Family Oral History Interviews

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Oral history interviewing of older family members is an excellent place to start looking into one’s own family history. From older family members, you can learn a good deal about the family tree, what various members of the family tree were like, where people lived and why they moved or stayed put, what their lives were like, and so forth. Younger family historians often start with interviews rather than electronic data such as census records, since interviews can be so highly informative. Add to that, older people in the family often feel honored when younger family members want to hear their stories – unless their stories are extraordinarily painful or laced with shame, in which case they may prefer to leave the past in the past.

Before plunging into family history interviews, I recommend doing some background planning first. There are heaps of guides available. One of the most useful is the Smithsonian Oral History Interview Guide, which I learned about in a conversation with a colleague who was using it with students and commented to me that it had opened up possibilities he hadn't considered before. This guide, which you can download as a PDF file, begins by discussing the value of interviewing “bearers of tradition” who are often but not always older than you. The guide walks you through the entire process of an interview, beginning with planning the purpose of your interview, figuring out equipment you might need, and co-planning logistics of the interview with the interviewee. The guide then provides helpful considerations when starting the interview and making it go well, then what to do after the interview. Following that are suggested questions you can ask about family folklore and history, local history and community life, and cultural traditions and occupational skills. The guide concludes with excellent suggestions for how you might share what you learned, such as creating a family exhibition. (Another guide that is useful and, although perhaps less extensive, covers much the same territory is Judith Moyer’s Step by Step Guide for Doing Oral History.)

You may not need to look further for potential questions to ask, but lists of possible questions are plentiful. For example, Kimberly Powell posts 50 questions for family history interviews. The Center for Oral History Research at UCLA offers a very extensive list of possible questions, classified by stages of life of the interviewee.  For younger family historians, or anyone who may find long lists of potential questions overwhelming, Family Tree Magazine suggests 20 questions.

It is important to pay attention to the ethnic, racial, and/or immigration background of who you plan to interview. Char McCargo Bah provides very helpful considerations when interviewing African Americans, differentiating among elderly rural, elderly educated, and non-elderly. For example, she points out that elderly rural African Americans hold taboos about what can be spoken about with whom, such as who it is proper and who it is improper to discuss intimate relationships with. She also offers useful advice about how to set up and conduct the interview in a way that will be respectful of different communities of African Americans.

Kimberly Powell offers considerations for planning interviews with Hispanic family members (given the huge diversity in who counts as Hispanic in the U.S).  James Sobredo, who teaches Ethnic Studies at California State University, Sacramento prepared a guide for interviewing Asian immigrants. The Minnesota Historical Society posts a rich collection of oral history interviews with recent immigrants and refugees.  While the material in this collection is oriented more toward teaching about immigration than conducting oral history interviews, the interviews themselves still can be helpful for thinking through what to ask and how, especially with respect to difficult life issues that immigrants and refugees have had to face.

Older members of Jewish families may be holocaust survivors, or children of holocaust survivors, which has implications for oral family history interviews. Jewish Gen, an affiliate of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, suggests 83 possible questions to ask an older Jewish family member. While some of these questions are pretty generic (such as what country did your mother’s ancestors come from?), questions about death and dying may help open up sensitive issues. (This site, by the way, has additional search tools tailored to Jewish families.) I also recommend Oral History Guidelines of the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has more detail about questions relating to before, during, and after the holocaust, and assistance in navigating experiences older people might have had while interviewing.

Oral histories, while immensely valuable, have limitations that family history researchers should keep in mind. Oral histories depend on memory – how accurate a person's memory is about different points in time, what people chose to talk about, highlight, remain silent about, or have simply forgotten. Stories may be embellished upon to make them more interesting. Stories handed down through generations may well be changed or embellished in the process. It is important to triangulate as much as possible with other sources – just as you would for any other source such as newspaper articles or even census data, which has inaccuracies. For example, I was able to more or less verify a story an older cousin told me about an ancestor's experiences in Vicksburg, Mississippi during the Civil War by reading a historical account in which I learned that the gist of the story was probably accurate, although some of the details (such as who said what) were embellishment.

It is also important to be aware that family oral histories may well not be situated in a very full a historical context. For example, stories my mother told me about her father buying and selling property didn't refer to the fact that banks and lending institutions facilitated such transactions for white families but not for African American families. Not thinking to add this part of the story supported the narrative of an ancestor working his way up the ladder of success through hard work, a narrative that leaves out how the rules for who could work one's way up the ladder were skewed. Doing family oral history can contribute to critical family history, but isn't necessarily critical by itself.

Researchers who want to learn more about oral history should check out the Oral History Association and the International Oral History Association.

Mining Census Data for African American Ancestors

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There are several guides and tools on the web to help locate African American ancestors. The website MySlaveAncestors offers some fairly specific guidance for people who are new to doing this work. Since the guidance on that website applies tools in this blog to the search for African American ancestors, I decided to try to trace someone in order to see what I could find.

I am not African American myself (although according to a DNA test I have a bit of African American ancestry), so I don’t have names of specific ancestors to trace. I decided, however, to trace someone who lived near one of my ancestors in Tennessee during the late 1880s, to work my way through a concrete example of using the tools discussed in MySlaveAncestors and this blog as a whole.

I selected Mr. Ellis Coffin, who in 1880, was renting farmland adjacent to my ancestor Dewitt Harris in Monroe County, Tennessee. I wondered what I could find out about Mr. Coffin and his family background. I used Ancestry.com because I have a membership. The tools themselves are public record; one does not need to subscribe to Ancestry.com to have access to them, but subscription offers a convenient “one stop shop,” as it were.

By entering the exact name Ellis Coffin, living in Monroe County, Tennessee, the only records that surfaced were the census from 1880, more recent censuses, and more recent Tennessee databases. I was able to determine that he was born around 1842 in Tennessee, and was married in 1867. I wanted to trace backward to see how far I could go.

I decided to narrow the search to the African American collection, which I could do at the bottom of the search page. Ancestry.com allows users to specify collections, and doing this helpfully eliminated, say, Coffins from London and Ireland. When I entered his probable date of birth into the African American collection, I found six slaves born about when Ellis was born, owned by J. A. Coffin and C. W. Coffin in Monroe County in 1850. Slave schedules had been added to the federal census in 1850 and 1860. But rather than listing slaves by name, enumerators needed only to put their owners’ names.

Presumably Ellis was born a slave to the Coffin family.  So, to find out more about the context of his birth, I searched Coffin in Monroe County, Tennessee, in 1850, this time using the “free” census rather than the slave census. I found one family; the name was spelled incorrectly but someone had suggested a correct spelling. (Users of Ancestry.com can suggest correct spellings when they find the name of an ancestor spelled incorrectly.) The head of the family was James A. Coffin. Going back to the Slave Schedules, I found that he owned 18 slaves in 1850.

While I didn’t want to shift the focus of my search away from the Black slave and onto the white slave owner, I was curious as to who James Coffin was, so I Googled his name (adding the word “Tennessee”). I found out that he had been a county clerk and a member of the Board of Trustees of a local college. Going back to Ancestry.com, I decided to see if there were property records of his purchase of slaves. I didn’t find such records there. However, I had visited the Monroe County courthouse several years ago, and in the course of tracing property records of my own Harris ancestors, located the purchase of a slave family of three by my great-great-great-great grandfather (Dewitt’s grandfather), from James A. Coffin. The deed named the family members. Although Ellis was not one of them, I felt uncomfortably close to him when I made this realization.

As a quick way to find out a little more about James A. Coffin’s family, I consulted the Public Member family trees in Ancestry.com. What I found useful was locating James’ middle name. I decided to Google his full name to see what came up. (Adding the term “slaves” didn’t help, as his name showed up in a few very long documents in the capacity of County Clerk.) Perhaps the most important thing that surfaced was that the Coffin family’s papers are housed at Houghton Library of Harvard University. It is very possible that one would be able to track down details of Ellis Coffin, his family, and who the Coffins bought them from, in these family papers of former slaveholders.

In short, although I didn’t find out as much about Mr. Ellis Coffin’s roots as I would have liked to have found, I found more than I had anticipated. And next time I’m in Boston, I’ll drop into the Houghton Library to see what more I can learn of this family who was born into slavery.

Installment #4 “Black People Don’t Float and Swim:” Unlearning Another Lie that Jim Crow Taught

(We've moved to: http://christinesleeter.org/black-people-dont-float-and-swim/)

By Dr. Sherick Hughes, Guest Writer

Unfortunately, the phrase “Black people don’t float and swim” has been interwoven as a deterministic lie deep within the fabric of this nation. There were skewed social science studies of our buoyancy and muscle density in relation to our White peers to suggest that we can’t float. From this conclusion, it was determined that my people are not born to swim like our White counterparts. In reality, neither buoyancy nor muscle density characteristics actually would prevent Black folks from swimming. I learned in a college water safety course in the early 1990s that each human can float by lying on her/his back or stomach in the water, filling up her/his lungs by inhaling air with the head above water, and then holding her/his breath in 5-10 second intervals. From there, humans must simply learn the kicks and arm movements that accompany the proper “strokes” that allow us to move most efficiently in the water.

Given these human facts about floating and swimming were ignored by Jim Crow in favor of a lie that my people can’t float or swim, how might critical family history assist folks in unlearning this falsehood? Nearly a decade after the college water safety course, I pursued ethnography and family history work as part of my dissertation 2001-2003. It was during this time that I first engaged three techniques that can be useful for critical family history: (1) revisiting the local libraries, (2) revisiting the local museums, and (3) listening for understanding. These three techniques provided fuel for me to challenge continuously the racialized floating and swimming lie that Jim Crow had spread throughout my family and in fact, throughout my birthplace in Northeastern, North Carolina. In this fourth and final installment, I describe how these three techniques can be quite useful for dismantling the Jim Crow lies that too often become faulty “common sense” in our families and communities.

Revisiting the Local Libraries
While we visit local libraries and read books as children and even young adults, I am encouraged by the practice of revisiting libraries for old and new texts that may shed new light on my family history. Cecelski's book The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in the Maritime South (2001) was available in my local library, but I missed it during my initial online searches. Consequently, it was my wife who introduced me to the book after a conversation with her former employer about my dissertation research. Cecelski became a key piece of evidence to provide a context around my family’s coastal, rural experience. I learned from Cecelski that historians now estimate that over 900 free Blacks lived in the Albemarle region of Northeastern North Carolina (which, includes my hometown), more than anywhere else in the South during slavery. The Blacks who lived there like Moses Grandy (one of the few published slave autobiographers), were known for their skills on the water, for building ships, for their brick masonry, etc. A critical mass of them were escaped slaves living in my hometown’s Great Dismal Swamp in Maroon communities, while others were free Blacks, including those who literally bought their freedom and began to help slaves to escape to the North.  Revisiting another library book by Siddle Walker (1996), Their Highest Potential, although written about a different part of the state, reminds us of the ingenuity and intellectual feats of the segregated Black schools that counters the pre- and post-Brown narrative of how horrible they were for Black children. Moreover, in my book, Black Hands in the Biscuits Not in the Classrooms: Unveiling Hope in a Struggle for Brown’s Promise (Hughes, 2006), I describe finding in the state archives the fact that in 1955 one county’s segregated Black K-10 schools sent more youth to college than the local white high school.

My father added additional context to Cecelski (2001) and I paraphrase:

Back then (during Jim Crow), White folks didn’t want to work down at our local (the Unionized International Longshoreman’s Association). They were ashamed to due to the grueling schedule (4:30am-6:00pm includes commute) lifting and transfer of goods from ship to port to cargo trucks and trains, so David D. Alston, a Black man, recruited Blacks to do this work. Knowing that most of the youth came from poor Black families, David D. Alston persuaded the union to open more of its doors to Black workers. The higher than minimum wages and health insurance with over-time pay benefits and bonuses were a big deal for Black men then and they are a big deal now. Then, when he died, they named a scholarship after him from our union local…that scholarship that you got all of those years. Now White folks want to work down there. The last time I was down there on the waterfront, most of the folks were White and that’s not right.

Revisiting the Local Museum
While we visit local museums and see their local exhibits as children and even young adults, I am encouraged yet again, by the practice of revisiting museums for old and new displays that may shed new light on my family history. At one of the museums in the Albemarle are pictures in black and white photography of Black men who saved many lives as life guards in the very rough and sometimes unpredictably waters of the Atlantic. The sandbars alone sank many ships which led to it being known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Similar to their hinterland brethren of the Great Dismal Swamp, a group of Black lifeguards emerged, survived and thrived in their work to save others in the Atlantic Ocean. Anyone who visits this museum display would be remiss to dismiss the honor that those young men have brought to local, national and international Black families by troubling Jim Crow’s lies about our aquatic capabilities. These brothers piloted ships, they built boats, and yes, they floated and swam with the very best. Seeing their portraits again, for the first time in the local museum as an adult, gave me the chills, because they had become such powerful photographs for me on a critical historical level.

Listening for Understanding, Not Just to Reply
I am learning from experiences of collecting oral histories formally and informally, that when I listen, I must consider how to listen. Listening for understanding is quite different and can produce quite different results when researching family history critically, than listening just long enough to reply and to maintain my comfort level of knowledge with the topic without expansion. This point became quite clear from a discussion with my nephew back in 2001, when he was in high school and I was home pursuing the ethnography and critical family history work of my dissertation. I worried that during the encounter, he was not beginning to understand better how our family's story connects to larger stories. I remember telling him what I was learning from Cecelski (2001), Siddle Walker (1996) and the local museum. Several years later, he returned home from the Coast Guard with a proud look on his face with a brief personal encounter to share:

The first time I went into the galley (eating and social area on the ship), there were huge portraits of a bunch of Black men on the walls who were being celebrated as heroes for their service work on ships and in the water saving lives. I felt so proud to know that other Black mean had not only succeeded but also thrived in the Coast Guard, both on the ship and in the water. Seeing those celebrated black men in the galley helped to build my confidence, especially when times got tough.

While I was encouraged by his story, I recall feeling frustrated as I replied, “Don’t you remember me telling you about this information back when you were in high school, didn’t you believe me?” My nephew looked as if he sincerely did not remember. That exchange has been a key turning point in my approach to sharing and receiving family history. I am learning from that turning point that in addition to contexts and family liaisons, there is much to be learned at all ages about listening for understanding and not just listening to reply. A listener and receiver of ethnography and critical family history evidence must fight against being just critical, liberal and conservative enough to hear his or her own voice.

Concluding Thoughts 
The critical family history and critical ethnographic techniques in Hughes (2006) coupled with the work of Cecelski (2001) and Siddle Walker (1996) did seem to help my nephew, family and me to make more meaning out of what we already knew about the family's history with water in our coastal hometown, and to add to our limited knowledge about our family’s prowess in schooling and water-based entrepreneurship from slavery to segregation. Yet, my nephew and I must continue to ask ourselves, “Is this experience in the water and on the boat something for which I should be ashamed, because White people do it, or is it something for which I should be proud, because it is what my people used to do, before Jim Crow pushed us out of this part of the local economy?” Obviously, I am arguing here that the evidence suggests that the latter is the closest to (t)ruth for our family, a Black family with six generations on the coast with records dating back to the early 1800s. The next step includes continuing to check other family members in the appropriate contexts with necessary family liaisons; and to fight against passing on Jim Crow’s aquatic lies to our posterity.

I continue to learn more about my family history of swimming, boating and Black life in the home of my birth, the county of The Great Dismal Swamp. It is the home of escaped and free Blacks, of Maroons, and of brave Black lifeguards, as revealed from my revisiting of local library books and displays in the local museum and in my listening for understanding. I find this evidence toward my critical family history troubling Jim Crow, my nephew and me with respect to our previous assumptions about possibilities and limitations of our family in maritime North Carolina from the late 1800s to the present. It is my sincere hope that information from this final installment (both alone and in conjunction with the previous installments) will inspire readers to initiate, sustain, and augment evidence from their own critical family histories in ways that keep troubling Jim Crow and the lies Jim Crow taught.

References 

Cecelski, D. (2001). The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in the Maritime South. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press.

Hughes, S. A. (2006). Black Hands in the Biscuits Not in the Classrooms: Unveiling Hope in a Struggle for Brown’s Promise. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishers. (Also see http://www.peterlang.com/download/datasheet/46083/datasheet_67431.pdf)

Siddle Walker, V. (1996). Their Highest Potential: An African American Community in the Segregated South. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press.

Dr. Sherick Hughes, MA, MPA, Ph.D. is Associate Professor with Tenure, and Founder and Director, Interpretive Research Suite & Carter Qualitative Thought Lab Graduate Program Coordinator/Chair, Cultural Studies & Literacies Program Founder and Director, Black Alumni of the School of Education (BASE), School of Education, University of North Carolina, CB #3500, Peabody Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599

Installment #3 “Did You Know Yo’ Mama was White?” Using New Interracial Family Evidence to Trouble Jim Crow and Me (and You)

(We've moved to: http://christinesleeter.org/using-new-interracial-family-evidence/)

By Dr. Sherick Hughes, Guest Writer

In this installment, I will use a pseudonym to protect the anonymity of the subject of my critical family history. I am related to the “Kayfred” family of North Carolina by marriage. “Grandpa Kayfred” was a widower and the patriarch of the very large family in a rural region of North Carolina. He was born in 1917 and he lived to be 93 years old with his mental capacity well intact, so he was a wealth of humor, knowledge, and family history. When I spoke with him in the summer of 1993, he was approximately 76 years old and I remember his kindness, his very light brown skin, curly hair, mechanic’s hands and green eyes. I assumed there was some admixture in his African ancestry, but it was not unusual due to the One Drop Rule for many Black folks in my family to have facial features, skin and eye colors, and/or hair types typically associated with Europeans. For years, I heard stories from “Grandpa Kayfred” and others about his violent arguments and exploits with White folks during Jim Crow. While I didn’t wonder about the admixture, I did wonder how “Grandpa Kayfred” survived such experiences within the southern rural territory of the Ku Klux Klan without being jailed, beaten, or worse. It was the county courthouse archives in search of his next of kin, when Grandpa Kayfred was about 90 years old in 2007, that would add a context and credibility to the stories.

I will attempt to demonstrate how learning from key episodes of what Zeus Leonardo calls race-class relations within the informal oral histories of elders like “Grandpa Kayfred", and seeking archival evidence to support that evidence, may give important revelations. Important secrets were indeed revealed about Grandpa “Kayfred” in relation to his family and Black-White race relations. I will conclude by considering how such information from family evidence can keep troubling Jim Crow and me (and you).

Learning Race-Class Relations from Elders: Key Episodes from an Informal Oral History 
“Grandpa Kayfred” was a mechanic by trade. In fact, he taught any family member willing to learn how to do everything from routine car maintenance to fixing and changing major car parts. He tended to charge on a fraction of the cost. When I was in college, my old Pontiac 6000 (passed down from my mother during my Junior year) was on the fritz again with a major repair. While I can’t recall that repair, I do recall that the car had over 200,000 miles on it when I received it from my parents and that “Grandpa Kayfred” only charged me about $20 for a repair estimated over hundreds of dollars in the mid-1990s. It was about this time that I learned of what I felt at the time, was the most implausible episode of “Grandpa Kayfred’s” negative interactions with White folks. “Grandpa Kayfred,” who prided himself on his word, his work and his integrity apparently got into an argument with a White man in the 1950s about the price of a repair and what he was owed for it. The White man called him several expletives; however, when called a liar, “Grandpa Kayfred” smacked the man in the face.

Now, such a gesture was a death sentence for Black men in the Jim Crow south at that time, but not only was “Grandpa Kayfred” spared his life, he was neither jailed nor arrested. I knew that lighter-skinned, more European–looking Black folks sometimes earned dubious privileges from Whites, but a slap in the face was well beyond any credible story that I had known for that time period. I also knew that “Grandpa Kayfred” was quite faithful and spiritual and giving and forgiving. Yet, something else must have protected him from Jim Crow justice.

Family Revelations in the County Archives 
County archives, including county census data and birth records, can provide useful and free resources for critical family history researchers, formal and informal. For example, I just learned that the 1860 census for Camden County, NC, the county of my maternal and paternal relatives bears a mistake. The census enumerator responsible for collecting the data erroneously noted the names of the slaves and the names of their respective owners. It is quite rare to find this in archival data and it has launched a firestorm of questions and blogs about the motives of the enumerator. While this “error” produced rare data, county census data can offer rich resources and surprises for professional and lay family historians. In search of next of kin and inheritance information, two family members went to the county archives when “Grandpa Kayfred” was about 90 years old. Much to their surprise, the records identify his father as “Negro” and his mother as “White.” They immediately went home and rather than await a family liaison and an appropriate context, they excitedly approached “Grandpa Kayfred” and asked, “Did you know yo’ mama was White?” While I was not present for this conversation, each time it is retold, there is a consistent replay of “Grandpa Kayfred,” “Hell yeah, I knew my mama was White, I just never told y’all.”

Rethinking Black-White Race Relations in the Family? 
The Kayfred family including Grandpa, are not known for their interracial friendships to put it lightly. Moreover, it is not unusual to hear a Kayfred say, “I don’t like White people,” not moving to the harsher word “hate,” out of respect for their Christian beliefs that counter “hating” any of “God’s children.” The “don’t like” seems to operate as a “hatred” in practice, from my purview. “Grandpa Kayfred’s” stories about White people, including the one he smacked and the circumstances leading up to the smack, certainly support the heavy dislike for White folks. Like most people of color in rural, North Carolina, the Kayfred family have a history of frequent and intense negative events, encounters, and episodes initiated by privileged White folks who consistently infantilize, devalue and deskill them. With this context considered, it became understandable why “Grandpa Kayfred” never shared the fact that his mother was White with his children and grandchildren. He also likely wanted to protect them by not have a family example for them to follow into interracial dating and marital relationships of their own. Once unveiled, “Grandpa Kayfred” offered more clarity to this story to his grandchildren and they shared the following narrative with me:

Born in the late 1800s, his White mother and Black father fell in love. She was from a very wealthy and powerful family, which is why she and her husband and children were not targets of the Ku Klux Klan or any other local racists. One condition of her marriage is that she had to give up all of her fortune except for the plot of land for her home. So while her family didn’t like her marrying a Black man, they didn’t completely disown her. The white Kayfred’s are Grandpa’s first cousins and they all knew it. This explains why he got into arguments and fights with White folks and was never arrested or anything.

This additional context explained not only Grandpa’s European phenotype, but also his ability to escape the fate of most Black men in the rural south who slapped a White man in the face who publically questioned his integrity. Now, the family has to grapple with having more immediate heritage to local White Kayfred family members. Distant admixture and the One Drop Rule are one thing, but realizing that your light brown skin and hazel eyes are from the mother of the man who raised you is quite another thing. Clearly, his mother passed away before any of the children or grandchildren would know her and there were likely few pictures of her, especially if she sacrificed her family fortune for love and equity. Still, the family who consistently repeat the family mantra of “I don’t like White people,” continues to come to terms with that statement because they are related to one of those people. Apparently they are related to one of those people with a level of courage, humility, commitment and a sense of equity and sacrifice for love that few people of any color possess then or now, in my opinion.

Where will race relations in the family go from here? How will the White grandmother be incorporated into family pedagogy and oral traditions, particularly with the death of Grandpa Kayfred in 2010? Right now, they seem to be living the contradiction and responding to the news with ambivalence. Irrespective of the White grandmother, they are still largely poor, Black and in the rural South in social times that Dr. Alexander calls The New Jim Crow.

Concluding Thoughts
This archival finding did seem to help my Kayfred family members and me to make more meaning out of what we already knew about the family's history, particularly “Grandpa Kayfred’s” history with local White folks. How can I lean forward with what I am learning from the Kayfred family to keep troubling Jim Crow? We might begin discussing this White woman as a unique part of the family and without the White savior narrative attached, we may begin understanding what White race-class privileges she gave up, which White race-class privileges she was able to share, and what White race-class privileges she continued to hold. What can we learn from our local White relatives with the same last name as ours, including the children and grandchildren of the White man that Grandpa slapped? What can we learn from her and them about the pitfalls and potential of authentic, critical White family allies? What can the Whites we know learn from her life about naming race-class privileges and finding ways to share them with the ultimate goal of undermining their own privileges toward a more perfect union? I continue to learn from the Kayfred family’s informal oral history and archival evidence. I find their critical family history troubling Jim Crow and me with respect to our previous assumptions about interracialization, classism and family ties in rural, North Carolina form the late 1800s to the present. It is my sincere hope that information will inspire readers to initiate, sustain, and augment the race-class evidence from their own critical family histories in ways that keep troubling Jim Crow.

Dr. Sherick Hughes, MA, MPA, Ph.D. is Associate Professor with Tenure, and Founder and Director, Interpretive Research Suite & Carter Qualitative Thought Lab Graduate Program Coordinator/Chair, Cultural Studies & Literacies Program Founder and Director, Black Alumni of the School of Education (BASE), School of Education, University of North Carolina, CB #3500, Peabody Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599

Installment 2: “I Don’t Think That’s My Daddy:” Preparing to share and receive sensitive family history

(We've moved to: http://christinesleeter.org/sensitive-family-history/)

By Dr. Sherick Hughes, Guest Writer

We talk a lot today in the U.S. about the symptoms of poverty, but little about how families became poor in the first place. Edmund Hughes, my grandfather was not always a poor Black man in Camden, NC, but Old Jim Crow would see to it that his family would lose so much of what they had gained economically, that there wouldn’t even be enough cash for a family photograph. With that, Jim Crow robbed me for years of ever knowing the face of my grandfather, until a chance interaction with a female cousin, an Iraq war veteran from California in 2011. Upon receiving the photo of my father from my cousin via http://www.ancestry.com I printed it from a color printer and stored in a safe and dry place away from my dog and children, until the next appropriate context to share it with my father for his feedback.

Finding an Appropriate Context
The appropriate context for sharing is a key consideration. I have found it necessary to prepare to share and to anticipate what information I might receive in return when sharing sensitive family history information from my research. An emotionally charged context like a wedding, funeral, holiday, day of hospitalization, etc., tends not to provide the most conducive context for sharing sensitive new information in my family, such as the photo, at least not when that type of information is coming from me. So, while I wanted to send the photo to my dad immediately to check to see if it was his father, I waited for an appropriate context, which happened to be an innocuous moment during a planned visit.

Finding Family Liaisons
Another component of this strategy is finding family liaisons to communicate your intentions and the sensitive information that you are planning to share. Such liaisons tend to be the folks who are trusted and respected the most by the family member(s) with whom you are intending to share your sensitive family history materials. That family liaison can help you gauge the most appropriate context for sharing and they can help you anticipate the type of feedback you may receive. In the case of Edmund Hughes, the best possible family liaison was my mother. My parents have been married over 55 years and to say they understand the best and worst times to approach each other or to have anyone else approaching would be an understatement. With anywhere from a few minutes to one week of prior notice, my parents seem to be brilliant at preparing themselves and their spouses for sensitive family information sharing and at helping me anticipate what I may receive in return.

Anticipating Going Back to the Evidence and New Searches for Contextual Information
I wasn’t prepared for what my father would say when he saw the photo. When the appropriate context came, I said, “Dad, I went on the computer to a program that helps families learn about their history, and with that program, I met a cousin who gave me a picture of a man that she thinks is your dad, would you like to see it?” My dad, Jessie Hughes, Sr. replied, “Yeah, Yeah, bring it here.”  Dad’s confused stare and momentary silence was deafening, and after a long 5-7 seconds of viewing the photo, he said something that neither I nor mom could have anticipated, “I know that’s my Aunt Becky, but I don’t think that’s my daddy…I don’t know who that man is….” I felt terribly unprepared in the irony that my well-planned sharing was failing miserably. Then, it dawned on me. To this day, my nearly 78-year old father shares one consistent historical narrative about my grandfather in several unplanned, but appropriate contexts each year that I can remember:

A victim of the Jim Crow racist farming debt system, his father was once a wealthy, ingenious and hot tempered man who lost the four fields that he once owned because the system charged extremely high interest rates to Blacks that would make it nearly impossible for them to ever repay any debt, small or large. Edmund Hughes found no other way to clear the family of 12 of the debt beyond paying the ultimate sacrifice, his life. When my father was a little boy, my grandfather committed suicide in one of the fields that he lost to Old Jim Crow. Soon after his father was dead, he had to quit school to work and he used to cry often, because he wanted to go to school rather than to work with adults in the fields.

When my father didn't recognize my grandfather 100% in the photo, I was compelled to go back to the historical evidence that I had collected to provide a historical context around the photo that may help me understand what had just happened. Each time I went back to the evidence with new answers and new questions. Additional searches at http://www.ancestry.com to augment the artifact from my cousin indeed provided further insight into the context of the photo.

From the 1940 census, I found my grandfather at 50 years old and my father at 4 years old. The death information for my grandfather suggests that he committed suicide near the age of 57. These documents together put my father at only 11 years old when his father died. My birth records note my father as having only been schooled to grade 6. It was beginning to make sense why my father recognized his aunt, but not his own father. First, his father and Aunt Becky looked to be in their 20s or maybe even early 30s in that photo. My father would have never seen his father at that age, because he would have been in his 50s and under extreme stress by the time my dad was old enough to really recall his father’s face. Second, Aunt Becky apparently aged quite well in Virginia Beach, VA and lived to reach a much older age than my grandfather, so my father saw her in adulthood more regularly and thus, could identify her easily in the photo. Third, my father was 76 years old in 2011, when I showed him that photo, which means he hadn’t seen my grandfather in 65 years. I thought to myself, “my peers and I temporarily forget faces we haven’t seen in 5-10 years, even the faces of family members, so temporarily forgetting a face after 65 years is certainly not only plausible, but probable.”

The good news related to this point was that the names of two of the three people in the photo had been labeled Rebecca (Aunt Becky) Hughes and Edmund Hughes, seemingly in Aunt Becky’s handwriting, in a space that was close to the person pictured in the photo. The third person was not named, but bore no resemblance to any other Hughes family member that my father knew and the names were not positioned, seemingly to name that third person. For me, the picture that corresponded to the name Edmond Hughes bore an uncanny resemblance to my father, particularly his very stylish pleated khakis and pressed shirt, his lean sturdy build, dark skin and the way he positioned his large, work-beaten hands on his lap. Once I put all of this information together in my head, I found a moment before bedtime, when the house was not so busy with people, to share it with my mother and father. Sharing this more complete historical context surrounding the photo eased my guilt from the initial sharing and confusion and it seemed to be actually quite well-received and appreciated by my parents, as well.

Concluding Thoughts
In the photo, my grandfather’s demeanor was the epitome of what Claude Steele describes as “a valuable person with good prospects,” and apparently he was such a person, until he met the cruel farming system of old Jim Crow. My findings trouble Jim Crow, because they tell me how the Hughes family became poor. It was not because they were invaluable folks without good prospects. It was not because they failed to be particularly ingenious or studious. It was not because they were lazy and dependent upon government assistance. The Hughes family became poor, because they were robbed. They were victims of dignity theft. They were victims of social identity theft and U.S. policies of the Jim Crow south sanctioned the robbery with little recourse beyond suicide and little Black male children who quit school to work.

My preparation to share and receive this sensitive artifact and related information was paramount to my willingness and ability to share it with the Hughes family and with readers today. The photo revealed a piece of the puzzle that continues to illuminate and clarify horrible episodes of death and dropping out of school in the Hughes family history. From my purview, suicides and dropouts are horrible episodes of any family history, and they are episodes that most people within my sphere of influence ignore, deny, or refuse to discuss publicly for fear of humiliation and suffering.

A critical family history/critical ethnography perspective supported my pang to confront and explore the sources of these episodes in the Hughes family. Somewhere along the road of confrontation and exploration toward these sources of pain, I was overwhelmed by the fact that I am still here and with the legitimized authority to share this story in this venue to an audience that may read it and hopefully decide that the current repackaged discourse on resegregation, privatization and separate-but-equal are welcoming invitations back to Jim Crow’s house. I hope sincerely, that readers can be inspired by my critical family history enough to embrace and act upon their own family histories critically and to receive and share the sensitive information from them in ways that keep troubling Jim Crow.

Dr. Sherick Hughes, MA, MPA, Ph.D. is Associate Professor with Tenure, and Founder and Director, Interpretive Research Suite & Carter Qualitative Thought Lab Graduate Program Coordinator/Chair, Cultural Studies & Literacies Program Founder and Director, Black Alumni of the School of Education (BASE), School of Education, University of North Carolina, CB #3500, Peabody Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599

Troubling Jim Crow: Installment #1, Guest Editorial

(We've moved to: http://christinesleeter.org/troubling-jim-crow/)

By Dr. Sherick Hughes, Guest Writer

At campus events, it is not unusual to find me singing the fight song of my alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With the first thunderous clap, I join the rhythm and singing of the refrain, “I’m a Tarheel born, I’m a Tarheel bred and when I die, I’m a Tarheel dead.”  Unlike many of the beloved fellow alumni with whom I sing at the state’s public flagship, I am quite literally a Tarheel born and whose family was enslaved and bred in the Tarheel state. Since my return to the home of the Tarheels as a tenured faculty member, I haven’t been timid about naming this irony within my spheres of influence. Having that little nugget of knowledge about the particular history of my family in the state brings pain and pride, progress and push-back; sending electrical signals of struggle and tiny ripples of hope up and down my spine each time I sing that refrain. I share that irony with others, now, with the inherent power and complications of my current social positioning, so it is not lost at the intersection of nostalgia and ignorance; yours, mine, and theirs. I am a proud Black man with maternal relatives dating back to the 1800s and slavery at Camden County’s Bartlett Plantation, the same county of my parents’ birth and where my six siblings and I matriculated through elementary, middle and high school.

Just months before Dr. Christine Sleeter offered me the honor to serve as a guest write for her “History and Family blog,” I received one of the best holiday gifts of my adult life from a socially distant, but genetically close female cousin via http://www.ancestry.com. It would be the first and only photograph to emerge of my deceased paternal grandfather, Edmund Hughes (who was my female cousin’s great uncle). The aftermath of this gift deepened my interest in translating Sleeter’s (2013) critical family history across my nuanced Black family with a particular interest in committing to our history in critical ways that trouble Jim Crow’s incessant misinformation and dis-information (i.e., purposefully erroneous narratives).

Critical family history “applies insights from…critical theory… to an analysis of how one’s family has been constructed historically…within and through relations of power” (Sleeter, 2013). Therefore, the goal of this series of blogs is to describe the three key strategies that I have applied to analyze how my family has been constructed historically within and through power relations in North Carolina. I will share one key strategy in each of three blog installments. Ultimately, the compilation intends to describe how I (with assistance from my relatives) am beginning the process of troubling the faulty, oppressive intergenerational narratives and unsubstantiated rumors spread by Jim Crow with hopes that this process will inspire others to do so.

I am finding that critical family history can be a particularly useful methodological translation across the lived experiences of my family and me. Albeit unintended, the Black critical family history techniques shared in this blog echo those that have been applied in the final wave of family history discussed by Gardner (2003) in “Black and white: American genealogy and popular response."  For Gardner, it seems that my work here would represent a third wave of family history, because it not only intends to build on heritage studies, but also “makes visible how race, class, culture, gender, and other forms of difference and power played out in the family's history” (Sleeter, 2013). It is my sincere hope that the information shared in the three installments that follow will illuminate the potential of this kind of Black critical family history work. Perhaps, in the naming and sharing of such techniques, other Black scholar-activists and I may concomitantly empower ourselves further by gaining more complex, clear and transparent understandings of the “vexing issues of the present by unearthing how they played out in our own pasts, and how the present is linked to the past” (Sleeter, 2013). And, perhaps, we may find other ways to connect and apply Black critical family history to critical race theory in education (Dixson & Rousseau, 2006; and Lynn & Dixson, 2013).

References

Rousseau, C. K., Eds. (2006). Critical race theory in education. New York: Routledge.

Gardner, E. (2003). Black and white: American genealogy, race, and popular response.The Midwest Quarterly 44, 148-160.

Lynn, M. & Dixson, A. D. (Eds.) (2013). Handbook of Critical Race Theory in Education. New York, NY: Routledge.

Sleeter, C. (2013). Critical Family History Blog. Retrieved May 19, 2013, at https://sites.google.com/a/christinesleeter.org/critical-family-history/Home/critical-family-history-theory

Dr. Sherick Hughes, MA, MPA, Ph.D. is Associate Professor with Tenure, and Founder and Director, Interpretive Research Suite & Carter Qualitative Thought Lab Graduate Program Coordinator/Chair, Cultural Studies & Literacies Program Founder and Director, Black Alumni of the School of Education (BASE), School of Education, University of North Carolina, CB #3500, Peabody Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599