A Greased Pig

Whiteness. The thing that envelopes us like the air we breathe. The thing we White folks never get around to examining. The thing that resists examination.

In New York City in the 1990s, a new acquaintance, Black, whom I had just met at Riverside Church said to me, “You know, it’s curious—but none of the White people I’ve ever met have ancestors who owned slaves.” Eyebrow arched, mouth twisted into a wry grin.

I remember thinking, I never heard of anyone in my family who enslaved people. The Bryants were sharecroppers, and the Shipps were poor farmers, weren’t they? They didn’t own slaves. —Did they?

I blinked. I laughed, “Yeah, what are the odds.” 

I kept my questions to myself.

*******

When my mother found out in 2005 that I had signed up for an account with a genealogy website, she leaped on the information.

“See if you can find out where Grandpa Bryant got the name, ‘Lonzo,’” she said. 

In the Bryant family Bible, my mother’s mother recorded the names of her parents, the Denneys, and her husband’s parents, the Bryants. The large book was kept in the drawer of one of the sofa end tables in her living room. In my grandmother’s elegant handwriting, Grandpa Bryant’s name is spelled out, Charles Lonzo Bryant. His parents’ names, Polly Vaughn and Mathew Bryant, are written just above his name. 

Charles Lonzo’s parents were sharecroppers. One of the things I learn early on is that, in a agricultural society, legal records are spotty for anyone who didn’t own land. I cannot trace his parents any further than my grandmother’s Bible, not with any certainty. When I do a search for Charles Lonzo, nothing comes up. As soon as Grandpa came of age, he had his middle name legally changed to “Lawrence.” 

Before the days of personal computers, one of Mom’s first cousins had traced the genealogy of the Bryants and Denneys the old-fashioned way, but he was never able to solve the mystery of Grandpa’s middle name.

The story goes that he worked as a farm laborer on the Davis family’s land in North Carolina. Katie Lou Davis, the landowner’s daughter, fell in love with him and ran off to marry him. She was disowned by her family, and the couple eventually moved to Norfolk. Charles studied to be an electrician and ended up working in the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth. In the only photo I have of Charles and Kate, he is darkly handsome with a mustache that curls on the ends. She is pale and serious. Mom tells me that the photo was taken just after they were married.

Kate bore a child every year and a half or so. Four of them were pale like their mother. Two of them, including my mother’s father and his older sister, were dark-complected.

One day Charles came home from work to find his young wife scrubbing them with a brush. Hard. “Kate, don’t take their skin off!” he said. “They’re dark like me, not white like you.” 

When Katie died in 1915 at the age of 32, her family blamed Charles for “making her have all those children.” There was some pressure on him to let the children go to live with other members of the family, but he insisted that he could take care of them. “I know what that’s like,” he said, “when your parents die and the children are farmed out to the relatives. That’s what happened to me.” It’s the only hint we have about his childhood.

He did keep the family together and hired a housekeeper, whom he married when they were both in their 50s.

But amid all these stories and facts, I have never been able to solve the Lonzo mystery.

I tell my mother that I am having better luck tracing the Denneys, her mother’s side of the family. I trace them back to Ontario, Canada, under the French name Denis (de-KNEE). They crossed the border into New York State before 1855 and farmed in Oswego on the shore of Lake Ontario. By 1900, they had resettled in Norfolk, Virginia, in a place called Tanner’s Creek. Along the way their name was anglicized, first to Dennis, then to Denny, and finally to Denney.

“I’m not interested in the Denneys,” my mother says. “I just want to know about the Bryants.”

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 have ancestors who owned slaves.

As I got serious about writing a book about my family’s experiences, I grew more and more curious about the Shipps and the Murdens during and just before the Civil War. Did they fight for the Confederacy? Did any of the Shipps or Murdens enslave people? Or were they just poor White farmers who were forced to fight for a cause that did not directly benefit them?

I found it easy to trace the Shipps and Murdens, because they were landowners at a time when land was the measure of value. All the way back to the early 1600s in the case of the Shipps, and the late 1700s in the case of the Murdens.

My dad had already told me that Andrew Wesley Shipp—not Granddaddy, but the man he was named after—fought for the Confederacy. Sure enough, I discovered that Andrew Wesley and his half-brother Simon joined up with the Confederate States Army (CSA) in 1862 in Tanner’s Creek. They fought together in Gettysburg in 1863. Following the Confederate defeat, Andrew went “Absent without leave.” Simon was captured and sent to a Union prison for six months. When he was released around Christmastime that year, he was “sent north” and forbidden to return home until after the war.

The Murdens’ story went along the same lines. John Francis Murden, my dad’s great-grandfather, also joined the CSA in Tanner’s Creek in 1862. His brother was killed at Chancellorsville, the first battle in Virginia, where Stonewall Jackson lost his life. John Francis rose to the rank of Sergeant and continued fighting until he was wounded at the famous Battle of the Crater, near Petersburg, Virginia. For which, by the way, he collected a disability pension till he died from the very Union he had fought to dissolve.

Good God Almighty! I think with a shock. I could qualify to be a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy!

But there was no evidence of anyone enslaving anyone.

Maybe they were just poor farmers, I thought. Hopefully, I admit.

I go back one generation to Andrew Wesley and Simon’s father, Nehemiah Shipp. Born in 1805, died in 1867, two years after the Civil War. Two hints pop up for records that might be related to him.

The first is the 1850 Slave Schedule. Oh, fuck.

As I open the facsimile of the actual document, my heart is pounding. The first column is labeled “Slave Owners” in the meticulous hand of the census taker. About two-thirds of the way down the page, there he is, Nehemiah Shipp, and in the next column, three Black females, ages 45, 8, and 3. 

It makes me ill to see these three-dimensional beings reduced to flat grey ciphers on the page. No names. No identification, other than “f” for gender, and “B” under the column heading “Colour.” Nothing to indicate what relation, if any, they have to each other.

The 1840 Census lumps everyone together, “Free White Persons,” “Free Colored Persons” (were there any in Princess Anne?), and “Slaves.” The White male heads of families are the only names given, not even their wives or children are named. Nehemiah is noted as enslaving three people, but these are evidently different people. The ages are less exact: one male, “10-23,” one female “10-23,” and one female “under the age of 10.”

I can’t find a Slave Schedule for 1860. But in the online Encyclopedia Virginia, I have since discovered that in 1860 enslaved Black persons made up 42.4% of the the population of Princess Anne County. 

The Murdens were richer than the Shipps. In 1830, John D. Murden, Sr., my 4^th great-grandfather, enslaved six Black persons, while one of his cousins enslaved 10. In southeastern Virginia, these are high numbers of enslaved people. 

And these are only my direct ancestors.

Good God Almighty! I think with a shock. I could qualify to be a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy!

How different my life would have been, had I been born to parents who never questioned what they were taught. And even so, as a White person, raised in a society molded and shaped by Whiteness, for Whiteness, I haven’t escaped. For the most part I’ve been blind to the ways my White skin has benefited me, and I’m sure—no, I know there are still blind spots. If I am unwilling to see how Whiteness has formed me, how can I ever hope to address racism and White supremacy in my world.

What my Black acquaintance in New York City said over three decades ago comes back to haunt me. Because it is true—no one in my family ever mentioned that our ancestors had enslaved anyone. If we talked about ancestors at all, we talked as if they were somehow outside the bitter history of this nation. It has taken me 70 years—the better part of a century—to come to terms with the part they played, not only in the Civil War, but in the practice of chattel slavery. One of those “state’s rights” they considered worth waging a bloody war to keep.

Somehow, up until well into the 21^st century, I have remained in complete ignorance. Somehow I have maintained an attitude of passive denial. Somehow I never asked the questions that needed to be asked. 

Somehow—

That “somehow” is what I mean by Whiteness. Whiteness is the thing that surrounds us all, White and Black, like the air we breathe. The thing we White folks never get around to examining. The thing that resists examination. As Granddaddy might say, “Slippery as a greased pig.”