The Truth Shall Make You Free
I was born September 27, 1944, the last of my father’s kids to be born in Natchez, Monroe County, Alabama. This was also the birthplace of both of my parents, grandparents, and my American ancestors as far back as I can substantiate. My father used to farm on his father’s land. According to my mother, one day, shortly before my birth, while my father was plowing the field in preparation for a spring crop, a White man appeared from the road and told him, “Take your horse and your plow and get off this land and don’t come back. You don’t own it anymore.” Bewildered and at a loss for words, my father decided that the best and safest course of action was to comply. A few months later, my father left the land of his birth and moved to Moss Point, Mississippi.
By the 1950’s, the transition from the farm to the factory was complete. Aunts Mary, Martha and Sob had settled in Birmingham, Alabama, and Uncle Jim had settled in Mobile, Alabama. And Aunt Bessie still lived in the tiny house off SeSe Road. Conversations about the land never stopped.
I was in grade school at that time and had learned to read and write, so I was the correspondence secretary between my father (who was illiterate) and Aunt Bessie. There was constant contact between the two of them and several lawyers in Monroe County. I read her letters to my father and wrote his letters to her. I didn’t understand the essence of their communication, but I sensed their anguish in those letters and, even at a young age, I knew that something grievously wrong had been done to them. I also sensed an eerie connection between those letters and the deep sadness that was always in my father’s eyes whenever he sat alone, talking to himself, when he thought nobody was listening. As I grew into adulthood, the conversations about the land happened less and less often, but they never completely went away.
Like most people, John Henry was the product of the ways and customs of his time, as well as his rearing and cultural upbringing. He was flawed and perhaps he could sometimes be stubborn, believing his words to be the gospel truth. Maybe he was rational and was able to, in the face of a preponderance of evidence, acquiesce to the errors of his ways, even if reluctantly. My father and Aunt Bessie both went to their graves believing that they were dispossessed of land that they would have never consciously or unconsciously forsaken. They did not deserve to depart this world feeling aggrieved, helpless, outwitted, sabotaged, angry.
Am I saying that there were blatant violations or disregards for John Henry’s rights to secure and maintain ownership of his property? No, I am not. Yet maybe I am. The fact is that I don’t know.
In the 1980s, an attorney from Cleveland was dispatched to Monroe County, Alabama, to look into the complexity of what was now a generational “snafu”, The lawyer’s findings were indeterminate, too vague to be of any real benefit. Further, they elicited more questions than answers.