Visualizing Our Histories, Our Stories — Part 4

We are continuing our series, and will be sharing artwork and writeups of the creative process, from our Linked Descendants’ working group members.

Some of us have begun to explore our thoughts, feelings and the multi-layered experience of finding our ancestors, through collage work. We created collages on our own using a specific framework as a starting point (eg: a river of life, an explosion of awareness, a tree of knowledge or life, a path towards or away, etc.) and then shared with each other in small breakout groups. Most of us found this to be a powerful way to further process our often conflicting emotions. Expressing what we know in visual, rather than written terms, allows for increased awareness, deeper insight, and further integration of the new and/or more difficult truths around our ancestors and overall family histories.

Today’s collages and process descriptions have been generously shared by Antoinette Broussard and Jerrie. (Click on each image to see it in more detail)

DISCOVERING REBECCA

Discovering Rebecca by Jerrie

My collage is about my search for Rebecca Payne, one of my great-grandmothers.

ANTOINETTE’S COLLAGE

Collage by Antoinette Broussard

Berry Benjamin Craig (on the left) was my maternal grandfather. He was born enslaved in December 1863, in Platte County, Missouri a year after the Emancipation Proclamation had passed. Missouri did not secede from the union and that allowed them with a strong Confederate presence to keep their slaves, enslaved. Eighteen years ago, I inherited my grandfather’s meticulously written and typed manuscripts on onion-skin paper. I’d not known him to be a writer. When I look at his photo I remember my mother explaining her father was a self-taught man. She’d repeat the term “A mind is a terrible thing to waste” which always reminded her of the education and opportunities he missed out on because of his race. My mother told me he studied and wrote at night when he returned home from work. His manuscripts were completed in the early 1930s. They were about his enslaved family including his biological father, William Paine Wallingford, the enslaver.  

On the far right, is a photo of Wallingford, my great-grandfather. I’ll refer to him  as W.P. What a mean, terrible man, I always think. I cringe when I imagine what he must have done to Violet. He was the perpetrator, who never paid for his crimes of enslavement, rape, and unlimited abuse of my great-grandmother Violet Craig Turner (at the top of the page), and his abandonment of the seven to eight children he fathered with her. She was enslaved by W.P for at least 15 years, worked on his farms, and birthed and nurtured her children. W.P. never assumed responsibility for them. He also had 11 white children with their white mothers. 

I started researching my grandfather’s stories to see if they were fiction or non-fiction, to see if my grandfather had put his literary foot to a true story. I needed to validate his work in order to include it with my research. I wanted to get his stories published.  

Violet, her five brothers, and parents were born in Kentucky, as was W.P.  

I traced them from enslavement in Missouri back to Kentucky. 

I reviewed W.P’s land records, court records, biographies, family histories, and census, looking for clues. I needed to know the history of Violet’s family. 

I reviewed the 1833 will of W.P’s father, John Wallingford, filed in Mason County, Kentucky. There were two unnamed children in the will; one was Violet’s age, born in 1828. Violet had named five of her children using the same names listed in John Wallingford’s will. I studied the records of Wallingford family members who had inherited John Wallingford’s slaves. Maybe they were my family members. That’s how the enslaved remembered their families. They pass down the names. 

I studied the families that accompanied W.P. from Kentucky to Missouri to see if there were any transactions between them with clues to Violet’s family. 

These enslavers along with the Wallingford’s had glowing reputations written into their histories—“who traveled down the Mississippi, Missouri, and/or Ohio Rivers, to conquer the wilderness and cut out a homestead, build a community, in Kentucky and Missouri. They valiantly fought the savage Native Americans, and how brave these pioneers were.”  That’s what I found written in the family histories, located in the libraries and historical societies. 

They were sheriffs, judges, ministers, doctors, newspaper editors, and farmers that used our black families, taking them apart as human beings. Black people were bred, used, chewed up, and spit out. Abandoned. And these perpetrators got away with it.  

We were made invisible. They buried the truth. Before 1870 our history is mostly non-existent. Every time I look at W.P.’s photo, I almost immediately look away, because I am reminded of his and his comrade’s injustices.  

Very little is known about Violet. She is listed in the 1850 slave schedules only by age and color, with a 9-year old black child, both owned by W. P. Maybe the child was Violet’s child? But there is no clarity of parentage.  

In the 1860 slave schedules, the 9-year old child is gone…maybe sold, died, or rented out, because by that time if she were still alive she’d be 19. I’ve never figured out who she was. There would be seven children by the time Violet was freed by a Missouri ordinance or the 13th Amendment in 1865.  My great grandmother Violet left pregnant, with five children, one ten-year old child was sold by W.P. to fund his involvement with the local confederate militia, and one not accounted for.  

W.P. lived with his white family, in an upper class neighborhood in St. Joseph, Missouri. He lived 20 miles from Violet and her children across the Missouri River, in Leavenworth, Kansas. According to my grandfather they lived in a shanty. When Violet’s children were older they crossed the river to ask W.P. for money.  

“We need help…you’re our father,” they said to W.P. 

“How do you know I’m your father? W.P. said. 

“We know, because Mother told us,” they said. 

But he did not give them money, or land. He left it all to his white children and wife when he died in 1875.  

W.P. can go back to England on his family line. My family lines were intentionally erased to erase our existence and their owner’s sins, and to promote the lies of their so-called goodness. I resent it that my nose always gets rubbed into the unfairness of it. I have to research his family in hopes of getting answers about mine. 

Nettie Craig Asberry (at the bottom of the page) was the 8th child Violet was pregnant with in 1865, when she and her children were freed. Nettie was the only one of the 8 born free. Her older siblings pooled their money to help with her education. In 1883 she graduated with a Teacher of Music Degree from the Kansas Conservatory of Music. For many years, Nettie was a choir director for the (A.M.E.) African Methodist Episcopal Church. She taught music in the schools in Nicodemus, Kansas. Later she moved to Seattle and then Tacoma, Washington where she helped establish African American women’s clubs for their self-improvement and independence. Nettie co-founded the Tacoma chapter of the NAACP, and she fought for women’s suffrage and people’s civil rights. She died in 1968. Her former home was purchased in 2021 by the state of Washington and is being renovated into a community center to honor her work. She promoted harmony among the races and wanted everyone to enjoy a good life. When I look at her photo I think Bingo. My family’s hard work to survive the terrible ills of slavery lives in the accomplishments of Violet’s children. 

— Antoinette Broussard         www.antoinettebroussard.com