

Perhaps the line of separation between races was not quite as rigid as the defenders of White Supremacy would like to believe.  But segregation was the law.  Not only on the books, but in their lives.

(To be continued)