Mississippi Goddam”:  Traveling Back

Easter Sunday, 1986, a bright, warm Denver day.  The kids and I crossed St. Paul Street to get Grandpa Bryson from the nursing home.  Sol had been living there since January when my ex-husband, Pete, brought his father from Puerto Rico, after his mother, Babe, died there of a sudden heart attack.   I imagied Sol in their high-rise studio apartment that overlooked the Atlantic Ocean, leaning over from his wheelchair, , reaching to touch her, fearful of what he saw and fearful of falling, trying to say a comforting word or two, until hours later, maybe somebody in the hall heard him crying and knocked on the door.

It was hard for him to hold up his head in those last days, but his eyes rolled upward when he heard us enter.  He doubted he knew our names, or maybe even our faces, but we were closest to him, familiar—his former daughter-in-law and his only grandchildren.   Dana kissed Sol’s cheek and Chris took the wheelchair by its handles and wheeled him out—through the living room, into the elevator and out the doors into the sunlight.  Sol closed his eyes and soaked it up.  We squeezed along the narrow sidewalk, up one side and down the other to the front steps of our house where the kids and I lived.  Pete, who lived fifteen miles away, had been wise to place his father in a nursing home across the street from family. 

We couldn’t get the wheelchair up the steps to our house, so I retrieved Sol’s special Easter gift from the porch where I’d left it-- a pint of Jim Beam.  When I showed him the bottle, he perked up for a moment, looking like his old self, the one his grandchildren could no longer recall, as Sol’s physical and mental deterioration began when they were quite young.  I poured him a drink, and put the juice glass in his hand, but he slumped again, as if it were too heavy to lift.  I reached over to retrieve the glass—to keep it from breaking, but he held on to it.  He wouldn’t let me take it from him.  His eyes widened and his face glowed.  He was joking with me, the way I’d known him twenty years earlier.

Once I asked Sol what it was like growing up in Mississippi.  I think we were in their apartment in the Bronx at the time.  I hoped my question would lead to a reverie of memories he would share with me, but he just looked up with those hooded dark eyes and practically spat out the words, “Mississippi goddam.”  I backed off.  I knew the Nina Simone recording and her brutal interpretation of it.  He didn’t want to talk about Mississippi then and he never did, although he did tell me he was born in Sparks, Mississippi.

I later learned there is no Sparks, Mississippi, and that he was born in Starkville, Mississippi. The words do have a similar sound—spark, stark, stock, stick, stack.  This error about his birthplace suggested to me that he must not have spent much time in Starkville or he’d have recalled the name accurately.  Both sides of his parents’ families were easy to find.  His mother, Lizzie Moore Bryson, was from a large farm family in the Starkville area, and his father, Virgil’s, side of the family lived in New Albany, Mississippi, about a hundred miles north of Starkville.  The town is in the northeastern part of the state on the Little Tallahatchie River at the intersection of two Chickasaw trails.

I remember when it was about time for Sol to apply for social security, he said he couldn’t swear what year he was born, that he had no birth certificate.  Years later I found the  1910 Federal Census report for Starkville, dated April 2010.  It shows a seven-month old black baby named Solomon living with his father Virg, a 22 year old railroad laborer and his unemployed mother, Lizzie, his mother’s sister Julia and her one year old son, and a boarder named Della.  Ten years later, Virg and Lizzie were sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, but I was unable to locate Sol anywhere in the 1920 census.  I like to think he was a ten-year old boy out playing in the sunflower fields when the census taker arrived.  It’s a small mystery, but we know the census is not always accurate. By 1930 Virg and Lizzie were living in New Albany, Mississippi near other Virge’s family, and Sol was 19 years old and living in Washington, D.C.

Sol’s mother’s side of the family—the Moores, some of whom still live in Starkville, owned farm acreage after the Civil War--perhaps a reward for Sol’s grandfather’s service in the Union Army, or perhaps not.  Sol’s mother, Lizzie, had four sisters.  According to Babe, who had heard it from one of the relatives, everybody knew that the five Moore sisters

There exists this big hole in the black Bryson family lineage where history ought to be.  I learned that in African American ancestry research, the 1870 census is usually the place to start, because it is the first place where an African Americans’ personhood was officially recorded with a surname, an address, an occupation and so forth. Before 1870  a “Slave Schedules,” that noted the sex and age of the enslaved, but no more, were a part of the enslavers’ census records.  Assuming that freed men and women used the surname of their enslavers after Emancipation and the Civil War ended (as most did—as a signal to help their separated family members find them), I looked at the slave schedules for the White Brysons who lived in the area of northeast Mississippi where Starkville and New Albany are located to try to find Virgil’s father, who would have been the first emancipated black Bryson in this lineage.

Ironically the story of the Black Bryson family must begin with the White Bryson  enslavers’ story--which is very well documented in church records, diaries, and census reports—for which I have to admit I am grateful, because it tells me at least one possible story of the enslaved Robert Bryson, Sol’s grandfather, the Black ancestor that Pete and my children and grandchildren share.  I will give a summary of that history here:

 In 1851 a Presbyterian minister, Pastor Young split off from a Presbyterian church in Laurens, S.C. for reasons I have not been able to uncover.  There were many Brysons in Laurens, both Black and White, (as there are in North Carolina, Tennessee, Scotland, and some say, France) and eventually quite a few moved to Mississippi, but among the thirteen White and three enslaved black people that Pastor Young led on a long walk to Mississippi, a few of the White people were named Bryson. The place where they settled became known as Brice’s (or sometimes spelled Bryce’s) Crossroads, Mississippi, and they built the ARP Bethany Church and formed a farming community there.  In my search for Sol’s grandfather, I focused on a White enslaver named Elizabeth Ann Blakely Bryson, who according to the 1860 federal census Slave Schedule, owned eleven slaves, including a 6-month old boy who may be, likely became, I want to be, I think he is Sol’s grandfather.  Ten years later, in the 1870 census, after emancipation and after the Civil War, a  12-year old black boy named Robert Bryson is living only twenty miles away from Brice’s Crossroads in New Albany—where I know many black Brysons later lived for many generations and still live there today. Furthermore, he is living with a woman named Adesa Bryson, noted as a White woman also living with two black teenage boys not named Bryson.  Robert is not listed as her son.  Was Adesa White or was she passing?  I could find no earlier census records for Adesa Bryson in that area or anywhere.  Still, looking at it from the point of view of what we do know, New Albany is the same town where Sol’s father, Virge spent all of his life, so this Robert Bryson living with Adesa in 1870 is probably the same child in the 1860 slave schedules of Elizabeth Ann Blakely of Laurens, S.C. 

But is “probably” enough?  I knew I had to go to Mississippi to learn more, so in 2016 I flew into Memphis where I rented a car and drove about two hours directly to New Albany.   It was a blue sky, white clouds kind of day in October.  The highway was wide and the cars were few, although there were lots of pickup trucks.  The cotton fields appeared to have been picked, but fluffy white shreds still floated on the breeze and rolled into balls long the side of the road.

“Welcome to New Albany.  The Fair & Friendly City,” the entrance sign read.  It was a small town with red brick one-or two-story buildings, a main street with lots of retail and an old courthouse that had clocks on all four sides of a cupola topped by a bird with open wings.  The place seemed deserted, or at least underused.  It was what towns looked like before the domination of predictable, boiler plate fast-food and chain stores.  There was a flagpole with an American flag, and below it, the Mississippi state flag, which included the Confederate Battle flag.  (I learned later that after years of protest, votes and lawsuits, the Confederate symbol is no longer part of the Mississippi flag.)  There was another flag--a green welcoming flag nearby read “New Albany:  Come see who we are!”  

Well, thank you, New Albany, I’m here to do exactly that!

There were railroad tracks, of course, and I thought of Virge, Sol’s father, and all the years he had worked the rails.  Next to the railroad crossing was the Deco Deli and Bar.  I figured that might be a good place to ask about Brysons.   The place was empty except for the owner behind the counter who served me up some grits and eggs (I wanted to try something “southern”  He was a White man and he was a talker and soon he got it out of me why I was there.

“I’m here to look into the Black branch of my family tree,” I said.  “I’m looking for Brysons.  Know any?”  He took an extra breath as if double-checking my White skin, but pointed to the storefront window. 

“Over by the county museum,” he said.  All the Brysons live over there.”

The Union County Heritage Museum was a red brick one story building with the traditional Southern portico and white columns.  Outside there was a friendly dinosaur bone sculpture to greet you.  Inside was mostly dedicated to the author, William Faulkner, who was born in New Albany, but there were the usual small town museum memorabilia—almost nothing about the Chickasaw, who had become landless, in part, due in part to land speculator, Andrew Jackson and in the 1830s were forced out of Georgia by federal law into land west of the Mississippi River.  Almost all of the displays were about White people.  I looked around for a Black employee to help me, but there were none, so I walked up to the person behind the counter and told her my mission.  She seemed happy to help and led me to a treasure trove of information, apologizing that it wasn’t on display yet, but said they had “plans.” 

In a photo album there was one intact photo of approximately one hundred children, students of the New Albany Colored School, built in 1890 and closed in 1904.  It mentioned four families that attended, one of which was Bryson!  A 1923 newspaper clipping showed eighth and ninth graders at the Union County Training School.  Sol would have been about that age to attend school at that time, but he was not in the photo.  Maybe he was in Sunflower County with his parents?  There was an undated photo of a line of twelve Black employees at the cotton compress each pushing a heavy handcart each with six pressed cotton loads.  I knew Virge, Sol’s father,  had worked at that company in 1930. 

Next, I headed for the cemetery.  I’d seen a photo of Virgil’s headstone online, but I wanted to see it for myself.   The large graveyard was just past the giant water tower with Faulkner’s enormous image painted on it.  But finding Virgil’s grave seemed impossible.  I stepped carefully through the trees, around upright vertical headstones and some planted horizonal in the ground itself.  As I made my way around the monuments, I saw a slender Black woman entering the Beasley Funeral Home, and I rushed to ask for her help.         Again, I felt that awkwardness arising-- that I was White, asking for help, this time from a Black person, in order to find information about our family’s Black ancestors.  

When I entered the building, the woman rose from her desk to greet me.  She was young with wire rimmed glasses, a curly bob hairdo.  I explained who I was looking for—"the Brysons—Virgil,” I said, who is buried here, and maybe Robert Bryson, too.”

 “And do you know any Brysons?”   I didn’t know exactly how to ask for what I wanted or what she might have to offer.  But she knew.

  “Well, I’m too young myself to know the Brysons that you’re talking about, but do know someone who would know.”  She picked up the phone, said a few words, and hung up.  “Joshua just woke up,” she said.  “But he’ll be here in about ten minutes.”

“Someone’s really going out of their way to help me,” I said.  “Thank you so much.”

“Oh, he’s glad to do it,” she replied.  Meanwhile she showed me where Virge’s headstone lay and I walked over, not far from the office, but back in the trees.  The large, beautifully carved headstone looked fresh with the name BRYSON all in caps across the top and Virgil, engraved to the right with the dates of his birth and death, and Elizabeth engraved to the left with only the date of her birth.   Along the bottom of the New Albany tombstone were the words:  Too good for earth, God called them home. It was sad to think of Lizzie buried among strangers near Long Island hospital where she died with only a number to identify her. 

I heard Miss Beasley shouting, running across the cemetery toward me with a paper in her hand.  “I found Robert’s grave, too!” she saidShe led me to a wooded area where a rectangular marble marker was buried flat in the ground, or had fallen there in the racially segregated ground.  It was smothered with sticks, dirt and autumn leaves.  You could barely make out his name, as, over time, weather had eroded the words.

Back at the funeral home I met Joshua, a handsome, older black gentleman in a baseball cap and a what looked like a new gray tee shirt that read “Honor Begins at Home.”  Joshua could hardly wait to tell me everything he knew about every Bryson in town.  I learned that the residential area near the museum I had visited was full of White Brysons mostly.   He said that the Brysons I was looking for, whose street names I recognized from census reports, had lived on Apple Street and Church Street.  Joshua pointed me in that direction and said to stop at the church if I needed help.

I found the area near the outskirts of town where a dozen shotgun homes were nestled in grassy yards, and big trees lined open fields.  An asphalt road wound through the neighborhood.  On Church Street I found Hall’s Church where the sign in front announced the times for services and Bible classes.  On the corner was a closed store, the kind where as a kid I might have bought a Coke and a loaf of Wonder Bread.  The sign was broken and the pole it hung from was brown with rust.

On Apple Street I saw two men sitting on their small porch of a shotgun house that sat back from the road.  I parked the car on the side of the road and waved to them.  They got up to walk toward me.  I got out of the car and again I explained I was looking for where the Brysons lived.  “Virgil and Lizzie Bryson, in particular,” I said.

“Why, old man Bryson used to live right there,” the man pointed down the hill to an empty lot.  “When I was a kid, old man Bryson lived there. 

“Was old man Bryson’s name Virgil?” I asked, and the guy looked around at his friend and they nodded.

“Well,  we was just kids, so we just called him Old Man Bryson.”

 “Thank you kindly,” I said with a slight Mississippi tone, and I continued driving slowly up Apple Street.

At the top of the hill was a man with a shovel in his hands—at that moment, it struck me that he looked like a kind of a monk.  He was wearing simple Bermuda shorts and tee shirt with an African style beaded necklace.   He had on Converse sneakers.  He was about fifty, I’d say, maybe older, looking strong and serious.  He had a moustache and white facial hair like sideburns but growing on either side of his chin.  His brow was wrinkled and his hair was thin on top.  His mouth was set firm and thin.  He looked tired.

He was clearly deep into a big project.  An area the size of several house lots had been dug up and half of a winding cement sidewalk had been installed through it.  Wooden forms for the next section were laid out and irrigation pipes were lying here and there.  The man stopped and leaned against his shovel when I pulled my car over.  I climbed the hill up to where he was working next to a wheelbarrow. 

After I introduced myself and told him what I was up to, I asked him what he was up to.  “Building Pioneer Park,” he said in a quiet, gentle voice.  He pointed to a wooden sign where fully rendered drawings showed what the goal was—a dozen trees surrounding an open grassy area with a sidewalk to walk in the shade and a concrete path leading to the center.  In the center would be a bench—“where people can rest,” he said.  All the work was volunteer and most of the time, he was the only volunteer. “It’s for the ancestors,” he explained, shaking his head, “Because they went through so much!”  The city wasn’t funding the park project; the museum wasn’t funding it; only donations from “selling” bricks paid for the supplies.  The bricks were memorials to love ones—"a testament for many generations,” I later read on the FaceBook page.

I can’t explain how moved I was by what I saw—this one very strong man on this day, by himself, spending his time digging and laying out frames for concrete, and doing it out of a sense of respect and reverence for ancestors, and what they went through and perhaps the recognition that if they hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here.  We live because of them, as they are personal threads of life that literally remain in our bodies.  Is it any wonder we do things, like carve headstone, or build parks, or write books, to bring them alive again?  While I want to resist the comparison, at the same time, I felt, yes, that’s what I’m doing, too, in a way, investigating, traveling, recording, and writing about our ancestors because our family would not be here today if the ancestors had not survived and made whatever they had made of their lives.  It’s almost as if we all share past lives, that the ancestor I will be in the not-so-distant future will live through those who come after, who came through our bodies, through our love and struggle with one another, and most of all, the struggle with the history that surrounds all of us all the time, and moves everything.

It was getting late and I still had to drive to Tupelo where I would stay for the night.  I thanked the man for his time and for his work and handed him a fistful of money—“for the ancestors,” I said, and he nodded with a smile.

I thought about what had been accomplished in one day—the museum, the graveyard, the headstones, and spot where Old Man Bryson lived, all the people who had helped me—from the owner at the Deco diner to Mrs. Beasley and Joshua, and neighbors on Church Street.   And now I knew that this lovely man who was making Pioneer Park right up the hill from where Lizzie and Virge and maybe my father-in-law, Sol, had lived on Apple Street.  I wanted to weep. I did weep.  Not boo-hoo crying, but that inside weeping that stops your breath for a moment, and maybe your heart.  Your tear ducts respond when something touches you, and reminds you to feel, to know deep in your body what your mind experiences.  Mississippi was definitely getting to me and not in the way I had expected.  Here’s a poem that I wrote shortly after this trip.  It will link what you just read to the story that follows.

Now it was time to learn about Pete’s paternal grandmother’s, people, Lizzie’s side—the Moores of Starkville—a hundred miles south of New Albany.  One of Dick Moore’s five daughters was Lizzie--Pete’s grandmother, and another one was Lelia--Eula V’s grandmother.  She lived in Starkville not far from her niece, Brenda. 

Brenda’s street stretched along a hillside in the college town and it was lined with small houses with big yards. She was an attractive woman with olive skin and long, straight dark hair, high brows and a relaxed way about her. Dressed in a bright magenta top and dark slacks, she was in her mid-forties, I guessed.  We sat in her living room.  She lifted her sunglasses up above her brows and parked them on her head.  Brenda told me her father was black and her mother was Chickasaw.

“A lot of black folks are part Indian,” she said, pausing.  She smiled.  “And the other way around.”

Eventually she leaned back on the couch, tapped her cell phone and called Eula Hart, her father’s sister, called by everyone “Eula V,” as if there were Eulas all over the place--which there may have been, as I later learned that Mississippi is the state where you are most likely to meet a person named Eula.

Eula V’s house was among a cluster of small modular houses with potted plants and patios.  “I just keep an eye on her,” Brenda said when we parked up close to the wooden porch where Eula V was sitting in the late afternoon glow waiting for u in her motorized wheelchair.  She was older than I’d expected.  Her thin gray hair was combed back neatly and the light shined through the gray.  She had wire rimmed glasses and wore a blue denim skirt and an immaculate white vee neck tee shirt that just barely exposed the top of her bosom.  For a moment in the way she would glance sideways at me, I thought I saw Sol’s eyes.  Her skin was very dark, as his had been, too. 

Eula V’s mind was sharp and soon she understood the connection between us—that I had been married to her grandmother’s sister’s grandson. In her Mississippi drawl she described for me how her grandmother and each of her sisters had their own houses on the Moore farm, and her great-grandparents lived on the same land, too.  “They were there, all in a row,” she said, reciting and counting them on her fingers.  “Let’s see.  There was Lucy house, Lelia house, Lizzie house, then Julia, and oh yes, Mollie.  All in a row up and down the hill,” she finished.

Brenda collected the glasses from our iced tea and suggested we drive out to the land.  Eula V’s eyes lit up at the thought and I was thrilled to have her show it all to me.  Brenda had told me how the land that had been in the family for more than one hundred years had been lost through sales, tax claims, mortgage foreclosures, partitioning and other means, not all of which were legal, but which amounted to a mass of confusion and which left behind a feeling of having been cheated.  Lots has been written about “the great land robbery,” as the story of Black families being ripped from their farms has been called. 

At this point the family owned just over two acres and the rest has become a Master-planned custom housing development that surrounds a 160-acre lake fed by Browning Creek.  That lake floods the land where the Moore family house and all the sisters houses once stood.   At the development, we helped Eula V out of the car.  She leaned on her walker, breathed deeply and looked around.  The blue of the lake, the long pier, recently-built houses dotted here and there around the property, all surrounded by dark green trees.  There were a few canoes in the water.  It was quiet, the sky was beginning to turn pink and clouds were thinning.  Then she pointed into the deep blue lake, repeating, with effort, like a chant: “Lucy house, Lelia, house, Lizzie house, Julia house and Mollie house.”  I wanted to ask Eula V how she felt being there, but I didn’t want to intrude with what felt like a private moment for her.  Did the natural beauty we were witnessing outweigh the family history that was underwater?  Or was that even the right question to ask?  I did not know.

Afterward, at Eula V’s house, stayed in the car while the two of them said their goodbyes, Eula V remaining on her chair on the porch with moths circling the porch light. 

New Albany was about the Brysons after the Civil War.  I wanted to visit Brice’s Crossroads, that was about the Brysons before and during the Civil War.  It was a twenty-mile drive from that motel in Tupelo and I wondered about the name Brice and if it was some version of the name Bryson.  Along the way I saw signs for the “Mississippi Final Stands Interpretive Center,” which Google told me would interpret the Battle of Brice’s Crossroad for me. 

But before anybody interpreted anything for me, I wanted to see for myself.  And soon enough, there it was—an open cross road in the country.  The area was deserted; a car passed by maybe every five or ten minutes. On one side was the most recent version of the Bethany ARP Church I had read so much about—the one that Pastor Young led his Laurens, S.C. people to.    On the other side was a marble monument to the Brice Home that had served as a hospital to soldiers on both sides during the Civil War battle fought in this place—one of the last big victories for the Confederate Army.  At a distance near the trees was a larger monument to all the soldiers who died in the Battle of Brice’s Cross Roads, also known in the South as the Battle of Tishamingo (meaning speaker for the Mingo, a term for Iroquois speakers) Creek, or sometimes the Battle Guntown, named for a nearby town.

I wandered a bit, looked in the church windows, checked the locked doors, and decided I needed to visit that Interpretative Center after all.   The modest, one story red brick building had two friendly statutes to greet you at the stairs—one was Johnny Reb and the other was a Yank.  Clearly, the powers-that-be gave symbolic equivalence when establishing memorials.  The Final Stands (meaning last battles of the South) Interpretive Center was one open space full of displays about that area, including one about the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek that caused the nullification of Chickasaw claims to land east of the Mississippi.

Again, I approached a woman behind the desk with the goal of my mission.  How could I learn more about those enslaved by the Brysons who had lived in that area before and during the Civil War?  She was a White woman and friendly, taking me to the only display in the center about Black people.  It contained historic artifacts, such as Black Union soldiers and caps, cartridge box and knap sacks they wore.  I read about the famous battle at Brice’s Crossroads, in the area I had just visited.  I learned for the first time about the USCT, US Colored Troops, which were part of the infantry in that battle, along with brigades from nine northern states.  One of the US. Colored Troops was the 55th Infantry, which, I later learned, may have included Dick Moore (Lizzie’s father), from Alabama who enlisted in the Union Army at the Contraband Camp in Corinth, Mississippi, just east of Memphis.

Contraband Camp?  What is that? I wondered.  I knew contraband meant prohibited goods that were traded during wartime, but what I did not know was that during the Civil War, escaped Black people were classified as forbidden goods—a policy that allowed the Union to keep the contraband of war, escaped slaves, instead of having to return them as fugitive slaves.  In effect, the policy freed the enslaved who escaped to these encampments that sprung up around Union forts as safe places for slaves to escape to, where they would be protected, and in some cases, educated by abolitionists and preached to by ministers.  In some places, like Corinth, Mississippi, the camps evolved into communities and Union forces recruited Black men to train as soldiers in the segregated army, the U.S. Colored Troops, the USCT. 

In thirty-minutes I was at the Corinth Contraband Camp, the sign read:  November 1862--December 1863 Here a newly freed people took their unswerving first steps on the long road to full citizenship.  Beside those words was a metal sculpture of a strong, determined-looking woman in long skirt and jacket with both hands firmly on her hips.  A mighty goddess, I thought. There were open grassy fields surrounded by thick forest.  Life-sized outdoor sculptures everywhere—of farmers, and teachers, children, and soldiers.  It was not hard to imagine rows of small cabins shared by families and strangers.

I thought about the possibility (probability) that Robert Bryson, Pete’s great-grandfather, was born into slavery in 1859 on the farm of Elizabeth Ann Blakely Bryson near the cross roads by the Bethany ARP Church.  He’d have been five years old when the battle of Brice’s Crossroads occurred nearby.  Where was he then?  Who took care of him then?  Those questions mixed with the questions I had about Dick Moore, Pete’s other great-grandfather, the one from Alabama who may have escaped to Corinth and fought with the 55th Infantry of the USCT—the same infantry that fought at that battle.  Five-year old Robert and teenage Dick would not have known each other, but is it possible that their paths may have merged at history’s crossroads?  That they may have unknowingly been within a short distance of one another during the same battle?  I had some answers and I had some questions, but the rest I had to imagine.