When I was a little boy I lived in a little town which you probably never heard of called Henning, Tennessee, about fifty miles north of Memphis. I lived there with my parents in the home of my mother’s mother. My grandmother and I were very, very close. Every summer that I can remember, growing up in Henning, my grandmother would have, as visitors, members of the family, who were always women, always of her general age range, the late forties, early fifties. They came from places that sounded pretty exotic to me – Dyers burg, Tennessee; Inkster, Michigan, St. Louis, Kansas City – places like that. They were like Cousin Georgia, Aunt Plus, Aunt Liz, so forth. Every evening, after the supper dishes were washed, they would go out on the front porch and sit in cane-bottomed rocking chairs, and I would always sit behind grandma’s chair. Every single evening of those summers, unless there was some particularly hot gossip that would overrule it, they would talk about the same thing. It was bits and pieces and patches of what I later would learn was a long narrative history of the family, which had been passed down across generations.
As a little boy I did’t have the orientation to understand most of what they talked about. Sometimes they would talk about individuals, and I did’t know what these individuals were; I did’t know what an old massa was and I didn’t know what an old missus was. They would talk about locales; I didn’t know what a plantation was. At other times, interspersed with these, they’d talk about anecdotes, incidents which had happened to these people or these places. The furthest-back person that they ever talked about was someone whom they would call ‘The African’. I know that the first time I ever heard the word Africa or African was from their mouths, there on the front porch in Henning.
I think that my first impression that these things they spoke of went a long way back, came from the fact that they were wrinkled, greying, or completely grey in some cases, and I was a little boy, three, four, five, and now and then when some of them would get animatedly talking about something, they would fling their finger or hand down towards me and say something like ‘I wasn’t any bigger than this young’un here’. The very idea that someone as old and wrinkled as she had at one time been no older than I, just blew my mind. I knew it must be way, way back that they were talking about.
When they were speaking of this African, the furthest-back person of all, they would tell how he was brought on a ship to this country to a place they pronounced as ‘Naplis’. He was bought off this ship by a man whose name was John Waller, who had a plantation in a place called Spotsylvania County, Virginia. They would tell how he was on this plantation and he kept trying to escape. The first three times he escaped he was caught and given a worse beating than previously as his punishment. The fourth time he escaped he had the misfortune to be caught by a professional slave catcher. I grew up hearing how this slave catcher decided to make an example of him. I grew up hearing how he gave the African the choice either to be castrated or to have a foot cut off. The African chose the foot. I grew up hearing how his foot was put against a stump, and with an ax was cut off across the arch. It was a very hideous act. But as it turned out, that act was to play a very major role in the keeping of a narrative across a family for a long time.