Program Note: Joe Johns traveled to South Carolina to do some genealogical research of his own, tracing Michelle Obama’s roots to a plantation in South Carolina. To see his process and findings tune in tonight, AC360º, 10PM ET.
The main farmhouse in Bernice, Louisiana.
Allison Davis
AC360° Fellow
The earliest memories I have of Bernice, Louisiana, are through the eyes of a grumpy 10-year old, sick of being shuttled back and forth between Shoney’s, Wal-Mart and an old courthouse near the center of town. It was in that tiny courthouse that my mother spent hours searching through dusty and yellowing papers for a mention of her great-great grandfather’s name.
These images of the town differ greatly from my mother’s. She thinks back to summers spent on her grandmother’s farm, hearing stories of her ancestors and sitting on the very same porches of the houses they built.
Bernice, a town of 1,809 people in northern Louisiana is known for being east of Shreveport and close to Arkansas. It is where my mother proudly grew up and, as I found out, it is more than just a town of box stores and fast food restaurants. It is where my mother’s family owns about 283 acres of land that later turned out to be the key to unlocking our family genealogy.
Thirteen years ago my mother decided to make good on a promise that she made to her grandmother: to document the family history. She set out to trace our family legacy as far back as it would go. She began her search with only a few pieces of information: she knew the names of her great-great grandfather, John Payne, and his son, Allen, and she knew they were both former slaves. Armed with only these pieces of a much bigger puzzle, my mother and I flew back to Bernice to start putting it all together.
Most family histories are woven with tales of triumph and travels of ancestors, of knowledge of when it all began and how it all played out. For us, it was the occasional visit to a sprawling farm in a sweltering small town that served as the only glimpse of our background. I hardly had any knowledge of my mother’s heritage. To me, my family history began with my father’s birth in Ohio and my mother’s in Louisiana. Even my mother had lost touch with her 12 year-old self who had once known every tree and rock on the family land. Our past was being eaten by our present.
Many understand the desire to connect with the past. Especially among black communities, so much depends on the tracing of our roots. But the obstacles involved in building that bridge from past to present are at times nearly insurmountable.
There are no census records for blacks before 1870 and often times slave owners never noted the names of their slaves. Our family is relatively lucky; my mother was able to find land records that placed her great grandfather early on in her search. History has a way of being evasive, however, and trails went cold, records lost. Needle in a hay stack? A cake walk compared to searching through decades worth of faded documents just to find mention of a single name with no proof it was the correct one. My mother, the sole family historian, was often compelled to give up.
Fortunately for us, she didn’t. Though it took her nearly 13 years, she has given the family something beyond just a plot of land in Louisiana. I never understood why she was so excited to find a decaying marriage license or a birth year in a census record or a record of the sale of my great-great-great grandfather John Payne to his owner, Daniel in 1840. All of these add up to something so much greater than fading ink.
My mother’s search, pieced together by land deeds, records of slave purchases and census records, tells the story of John and Nancy Payne, two slaves from Alabama, who had a son, Allen. Allen purchased 40 acres that, with the help of my great-grand mother Mary Jane, later expanded into 312 acres between 1887 and 1922.
While his father was sold for 25 cents in 1840, Allen was worth $100 as a farmer in 1870. We now know when he was married and when he had children. He opened a school, helped build a church. From captivity was borne a life, from tragedy was borne a legacy.
For my mother, the trail has gone completely dead, she can do no more without a team of historians behind her, but the goal has been accomplished. Our history is one with shaky dates and gaps in years, but it is ours.
Last August, I returned to the 283 remaining acres for the Payne family reunion, the first I’d been to in almost a decade. I helped my mother compile her many years of research into a story that she gave to our entire family. As I shuffled through more than a decade of her work, I began to realize what the sum of countless flights to Louisiana and hours spent with my mother in courthouses and libraries meant – an incredible story that brought a new found sense of pride and unity to Allen Payne’s descendents.
crazy
