"Ellen's father was a white man named Jerry Dial . . . " is how the story of my family opens, a bitter ancestral version of "Once upon a time . . . "
It is followed by the tale of a Scots-Irish Southerner who fathered a daughter with his neighbor's slave woman, Lavinia--my great-great-great-grandmother.
Enslaved until age 35, when she was freed by the Civil War, Lavinia lived in Sumterville, Ala.--deep cotton country. There, the birth of her child Ellen, in 1849, would splinter my family into fragments that would remain separated for 150 years.
Lavinia lived and died a servant. But in death she has attained a power that life never granted her. She is my family's Eve, our beginning and the person to whom we can furthest trace our roots. As generations of her children from that union now seek the details of her life, back she leads us. To find her--and our own origin--we must look in places we have avoided for more than a century and see our family as never before: in black and white.
The Family Reunion
More than 150 years after Lavinia gave birth to Ellen, their family--my family--is close. Like many African American families, we meet not only at funerals and weddings, but also hold formal reunions. For the past decade we have gathered every two years, anywhere from 50 to 80 people. Last time we gathered in Houston.
Wearing T-shirts with the Richardson name, we have steamed down the Mississippi in New Orleans, grieved at the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and toured a house on the underground railroad in Memphis.
Mainly, however, we reaffirm our sense of belonging.
Ours is called the Richardson family reunion in honor of Lavinia's daughter Ellen and her husband, Anthony Richardson, from whom about 150 people descended.
We know a great deal about the couple, thanks to a biography written by two of their granddaughters.
After the Civil War, the young, newly freed slaves owned nothing and sat in borrowed clothes for tintype portraits, which show a small, dapper man and his lovely bride.
The biography recounts how Anthony's white father and owner, Thomas Knight, had sold him from his mother when he was 4, to a Dr. Chambers. After a succession of sales, he came to live at age 14 with the Richardsons.
That sale, ironically, would lead to one of the most important legacies Anthony would leave to his family: literacy.
