A Little Back and Forth

After standing there for another minute, I was now the one pacing around on the side of hill like a nervous squirrel too far from the safety of a tree, akwardly not knowing where to stop or stand, wanting to stay, wanting to flee, really not knowing what to say.

For sure, this was a pick-your-battles moment. I wasn't here to do an ethnography of the white American South, plus I have reasons not to alienate this guy, regardless of his possible attitude toward me. There was the data spread out around us on and in the ground. And really, he seemed more convicted and conflicted by my presence than defensive or angered. I didn't want to make assumptions, but I didn't know what to do.

The journey I was on had started at least two years if not longer ago and it was deeply personal. I'd invested some time to get here. My goal was to learn as much as possible about my mother's African-American family story to balance out this sort of lopsidedness I'd always felt inside when weighing what I knew about her story - the woman who raised me - against what I knew about my father's family story, a story from Ghana that's been intact for generations. I have gotten to know my father's story much more intimately as an adult. For all its love, my maternal story by contrast has had that scar ripped into it by the Middle Passage and burned into it by American slavery. There was this scorched-earth border line that we were on the other side of. If my paternal story was a Sankofa story, then my maternal story was more like a tall tale by Satchel Paige. Nobody wanted to look back because somebody might be gaining on you. I am proud of both but reconciling the two has been a life-long struggle. If W.E.B. Du Bois describes a double consciousness, I feel like I've often lived with a double-double consciousness.

In 2018, I took a DNA test.

I did research in 2019 and 2020.

Early in 2021 I was contacted by a distant maternal cousin doing her own research which proved to be pivotal in pointing me toward the Mount Carmel cemetery. Thanks to the pandemic, I'd waited until I was vaccinated before taking days off work, jumping a flight from Chicago to Paducah, renting a car, booking a hotel room. My late grandfather had left this town more than eighty years ago and rarely came back. Never with me or my two brothers. His daughters, my mother and my aunt, had never talked to us about this place any more than to say that it was where their daddy was from (Grandma, their mother, was from nearby Russellville). Piecing together family history while sorting Mama's DNA suggested I most likely had ancestors who'd survived slavery planted in the ground here, where I found myself standing. But was I here just to have a ten-minute back and forth with Old Mr. Charlie literally on his home turf? Was I going to just say thanks for the two sheets of paper, pack up and head on out to the airport? Maybe so, but good god, I'd booked myself down here for six days and on the phone he'd seemed so sincere and eager to talk.

In that moment, a white van pulls up on the winding pathway, tires crunching gravel, stopping just behind my rental car. A man steps out of the driver's side, a black man like me. Same brown skin as me. Some grey hair like me. A bit older. Dressed like a deacon of the community, that is, in work boots, workman's jeans, a polo shirt over a slightly round belly, and a baseball cap. Ready to fish. Ready to work. With a very kind but not so open face, he'd meet your eyes while talking to you then look over your head when you were speaking like he was already thinking ahead of you. I assumed he might be the type that would want to know who my family was in the area, where I was staying, did I eat barbecue. About none of this was I wrong. He asked a lot of questions though I would xomw ro appreciate his willingness to share a lot more of his life than he ever asked of mine.

"I hope you don't mind that I invited someone else to meet us out here," Sanders said. "I wanted you to meet Lonnie. He's one of the leaders in the black Catholic parish and might be able to help you." Turns out, based on my last name and the way I talk, Sanders coudn't figure out if I were black or white. Evidently he decided to cover his bets.

Mr. Crowdus introduced himself as Mister Crowdus, not Lonnie. He added with a slightly disengenious and self depricating tone (reminding me right away of my late grandfather) that he was the owner of a small economically disadvantaged business. Sanders scoffed a bit at this comment by Crowdus, yet the air between these two men seemed pleasant enough. While no warmth flowed, no real animosity between them registered either. I would pick up as the day progressed that the two men perhaps were resigned to being on this earth, in this town, at the same time, while consciously agreeing to not see things quite the same way.

I was relieved to see this wasn't going to end with a simple hello-goodbye brush off by Sanders as Mr. Charlie. Certainly I had to step back and apprecriate his effort. When Sanders and I had spoken on the phone a couple of weeks ago he'd said he was actually 'tickled' by the chance to meet and share what he had with a descendant. Not surprisingly this had raised my expectations beyond the level of two sheets of printer paper. So here I was hopeful yet apprehensive that Crowdus, deacon of the moment, might yet show me his own version of southern opacity.

As we exchanged introductions, I explained to Lonnie Crowdus why I was in Paducah, exploring my probable connection to the Roberts, a family of formerly enslaved people, buried in the ground where we were standing. I explained that I was following up on clues and information springing from a DNA test. Still, he asked me if I were related to this family and that, all with different names than Roberts. Was he ignoring what I'd just said or was he testing me? Somewhat abruptly, Crowdus turned away and did a sure-footed stroll down to the bottom of hill where he proceded to do his own pacing back and forth. A few minutes later he came back up the hill engrossed in a mobile phone call to his wife. Speaking aside to me, he said she tends some of the living foliage in Mt. Carmel. Or really, speaking to some dot in the air above my head. He shared that she might be close by. She wasn't.

In the few minutes that Crowdus had been pacing around down the hill and out of earshot, Sanders said to me that I'd been standing on Crowdus' daughter's grave. He pointed to the headstone. Seems that this along with several of the other headstones were recent additions to the black yard, placed there recently by families intentially. He didn't say more as Crowdus was half way back up the hill. Lonnie Crowdus and I exchanged numbers then he was off, backing up his white van and slow crunching it away toward the main gate. Sanders and I bumped elbows then he, I assume, returned to whatever work it was that graveyard caretakers do when they are not burying bodies and talking to visitors. I walked the hill a couple times more, took pictures, poured libations, burned incense. Afther I placed offering bowls of coffee and water in front of three head stones I thought were part of my story, I laid down on the grass for a while to look again at the sky, to listen for something.