bungalow with green shingles and burgundy window frames, once solitary in the trees, but now anchoring the corner of my block. A house that my eldest daughter’s friends told me I could not paint a different color, because they wouldn’t be able to find their way to the place where they could always be sure of food and a couch on which to sleep, and the right book to take with them in the morning.
My house—which I made into the home from Robert Frost’s poem: “When you go there, they have to take you in.”
I learned that from my marriage family, from Alberta and General Sims.
Every night, I stand there for a moment with my dog, the brittlebush quivering in the wind, thinking that all those years, no matter which way I looked, I was never alone.
The women who brought us here were utterly alone. Sometimes they had only what they held inside to call company. Even as children, they had no one but themselves.
Fine, Near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, 1876
She was
called Fine when she was orphaned. Then her name changed for each man in her life, for seventy years. She became Fin Hofford, Viney Rollins, Fannie Rollins, Tinnie Kemp, Fanny Kemp, and finally, in letters carved onto her headstone in a historic black cemetery outside Tulsa, Oklahoma:
BELOVED GRANDMOTHER
FINEY KEMP
1874–1952
nothing but
a new possession to the white people who took her from the former slave cabin in the countryside northwest of Nashville, where she was born maybe in 1869, only four years after the Civil War ended, according to an 1870 U.S. Census document, or maybe in 1874, according to information written on an application for social security just before her death.
It doesn’t matter. By the time she was five or six, Fine was a child bereft. Adrift.
Like countless children during Reconstruction, a violent maelstrom of greed and revenge and ruined land, Fine moved through the world alone. Small wanderers were everywhere along the roadsides, among the trees, in the edges of the yards.
Bereft of all love and care. Bereaved is what we feel when someone dies. Bereft is when we are left without anything.
Henry Ely, her father, had been “run off by the law,” Fine told her grandchildren, said to have made his way to Texas. Shortly afterward, her mother, Catherine, died in the place where she and her own sister had been enslaved for their entire lives. Fine was the youngest of five children. Imagine the children in the cabin doorway, watching wagons enter the yard to take them away.
Fine told the story of her life to her daughters and her grandchildren in Oklahoma and California; as her grandchildren became our elders, they recounted the details at family gatherings, and now the last surviving grandson of Fine, our beloved uncle John Prexy Sims, is eighty-two years old and tells her story to our own children.
“They took her by herself,” he said. “Her mother was dead and her father was gone. There was no one to contest the white people who came and picked the little ones out like puppies. The family that took her called her Fine simply because she looked strong and healthy.” She never saw her family again.
John said, “Her father was a Cherokee man, and he was in love with two sisters who were slaves. They were so beautiful he couldn’t pick one. So he loved them both.”
Family legend: Catherine and her sister lived together in one slave dwelling. Henry Ely was a free man, not allowed onto the plantation, so he dug a tunnel from the forest at the boundary of the land and under the fence. He planned the tunnel to open up into the dirt floor of the cabin of the sisters. (Like a fairy tale of a prince and two princesses—the fairy tales we were all told of captive women and a man whose love might rescue them. But this was 1850s Tennessee.)
Free men of color were often killed or forced out of the area by slaveowners or vigilantes. New laws made the very presence of men like Henry illegal. If Henry was Cherokee, his life was endangered by President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. Jackson wanted the west, and Tennessee was then part of the west. Manifest Destiny—painted landscapes with white angels wearing white garments hovered over the wagon trains of white settlers as they crossed the Appalachian Mountains into Tennessee. The indigenous peoples known as the Five Civilized Tribes, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole, were forcibly removed by American militia from Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, sent on the winter death march known as the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma Territory.
Whoever Henry Ely was, he called Catherine his wife, and they had six children. (The names of her sister and the children of that sister, and whether they were fathered by Henry are unknown.)
By the time her family disintegrated, when Fine was about five, Reconstruction meant violence, starvation, and murder for freedmen and freedwomen. The Freedmen’s Bureau made reports such as these, in 1866, in Murfreesboro, near the place where Henry and Catherine lived, where a “colored” man gave testimony:
July 28, 1865: “Ben (col’d) says on the 29th of June, ‘Beverly Randolph beat my wife with his fists then caught her by the chin threw back her head pulled out his knife swore he would cut her throat’—(the woman was large with child at the time.)” Randolph was fined $50.
The Freedmen’s Bureau reported further: “The freedmen are daily driven from their homes without a cent after having been induced to work the year with a promise of a share of the crop. Husbands are not permitted to claim their wives or parents their children, women have been struck to the ground and choked.”
“A freedman living twelve miles south came in last night, covered with blood, with severe cuts on his head—his former master had beaten him with a heavy stick while his son-in-law stood by with a pistol, because the freedman had said that he intended to go and hunt up his children, whom he had not seen in four years.”
This is the world Fine was born into.
She had lived in a small cabin with her people. Then there was a wagon—she either rode or walked behind. Did she cry and scream, when she saw her siblings taken away? Or was she taken first? She went alone. She never saw again the brothers and sisters with
Skin
that looked like hers and now her life was filled with cruelty, especially at the hands of an elderly matriarch to whom emancipation meant nothing.
John Sims’s voice still resonated with hurt when he talked about Fine: “She told me many stories about her life with the family that took her. Her food was scraps from the plates of the family, or whatever wild nuts, fruits, and berries she could find. Her clothes—castoffs from the family. She found that she could earn a little money by selling the wild blackberries that she picked (five cents a gallon). This little money she would save in hopes of buying a pair of shoes, but in spite of her efforts to find a safe hiding place,
