Begin with a Southern Grandmother

If you are a white Southerner hooked on family history, you probably first got interested listening to your grandmother’s stories. Memories fade, grandmothers die. Fortunately, my Texas-born grandmother kept a scrapbook, as did most Southern woman of her era, the first half of the 20th Century. The wedding invitations, newspaper clippings etc. substantiated the tales of her family in Waxahachie, Texas: her Connor ancestors in Cokesbury, South Carolina,: her married life in Toledo, Ohio; her travels around the world.

The scrapbook resided in an aluminum box in the basement of the 19th Century town house in Greenwich Village, in lower Manhattan. She lived there from 1937 to her death in 1967, surrounded by the artwork, silverware, Limoges china and furniture she accumulated and saved from the failure of her husband’s bank. Listening to her stories occupied the time I spent with her, escaping my miserable teenage suburban life. I loved her deeply and I was fascinated by the places and people that inhabited her memories and her mementos.

Over half my life, and for all the hours I spent researching and writing about these papers and photographs, I managed not to conclude from the photograph of the six-pillared South Carolina house where her grandfather was born: My grandmother’s ancestors were enslavers. Even after I saw their names listed as the owners of slaves in the early Census of the United States, I couldn’t make the connection between the then of slavery and the now of its consequences.

Denial evaporated when 9 people were massacred in the AME Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston. I read that one of the martyred, Clementa Pinckney, had graduated from Allen University in Columbia, which got its start in 1870 in Cokesbury as Payne Institute. We made a donation to Allen in his honor.

Meanwhile, a Connor cousin made an exhaustive study of the Connor family of Cokesbury. She learned that a badly written will by our great-great-grandfather caused no end of family strife, but also revealed that my own great-grandfather’s medical education was paid for by the profits from cotton raised by slaves. His will also contained lists of the enslaved grouped in families and with names, some 40 years before the first Census after emancipation.?

As my cousin examined documents at the South Caroliniana Archive, she met a genealogist researching her own enslaved ancestors in the same town. They soon realized they were descendants of, and linked by, the institution of enslavement. They also learned that the Connors of the Reconstruction era were members of terrorist groups, like the Ku Klux Klan and Wade Hampton’s Red Shirts. A Connor was directly responsible for an assassination, and the murder of an enslaved ancestor.

I’ve had to wrestle with what I loved about my grandmother. Can I separate her warmth from her style of living? I see now that her furniture, her paintings, the silver tea service were part of the “Gone with the Wind” world that the family once inhabited.

Was she aware of the political activities of the previous generations of the Connor family? She died in 1967. My father and his brother died just a few years after her, secrets with them.

I do know that a Connor broke the 10th Commandment: Thou shall not kill.

Perhaps that is why my Grandmother, and hers before her convinced their husbands to convert to Catholicism, where confession of sin can bring forgiveness and redemption.

My cousin died at the beginning of COVID. Her widowed husband encouraged me to contact our Linked Descendants to pursue the goals of Coming to the Table. They have encouraged me, with warmth and grace. I have already learned much about our shared past. Together, we hope to find a way to celebrate 150 years of accomplishments of the Black Cokesbury descendants from Enslavement to Emancipation to the present.