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Introduction
Family
Origins -- Church, Family, & Place
I call Jerusalem my home. I was born, however, in
South Baltimore at University of Maryland Hospital. Jerusalem
remains a place of refuge and spiritual comfort. It is where Mama
lives, where Daddy is buried. It was and continues to be a
village, a hamlet of about ten families, spread out around a
church, named Jerusalem Baptist, founded by freed Christian slaves
in the late 1860s. There are some who believe it was named, not
merely for the ancient and holy city of Judea, but also for the
former county seat of Southampton, Virginia, that the Christian
prophet and apostle Nathaniel Turner intended to seize in his holy
war in August 1831. The first sixteen years of my life were
conditioned by this place and when I was twelve I was immersed,
along with others my age, in Jerusalem’s baptismal pool by the
then new pastor Reverend John Boone.
Jerusalem
is located in a piney woods five miles outside the township of
Jarratt, named for a late eighteenth-century English landowning
family that settled on the borders of two counties Sussex and
Greensville in southeastern Virginia, about thirty-five miles
south of Petersburg. Route 301 (Old Halifax Road) and now
Interstate 95 run through the town. Along with Emporia, Jarratt
was a significant during the Civil War when General Grant held
Petersburg in seige. Jarratt Station, a crossroads of train
traffic, was burned down and the rails twisted to assure that
supplies did not reach the Confederate Army.
The
last of her generation, Elizabeth Jarratt, who died nearly a
hundred years old, was the last Jarratt to live in the
English-styled house that sits at the head of the main street of
the business district near the old station. When my aunt Annie
cared for her before her death, I visited the old home and honored
Miss Elizabeth with a bouquet of orange roses. The old house has
been abandoned, except for the Negro attendant, who, it has been
rumored, has taken up residence in the room where his mistress
used to sleep.
Despite
the former sway of the Jarratts and other white families, much of
the land acquired by Jerusalem was formerly owned by William
Bassett, a mulatto and the first pastor of the church. Along with
others of his generation, Bassett fostered among his congregants a
program of land ownership and education. Early in its history as
the church prospered, there was internal conflict. Bassett led a
portion of the members away from Jerusalem and helped to found
Hassidiah Baptist, a church about five miles southwest and near
the township of Jarratt. When he passed in the late 1880s Reverend
Bassett was elaborately buried in the Hassidiah cemetery within a
wrought iron fence with a four-foot headstone. Mama’s
grandmother Malvina, a member of Hassidiah, was buried not far
from the foot of his grave. My immediate family, however, has
continued as members of Jerusalem since its founding.
The family land of about ten acres, on which I was
raised, was consecrated over a century ago by the fathers of
Jerusalem, former Christian slaves. So I consider it sacred, a
magical place. My grandparents purchased this land from the church in
1948, the year of my birth. Before that year, my grandfather
William Norman Lewis (Daddy) and my grandmother Ella Jackson Lewis
(Mama) had been sharecroppers and lived on other people’s land
from their marriage in1926 until they acquired this piece of
church land. Just
before
moving to their new home, Mama and Daddy worked the
farm of Cary Mason, a Negro farmer whose husband was called fondly
“Kicky Bob.”
Old Jerusalem with its cemetery, now overgrown by
trees and bushes, was constructed beyond what is now the open
fields in back of our house. When I was a boy, Daddy and I went
back near Old Jerusalem with mule and wagon and snow on the ground
to cut a tree for fuel. It was then that he pointed out the sunken graves
of former Christian slaves. Though it still can be detected, that
wagon path to the old church has now been overgrown by bushes and
trees.
Before
they could reside on their ten acres, Mama and Daddy first had to
clear the forest of trees and bushes. This readying process was
done by cross-cut saw, ax, grubbing hoe, and a mule and wagon.
Once removed from the earth or the trunks, and then piled, the
bushes, limbs, and stumps were burnt and the ashes spread out on
the land; the logs of a worthy size were then taken to the mill to
be cut into boards for the new house. After the land was cleared for
occupancy, they needed a well as a source of water. Daddy dug the
twenty-foot hole with pick and shovel and Mama pulled up the mud
and clay by pulley, rope, and bucket and dumped it. Mama and Daddy
were sturdy as their
parents before them, twentieth-century pioneers, of a sort.
Building
& Rebuilding
Daddy
was a trained carpenter and so he built, with the assistance of
Mama and neighbors, a four-room house with an upstairs in sight of
the church and its cemetery.
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By
the time they moved into the house at Jerusalem all their
daughters, except Annie (called “Bunk”) had married or
gone to the city, to Richmond or Baltimore. Four of us
thus lived in the new house—Mama, Daddy, Annie (their
youngest daughter, then about ten), and me. Destined for a
short life, that house in 1952, when Annie was about
thirteen and I about four, burned down along with
everything therein. Though there was suspicion of foul
play, none was brought to account. For me, the worst of
the loss was twofold—the old, wind-up Victrola and its
78 rpm records and the space to be alone indoors.
While
Daddy rebuilt, circumstances thus required us to live for
a year or so in the cramped space of a cinder-block
building. He had built this structure closer to the
dirt road for a country store; on weekends, it was used
also as a juke joint, which may have caused some
consternation for the saints of the church.
The
present house was built in front of the old house and thus
closer to the road but not as close as the store. Daddy
constructed this house twice as large, with eight rooms
downstairs and three low-ceiling rooms upstairs. He wanted a
family house so that his children would have a place to
return if they got in trouble in the city. His
thoughtfulness has kept the family tied together and the
family has made ample use of the house. Nearly five decades
later that house still stands and is still in use. |
| Photo above left: Mama,
Bustuh Rivers, and Daddy, 1956 |
Mama and Annie and her husband Nat now
live in the house, which has been given a face life with new
siding. It remains a place for faraway family members to make
visits home.
The
Coming End of Black Farm Life
It
was in this house that I grew into adolescence and learned moral
and spiritual values and to obey God and my parents. The bible and
discussions of the scriptures were at the center of our lives. It
was allso in this house that I first performed my studies and prepared
for my classes. There were few intrusions from the outside
world—no telephone and seldom even a newspaper. There was the AM
radio, however, that picked up a
few stations. A local rural station in Emporia provided news and
agricultural reports in the morning, country and western music in
the early afternoon and the more harmless versions of rock and
roll (Pat Boone and the Platters) in the late afternoon, and then
it signed off. At night, there was Randy’s Record’s Mart of
Nashville, Tennessee, with its blues/jazz format. I also heard
here the
first Clay-Liston fight, and prayed a victory for the Louisville
Lip. When we got our black-and-white television in August 1958, I spent
many hours before the tube until the screen was filled with snow
and I was wakened to go to bed.
Outwardly,
ours was a fairly simple life. There was no indoor plumbing or
central heating. Water was carried from the well in a pail and the
house in the winter was heated by wood, which had to be cut with a
cross-cut saw and chopped and carried into the house. We relieved
ourselves in an outhouse set off from the main building at a
distance. The last one constructed with its concrete floor still
stands, barely. There were other structures out back—a barn, mule
stables, hog pens, chicken coop, wood shed, and a smokehouse. This
last smokehouse was built on the concrete front porch of the house
that burned down. In it, after the hog killing season, meat
(hams, shoulders, fatback, bacon, snouts, ears, tails, feet) was
salted, smoked, and stored. Sausage packed in guts hanged from the
ceiling. There were fields in back of the house in which we raised
tobacco, cotton, corn, peanuts, and a vegetable garden. A mound of
pine straw and dirt preserved the
potatoes.
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Inwardly,
our lives were fairly complex. Making a life, which means
sustaining a family, is never a simple matter, even in our
agrarian world, in which there were primarily two industries,
harvesting the forest and tilling the soil. This new house had to
be furnished, all eight rooms and upstairs, and made into another
home. This project of home and family required the energies,
commitment, and creativity of all hands, adults and children, and,
at times, the resources of those away from home. Nine years older
than I, Annie and I grew up together in this house at Jerusalem as
older sister and younger brother. We had our chores, which were
many. Here we found no shame in work and learned how to work and
find one’s humanity in work. Wood had to be cut and toted, pails
of water hauled, clothes washed on a board and hanged on a line;
and the fields hoed.
The harvest had to be taken in and stored; pigs killed and
cleaned; garden produce picked and canned. There was always a
harvest surplus that Mama and Daddy willingly and happily shared
with their children, kinsmen, neighbors, and visitors living
nearby or in the city away from home. Of course, there were always
debts and insurance to be paid. |
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Mama Photographed at a
church gathering, 1950s |
By
late 1948, Mama began working as a cook at Jarratt Motel, up on
Route 301, eight hours a day, for less than twenty dollars a week.
In addition to the six days as a cook at the motel, at
which she retired in the mid-1970s, Mama continued to work the
fields at the house, raise her chickens, can and store meat away
for the winter. Daddy farmed, worked at sawmills, built houses,
and whatever other work he could find to make ends meet. His last
job, I believe, was as a custodian at the new modern elementary
school built in Jarratt in the late 1960s. Despite our trials and
accomplishments, we all looked forward to Christmas, when family
would come from afar, and a grand meal would be set on tables.
Daddy would pray a long and sustained prayer and then we would eat
until all burst at the seams. Then presents would be shared and
opened and all seemed right with the world.
On these grand
holiday occasions, our family communed with those present and those
remembered. Memories of those fallen by the wayside were then
passed along.
Assembling
the Ancient Past
Mama’s
paternal grandmother Malvina Jackson was born in 1850 a slave in
Scotland Neck, North Carolina, and died 1952, over a hundred years
old. Leaving her dead husband John in Carolina, Malvina, called
“Malviny,” and her four sons Thomas, John, Willie, and Herbert
and daughter Emily came up to Jarratt in the early 1880s and made
it their home the duration of their lives.
| Mama’s father, Thomas
Jefferson Jackson (1865-1951), called “TeeJay” by his drinking
buddies, was the oldest son of Malviny. TeeJay met and married
Laura Williams, daughter of the upright Sam Williams, born 1829(?)
a slave, on some indefinite farm in southeastern Virginia. (Former
slaves were not too anxious to speak of their former lives. They
were new men and women in Christ.) Fannie Mason was Sam
William’s beautiful and fair wife and Laura’s mother. Of a
weak, it seems, constitution, Fannie died in her thirties shortly after
Laura’s birth, about 1872, and Sam Williams died in 1910, about
eighty years old, a year before Mama was born..
After Fannie’s death, Sam Williams never remarried
and thus raised his three children—Tempie, Allan, and
Laura—alone on his ten-acre farm. He lived to see his two
daughters well-married. Tempie had two daughters Merty and Suzanna. |
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Photo right: Lucinda, me,
Mama, my sister Theresa, 1997. |
Through Merty, Tempie has numerous descendants. Suzanna, whom we
called “Cousin Sue,” was a farmer with one son, Charles.
Outliving her son, she died in her eighties and, because of her
thriftiness, according to reports, left her two grown grandsons
hundred of thousands of dollars, some say a million dollars. Allan called “Guy” was a
dwarf and died without issue. Laura was the baby girl. She was
about twenty-three when she married TeeJay in 1893. Together, they
had eight children: Wiley, Fannie, Jimmy, Sally, Sam, Tom, and
Ella (the baby girl). Wiley, Fannie, Jimmy, and Tom died as young
adults. While in Hackensack, New Jersey, Tom had a daughter named
Betty. Sally and Sam, both dead, also have numerous descendants.
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The
oldest of TeeJay’s children was Henry Robinson, whose mother was
a resident of Southampton. Uncle Henry, who died in 1984, had
three daughters. His father, Teejay was a timber boss for Gray
Lumber Company in Waverly, which is situated at the
other end of the county from Jarratt, about forty
miles away. As Mama recalls, she rarely saw her
father as a child. He came home about once a month;
he did, however, send money home on a regular basis.
Laura supplemented the family income by taking in
wash and working in the fields. According to Mama,
they all knew nothing but work; there was little
time for formal learning or travel. As an adult,
she did manage to visit by the Trailways bus as often as possible
her sister Sally who moved to Baltimore in the late 1920s. I spent
my first two months of life in Aunt Sally’s house on South
Fremont.
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The
Birth of the Lewis Family
At
fifteen, Ella Jackson, born 1911, married William Norman Lewis
(1905-1970). Daddy had
seven brothers, all the sons of Mary Lewis—Edward, Irvin, Joe,
Richard, Arthur, Percy, and Theodore (called “Billy”).
Daddy’s mother Mary Lewis, born 1875 and died 1959, was thirty
at his birth. Never a landowner, Mary lived most of her life on
her sister Sally Myrick’s five acres. Their mother Betty Jones
was born and became a young woman in slavery and never married.
Mary, however, took possession of her father’s name and thus
surnamed all her sons Lewis.
For, if nothing else, they were her very own. Mary worked most of
her life as a field hand on the Owens farm. Mary’s seventh son,
Percy, was a mulatto, fathered by her employer Marvin Owens. In
her seventies, Mary married Jake King. Her first marriage was of
short duration. One of Mary’s descendants, through Daddy’s
eldest brother Edward Lewis and his son James, is the diminutive
actor Webster Lewis, who in the 1970s had his own show on
television.
Grandma
Mary also raised the son of her sister Sally Myrick, Richard,
called “Blind Dick.” He was born without sight. Working as a
domestic in Richmond, Sally was unable to care for him and thus
that responsibility devolved to her sister Mary. The same age as
Daddy’s brother Richard, Blind Dick died when I was a boy. All
eight of Mary’s sons are now deceased, except, possibly, Percy,
who deserted his family in the mid-1950s. Like many young black
men of southern Virginia, Daddy loved the land and so did most of
his brothers.
Arthur, whose father was Daniel Robinson and a
deacon at Jerusalem, also remained in the countryside. He had
three children—Martha, Mary (called “Phoodie”), and Herbert.
Martha and Mary moved to Philadelphia and raised their families
there and continue to live there. Herbert, their brother now a
deacon, remained in Jarratt. Uncle Arthur is dear in my memory. It
was he who bought me a little blackboard and taught me my letters
and numbers. His foresight, interest, and diligence led me to
excel in my elementary studies and outstrip my peers and graduate
a year early.
As
young men, both Joe and Richard moved to Richmond. At his death
Uncle Joe, however, was returned to Jarratt and was buried in the
family cemetery; Uncle Richard, however, was buried in a
proprietary cemetery in Baltimore. His second wife Catherine
wanted him near her. Although I met Uncle Joe several times, I did
not know him as well as Richard, whom Daddy called “Dick.”
Uncle Richard made his life as a mechanic, first in Richmond and
later in Baltimore.
When I was a boy, I loved for Uncle Richard to
come home to Jerusalem. He was “big time” and always had for
me a few coins and at times a few bills. In Baltimore in the late
1960s, I worked for Uncle Richard, who managed the preparation of
used cars for A.D. Anderson Chevrolet, whose lot was at 25th
and Maryland. I washed, waxed and buffed, and vacuumed cars.
Unlike Daddy, Richard was very playful; he even had an electrified
train set in his basement on Bentalou. Richard had two sons, one
in his youth by his first wife called “Sonny” (now dead) and a
much younger son named Carlton
Uncle
Richard, a lover of cigars and big Oldsmobiles, attempted to
persuade his brother to move to Baltimore. Daddy had no love for
the city and thus remained in the country of his birth and became
a sharecropper on a number of farms and supported his mother Mary.
He worked also in the timber industry, the other major source of
wages, most often at Cap’n Smith’s sawmill, the place that
milled most of the boards for the family houses. But Daddy was
also a carpenter and bricklayer. Like most men and women of the
countryside, he possessed multiple talents, which were necessary
for survival and progress. Shortly after their marriage and after
living with Grandma Mary for awhile, Mama and Daddy lived for a
year or so with Daddy’s father George Graves.
Cox'
Snow & George Graves
Born
a slave fifteen years before Abraham Lincoln was elected
president, George Graves (1845-1932), a mulatto, had a
considerable estate of twenty-five acres by 1926. He was “twelve
years old in Cox’s Snow,” he told Mama. (According to The Negro in Virginia
[1940, p. 32], numerous slaves dated their ages by this snow that
“came up to the eaves of the house.” Cox’s Snow was named
for Dr. Philip Cox, who had delivered many Negro babies.
Responding to a medical call, he went out during the snow and was
found in his buggy, reins in hand, frozen to death. This was the
“worst snow that ever hit the Old Dominion.” It came the
winter of 1857—February 9, 10 and 11—and “covered all
Virginia and most of North Carolina.”) Thus George Graves, a
deacon at Jerusalem, was sixty years old when Daddy was born and
about sixty-two when Richard was born.
Actually,
Daddy had three other siblings. For George Graves had another
family in Petersburg before he met Mary Lewis and had two sons by
her (William and Richard, Mary’s fourth and fifth sons). George
Graves’ other children were Alice, Molly, and Edward. They were
adults when Daddy was born, probably in their twenties or
thirties. Certainly, Alice was as old or older than Mary Lewis
when Daddy was born.
Sharecropping
& Getting an Education
Though
Petersburg was Edward Graves primary residence, he lived for
awhile with his father, George Graves, whose estate was across the
road from where Mary resided. Edward Lewis (called “Little
Eddie”), Mary’s first child, was the son of Edward Graves, who
seemingly was of a weak constitution and died mysteriously in his
late twenties or early thirties. Little Eddie was Mary’s “love
child” and his father, whom Mary had hoped to marry, the love of
her life. Alice and Molly inherited George Graves’ twenty-five
acres, sold it at his death, and were never seen thereafter. In
his early eighties, George Graves offered to sell his estate to
Daddy at market value. Though he could have purchased the land
from his mulatto father by installments, Daddy, however, refused
to buy that which he felt should have been his by inheritance.
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Though
highly skilled in the arts of rural life, Mama and Daddy never
finished their elementary education. Though he could read, write,
and figure, Daddy often boasted, for he had much to be proud of,
that he went to school only one day of
his life.
He exaggerated, according to Mama.She
stayed a more extended period at Creath School,
which was about two miles north of Jerusalem on a dirt road that
wound through Sansee Swamp. The two-room clapped board school for
colored children was named for the local white farmer, Luther
Creath, who donated the land on which the school was built. Many
of the area Negroes also worked on the Creath farm. Creath school
had originally been part of the church school at Jerusalem
Baptist, which has been on its present foundation since 1870. The
Creath building was torn down in the 1970s.
It
had been in operation since the early years of the second decade of
the twentieth century.
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| A painting of Mama by Kaki |
When Mama went to Creath she lived three to
five miles north of the school at her grandfather Sam Williams’
place.
Grandma Mary, Daddy’s mother, lived a mile north of the
school across from the Owen's farm. Like many other children, Ella
was taken out of school in the spring for planting and in the fall
for harvesting. She always found herself behind in her studies; in
addition, she did not have the necessary clothing to present
herself well. So she dropped out of school at ten or eleven to
work at home with her mother Laura or on the Creath and Owen's
farms. She too can read, write, and figure.
Daddy
(fondly called “Pompsie”
or “Tinka”) and Mama had five daughters: Virginia, Susie,
Lucinda, Edith, and Annie. Like Mama before them, they too
attended Creath School and all five finished Creath’s seven
grades. Mama sacrificed to assure that they went beyond her own
studies. All five went on to the training school in Waverly and
all, I believe, reached at least the ninth grade before dropping
out and then marrying. Mama’s daughters were all children of the
Great Depression; that is, everything was scarce, especially
money. Lucinda recalls working for seventy-five cents a day for
ten hours work in the fields. Mama thought her daughter had it
good, for she had worked for fifty cents a day. Love of family and
hope for the future, however, endured through it all.
Five
Sisters & Me
Susie lived and continues to live just beyond the
back field, on the same road as the church. With an additional
purchase of land from Jerusalem, Daddy gave Susie and her husband
Clarence Carter this parcel of land and built with his own hands a
house for her after Clarence’s death. Clarence died on the way
to the hospital after a gunfight near Dew Drop Inn with the local
police in a town ten miles south of Jarratt, called Emporia.
Clarence’s family was from Southampton but lived in Sussex and
then in Greensville counties. (By some reports, Clarence’s
mother Elsie was the daughter of Jim Jordan of Como, North
Carolina. In the 1950s, this fabled root doctor, whose customers
came from faraway places such as Michigan and New York, amassed a
considerable fortune.)
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A
grieving widow in October 1956, Susie was left with three sons:
Norman, Clarence Vaughn and Clinton McNeal (called “Mack” or
“Clint.”). Norman, born the same year as I, was the oldest of
the three brothers. Like Mama’s five daughters, we four boys
along with other children of Jerusalem walked to Creath and
graduated. As soon as we were
old enough we worked the fields behind the house under Daddy’s
supervision. After three decades a widow, Susie married George
Threatt, a truck driver who died in the 1990s; he
lies in Jerusalem’s cemetery near Susie’s first husband
Clarence Carter.
Mama and Daddy’s oldest daughter Virginia (called
“Sistuh”) married Samuel “Bustuh” Rivers, whose
grandfather was a great Negro landowner in the Gray-Yale area (See
black-and-white photo above of Mama and Daddy on porch, between
them is Bustuh Rivers).
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A painting of Daddy by
Kaki |
The
Rivers’ family land was on the edges of and extended into
Southampton County. Sistuh and Bustuh had four children: Sandra,
Elaine, Lydia, and Sam Junior, called “Sonny.” They all went
to an elementary modeled on Creath called Rivers School, built on
land donated by their great grandfather. Their grandfather
Norfleet, “Snooks” Rivers, a farmer, also ran a juke joint at
Rivers Mill in Southampton, where corn was also milled. This
manmade body of water also served recreationally as a fishpond. As
a little boy, I stayed with Bustuh and Sistuh for days in the
two-story farmhouse in back of the school. With the building of
modern schools, Bustuh turned Rivers School into a juke joint and
then later Daddy helped remodel it into a house for Bustuh, Sistuh,
and their family.
Edith married Cleveland “Skik” Taylor and they
eventually had four children—Robert Lee, Wanda, Kenneth, and
Cleveland. Skik died when they were children. Their early years
were spent in Cherry Hill, a government project south of downtown
Baltimore. Concerned about the welfare of his daughter Edith and
her children,
Daddy convinced her to return to Virginia with her children. He
had a house built for her on a parcel of the ten acres at
Jerusalem. Though they started school in Baltimore, Edith’s
children all completed their education in Sussex. Edith died in
her late thirties and lies not too far from her father William in
the church cemetery. Wanda and Cleveland continue to live on what
was church land. Kenneth and Robert Lee have both made their homes
in Texas.
Lucinda
married William Lee Carter, brother of Clarence. These two Carter
boys had about eight or nine other brothers and sisters. By
William Lee, Lucinda had two children: Celestine and Deborah.
Excluding me, the first child, Lucinda also had three other
children: Theresa, Ronald, and Aisha. Except for me, all of
Lucinda’s children attended public schools in Baltimore. At
seventeen, when Lucinda first went to Baltimore, she carried me in
her belly and lived with her Aunt Sally (Mama’s sister) during
her pregnancy. Soon after my birth, while in the cradle unattended
I was bitten by a rat. I was thus sent back to Jarratt when I was
two months old and raised by my grandparents, who feared for my
health and safety. I have always called my grandmother Ella
“Mama” and my grandfather William “Daddy.” In the 1970s
Lucinda remarried and continues to be married to Grover Reed,
formerly of Georgia. He is the father of Aisha.
Annie, who now lives with and cares for Mama, married
three times. She has indeed been a blessing for her mother, who is
now 91. Dropping out of Waverly Training School at sixteen,
she first married David Hawthorne, who fathered her first two
sons, David and Clarence (called “Peter”). Their father David,
Sr. is now dead. Her other two children, Michael and Michele, came
from her second husband, Amos Fleming, whom Annie met in South
Baltimore. A fun guy, Amos still lives in the countryside, near
Emporia. Her third husband is Nathaniel Givens, a farmer and
mason. Annie’s children were educated partially in Baltimore and
then in Sussex.
Prodigal
Son & Family Trailblazing
The
first in my family, I attended Central High School from 1960 to
1965. Replacing the wooden barracks-like buildings of Waverly
Training School, Central, a modern
structure of brick and steel, was newly built in 1959 for Negroes
in order to sidestep the Brown decision of the Supreme Court. The
previous generation traveled forty miles by bus to get to Waverly,
whereas we had only twenty miles to get to Central. That
generation thought we had it easy.
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At
sixteen, I graduated from Central, the first in my family to
complete high school. In 1965, I left Jerusalem on the Trailways
Bus for Baltimore and enrolled for collegiate studies at Morgan
State. It was another first. I, however, dropped out of Morgan
after five semesters and two years of ROTC, Spring semester 1968.
My matriculation at Morgan was interrupted by the Black
Consciousness Movement, the Vietnam War, and the larger cultural
revolution taking place in America and the world. Norman, I
believe, earned the family honor of the first to graduate from
college when he received his degree in business administration
at Norfolk State.
I have lived most of my life in Baltimore. But I also
lived near College Park, Maryland, where I attended the
state university, and in Washington, DC. |
| A painting of Rudy at 12 by Kaki |
After I completed my graduate studies at
College Park, I also lived four years in Louisiana—a year in
Monroe, two years in New Orleans, and a year in Baton Rouge. A
year before I went to Louisiana, I spent ten weeks in Zaire,
Central Africa. A trip paid for by the Peace Corps, it was a
wonderful experience that contributed to my maturity and world
view.
Letters
of An Abiding Faith
After
I left Jerusalem in 1965, Mama wrote me numerous letters from
home. I managed to preserve fifty-eight of them, written during an
eighteen-year period (1976-1994) while I lived in various places
in Maryland, District of Columbia, and Louisiana. These letters
reveal the general state of the family, its health and activities;
life at the family farmhouse; death of family members and
neighbors; and problems of family inheritance. They also contain
reports on the weather; words of encouragement to me, her
“son”; statements of religious faith; Mama’s anxieties,
fears, and pains; and her adventures beyond Virginia. At times her
simple sincerity is exceedingly moving.
In
going to school irregularly, Mama’s writing is not easy to read
for one unaccustomed to her hand. In transcribing the letters, I
kept a semblance of her cacographic style and syntax. What is most
important, which the reader will find pleasing, is that her unique
voice can still be heard. In editing the letters, I placed an
asterisk at words and at the end of sentences that would not be
understood otherwise by someone not familiar with my family’s
inner workings and relationships. At the bottom of the page in a
smaller font, I added explanatory notes to give context for the
letters and an understanding of words, persons, and situations. To
create greater textuality, I have added not only biographical but
also autobiographical material about where I was and what I was
doing and who my relationships were when the letters were
received.
The
letters enclosed here thus present a family portrait, lived lives,
as well as portraits of persons outside the family—neighbors,
friends, acquaintances, teachers, and employers. All of it is not
pretty. But it is sincere, honest, and spiritually revealing. The
driving motive or desire for pulling these letters together in
this format is that I want my family to be remembered. Unlike the
dead souls of former slaves in the backfields stretched out in the
cold dirt, their graves overgrown by trees and forgotten, I want
my family to live forever with all their glory and all their
failures, as a lesson for the living.
Then
there is this place of my spiritual and moral training, Jerusalem,
the village and the church. It too must not be forgotten. It is a
living and ongoing memorial of the work and foresight of liberated
Christian slaves. At Jerusalem Baptist, six generations of my
family and their neighbors have found and continue to find solace
and a foundation for their lives in a troubling world. Though not
as popular as in the 1940s and 1950s when it had three hundred
members under its beloved pastor the Reverend General Ruffian,
Jerusalem continues its missionary work of bringing lost souls to
Christ.
My aunt Annie is now an ardent worker and disciple of
Christ. Her Christian work has made Mama proud and thankful, for
her prayers have been answered. Our family home, too, continue to
be a
refuge and a place of consolation for those who have lost their
way in the cities and the byways of life. It remains too a living
memorial to its architect and builder, William “Pompsie”
Lewis. Though he had only one eye, he was a man of great
foresight.
Most
of all, this work has been done to honor Mama, Ella Jackson Lewis,
so that she may live forever in the hearts and souls of her
descendants. These letters have been saved and displayed that her
progeny will know that it was indeed possible without wealth,
privilege, and station to live a righteous life in this world. The
reader will see one who, for more than seven decades, with all her
life’s blood and a great giving spirit, successfully provided
for, protected, and led her family in the ways of the Lord Jesus
Christ and was a comfort and a helper to her husband William as
the scriptures teach. But even more, I hope these letters will
reveal her great faith in God and his salvation.
* * * *
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