And It Begins Like This. LaTanya McQueen
genealogy forum. The date January 15, 2002.
I’m able to send to a response to the original poster. Hi Kim, I believe I am someone you’re looking for. Please write me back.
No one will answer.
Unlike with Billie, there is next to nothing on Leanna Brown. She was married but I'm unsure of the dates. If she was a slave then it's possible her marriage would not have been recorded.
In search of answers I decide to look through the cohabitation records for the county. If I'm able to document when she was married then perhaps it will clarify the nature of her relationship with William Siddle. It could potentially offer clues to who the other children were.
Cohabitation records were created to legitimize marriages and children born to those in slavery. In these records, the information can include names of the individuals, ages, places where they were born, the names of their last known slave holders, and approximate year of marriage or cohabitation. These records can often be found in local courthouses, state archives, and libraries.
I check the website of the North Carolina State Archives and it says that cohabitation records are known to have survived for the following counties, but Caswell County is not included in this list.
Once, in graduate school I fell in love with a white boy who was unaware of my feelings. One night we were in a Starbucks talking. The cashier had begun her closing up ritual but we continued to stay.
I showed him an article about a celebrity who’d recently made some racist comments regarding his own dating preferences. I mentioned it off the cuff even though there was more to be said—a larger conversation about racial bias and prejudices in dating preferences, for one thing, or the effects of European beauty standards on women of color, or even the current problems in interracial dating. There was more to be interrogated between us but the minutes were quickly ticking by and soon we were the only customers left.
“That’s some bullshit,” he responded. “Who does this guy think he is?”
His anger, far worse than mine, made me believe he was trying to tell me something more, but then I remembered this was all a surprise to him. He had no idea what it was like to experience these attitudes day in and out. He was a conventionally attractive male with parents who would have given him the world. His anger came from a place where injustice was never a reality.
In the end, nothing ever happened between us. He fell in love with someone else. Her skin the color of cream.
On her Facebook page I find a photo of the two of them. Many times there will be moments when my thoughts will get the best of me and I’ll go back to that photo and wonder if the reason nothing ever happened between us was because I did not look the way he was wanting.
Before the death of my mother I was not a person who talked about race. I was a person who actively avoided it throughout most of my life. It was easy when you were the only black person in a room, when for years you were the only black person you know. You find ways to adapt to the world around you, joining in with all the appropriate cultural signifiers, and because my skin was light enough I thought somehow I would be enough, that I'd be accepted beyond the Other that I am.
My desire to fit these pieces I have in a certain way is strong, undeniable, but I find myself asking what to make of them. How does one begin to compile these bits of fact, these stories and anecdotes, together into a way of understanding?
I struggle to turn them into a narrative that makes sense, so all I can do is offer them in the hope that somewhere one can find the truth.
According to population projections by the U.S. Census Bureau, by the year 2044 whites will become the minority. There will be a growth of new minorities, from Asians, Hispanics, and those identifying as multiracial. This last group—multiracials—will more than triple in number.
The same day I read this in the news I find an article about the rise of ethnic plastic surgeries cropping up in the U.S. Rhinoplasties to sharpen the flat shape of an ethnic-looking nose, for example, or “facial contouring” procedures in which the bones of the jaw are cut to make the appearance a v-shape.
“I think we’re kind of losing ethnic niches. I don’t think there’s going to be a black race or a white race or an Asian race,” Dr. Michael Jones, a plastic surgeon, is quoted saying in the article. “Essentially, in 200 years, we’re going to have one race.”
On my teaching evaluations my students say I discuss race too much. They are angry because in talking about American literature, I force them to read Charles W. Chesnutt, the first African American fiction writer. We read the slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass. We read W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. I bring in recordings of the Harlem Renaissance poets and let them hear the music and rhythm in Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” They listen to the songs of Negro spirituals. I bring in Toni Morrison and Amiri Baraka, and I make them read James Baldwin's “Going to Meet the Man,” a story that makes my hands shake every time I read it. That day, I spend an hour in front of my mostly white class talking about the Klan. I show them pictures of lynchings, one after the other after the other. I tell them of the brutal, ugly history of our country so that they can try to understand the world Baldwin has come from, but they never do.
The day I teach Baldwin everyone is bracing to hear the decision about Michael Brown and so the first thing I do is take a piece of chalk and begin writing. On the board I write the names I’ve collected of the black men and women throughout history who’ve been murdered—whether lynched or shot by police. One by one I write their names, filling the board with my scrawled script.
I leave it up during the remainder of the class, and towards the end, when I feel my own energy draining, I tell him that it’s important to remember. “There is a pattern,” I say, repeating the theory my godmother once told me. She believes that in looking at history, in seeing the moments of racial progress for African Americans there has always been a steep backlash in response. It happened after the Civil War with the creation of the KKK, it happened after Reconstruction with the rise of the Jim Crow era in the South, and it happened after the Civil Rights Movement with the KKK’s reemergence.
“Recognize it and maybe you can change it, because the problem is we keep forgetting.”
Then I erase the board, slowly, hoping with this action the point hits home, but they are already packing their bags and out the door.
“I used to see Leanna as a victim,” my godmother tells me. “She was in the sense that she was a black woman and didn’t have any power, but the more I delve into the past, the more I've come to fully understand how much people don’t fit into the boxes history wants us to put them in.”
I've wanted to believe that the basis of their relationship was love, that Leanna Brown took the name for her children because she wanted a piece of this man to hold onto, to be carried down among the generations. It is a story that goes down better than what history is known to provide—that her children were the product of rape.
I'm not sure how much I believe in generational curses, if the sins of the fathers shall be passed on to the children and then to their children's children.
Yet the patterns in my family are certainly there, repeating among generation to generation, and so for me the name carries with it a mark, a stain. It is more than the mark of my race, with that name are years of self-hatred, of anger, of wrongs done I can barely fathom and will never fully understand.
So how then can a name that carries so much pain with it have come from love?
Of course though, my students are unaware about race. To them I am just a black teacher talking about race when they don’t want to talk about race. They are unaware of the history that has come to define my existence.
“Don’t you understand?” I want to explain. “Do you even understand how long it’s taken me to get here? To get to this point of even the acknowledgement of who I am?”
I'm in a bar sitting alone. A man comes up and sits down next to me.