1987
Being in the American South, it didn't come as a complete surprise to me that one would find artifacts and stories about a white Roberts family in Paducah as well as a black one, nor that there was some kind of relationship between the two, black and white.
I'm talking about this relationship in this indirect some kind of way for two reasons.
First, as of this writing, I'm still in the discovery phase of my research so I don't know for a fact that the Jack Roberts who bequeathed two slaves, Charles and Jane Roberts to the Catholic Church in 1850, is the progenitor of the white Roberts families in the town today.
Second, I'm procrastinating.
Of course I don't want to deviate from my orignial destination -- compulsively I need to touch the gate first. I need to be satisfied that the people buried in Mount Carmel are indeed my people. I need to know why my grandfather left. But really, I am just not ready to look into the face of another living human knowing for certain that at a given point in time this person's ancestor(s) had absolute material dominion over the bodies of persons who were by blood and spirit, my people. I am not ready to look into a pale eye that might arrogantly take my standing there - my presence - as proof of its own superior history, confirmed by virtue of a family name. A Scottish name, not African. For most of my life I have been spared this head-on collision with American history or at least from the full force of it by my direct and living connection to Africa, to Ghana, to the Fanti and Ashanti people who are part of my family.
But I am also a Roberts. I am also a Young, a Keedy, a Jones, a Moore and a Butler. I am part of the history of the Jackson Purchase of 1818. My people are from the counties and the state cobbled out of the westward side of the Virginia Colony and from land taken from the Chickasaw nation. But yes too, my people are from Kumasi and Kofiordua. And yes too from Tema's beaches and from the hills north of Accra. And yes, I am from McKracken County, from Paducah and from nearby Russellville. But I am not ready to stand eye-to-eye with someone who thinks that at any time or place in this world they might have owned me.
As he was driving me around the town Crowdus shared a few details connected to the Roberts family name in Paducah. He explained that just down the hill from the negro section of Mount Carmel there was a another area containing about two-dozen plots owned by a white family named Roberts. Some were still unoccupied. Today there is no visible hard demarcation between the black and white sections but I was made to understand that those who knew, knew where one ended and the other began (indeed, the local parish has aspirations to erect an honorific fence around the black section, given the investment they'd made in the angel garden I suppose). In telling me about this other Roberts family, my guide pointed me toward a murder.
The next day, I researched this sensational event in the Paducach public library. In July of 1987, the wayward son of a prominent family, Thomas 'Tommy' Roberts, age 32, was shot dead while parked on a dark secluded road in his pickup truck for some clandestine sex. The killer turned out to be the jilted lover of the woman Tommy was there getting it in with. They were all coworkers. People were married but not to each other. There was lots of bullets and blood. Tommy died with his pants down.
Small town bananas.
According to accounts these Roberts, being a respectable catholic family, were quite embarrassed by the circumstances of Tommy's departure. Through the prism of their faith, despite a legal divorce, he was still married to the mother of his son, who of course was not the married woman he was murdered with in the truck. So perhaps to no one's surprise in a small southern town like Paducah, instead of planting him down in the glen with his white family, they buried him up on the hill with the black Roberts.
In nineteen-eighty-seven.
I'm talking about this relationship in this indirect some kind of way for two reasons.
First, as of this writing, I'm still in the discovery phase of my research so I don't know for a fact that the Jack Roberts who bequeathed two slaves, Charles and Jane Roberts to the Catholic Church in 1850, is the progenitor of the white Roberts families in the town today.
Second, I'm procrastinating.
Of course I don't want to deviate from my orignial destination -- compulsively I need to touch the gate first. I need to be satisfied that the people buried in Mount Carmel are indeed my people. I need to know why my grandfather left. But really, I am just not ready to look into the face of another living human knowing for certain that at a given point in time this person's ancestor(s) had absolute material dominion over the bodies of persons who were by blood and spirit, my people. I am not ready to look into a pale eye that might arrogantly take my standing there - my presence - as proof of its own superior history, confirmed by virtue of a family name. A Scottish name, not African. For most of my life I have been spared this head-on collision with American history or at least from the full force of it by my direct and living connection to Africa, to Ghana, to the Fanti and Ashanti people who are part of my family.
But I am also a Roberts. I am also a Young, a Keedy, a Jones, a Moore and a Butler. I am part of the history of the Jackson Purchase of 1818. My people are from the counties and the state cobbled out of the westward side of the Virginia Colony and from land taken from the Chickasaw nation. But yes too, my people are from Kumasi and Kofiordua. And yes too from Tema's beaches and from the hills north of Accra. And yes, I am from McKracken County, from Paducah and from nearby Russellville. But I am not ready to stand eye-to-eye with someone who thinks that at any time or place in this world they might have owned me.
As he was driving me around the town Crowdus shared a few details connected to the Roberts family name in Paducah. He explained that just down the hill from the negro section of Mount Carmel there was a another area containing about two-dozen plots owned by a white family named Roberts. Some were still unoccupied. Today there is no visible hard demarcation between the black and white sections but I was made to understand that those who knew, knew where one ended and the other began (indeed, the local parish has aspirations to erect an honorific fence around the black section, given the investment they'd made in the angel garden I suppose). In telling me about this other Roberts family, my guide pointed me toward a murder.
The next day, I researched this sensational event in the Paducach public library. In July of 1987, the wayward son of a prominent family, Thomas 'Tommy' Roberts, age 32, was shot dead while parked on a dark secluded road in his pickup truck for some clandestine sex. The killer turned out to be the jilted lover of the woman Tommy was there getting it in with. They were all coworkers. People were married but not to each other. There was lots of bullets and blood. Tommy died with his pants down.
Small town bananas.
According to accounts these Roberts, being a respectable catholic family, were quite embarrassed by the circumstances of Tommy's departure. Through the prism of their faith, despite a legal divorce, he was still married to the mother of his son, who of course was not the married woman he was murdered with in the truck. So perhaps to no one's surprise in a small southern town like Paducah, instead of planting him down in the glen with his white family, they buried him up on the hill with the black Roberts.
In nineteen-eighty-seven.
So many emotions are bound to erupt in this journey. I can only imagine! I’m curious: Have you done a family tree, or is there one someone else has put together?
ReplyDeleteI have one from Ancestry DNA for my mother and one written down by my father.
DeleteLooking forward to your next post. Maybe someday I’ll do this. I think a couple of people in my family got started on some rudimentary genealogy work, including my sister. But I don’t know what became of their research. I think my sister’s was really very informal. And I’m not close to the cousin whom I know was doing something maybe more structured.
ReplyDelete