Page 1 →Getting Under My Skin

My grandmother Mary Ann did not look like me, which gave me my first clue about him. She looked like a white woman. I knew that she wasn’t white. She was my grandmother. She never pretended to be anything other than colored on the inside. Yet her appearance puzzled me. I recall a woman about the age I am now, the color of vintage lace, with gray eyes and long, straight, dark brunette hair that fell to the small of her back—a cultural mark of beauty. Her two chubby brown granddaughters, my twin sister Toni and I, used to playfully quiz her about her intriguing appearance. Secretly, we wanted to look more like her, but I didn’t necessarily covet her skin tone.

Even though my brown skin placed me below the lighter skinned girls in the caste, I passed the “paper bag” test. My mother encouraged me to like the color of my skin. She wanted brown children. As a child, she had felt punished for being light-skinned and didn’t want any of her children to experience the hardship and trauma she suffered. Heading to college, she decided that she would marry a dark-skinned man because she wanted brown children. She married my father, a man with melanin-rich skin. Coincidentally, my father wanted to marry a light-skinned woman because he also wanted brown children. At that time, Black equated to ugliness not only in the Page 2 →predominant white culture but also for those who had internalized white norms as a means of assimilation. Instead of Black, we referred to ourselves as colored or Negroes.

Subsequently, these two science majors genetically engineered me. I learned that it was best to be a brown colored girl, because my complexion wouldn’t be a target for other colored people held hostage by the hierarchy of color where hue demarcated your level of privilege. The shade of my complexion made my status clear and acceptable to all.

But I did covet Grandma’s hair. I wanted flowing straight hair, like Rapunzel, not the coils that required parting, yanking, pulling, and twisting to comply with the obligatory standards of beauty. Even so, hair plaiting offered welcomed intimacy. I savored the feeling of my grandmother and mother’s fingers lacing around my hair and caressing the bergamot-scented emollient on my scalp.

When I was five years old, I asked Grandmother Mary Ann why she looked white. I wanted to know. She obliged me, and we had the talk. My grandmother shared that her mother Mary Ann, had blonde hair and blue eyes and was enslaved until she was five years old. Her father was a white man, but he wasn’t her father: He was her master. Now my young mind started to turn a corner. Was he or was he not her father? She explained again that her mother was not his child; she was his slave. He did not act like a father but like a master. I found the whole concept perplexing and strange, like listening to a fairy tale gone wrong. She explained that some of the masters established schools to educate their house servants, and he was that kind of master.

Grandmother continued to share that we came from house slaves who did domestic chores and served as wet nurses. She chuckled and said with a hint of pride, “The mistress and the slaves nursed each other’s babies, but my grandma [Ellen Coward Hargrove] affectionately known as Madodo nursed her own babies first.” Common lore held that the bondswomen’s milk contained more nutrients. She didn’t unpack to my little ears the incest or the sex trafficking that happened in this laissez-faire environment of sex on demand by masters and their associates.

Grandmother said that her siblings’ complexions ranged from a translucent pearl to varying shades of yellow to brown. Grandmother didn’t talk about slavery for too long. She protected us from those memories. She said many shameful things happened to people and that colored people suffered a lot under chattel slavery while they fervently prayed for God’s deliverance. Freedom took a while but happened in due season. She talked about Page 3 →plantations as forced labor camps with colored people laboring for very long hours. These messages were instilled in me at a young age—that the color of your skin and the texture of your hair mattered. Like magic, they emanated power.

Page 4 →For many Americans, enslavement is recent history. I am one of those Americans. Consequently, the institution has a profound visceral impact on me. I knew people who knew people who were enslaved. My maternal great-grandfather was enslaved until he was in his teens. Reading about the inception and practices of our color caste system gets under my skin. America’s historical and legal records are riddled with accounts of atrocities against Black and brown people to instill terror and thereby attempt to control their thoughts so that their bodies would yield to the enslavers’ demands.

This dark history weighs heavily upon me. Sometimes I want to cease my research, because these ghastly narratives are repulsive and heartrending and harass my thoughts today. Like others, I want to see no evil and hear no evil, but that attitude lulls me into denial, a defense mechanism that dulls the pain at the expense of distorting my perception. My spirit is restored from the insightful words of Alexander Berkman: “Man’s inhumanity to man does not have the last word. The truth lies deeper. It is economic slavery, the savage struggle for a crumb, that has converted mankind into wolves and sheep.”¹ I must examine American history because these stories reveal the thought-world and prevailing culture of my ancestors. These ugly and disturbing passages disclose the origins of racialized enmities and inequities generated by the human chattel juggernaut. Had I lived earlier, the chains would have fastened me to people who looked like me. The origin of America’s racialized caste system is a horror story, but horror frequently serves as a crucible for heroism—a kiln for our spiritual and societal transformation. For me, this is horror’s redemptive purpose.

My grandmother’s youngest sibling, Charlotte McFall Lacy, whom we called Aunt Lottie, acted as the family historian and griot. She kept the records of our family history through oral tradition. She didn’t let the uncomfortable nature of the topic stop her. Aunt Lottie resembled my grandmother, but she didn’t act like my grandmother. The first time I recall meeting my Aunt Lottie, she stepped out from behind the steering wheel sporting culottes, black and white saddle shoes, and bobby socks. Her wavy brown hair was fashionably short. On my first trip to Charleston, she ferried my sisters and me to the slave market. I recall tentatively tiptoeing through the chambers. The market held a strange solemnity. She told us about some of the brutalities that enslaved people suffered. Looking at the dark, rusty, chains, the cuffs, and the dingy walls, frightened me. Enslavement seemed far enough away and yet unsettlingly close.

I remember feeling jumpy throughout that short tour, especially when Aunt Lottie said that parents could be sold away from their children. For Page 5 →a six-year-old, it was worse than any spooky house that I could have ever imagined. Her words alarmed me. One false move and my whole life could change. I kept thinking I was glad that I hadn’t been born back then. I worried that my mother would be sold away from us. She spoke her mind. She didn’t like to be bullied. I wouldn’t call her sassy, but opinionated. I recall Grandmother saying, “Laura, your mouth is going to get you into trouble!” I guess I followed close behind, because I used to hear that warning from my mother as well.

Looking back, I wonder if that was an age-appropriate field trip. The whole idea of being sold away in chains fastened to a coffle left an impression. Then again, this cultural practice happened to Black children, and it was undoubtedly cruel, violent, and traumatic. The harsh conditioning process of slave making began in childhood: If children resisted, they could be sold, maimed, or killed. As soon as enslaved children could take instruction, they worked. They ate in troughs designed for animals, eating with their hands or, if available, with seashells. Their eyes witnessed cruelties, and some experienced sadistic forms of torture. I can imagine the hollering, pleading, clinging, and whipping that happened in the slave market as the owners ruthlessly severed family connections.

It is an innate attribute of the human condition to want to hold onto the children we bear, but the child delivered by an enslaved woman did not belong to her. The spiritual song, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” was a common dirge.² Enslaved women and men realized that it would take a village to raise a child, but to remind enslaved people of their place in the caste system, the enslavers attempted to rob them of any semblance of a family. The racist laws reinforced the belief that enslaved people did not deserve love, emotional attachments, or any evidence of their shared humanity. However, despite this maleficent framework, like water, human love and connection fashioned its own groove.

Charleston was a “melting pot” because of the human chattel industry. While playing with my sisters on Palmetto Street, I saw the most striking combinations of Blackness—an earthen admixture of brown-skinned people with blue eyes, ebony-skinned people with straight hair, and blondes with tawny complexions. However, the closer these features were to white characteristics, the more they were valued. A pragmatist, my Grandmother Mary Ann used her light skin to leverage certain goods and services in the marketplace. She would chuckle about how she and her sisters would sometimes pass to enter stores that prohibited African Americans in the Jim Crow South. Grandma earned admission to study piano at Columbia College in Page 6 →New York City, but World War I ended these aspirations. She didn’t have the financial means and pivoted to other marketable skills. She remained in Charleston and sewed death shrouds and dresses for wealthy white Charlestonians.

My Aunt Lottie appreciated her light skin because of the opportunities her complexion afforded her. At a time when African Americans hesitated to travel for fear of racial animus and violence, she traveled extensively throughout the country and the world. In the 1920s, she earned her master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago. Eventually, she became a professor at West Virginia State University. Katherine Johnson, the human calculator in the movie Hidden Figures, studied under Aunt Lottie’s tutelage and mentioned her in her memoir.³ Aunt Lottie believed that her light skin accorded her a position of leadership in the African-American community, and she willingly accepted the mantle of service.

In the generation to follow, however, animus continued to grow toward light skin and the privileges it brought. Mother had a very different experience within the color caste system. During World War II, Grandma worked as a foreman in a sewing factory, a job that would have been prohibited for many discernibly Black women. However, she earned good money. My paternal grandfather graduated from Hampton Institute; taught carpentry at Central High School in Louisville, Kentucky; and purchased several homes on their street. My mother had enough, while those around her had negligible resources. She recalled a childhood of being bullied and threatened with physical violence by African-American children from impoverished homes. Malnourished, these children suffered from rickets and bowed legs, but my immaculately dressed mother had pretty legs. Her healthy appearance triggered their envy. “You think you’re cute,” or “You think you’re better than us” became an unfortunate gibe in her childhood. Even though my mother didn’t like being light-skinned, I felt proud of my light-skinned mother with brown, blowing hair. As a child growing up in a color caste system, I knew that her appearance garnered adoration and preference. The color caste system seeped into my consciousness. I was learning how to assimilate.

So the genetic trace of my white ancestry trickled throughout my maternal family, but I learned to keep the knowledge of it at, and below, a whisper. I was warned not to discuss any of these matters, especially in front of white people. Discussing cross-racial relationships was considered impolite and dangerous because, in many states, these bonds remained illegal. When Aunt Lottie even hinted at superiority because of her complexion, my mother retorted, “Aunt Lottie, the only thing that our light skin proves Page 7 →is that we were ‘shitted on.’” In many ways, Mother’s response was a brutal fact. When I unearth the stories of female house slaves, the archetype of Cinderella emerges but without the restitution of a happy ending through matrimony. Frequently, female house servants were second-class kin, the scapegoats doomed to respond to their masters’ and mistresses’ demands. By design, these women were made for the white man’s purpose and pleasure.

Grandmother wanted to let sleeping dogs lie, but Aunt Lottie wanted to talk about the white side of our family lineage. She wanted to share the story of our heritage with all its complexity. When Aunt Lottie referred to the master, Grandmother and Mother smirked. They didn’t want her to even get close to trying to brag on the connection. They felt deeply affronted by its abhorrent nature. But Aunt Lottie persisted. She thought that we needed to know our ancestry. She stubbornly refused to erase these connections. The Africans’ footprints were swept away like ocean waves upon sand, but the white men had footprints in historical documents, and through her storytelling she prepared me to be ready at the right time.

Prompted by my mother’s suggestions, I went on a short vacation from my studies at Yale Divinity School and traveled to Charleston to visit Aunt Lottie. As she was getting on in years, I knew that I would need to listen to her stories more intently and document them. Accompanied by my cousin Frank, we took the road trip headed south on Interstate 95. I do not recall when I first heard his name, but I knew that knowing the master’s name was a rarity. His name was Colonel Asbury Coward, the eighth superintendent of The Citadel. I thought it was a peculiar name, rather conspicuous and certainly ironic. One not easy to forget, that’s for sure. One afternoon, Aunt Lottie drove us to The Citadel to view Colonel Coward’s portrait. We walked across campus to where his oil painting hung in the refectory. She stood at attention beside it and said, “See, I have his nose.” She appeared proud of her connection to him and proud of his ascent. I snapped my Polaroid and watched the photograph fade into view. Now, admiring his portrait, I felt like an Oreo cookie; secretly, I also wanted to admire his accomplishments and my connection to him. But he was an enslaver, and that reality created a sharp divide. After viewing the portrait, Aunt Lottie took us on a windshield tour along the Battery. She knew the old Charleston family names and pointed to the windows of the rooms where our female ancestors had lived as enslaved house servants in these grand plantation-like homes.

Page 8 →In the mid-1980s, I joined the military, another hierarchical system that made me ask myself whether I was a glutton for punishment. I gave my mother a great deal of influence over that decision. She persuaded me first on a spiritual level, and then on a political one, and ended on an economic reality. “What better job could God ask of you than to serve young people living and working in violence? Besides, you will learn how the white man thinks.” She continued, “If the eagle isn’t flying, nothing is.” So, I donned the naval uniform and had my assumptions confirmed that many white men did not want to discuss matters that disturbed the status quo as it pertained to color. They denied their preferential treatment at every turn. Common statements such as “We are all blue,” or “You’re a Black woman, so you’ll get promoted” were frequently declared, but they were woefully inaccurate statements. Many white male Navy chaplains avoided uncomfortable conversations that called to mind racialized inequities. As a result, they could unwittingly exploit their fundamental advantages in the system. However, occasionally, the Navy succumbed to outside pressure to address societal harms.

During a professional development training course, we candidly discussed our attitudes on race relations. Several white chaplains discounted the idea that color signified a barrier to equity. They endorsed the idea of meritocracy and accepted the political nature of assignments that leveraged promotions influenced by the good ole boys’ network. They pretended that racism did not exist to protect their advantages. They did not see systemic inequities, only individual responsibility. The conversation started to get under my skin. As a way of jockeying for position in the hierarchy, one of these chaplains, an Episcopal priest, gloated about his alma mater, The Citadel. Finally, in the heat of discussion, I took the bait. I announced, “Here lies the problem when talking about race relations—Colonel Asbury Coward, a superintendent of The Citadel, is an ancestor of mine. He and my Great-Great Grandmother Ellen had five children, and I am not supposed to acknowledge it. Their relationship has been completely denied. Like it never even happened.” Because of my color, I knew how quickly I could be dismissed. You could have heard a pin drop. I wondered to myself, “How do you like me now?” I felt like a schoolgirl chanting that my white ancestor is better than your white ancestor, and I’m Black, so there!

Page 9 →Then one of the white subject-matter experts, blurted out, “She was raped!” My plan for one-upmanship backfired. What was I thinking about, making this statement? Perhaps I wasn’t thinking at all. I felt the sensation of falling off a cliff and yelling on the way down, “Why didn’t I keep my big mouth shut?” I attempted to explain that they could have had a relationship. But it felt too preposterous for me to argue with his allegation of assault. At best, their relationship was a hostage situation. Again, he shouted, “She was raped! The customs and legalities of that period had no bearing. She was raped.” No one said a thing. Nothing more to say.

To hear him say that word triggered shame in me, like shrinking inside my skin. His amplification felt jarring. To be raped was to be violated, discarded, shamed, and even blamed. Suddenly, I identified with the victim. I felt embarrassed and crushed by that four-letter word instead of furious at the perpetrator. Rape burst the idyllic, romanticized bubble that my Aunt Lottie’s playfulness had unintentionally blown around their relationship. The word “rape” signified that Ellen was just a piece to Asbury and that she lived her life in pieces, like bed wench, wet nurse, chambermaid, ladies’ maid, housekeeper, laundress, and seamstress. I had not grappled with the power differential between them. Laws defied acknowledging, dignifying, and preserving these relationships. Consensual sex was a misnomer within this system of power and disenfranchisement.

I imagined that Ellen had a privileged position among enslaved people because of her proximity to white privilege and her mulatto designation. I didn’t want to imagine her suffering from coercive tactics like verbal and physical abuse, living with her children in the cellar, the attic, or under the stairs on pallets. In my childhood memories, Grandma told me, “Madodo was beautiful.” I chirped, “What color was she?” “Your color.” I felt a well of pride. Ellen was a “house slave”—a “higher” position than field slaves in the caste. The instructor disrupted my romanticism to even more discomfort. I, too, had become indoctrinated by our color caste system and ascribed value to one’s proximity to whiteness. But more than that, I wanted to see her esteemed by him, instead of trafficked.

After the session, one of the senior chaplains discreetly approached me and suggested that I do some genealogical investigation. He hinted, “Colonel Coward has a large footprint. You can find some good information.” The Black chaplains appeared gratified that I had attempted to deepen the conversation, yet even when I had blurted out the story, in the back of my mind I still wondered if the tale was true—a symptom of imposter syndrome. I could not provide any documentation. Great-Great-Grandmother Ellen did Page 10 →not have any legal papers substantiating their relationship. Through the passage of time, their connection was diminished to hearsay and almost became a work of fiction. I mean, while it was happening, it “wasn’t happening,” so why would I think it happened now? Verifying this relationship seemed futile, like looking for a black cat in a coal cellar. I knew the African-American descendants of Thomas Jefferson had met some dogged and oppositional resistance from his legitimate heirs. I didn’t need to get into that ring without the right gloves.

With the election of President Barack Obama, the perceptions of those I brought into this conversation about race had shifted and expanded. A Black biracial man occupied the highest position in the political world. However, his election fueled tensions in our public discourse about race. During this seismic shift and inspired by the work of the Griot Institute for the Study of Black Lives and Cultures at Bucknell University, I began in earnest to verify my family’s oral tradition.⁴ Under the guidance of the late Professor Carmen Gillespie, the Griot Institute offered a seminar on the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. I attended those lectures, read books that explored this union, toured Monticello, and thought deeply about how notions of color have shaped our body politic.

Some of my ancestors would have been categorized as white Blacks—those who were phenotypically white but classified as Negroes. As if for the first time, I found myself shocked that some slaves looked white. The white elite had, indeed, learned how to enslave themselves. Journalists Brittany Luce and Eric Eddings, in a provocative segment on passing in the podcast For Colored Nerds, confirmed my observation.⁵ They recalled how abolitionists garnered white support by instilling fear in white parents that their children could be mistaken for slaves and abducted into the trade.

Given how many white men had both white and colored offspring, unacknowledged, interracial relationships were prevalent. Intricate social practices and notions of propriety evolved around those relationships. These involved “acceptable” duplicities. In Charleston, the overwhelming number of slave manumissions were granted to mulattoes, their enslaved paramours, and the children of these unions. According to the South Carolina Encyclopedia, in 1860, mulattoes constituted five percent of the state’s enslaved population but seventy-two percent of the freed people. Women were more frequently manumitted than men.⁶

Page 11 →My sister Toni interviewed a Black genealogist, the late Wilhelmina Kelly, who joined the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) through her white male ancestor.⁷ One could claim membership through Black ancestors, because many Black men did, in fact, fight in the Revolutionary War, but their service is harder to corroborate. Within the limitations of the law, her white male ancestor discovered a way to legitimize his relationship, so she had a paper trail. The three of us put our heads together to devise a strategy to be admitted to the DAR through a white ancestor.

We wondered whether the Cowards fought in the Revolution and attempted to trace them in the documents available to us, but our lack of marital records and rudimentary paperwork impeded our discovery. Moreover, as Black women, we felt almost like traitors, searching for the confirmation that white soldiers would provide. My Black ancestors could have fought and died in that war, many receiving a booty of broken promises. We couldn’t find the Cowards. Furthermore, we still needed to establish our kinship with them. The DAR did not accept DNA, and we didn’t have any donors at that time, but that restriction planted another idea: Find the holy grail—DNA. Although genetic material would not satisfy the DAR, one minute sample from a legitimate descendant would answer the pivotal question.

Fitting together my pieces of information, I found a compilation of Colonel Coward’s Civil War journal in The South Carolinians, edited by Natalie Jenkins Bond.⁸ I purchased a copy. Sitting at my desk with the unopened book, I had the haunting notion that I shouldn’t be “snooping around” in his private life. But curiosity got the better of me. I also heard my mother, my Aunt Lottie, and my grandmother encouraging me. I could hear my mother whispering in my ear, helping me to connect the dots. A perceptive woman, she enjoyed detective work and positing theories. When the book arrived with the “Stars and Bars” and palmetto ensign on its cover, I felt a moment of recoil and resistance. But when I opened the cover and saw his picture, I felt stunned! That’s the man! He’s my great-great-grandfather. My grandma bore a vivid resemblance to him. Gazing down at his photograph, I detected vulnerability. Something shifted inside me. I found I could not hate him, because he looked like people I deeply loved and sorely missed.

The next big hurdle was to read his war journal. I worried about the content and the language he would use to describe people that looked like me. Questions swirled. Would his words hurt? Would he refer to my people as “niggers”? Would he disparage them? He didn’t use the term “niggers” in the narrative. Instead, he used “colored” and “Negroes.” Sometimes he used Page 12 →the historically genteel but disparaging word “darkie,” a term my mother declared equally repugnant.

I found myself taking a measured view of his morality, given his cultural conditioning. The racial caste system was the Southern—indeed, the American—way of life. That’s a brutal fact. Asbury had his place within this color caste system. White supremacist ideology permeated his story; that’s the narrative that he was taught and that sustained his social ranking in the racialized hierarchy. He learned to exploit the narrative of racial difference to leverage power and privilege for himself and those most like him. Initially, I felt shackled by the ill-begotten narrative of racial difference that fostered enmity instead of affinity between us. American culture drew bright lines of separation, and that division created wide disparities that exist to this day. Colonel Asbury Coward inherited a racialized caste system that gave his whiteness preference, privilege, and protection. Had I been in his position, I’m not quite sure how I would have managed this advantage. Fear of death, violence, terror, ostracism, family separations, and the threat of impoverishment forced and manipulated everyone’s complicity in the caste system. Many of us still spend much of our time adapting to the structures we live in, figuring out ways to thrive or survive instead of working to dismantle and transform our social constructs from the ground up. When I approach that larger task, I identify with Sisyphus rolling a rock up a hill, only for it to slide down. Incremental change is a slow, at times imperceptible, process. I can feel frustrated by the apparent ineffectuality of the cause, and so I remind myself that doing good is good.

Consequently, I choose not to see Colonel Coward as a one-dimensional demon rampaging through the 1800s. It flattens him into a paper cutout and discounts the complexities of the human condition. The racialized caste system traumatized everyone in varying degrees, but power and privilege matter in the world of realpolitik. Therefore, in matters of human suffering, there was no equivalency between enslaved Black and free white people. By design, they lived in two distinct and remote worlds, one labeled Black and the other white. However, I also acknowledge the universality of the human spirit, which continues to inform my perspective. People are capable of both sacrificial love and horrendous evil. For better or worse, we are subject to each other’s autonomy.

To understand him, I needed to gather as much historical background as I could to inform my perspective. Again, I wanted to enter this project with curiosity rather than hostility. I asked questions and followed leads. I read copious historical documents and literature depicting life during the Page 13 →antebellum period. To work through my resentment, I found photographs of Colonel Coward online and selected one as a screen saver—the one in which I thought I detected a twinkle in his eye. I referred to family notes and a family tree that my Uncle Frank, my mother’s older brother, left stashed in the pages of the book Initiatives, Paternalism, and Race Relations on the Charleston Avery Normal Institute.⁹ Prompted by Uncle Frank’s encouragement, I discovered an extensive genealogy site that traced Coward’s lineage back for generations and found tidbits of surprising information in obscure articles about him.

I used to look at my screen saver, at this elfin man and say, “Look, if you want to repair the breach, I need some paper that connects us.” During a workshop at the Griot Institute, a prominent genealogist, Helen F. M. Leary, stated simply that any white man who had proximity to an enslaved woman had sexual access to her. I needed at least to establish the physical proximity between Colonel Coward and Great-Great-Grandmother Ellen. Without a piece of paper proving that she served as his bondswoman, my project could not advance. But I kept on, hoping the paper would turn up.

I wanted the man on my screen saver to help me with my project. From what I had deduced, he enjoyed being a prominent, influential figure, but he did have to scramble and strategize for the prestige that he eventually enjoyed. He wasn’t born with a silver spoon, but his chubby little fingers held fast to a white card that alighted in the palm of his hand. At the moment of birth, his physical attributes gave him access to numerous cultural privileges.

Then, in early 2013, sitting in the lobby of the Hale Koa Hotel on Waikiki Beach, I received an email from my second cousin Lahnice McFall Hollister. She was doing genealogical research and came across a slip of paper naming our Great-Great Grandmother Ellen and her mother Charlotte as property intestate to Asbury upon the unexpected death of his father, Jesse. I had my piece of paper. Ironically, I felt thrilled. Although an odious proof of ownership should have hardened me toward him, that paper provided a piece of the puzzle.

In the following months, I drove to The Citadel to read through Colonel Coward’s personal papers. I still felt like a trespasser. I didn’t know my place—or I did know my place and didn’t accept it. Essentially, all Black Americans have white ancestry. “Broadly, the genomic analysis found that, on average, the African-American genome was 73.2 percent African, 24 percent European and 0.8 percent Native American.”¹⁰ I am a BIPOC: Black Indigenous person of color. Yet, as I sorted through his material, I started Page 14 →to feel empowered and thought to myself, “Who’s sitting in the catbird seat now? It took almost two hundred years, yet here I am rifling through all your stuff.”

I got nosy. I spent several hours rummaging through his boxes and reading the microfiche ad nauseum. At times, I imagined an overseer in the corner waiting to swat me away for meddling. I felt naughty as I started to read his unpublished handwritten diary. The salutation read, “My dear children,” a term of endearment that did not include me, yet here I am.

Colonel Coward’s personal diary provided glimpses into his character. He wrote of his courtship with his apparently well-to-do wife, Elise, and referred to her as “the pink mantle”—one of many marks of affection and condescension—as he persuaded her to take his hand. Her father was a vendue master, an auctioneer. Although their marriage was, in part, an economic transaction, Elise was flesh and blood to him, whereas Ellen was a commodity to serve their various purposes, or perhaps just his. To justify this practice and validate their privilege, Coward and men like him referred to characters in the Old Testament such as Abraham, who had Sarah and Hagar. Coward had his wife, Elise, and his enslaved concubine, Ellen.

Initially, I assumed that Asbury Coward was of the planter class. Quite the opposite—the Cowards were yeoman farmers, the working poor, commonly referred to by the power elite as waste people, or poor white trash. This group found themselves wedged between a rock and a hard place: They could not compete with free labor. To escape grinding poverty, to gain financial stability and to elevate his position in the caste, his father, Jesse, made a Faustian bargain. He decided to work as an overseer on the Quimby and Hyde Plantations, where cruelty was a requirement for anyone working in the human chattel industry. Owners and overseers commonly used terror to compel compliance. Perhaps one of Jesse’s motivations was to give his son, Asbury, the advantages of a good and costly education. For Jesse, the end justified the means.

Ellen and her mother’s circumstances were ever more knotty, vulnerable, and precarious. They had no authority over their own lives, and their bodies were owned by a man who resorted to violence. For many overseers, corporal punishment—the cat-o’-nine-tails and the sugar house (a workhouse of torture)—were instruments to enforce compliance in a system that normalized and excused violence on Black skin no matter what the shade. I imagine enslaved women studied these men closely. Forced to sleep with the enemy, these women probably made themselves economically valuable to leverage some form of negotiation. They toiled to secure their utilitarian value to Page 15 →their owners and perhaps reap some of the privileges from their proximity to whiteness.

Colonel Coward had a harsh childhood reminiscent of a Dickensian novel. His mother’s death when he was three months old left him shuttled between the bosoms of his maternal Aunt Sarah Jane and his Black mammy Elsy, who provided most of his care and nourishment. As a child, he experienced episodes of paroxysms. Several times in his handwritten diary, he laments that he could have injured and killed his kinfolk who got under his skin. With remorse, he wrote about different strategies like counting to ten, staring off in the distance, or boxing to manage his anger. Gaining some insights after reading Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “Ligeia,” Colonel Coward believed he conquered the demon of anger through an act of will.¹¹

I wondered about the source of his violent tantrums. Perhaps his fits of rage were a result of childhood trauma. He may have witnessed his wet nurse, Elsy, being beaten. Perhaps, the enslaved people he became attached to disappeared. Perhaps he frequently witnessed corporal violence. Perhaps, as a child, he was trained to inflict violence on enslaved people as a weapon of control. Perhaps he got bullied. After all, in stature, he appeared to be a bit of a runt, but he could pack a mean punch.

One concern that nagged me was whether Asbury had affection for Ellen. They knew each other as children. I wanted her to have a better situation than what her circumstances appeared to have been. For me, love creates safety. I did not want to think of her being repeatedly raped and left emotionally ransacked. I wanted to see her loved and not simply worn out like a throw rug. Legally, Ellen would never have the status and the protections of his wife, but could she at least be an object of his affection?

Later in the year, I attended a conference with Coming To The Table, an organization that aims to link the descendants of the enslaved with those of enslavers.¹² I decided to contact Colonel Coward’s legitimate heirs. Searching the web, I found one—his namesake. I discovered that we had one more thing in common: We both served in the Navy. I wrote to ask if he would be interested in exploring our common ancestry. My registered letter did not receive a response. Once again, I put the matter to rest and went back to work in the “real world.” I moved to DC.

My employment as a resiliency facilitator for the US Department of Defense postponed my search, but as soon as my contract ended, I shifted my attention Page 16 →back to substantiating our oral tradition. Despite a full career as a Navy chaplain, I knew that the pen was mightier than the sword. I wanted to write this story before time erased it. One nagging question throughout this process of discovery was, “Why didn’t I ask my ancestors more questions?” I had been busy living my life and asking other questions. After retiring from the Navy, I seized the opportunity to refocus my attention, synthesize the information, and begin writing the story. Although I had experience in homiletics, I needed to study the craft of writing and consequently enrolled in a writing program at Salve Regina University. My sermon writing was expository, interposed with some anecdotes, but a book requires another kind of prose. “Cut to the chase” was a common slogan in the military, but expediency doesn’t always make for good storytelling, which invites the reader to slow down, imagine and reflect. Plus, my ancestors’ story was going to be hard to tell, because the themes expressed in the narrative remain painful, emotionally charged, and controversial.

It is exceedingly hard to write because, for many, Asbury Coward epitomizes a villain—the perpetrator. The trouble is that villains are not villains to everyone, and all of us have played the part. Frequently, perpetrators are or have been victims. Besides, Asbury was this and then he was that, and then he was this again and then he became that. Human nature cannot be categorized as all good or all evil, nor does human growth mimic a straight trajectory. We are not stock characters but a string of moments, some good and some otherwise. We retrace and reintegrate.

I do not want to minimize his egregious behavior. He owned slaves. He fought for the Confederacy. He joined the Red Shirts, a ragtag, violent, and extremist wing of the Democratic Party. Writing about him challenges me, because he was the enemy, yet I want to make a connection. I would read something about Asbury Coward that I admired or some action that he took that reflected magnanimity and insight. Then I would read something that caused me to wince or to raise an eyebrow. Yet I pressed on amid the complexity, hoping that he wasn’t a stock character.

The cultural climate played a critical role in facilitating my research through a groundswell of information. Over several years, a spate of books that reexamined American history emerged, telling hard, dark, under-told stories about enslavement, civil massacres, Jim Crow, lynching, convict leasing—the relentless drumbeat of strategic and perpetual confiscation of wealth. I saw how our sanitized historical narrative had reinforced the racialized caste system. Open conversations about racial disparities and the structures that perpetuated these harms became more acceptable, and even urgent.

Page 17 →The aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the toppling of numerous Confederate monuments motivated me to make the story public, regardless of where I landed in the authentication process. Racial reckoning had become a popular catchphrase. Feeling the urgency of the moment, I continued reading the works by thoughtful leaders like Ibram X. Kendi, Robin diAngelo, Isabel Wilkerson, Clint Smith, Daniel Hill, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. I also listened to the podcast of Nikole Hannah Jones’s The 1619 Project.¹³ These authors and the Black Lives Matter movement changed the conversation about race and color. They provided new ways to discuss the artificiality of race and the reality of structural racism. I heard legal scholar and civil rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw contend that race is fiction. Racism is a fact. I breathed a sigh of relief that we could discuss these social constructions instead of dismissing their reality and their potency in generating harms and sustaining disparities.

Despite the rising animus during the Trump years, the cultural climate seemed more receptive. Scholars made advancements in sharpening the terminology for discussing race relations. For example, the concept of erasure gave me tacit permission to explore my ancestry. I no longer felt gaslit by others’ denial or skepticism. I felt validated and inspired to continue to search for the truth. Their scholarship also awakened me to what Kendi calls a “dueling consciousness” and revealed my personal complicities with assimilation.¹⁴

One evening, I watched a PBS NewsHour segment “Race Matters,” which covered the Universities Studying Slavery programs. To familiarize myself with this undertaking, I located the website and noticed that The Citadel was listed. This university has a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Center Team (TRHT), which was codirected by Tessa Updike, an archivist, and Dr. Felice Knight, an African-American historian.¹⁵ With these two individuals, I knew I had an opening to discuss my project, even though I still lacked credible DNA evidence.

To present my case, I met with the TRHT and was reminded that they needed DNA evidence. My second cousin, Lahnice McFall Hollister, had been extensively researching my grandmother’s family, the McFalls of Charleston. In her article published in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, “Three Generations of South Carolina Freedwomen,” she recounted our family’s oral tradition and identified Asbury Coward as the owner and possibly the father of Ellen’s five children. Our great-grandmother, Mary Ann McFall, was the eldest daughter of this union.¹⁶ She was the blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl who was enslaved until she was Page 18 →five years old. In my second meeting with the TRHT, I invited Lahnice to be my ally, because her work was extensive and documented. Although she had not set out to prove Coward’s kinship, her findings did substantiate Coward’s and Ellen’s proximity.

Knowing that I must verify my oral tradition, I again googled Asbury Coward’s name. I found an obituary with a photograph of Coward’s heir, Captain Asbury “Sandy” Coward IV, a white-haired, blushed-complexion, round-faced man in his Navy choker white dress uniform. With some agitation, I read his obituary. As I perused the article, I found the name of his younger brother, Curtis Coward. I recognized this name from a previous search. Hearing the tick of the clock, I made a last-ditch effort. He might be the last living white male heir and the missing link. I sprang into action, located his email address, and contacted him. In my introductory email to Curtis Coward, I shared the story of my trip to The Citadel with my Aunt Lottie—Charlotte McFall Lacy—to see Colonel Asbury Coward’s portrait. There she pointed out her resemblance to him. I explained my goal of verifying Asbury Coward as our common ancestor. He responded within twenty-four hours. I was thrilled. He seemed open, curious, and eager. Finally, after all these years, I was going to uncover a family mystery.

When we spoke, I offered my condolences and asked him, “Are you a descendant of Colonel Asbury Coward, a superintendent of The Citadel?” “Yes,” he responded, “I’m wearing his signet ring as we speak.” During our conversation, he reminded me in a crusty voice that I had reached out to his brother several years ago. He and his sister-in-law had discussed my letter, but the conversation dropped. He quizzed me, “Guess what my middle name is? McFall!” He did not challenge any of my claims, because the practice of taking enslaved women as concubines was customary. He reminded me that Thomas Jefferson had Black descendants. He also mentioned that he had two daughters whose work related to racial equity and that they were eager to meet me. We agreed to continue our conversation the following week.

Coincidentally, I had planned to meet Dr. Felice Knight at The Citadel that afternoon. When I met with her, she shared in the excitement of this phase of discovery, but she said that his agreement did not provide the evidence I needed. I had anticipated her response. The following week, I met virtually with Curt. This time, I asked if he would donate a DNA sample. I knew it was a big ask. Even though we might share an ancestor, we were Page 19 →total strangers. At the end of our conversation, though, he said he would do whatever he could to help me with my project.

On Thanksgiving Day, Curt informed me that his DNA information was now available. I uploaded my data on his site the following week. On December 3, 2021, I received confirmation: Colonel Asbury Coward was my ancestor. Curtis, his legitimate heir, and I shared the same great-great-grandfather. Through patience and persistence, I found him. My maternal ancestors had spoken the truth, and I had substantiated their story.

According to my female ancestors, all five of Ellen’s children were fathered by Asbury Coward from 1857 to 1874. Dr. John Allen McFall, the eldest brother of my grandmother Mary Ann wrote in his journal that some of the former slave owners did provide a form of guardianship for their newly emancipated colored families. I imagine that this custom followed a patronage model, with favors discreetly bestowed by the patriarch to their colored relations. According to Dr. McFall, freed mulattoes fared better than freed Blacks because of the patriarch’s oversight. In his writings, the name of Asbury Coward, his grandfather, was never cited. Consequently, it’s hard to state with absolute certainty what Asbury might have done for his colored offspring. Erasure removed the trace of any intimate attachments. Through my research, I detected that Asbury might have offered some guidance and protection. Emancipation left Ellen marooned and pregnant, with their three children in tow. Countless newly freed females with children mentally collapsed. They didn’t have a foothold in the prevailing winds of change. Emancipation found Black women with children in a no-win situation. Many perished.

In many foreseeable ways, freedom equated to severe deprivation for freed people. Jim Downs reports in Sick From Freedom that nearly one million enslaved people died from 1862 to 1870.¹⁷ Black families suffered and died from a barrage of racialized hostilities, exposure, and communicable diseases such as smallpox. Their ailments went untreated. Many Blacks gradually withered away from starvation. So dire were their health problems that a white religious leader thought that Black Americans would vanish. “Like his brother the Indian of the forest, he must melt away and disappear forever from the midst of us.”¹⁸

Asbury’s actions could have helped to keep Ellen and her family alive. Although he had no legal obligation to his colored family, he had a moral Page 20 →and ethical one, which he could have attempted to fulfill. It appears that Asbury quickly devised a plan to restore his household and reinstate his school, Kings Mountain Military Academy. He went to the Freedmen’s Bureau and disclosed his plan to distribute some of his freed people to the Lowcountry.¹⁹ Others would stay in York County because of their family connections. Ellen and her mother, Charlotte, remained in York County for several years. Ellen continued as his concubine, which allowed her to remain under Asbury’s protection during a volatile period. She worked as a laundress, a seamstress, and a domestic servant in exchange for food, shelter, protection, and education for her children. Charlotte also served as a laundress and domestic servant. This time, their arrangement seemed to be based on mutual need dictated by even more dire circumstances.

Although Asbury’s disclosure to the Freedmen’s Bureau appeared charitable, his decision could have been motivated by economic expediency and exploitation. When he returned home from the war to York County, Asbury rallied his spirit. He read a tattered sign that he adopted as a credo: “I had it. I lost it. I start all over again.”²⁰ Like many men in his economic caste, he built on what he knew—the old order—and labor was on a fire sale. Consequently, Asbury relied on Ellen and Charlotte to support his aspirations. Before the war, their manual labor defrayed the cost for his attendance at The Citadel. He hired them out to meet his expenses and would use them again.

It is also possible that Asbury had genuine concern for Ellen and their children. There is some evidence that he was not entirely committed to the Confederate ideology. For example, he admired President Lincoln and considered the president’s assassination a grave calamity. On hearing the news of Lincoln’s murder, Asbury burst into a rant. A fellow Confederate colonel, Samuel Melton, did not share Asbury’s sentiments. To quell the situation and calm Melton, Asbury stated, “Mr. Lincoln had much of the milk of human kindness in him. He would have been inclined to deal justly and reverently with the present condition of affairs. God help us all! New trials I see awaiting us ahead!”²¹ By voicing this opinion, Asbury barely avoided fisticuffs with Melton. Asbury then shifted the topic, perhaps from fear of being perceived as a loose cannon or a victim of battle fatigue. Even so, his words suggest that he may have heard the still small voice of righteousness.

Asbury’s statement about Lincoln accurately predicted the looming situation as an unmitigated disaster. Yorkville became an extremely fractious and hostile environment in which to live and work.

The Civil War ended, but the tensions between the Confederates and their sympathizers and Freedmen and their allies escalated. Even though the Page 21 →Confederates lost the war, they refused to forfeit their power and privilege to the Freedmen who demonstrated their potency in every sphere. Former Confederates could not envision a biracial nation and conducted asymmetrical warfare on their formerly enslaved people.

Being married to Elise and with a growing family, Asbury’s life became thornier and more complicated. During the Ku Klux Klan insurgency in York County, Asbury walked a tightrope, waffling between his competing connections. Many Klan members were his superiors, friends, and neighbors. He needed them. One of his close associates, a town’s physician, Confederate General James Rufus Bratton, commanded the Klan and led in some of its most heinous and notorious exploits. Conversely, Asbury had intimate connections with Charles Bessear, his faithful manservant during the Civil War and later his cook at Kings Mountain Academy. Then there was Ellen, accompanied by his children. Though customary, Asbury and Ellen’s relationship was illicit and grew more tentative with each passing year. Asbury’s former privileges twisted into present liabilities. He got caught! He landed in a political and interpersonal quagmire with no easy answers. Ellen provided one. Elise probably breathed a sigh of relief.

In the mid-1870s, Ellen left York County for the Lowcountry, accompanied by her mother and five children. Her oldest, Henry, was about thirteen years of age, and her youngest was a toddler named Charlotte. Dr. McFall suspected that Ellen left York County because of the Klan, though she never confirmed his hunch. He reported that the Klan murdered over eight hundred Freedmen and destroyed hundreds of barns and homes.²² Having surrendered their arms, Freedmen could no longer defend themselves, and race cleansing ensued. During this coup, the Klan drove the Freedmen out of the area, and some of those brave souls migrated as far as the West African coast. Others fought back or sought the protection of living in the woods instead of inhabiting their homes, where many of the Klan’s night raids occurred. Despite the racial animus, Ellen’s line flourished, and it’s conceivable that Asbury Coward has more Black descendants than white heirs. A sturdy woman, his wife Elise had numerous pregnancies, but her children didn’t have comparable longevity. She spent much of her childbearing years in and out of a black gown.

After Ellen’s departure, Asbury’s political alliances regained their former congruency. His school flourished. In 1876, he served as chief marshal of a Red Shirts parade in support of the political campaign of Wade Hampton III. Although Asbury wasn’t a Klansman, he eventually backed the Red Shirts’ white supremacist ideology and their use of violence to maintain Page 22 →control. In so many ways, he had already made numerous investments in this way of being.

As a political pragmatist, I think that Asbury assessed his situation and made choices that were based on his competing allegiances, alliances, and ambitions. His self-interests aligned with their supremacist ideology. His network consisted of a gang of elite, cantankerous, disaffected, traumatized, grief-stricken, and wounded former Confederate soldiers. He knew their ferocity as well as he knew his own. Resisting his band of brothers not only could have sealed his fate but also could have doomed his household. The Klan murdered both Blacks and their white sympathizers. Asbury may have feared the repercussions of resistance. Or maybe he kept his hands clean while letting others do the dirty work of reestablishing the South’s repressive regime.

Despite Asbury’s complexities and apparent contradictions, neither he nor I created our social and economic caste systems. We didn’t hatch this plan. The planter elites did. By a consequence of birth, we landed on disparate rungs on the ladder, but we each bear responsibility for the harms we may have caused to others. Asbury did not construct the notion of whiteness, but the idea of whiteness became a moral hazard for him. Asbury’s supremacist ideology perpetuated the narrative of racial difference and stirred the animosity that formed the bedrock for the socioeconomic injustices that barred Black people from equitable participation in the political structure that governed them. State legislators and institutions strategically stripped Freedmen of their hard-earned civil rights, which perpetually tormented and impoverished them. Whatever his feelings toward Ellen, Asbury chose not to share power or privileges with Freedmen. Instead, he dispensed benefits as he deemed equitable to those he favored.

Some white people found ways to use their whiteness as a lever for equity and the abolition of social injustice. They struggled to awaken a nation mesmerized by the love of capital, but they couldn’t generate a critical mass to continue the process of reconciliation. There just weren’t enough of them. Even though I desperately wish that Asbury and those like him had not resorted to or been complicit with violence and instead operated from a place of goodwill and equity, they didn’t. Perhaps they couldn’t. The white populaces could not overcome the centuries of negative conditioning and predatory behaviors toward Black people and resorted to the same vile tactics to victimize and disenfranchise newly freed people. Former Confederates recreated the Old South. That pernicious script provided them with a Page 23 →sense of order, comfort, and certainty but left them spiritually deformed and in so many ways morally bankrupt, for they had invested in a lie. In an episode on Fresh Air hosted by Terry Gross, historian Eric Foner shared that Lincoln had wanted to send Black people back to Africa because white people hated them so much.²³ These divisions didn’t just happen.

As I researched Asbury’s life, I realized that the human chattel system fastened everyone within its tight grip. The industry incarcerated Black people and insidiously reduced desperate and fearful white populations down to their lowest common denominators to maintain the racialized hierarchy, which calcified the divisions. In this scenario, I think everyone could be seen as a victim.

And so, I think I understand some of Asbury’s choices. The caste system is a behemoth and greater than any individual. The colloquialism “hate the game but not the player” works for me. In the asymmetrical competition between Blacks and whites, Asbury had been dealt the white card. He was a player. He understood the machinations of hierarchy. Of course, he was going to play that card adeptly in alignment with his values, interests, and aspirations. The game was rigged. For him to do otherwise would have seemed irrational and foolhardy. He had family obligations. I can only imagine the political enticements and the incentives he received to remain loyal to his caste. In a sense, he was presented with keys to this kingdom. Eventually, he plotted and landed at the head of the fortress, The Citadel, formerly an arsenal established to violently quell any sentiment of liberation from the enslaved population.

Asbury had the safety net of his social status, but my great-great grandmother Ellen did not. Born of an enslaved mother, she started her life at the bottom rung of the social ladder. But she did have the presence of her mother, Charlotte, whom I acknowledge as one of the unsung heroes in our family narrative. Charlotte did everything she needed to do to keep her small family together. These women worked as a team. Under Charlotte’s vigilance and tutelage, Ellen learned how to survive and, in many ways, overcome enslavement. Charlotte imparted to Ellen the tools she needed to keep her safe in a treacherous environment, the master’s household. Charlotte held aspirations for her daughter, and I believe that she taught Ellen how to manage and overcome a life defined by adversity by leaning into her inner resources—intimacy with God. Ellen could find wisdom, solace, and dignity from within. These life skills contributed to Ellen’s personal agency so that she could emancipate herself in due season and succeed. Their remarkable Page 24 →resiliency has been passed down from generation to generation and paved the way for the educated Black middle class.

As I attempted to walk in Asbury’s leather brogans, I softened. He kind of got under my skin. I wondered whether the enslavement of others worked for him or whether it added multiple layers of complexities and conflicts. At times, I wondered if he quietly shared the same thought. I’m sure that there is more information to uncover about my great-great grandfather Asbury that would further disappoint, appall, and maybe surprise me, but I am certain that we all have clay feet. No one lives a perfectly moral, just, and virtuous life. We do the best we can with the hand we’ve been dealt.

Despite our damaged history, Asbury Coward is no longer my enemy, because I choose not to perceive him that way. When I label him, I make him into a caricature. If I reduce him to one motive, one trait, one flaw or one “ism,” I negate his humanity and my ability to get under his skin. Clearly, he wanted to do good work, and he accomplished it. He led in the formation of a generation of leaders. I will not erase the good that he has done or depreciate his legacy for those who directly benefited from his actions. On his death certificate, his occupation was stated not as a soldier but as an educator. An ethic of service is an integral part of both vocations. I know this because I worked as an educator and served as a military chaplain. The University of South Carolina awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws for his work in education.

I think I recognize how difficult it was for ancestors like Asbury to surrender his power, his ambitions, his privilege, his influence, his connections, his family, his location, his comfort—his whiteness. It’s a big ask. But for Ellen, it was an even bigger ask. She had to carry his debt. She carried the responsibility of raising his five white–Black children with fewer ways and paltry means to provide for them. She had to pay his debt, and I’m certain there were many other outstanding debts of his that she had to cover. I guess that’s a part of the messy situation my late mother referred to when Aunt Lottie esteemed their light skin. Female house servants got the raw end of that deal.

Like many Black Americans, I inherited a complicated and fractured familial legacy. In many ways, I have benefited, and I stand on the shoulders of all of them. My mother used to comment when someone did something questionable or egregious, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Surely, I can extend grace on this man, this very human soul. From the moment I saw Asbury’s photograph on the inside cover of The South Carolinians, I Page 25 →knew he was my great-great-grandfather. He looked like family because we are family. Asbury Coward’s paternity appeared on my DNA swab. Under our skin, we are kinfolk. When I shared my findings with my godmother, my late mother’s longest friend, she quipped, “You look like him.” I paused, surprised. Asbury Coward is a part of the people who look like me. He’s under my skin. He’s in my blood.

The Reverend Thomasina A. Yuille has provided spiritual leadership for diverse populations within the U.S. Navy, the Protestant Church, and within higher education. Currently, she is piecing together her family history to document her ancestor’s oral tradition and to delve into their navigation of the complex American landscape of family, color, and race.

1. 1. Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (New York: Mother Earth Press, 1912), 225.
2. 2. “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” is a traditional Negro spiritual that dates from the time of enslavement. The song was popularized in the late nineteenth century by the Fisk Jubilee Singers. See www.allmusic.com.
3. 3. The mathematician Katherine Johnson (1918–2020) was one of several African-American women employed in NASA’s Flight Research Division. Her work identified the precise trajectories needed for the Apollo 11 moon landing. See “Katherine Johnson Dies at 101; Mathematician Broke Barriers at NASA,” New York Times, February 25, 2020, A1. Her accomplishments were celebrated in Theodore Melfi’s biographical drama, Hidden Figures (20th Century Fox, 2016).
4. 4. The Griot Institute for the Study of Black Lives and Cultures was founded in 2010 and is currently directed by Dr. Cymore Fourshey. See https://www.bucknell.edu/academics/beyond-classroom/academic-centers-institutes/griot-institute-study-black-lives-cultures/about-griot-institute/our-history.
5. 5. Passing is a 2021 film written, produced, and directed by Rebecca Hall and based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel. Luce and Eddying’s podcast is available at https://www.forcolorednerds.fm/.
6. 6. Bernard E. Powers Jr., “Free Persons of Color,” South Carolina Encyclopedia (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), www.scencyclopedia.org.
7. 7. Wilhelmina Rhodes Kelly (1946–2019) was an African-American genealogist and author of four books: The Hines Bush Family: And Other Related People from the Barnwell District, South Carolina 1842-2004 (Tuscon, AZ: Hats Off Books, 2004); Bedford Stuyvesant (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2007); Crown Heights and Weeksville (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2009); and The Long and Winding Road to Jamestowne, Virginian 1607 (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2009).
8. 8. Natalie Jenkins Bond, ed., The South Carolinians, The Memoirs of Col. Asbury Coward (Burlington, VT: Vantage Press, 1968).
9. 9. Page 26 →Edmund L. Drago, Initiative, Paternalism, and Race Relations: Charleston’s Avery Normal Institute (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990).
10. 10. Arvind Suresh, “Sen. Elizabeth Warren Controversy: Almost every American has a sliver of Native American ancestry,” Genetic Literacy Project, Oct. 16, 2018, www.geneticliteracyproject.org.
11. 11. Poe’s story was first published in September 1838 in the magazine American Museum. A revised version appeared in 1840 in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. See John Ward Ostram, “Poe’s Literary Labors and Rewards,” in Myths and Reality: The Mysterious Mr. Poe, ed. Benjamin Franklin Fisher (Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1987), 38.
12. 12. Originally founded in 2006 on the campus of Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, Coming to the Table is now associated with RJOY (Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth). See https://comingtothetable.org/.
13. 13. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (New York: Random House, 2021) is edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein. It is an expansion of Hannah-Jones’s earlier work, “The 1619 Project,” which appeared in the New York Times Magazine in August 2019.
14. 14. Ibram X. Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019), 29.
15. 15. Universities Studying Slavery is a consortium created by the University of Virginia. There are currently seven South Carolina member institutions: The Citadel, Clemson University, College of Charleston, Francis Marion University, Furman University, the University of South Carolina, and Wofford College. For more information see https://slavery.virginia.edu/universities-studying-slavery/. Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation is a comprehensive organization, sponsored by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, which works on both the local and national levels to “address the historic and contemporary effects of racism.” See https://healourcommunities.org/.
16. 16. Morna Lahnice Hollister, “Three Generations of South Carolina Freedwomen: Tradition and Records Reconstruct a Meaningful Heritage,” The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 172 (2018): 41.
17. 17. Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 17.
18. 18. Paul Harris, “How the End of Slavery Led to Starvation and Death for Millions of Black Americans,” The Guardian, June 16, 2012, www.theguardian.com.
19. 19. The Bureau of Refugees, and Abandoned Lands, commonly referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau, was established by the Department of War in 1865 for the purpose of managing “all matters relating to the refugees and freedmen and lands abandoned or seized during the Civil War.” The National Archives provides a useful history of the bureau and its work. See “The Freedmen’s Bureau,” October 28, 2021, https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/freedmens-bureau.
20. 20. Bond, The South Carolinians, The Memoirs of Col. Asbury Coward, 186.
21. 21. Bond, 185.
22. 22. McFall, Autobiography, 10.
23. 23. “Lincoln’s Evolving Thoughts on Slavery, And Freedom,” Fresh Air, hosted by Terry Gross, October 11, 2010, https://www.npr.org/2010/10/11/130489804/.

• Berkman, Alexander. Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. New York: Mother Earth Press, 1912.
• Bond, Natalie Jenkins, ed. The South Carolinians, The Memoirs of Col. Asbury Coward. Burlington, VT: Vantage Press, 1968.
• Bressler, Martin and Linda Bressler. “A Study of Veteran-Owned Small Businesses and the Impact of Military Reserve Call-ups Since 9/11.” Academy of Entrepreneurship Journal 19, no. 2 (2012): 1–22.
• Downs, Jim. Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Drago, Edmund L. Initiative, Paternalism, and Race Relations: Charleston’s Avery Normal Institute. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990.
• Gross, Terry. “Lincoln’s Evolving Thoughts On Slavery, And Freedom.” Fresh Air, October 11, 2010, https://www.npr.org/2010/10/11/130489804/.
• Hall, Rebecca, dir. Passing. Netflix. 99 min. 2021.
• Hannah-Jones, Nikole, et al., eds. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story. New York: Random House, 2021.
• Hollister, Morna Lahnice. “Three Generations of South Carolina Freedwomen: Tradition and Records Reconstruct a Meaningful Heritage.” The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 172 (2018): 33–42.
• Kelly, Wilhelmina Rhodes. Bedford Stuyvesant. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing 2007.
• ———. Crown Heights and Weeksville. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2009.
• ———. The Hines Bush Family: And Other Related People from the Barnwell District, South Carolina 1842–2004. Tucson, AZ: Hats Off Books, 2004.
• ———. The Long and Winding Road to Jamestowne, Virginian 1607. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2009.
• Kendi, Ibram X. How To Be An Antiracist. New York: One World, 2019.
• Melfi, Theodore, dir. Hidden Figures. 2016. Hollywood, CA: 20th Century Fox.
• Ostram, John Ward. “Poe’s Literary Labors and Rewards,” In Myths and Reality: The Mysterious Mr. Poe, edited by Benjamin Franklin Fisher, 37–47. Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1987.
• Powers, Bernard E. Jr. “Free Persons of Color.” South Carolina Encyclopedia. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. www.scencyclopedis.org.
• Suresh, Arvind. “Sen. Elizabeth Warren Controversy: Almost Every American Has a Sliver of Native American Ancestry.” Genetic Literacy Project, October 16, 2018, www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/10/16.