Reduced to Equality - Conclusion

This concludes the posting of my book-length manuscript, Reduced to Equality: My Odyssey to Renounce Racial Privilege ~ and Find Myself. You may read the previously posted segments here.


2004 (cont'd)

After months of chasing the story, I learned little more than I had known at the beginning. And John Ed’s bi-racial child was born only one month before he eloped with Elizabeth. I don’t know why John Ed married Elizabeth so quickly after Dillon’s birth, if as Pearce suggests, he was in love with Dillon’s mother, so we just have to surmise things. Like, well, maybe he was so hurt by not being able to be with Dillon’s mother and his son that he went sideways into another relationship. But why a Garrard? Maybe Elizabeth, who was, after all, a real looker, was his second choice. Or maybe he wasn’t really in love with Dillon’s mother. Or maybe, since they had talked him out of doing what he really wanted to do -- based, I’m sure, on family “honor” -- he just wanted to piss everybody off and make years more trouble in the family by snatching the granddaughter of a former Governor of the state.

Regardless, he got Elizabeth pregnant almost immediately, and had a son with her the following year. But the boy, named Benjamin Franklin White after his grandfather, died only a few years old, and though John Ed and Elizabeth stayed married for more than fifty years, they only had two more children -- in 1862 and 1865 -- in spite of the local and family practice of having many.

The family tells the story that Lizzie raised Dillon like he was her own, but the census in 1870 does not list the boy -- who would have been ten or eleven-years-old at the time -- in John Ed’s house. John Ed did send Dillon to the University of Kentucky eventually, as he probably promised Dillon’s mother he would, though Dillon only attended for a year until the feuds intensified and he came home to stand beside his father, along with his younger half-brother, my great-grandfather, Daugherty White, named for his slave-holding uncle.

Dillon never owned any land, but he is shown in the 1880 census, at the age of twenty-one, living with a housekeeper right next door to John Ed and Elizabeth. Four years later, he married Sallie Allen, the daughter of a Baptist minister, and before it was over, they had had eight children in a span of fifteen years.

As I thought it over more and more, and put together different pieces of research, I realized that, since Kentucky had slaves until 1865 and had ordered free Blacks out of the state in 1851, then a mulatto woman in Clay County, Kentucky, in 1859, when Dillon was born, was either a slave or in the state illegally. There appears to be no birth certificate for Dillon. And no one in the family seems to know his mother’s name. Even Dillon’s granddaughter assured me that her mother did not know her own grandmother’s name, which is highly unusual in Clay County. It is as if Dillon's mother did not exist, except that she left a son, my Great-Great-Uncle Dillon, who was shot to death on Christmas eve in 1900 at the age of forty-one while trying to force his daughter to leave a dance.

Dillon’s murderers, who were drunk and supposedly feuders from the Garrard side of the conflict, apparently didn’t believe that his status as a member of the White family would mean anything because he was born out of wedlock. Nevertheless, Dillon’s wife Sallie, knowing that everyone would expect her sons to retaliate according to feud law and tradition, was scared that someone would try to kill them before they could act, so John Ed helped her to move the whole household to a different county. Then, for whatever reason, the White family chose not to seek revenge, not to report the crime to the authorities (although everyone knew the four men who had committed the murder), and not to file probate on Dillon’s estate until several years later.

Some think it’s because, by 1900, the White family dynasty was on the down-hill slide. The freeing of their slaves had cost them dearly, with no way of recouping their losses, since the federal government refused to pay the injury allotments the family felt they deserved because they had backed the Union. And then huge salt domes were discovered farther west and on the Kanawha River, forcing the Whites completely out of the salt business by 1885.

One of the ways White people, such as my family, have avoided feeling responsible for their transgressions against their fellow human beings is simply not to “know” what happened, not to talk about the truth, to “go to the grave,” as they say, with secret after secret.

“They held slaves?” they might ask.

“I don’t know…” they might add.

“You know, everybody back then…” they try to argue.

“Not everybody…” you remind.

“Yeah, well…I don’t know…” and they trail off. “That was a long time ago.”

And it was. But long time ago or not, it happened and it had an effect -- on the individuals involved, either master or slave; on the families involved, either master or slave; on the mountain community and the state and the nation in which it stood, to the present.

Zen Buddhists believe that our ancestors are not just vaporous memories wafting through time and space in some vacuous manner irrelevant to us, but rather reside yet in the very cells of our bodies, come down through us genetically, for good or ill. As I did my research, reading and poring and thinking and considering, talking to strangers, and reading and poring some more, I began to feel as if they were all around me: old Hugh Lowry and all his sons and grandsons, Col. Daniel and his kith and kin, those who murdered and were murdered, and always and ever, the slaves, listed nameless on slave schedules census after census, distinguished only by their gender, their age, and the name of the one who held them in bondage that year. And, as the days and weeks turned into months, increasingly I saw her there, as well: Dillon White Hollin’s mother, off to one side, waiting now for one hundred forty-six years to be granted the right to her name.

After meditating one day, assuring my ancestors that I knew they did the best they could with whatever their consciousness was at the time, that I was forgiving them their drunkenness, their meanness and their cruel self-centeredness, that I was not angry at them for doing awful things and leaving the legacy in my physical, psychological, and spiritual being, it hit me. They had kept coming to life, generation after generation, until I could be born and write this book. They wanted the record told. They knew now that their actions had not served them well, but rather had put a blot on themselves and their progeny that they could not do anything about because they had lived and died without ever acknowledging that all humans are just doing the best they can and that no humans deserve to suffer at the hands of any others.

“Well, that’s a bit lofty, isn’t it?” my rational mind asserted. “Not to mention convenient, at this late date.”

But a few days later, following a thread to something else entirely, I saw it: a little remembrance at the tail-end of a slave narrative I shouldn’t even have come across, offered by a woman who had not even been held by the White family:

“My master wuzn’t as mean as most masters,” reported Sophia Word in 1936 at the age of ninety-nine. “Hugh White was so mean to his slaves that I know of two gals that killt themselfs. One nigger gal, Sudie, wuz found across the bed with a pen knife in her hand. He whipped another nigger gal ‘most to death fer fergitting to put onions in the stew. The next day, she went down to the river, and fer nine days they searched fer her. And her body finally washed up on the shore. The master could never live in that house again as, when he would go to sleep, he would see the nigger standing over his bed. Then he moved to Richmond and there he stayed until a little later, when he hung himself.”

Appealing to various sources, I tried to find out whether there was a corroborating family tale among the Whites, but it was not uncommon for a given nuclear family in Clay County to have many children, naming them every one for one or more relatives. My great-great-great-great-grandfather Hugh, for example, had thirteen children, eight of them sons. And, as lately as my mother’s generation, there were among she and her seven siblings no less than ten names still carrying on the tradition, including Daugherty, Lowry, and Hugh.

With multiple Hugh Whites holding slaves, then, I wasn’t able to identify the particular ancestor or “prove” the account, though I did learn that there was a family home in Richmond, Kentucky. Still, there’s no doubt in my mind that the story is true. I can feel it my bones. I can hear it in the whispering wind rustling the leaves on the tree outside my window. But rather than feeling ugly or sad, the feeling is one of resignation and release. A sigh, if you will, that the truth will be told, with or without the details, that the pain he caused others and then his family can be laid to rest in the pages of this book, that the pain that drove him to give up his life will be washed in the light of an old woman’s words come to us through history like a song of freedom for us all. We cannot and do not avoid the repercussions of our actions, however ill-guided, socially-accepted, or unintentional.

When I asked my mother about what it was like for her growing up in Clay County as a child, related to the matters at hand, her memories were few. She remembers growing up with African-American “squatters” on her father’s land, sharing holidays with them, having them help to get her family through the Great Depression, and not much else.

But one of her memories that I found particularly interesting was that my grandfather, Rob Roy White, her father, would not allow his children to use the “n-word,” even in their home, though it was common custom in Clay County to do so. I couldn’t help but wonder if his stance had anything to do with the fact that his father was raised with a Black half-brother. I know my grandfather was trained as a lawyer, although he never took the bar exam. I know he was an engineer and newspaper editor and sheriff and historian and that he preached the Sunday sermon when there wasn’t a preacher in town and that he told Uncle Remus stories using his deep, deep voice in what I recall as perfect Black dialect. But I wish I had known to ask him what he knew about his Uncle Dillon, who died when Pa, as we called him, was already twelve-years-old. Did he know that Dillon was, by every interpretation of the “one-drop” rule, himself one of those people that other White people called by that pejorative term? Did he ever hear him called that? Is that why he grew up, the grandson of a slaveholder’s son, with such strong principles against it?

When I first told Morgan that I wanted this book to make a statement about the socially-constructed, political notion of “race” and relate it to my family’s history as slaveholders, she was her usual blunt self in her unhesitating response.

“What do you mean, a statement?” she asked flatly.

“I’m not sure,” I waffled. “I just want to go on record, as a representative of the White family, accepting responsibility for our past history as…I don’t know…some kind of apology, I guess.”

“Well, I can tell you one thing,” she finished with a flip of her head. “No amount of bullshit liberal White guilt trying to make apologies will ever be enough!”

Needless to say, in spite of the fact that I’m pretty used to her nonchalant dismissals when she feels strongly about something, I was a bit taken aback. Not because I didn’t agree with her, but because I did. It’s not like I was voted the Chairperson of the Whites of Clay County or something. Who did I think I was anyway? And after the Civil War, with slavery no longer legal and salt production moved to more centrally located and even more plentiful sources, my ancestors began to live a lot more like ordinary folks.

Besides, despite the fact that Great-Great-Great Uncle James left millions of dollars when he died, his granddaughter Bessie bequeathed it all to her White maid’s illegitimate daughter, who was in and out of mental hospitals most of her life and finally died, leaving the money to -- of all people -- her lawyer. It seemed somehow poetic in the face of the White family’s use and abuse of that occupation themselves over the years, especially since the base of much of that wealth was ill-gotten through the suffering of others. I had never heard anything about that branch of the family before, so hearing the story now seemed anti-climactic.

Still, money or no, if Morgan was right and I believed that she was, then it wouldn’t be enough to just make a polite apology and go on with my life, or even to imagine the book as an effort to make a difference in a racist society in a new millennium, which it is. I had to do something. But what?

It didn’t take long for the idea to come. I would set up a scholarship fund, using half of my book royalties, for anyone who could document, using any mechanism whatsoever, that they are descended from a slave who was held by my ancestors. It wouldn’t be much, necessarily. It wouldn’t be enough, in any case. But it would be something. It would model for other White people that, because we have benefited personally -- psychologically, emotionally, and financially -- from the exploitation and suffering of people of color, we have no choice but to make personal attempts to, at least figuratively, even the playing field ourselves.

I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth, God knows. I remember well using outdoor toilets, taking baths in a sink, and only eating meat for Sunday dinner. But my life and my opportunities from Day One were prescribed by not only my skin tone, as a White woman, but by the on-going legacy of my position as a member of a family that chose to benefit in a thousand ways by holding other human beings in bondage. Even the way I carry myself these long, long distant days after my family was rich has served me well whenever I wanted it to. I cannot go back and undo even one sad fact of that sad, sad history. But, having looked into my soul and found my ancestors there, I must now let them tell me what they would have me do to stop the on-going saga of our participation in the racism that belongs to all White Americans, no matter what their names.

We are often given to saying in one context or another that two hundred fifty years of slavery has had an on-going effect on the African-American community in the United States. What we don’t say, largely because no one has forced us to, is that two hundred fifty years of being slaveholders has had an on-going effect on us -- the European-American community, even for those individuals and families that never held a slave themselves.

Very few White people ever made -- before or after the Civil War -- the kind of sacrifices necessary to hold themselves outside the racist construct that our social institutions were established to be from the outset. The rest of us -- all the rest of us -- have been complicit by our lack of protest, complicit by our participation in the institutional oppression that has always given us the most of the best and the least of the worst, complicit by our ready acceptance of the economic prosperity that was produced for us as a nation by millions of Black laborers working twelve to fifteen-hour days for free year after year after year for two and one-half centuries.

My ancestors were "Christian" people, if you examine the records or even ask the family today. And it’s hard for White people to understand, admit, or deal with the reality that being “Christian” by category (rather than “Christ-like” by principle and practice) has never precluded individuals and groups from being less than moral or even committing atrocities. The Crusades and the Inquisition stand as ready proof of that.

Montesquieu’s assertion in The Spirit of the Laws that Blacks had no souls laid the groundwork for a raft of “Christian” nations to unleash fleet after fleet of slave ships, killing millions of Africans horrifically to fill endless coffers with gold. Even once that perspective was discarded, many European-Americans agreed that it was better to enslave and convert Africans to Christianity, however brutally it was accomplished, than to leave them to die as free people in “heathen” lifestyles of their choice.

All of our nation’s “founding fathers” were slaveholders, even as they invoked the name of God at every turn and claimed that God had created all men equal. Further, the Baptist church itself in the southern states held no less than 25,000 slaves before the Civil War for the purpose of renting them out. And slaveholders, including my ancestors, I’m sure, appear to have thought nothing of going to church on Sunday, having beaten a slave half to death and rubbed salt in his or her wounds the day before for not having worked fast enough or some other offense deemed punishable without conscience.

Even a century and a half later, "Christian" believers often seem able to skirt issues that would seem on the surface to call into question the morality of their faith when it intersects with “race.” Where were the Christian ministers after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote his letter from the Birmingham jail challenging them to support people of color as they suffered for daring to suggest that they, too, were children of God and equal to White folks? Where is the protest in the Christian community when the Ku Klux Klan burns crosses as the symbol of their belief-system or wears crosses on their robes while espousing their poisonous doctrines today? Where is the organized response from Christians when the Christian Identity movement and other so-called religious entities tout beliefs that pair rabid racism with fundamentalist Christian dogma? The routine practice of overt, covert, and subtle racism by well-meaning White people who profess Christianity would make the Jesus who threw the money-changers’ tables out of the temple go ballistic all over again. “We have met the enemy,” said Charlie Brown once years ago in the popular cartoon, Peanuts, “and it is us.” Indeed. And we don’t want to hear it.

We ignore the jokes, minimize what African-Americans tell us about their experience of life, always think we got the job because we deserved it, always suspect that Blacks got hired because somebody had to hire them, walk on eggshells around racist family members so as not to “offend” them, date and marry racists (considering it not to be a fatal flaw), and don’t reach out to make a real difference because we’re too busy, too uncomfortable, too unclear about what exactly to do, too few, and too…racist?

We are so conflicted on the socially-constructed, political notion of “race,” we have convinced ourselves that the more than 700 hate sites on the internet viciously hyping the murder and degradation of Blacks, Latinos, Asians and Jews are really just exercising their first amendment rights. So there are laws against speeding and under-age drinking, but hate-mongering against people of color is “constitutional” in the United States. “Inciting to riot” is illegal; inciting to murder is not. Paying someone to kill is illegal, but psyching people up to kill people of color for free is purported to be protected by U.S. law.

No wonder African-Americans -- our fellow citizens, our brothers and sisters before God -- are ill, stressed, and angry. Now, what are we going to do about it?

EPILOGUE

Four days after I finished my book, after celebrating my fifty-ninth birthday with crab-stuffed shrimp and tira misu, I came home to find an e-mail waiting for me from someone I didn’t know. I had sent out a blanket request a couple of weeks before on several genealogy list-servs seeking information related to Dillon White Hollin’s mother. I was almost done with the book at the time, but had not tried this, as yet, and hoped for a last minute miracle. None came and I had closed out the book, assuming that none would.

“I doubt if you will get very many responses to your questions,” the unexpected e-mail began. “Dillon is listed in the White family bible. I would be curious to know what information you have to share…” And it was signed “Regards.”

I immediately decided that this was my birthday present from the Universe. I figured that I had nothing to lose anyway, so without even waiting until morning, I gratefully and graciously outlined everything I knew, genuflecting appropriately to demonstrate my good faith and respect. Within thirty-six hours, I had it, at least what there was to have.

My informant, as we call them in sociology, who chose to remain anonymous, had his own reasons for searching out the name of Dillon’s mother and, consistent with my earlier struggles, had not found in a decade of rigorous research “absolute proof” available. Nevertheless, he had done much work and had a theory that made sense to me.

It centers around a tiny family listed in the Clay County census in 1860, a little more than a year after Dillon’s birth. A Jeff Allen, age 22, and his wife, Mary, age 17, whose marriage was recorded on January 25th of that year, appear in the census with a 2-year-old son listed as “Dilliard Hollandsworth.”

It’s important to understand that names were apparently changed more or less at will in Clay County in those days and not necessarily in court. A given member of the Hollingsworth family, for example, might also appear variously over time as a Hollinsworth, Hollandsworth, Holland, Hollan, Hollen, or Hollin. Census takers, for one thing, didn’t seem concerned with consistency, spelling, or for that matter, any form of documentation on either race or name. Needless to say, this plays havoc with the ability to follow a genealogical thread. But once you accept it as more or less inevitable, any irritation is minimal, though it cannot help but leave one somewhat perplexed. Is it him? Is it not? Who would know? Did they mean to do this and, if so, why? Questions reign supreme and often without any clear answers.

Still, the date and ages seemed plausible. And, though the original Hollingsworth family came into Clay County in the very early 1800’s listed as “free whites,” whatever that is, most of those with the various versions of their name were subsequently listed as Black or mulatto at one point or another. This is a major issue, since central to the story about Dillon and his mother is always the fact of her race being the reason John Ed was talked out of marrying her. And while the story has been orally transmitted from generation to generation and household to household for nearly a century and a half, that one detail has always remained intact against great resistance from all branches of the White family.

By 1870, when a ten-year-old named “Dillian” appears as a farm worker in the household of James C. White (both of them listed as Black) and another ten-year-old named “Dilliard” appears in the household of an Elizabeth Parker (both of them listed as mulatto), Jeff and Mary had seemingly vaporized, at least out of Clay County. It would appear likely, at least on the surface, that, if Mary was Dillon’s mother, then she left him to John Ed’s protection, with John Ed’s agreement, but not in John Ed’s house.

Ten years later, in 1880, a 21-year-old “Dillian Holland” is found in the census immediately next door to John Ed and Lizzie and their two children, Ella and Daugherty. That John Ed wanted Dillon close to him, however this practice grieved his wife, as it must have or Dillon would have been in the White family home, suggests that John Ed did more than likely feel very strongly about Dillon’s mother, Mary.

There is no way to know at this point, given what little we have as information, whether or not Dillon knew his mother. It is absolutely within the realm of possibility that he did not, since the Whites made an art form out of secrecy, backed up with legal expertise. Still, he may have been told. If John Ed had once loved her as much as it seems that he might have, given his commitment to their son, it’s not beyond imagination.

A number of the White family males had many children out of wedlock -- slave and free -- that they did not claim or acknowledge. There is even some indication that John Ed had at least one other child out of wedlock himself some years after Dillon was born. But only Dillon, to the best of my knowledge, of all the  White family members born out of wedlock, was held close and claimed and supported in the way that he was.

So, I was a bit startled, actually, when I received a copy of a letter from one elderly Clay Countian to another, describing the murder of Dillon Hollin and making his racial heritage finally, utterly clear. The men who shot my grandfather’s uncle that dark night were drunk and dancing until he arrived. Dillon, married to a Baptist minister’s daughter, was loathe to have his only girl, Ada, out dancing at local affairs, especially in the face of his having spent his life having to listen to his mother being maligned for having had him outside of marriage.

Apparently, Ada didn’t want to leave the party and her dancing partner, John Lucas, being drunk and a Garrard supporter, decided to use the opportunity to get in a lick against the White family. With the help of several other men, he shot Dillon White Hollin point blank without even going outside to do it, calling Dillon, as he did so, “White’s nigger bastard.” I wonder if those were the last words my Great-Great-Uncle Dillon ever heard. I wonder if he thought about his mother as they were spat out at him, meant to kill his soul even as the bullets killed his body. And I wonder if Mary Hollinsworth was alive or dead at that moment in time. But regardless, as a mother myself, I’ll bet she was there, somehow, arms around her son, in spite of them all.

How different it would all have turned out if Dillon had just let Ada go to the party that night. How different it would all have turned out if Clay County, Kentucky, had not been so violent in those earlier times. How different it would all have turned out if John Ed had married Mary regardless of what the rest of the family said. And how different it would all, all, all have turned out if the socially-constructed political notion of race did not prescribe the lives of all Americans, including my ancestors, my children, and myself.

The End
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NOTE: The photo at the end of this post -- dated 1895 -- is of Dillon White Hollin and was shared with me by my anonymous informant.  I am grateful for it.

NOTE #2: The graphic at the top of this post is a stencil offered here.