Griot The Evolution of Edgecombe: A Historical Perspective

By Curtis Hardison

Griot: The Evolution of Edgecombe is the true story that chronicles the journey of three African captives from their homelands of Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Angola into the hands of European slave traders. From there, they were eventually sold to shipping agents that delivered them across the Atlantic Ocean, where they were first sold to sugarcane plantations on the island of Jamaica and finally at a dockside auction near Norfolk, Virginia, in the early 1800s. The purchaser of their existence, Jessie W. Batts, carried them in chains back to his farm at Topsail Township, North Carolina, where they and their children lived the remainder of their lives as his chattel slaves, his private property.

At the nearby Sidbury farm near Topsail Island, a house slave by the name of Sangho Shook became impregnated by her owner after being repeatedly raped in the cookhouse. She gave birth to his daughter who was given the name of Harriette. When Harriette came of age around 1888, she married a grandson of Janey and Tuney by the name of Henry Clay and thus continued the evolution of Edgecombe, now into the thirteenth generation of descendants of three African captives.

After the end of the civil war, the newly freed ex-slaves from two farms, along with their families and relatives, began constructing homes, clearing fields, farming, and raising livestock as they began rebuilding their lives in the backwoods. This narrative chronicles their lives and the lives of many of their descendants as the place in the backwoods of coastal North Carolina gradually evolved into the independent thriving farming community of Edgecombe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781684984855

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Foreword

Acknowledgement

1: Going Back to the Source

2: Keeping the Tradition Alive

3: Becoming an American Slave

4: The Historical Perspective

5: Who Were They?

6: Life after the Atlantic Crossing

7: The Life of Sangho Shook

8: Speaking My Ancestors' Truths

9: The King Charles Connection

10: Creating a Legacy or the Long and Twisted Road to the Topsail Land Grants

11: Y'all Free, Y'all Can Leave Now

12: Creating a Community

13: Edgecombe

14: Camp Davis

15: The Rosenwald School

16: The KKK Rally That Failed Miserably

17: Work Hard and Play Harder

18: Gifts, Ghosts, and Restless Wandering Lights

19: The Tuskegee Airmen/Natalie Cole Connection

20: Field of Gold or the Blackbeard Connection

21: Standing on Broad Shoulders

Sources

About the Author

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Griot The Evolution of Edgecombe

A Historical Perspective

Curtis Hardison

Copyright © 2023 Curtis Hardison

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2023

ISBN 978-1-68498-484-8 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68498-485-5 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Foreword

A Yoruba Proverb reminds us that a river that forgets its source will dry up, but however far the stream flows, it never forgets its source.

This is a book about twelve generations of real people, in a real community, that have descended from real, enslaved Africans, and to accurately portray my community's connection to the free, independent, proud, and fearless African ancestors that preceded them, it became necessary to journey back through seven generations, three African countries, four tribes, and at least three plantation rapes committed by European immigrant settlers and slave owners in coastal North Carolina.

The material in this book would not have been possible without the gracious and, at times, painful cooperation and reflections of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the three enslaved Africans that became the foundation of my community. They provided me with first and secondhand narratives of our African ancestors who had survived each phase of the journey from African villages to holding facilities on the west coast of Africa, to the transatlantic crossing, to enslavement first on the island of Jamaica and eventually on farms in coastal North Carolina.

I am eternally grateful, first, to the reverend Hulda Jane Alexander and then to all of the descendants of the first enslaved Africans for their patience and tolerance in providing answers to my never-ending, often invasive questions after being graciously invited into their living rooms, kitchens, porches, and yards, often pushing them to recall memories deeply buried in their pasts. Yet I am at a loss as to how to adequately express my appreciation to them for unlocking and sharing those distant, sometimes painful memories as they revealed long-forgotten family historical facts of our ancestors, two Africans who were first enslaved on the island of Jamaica for an undetermined period before they would, once again, be placed aboard a ship that would deliver them circuitously to the American east coast to be purchased fresh off a boat from Jamaica by Jessie W. Batts, an immigrant tobacco and peanut farmer, at a dockside slave auction near Norfolk, Virginia.

After the purchase was completed and the bill of sale properly documented, his newly acquired African slaves were taken back to his farm near Topsail Island, North Carolina, where they would live the rest of their lives as his personal chattel property.

Approximately two hundred and fifty years after their arrival on the island of Jamaica, I would finally be able to identify their tribes and countries of origin through the miracle of DNA analysis.

My initial research revealed that the enslavement of my original African ancestors began in the early 1800s when an African male and an African female were taken by force from the villages of their ancestors, bound and shackled together with other captives, and forced under the constant threat of death on what must have felt like an endless trek across Africa, for reasons which were far beyond their ability to imagine. The journey that would see them moved across savannahs, rivers, and uncharted wilderness areas while enduring brutality beyond their abilities to comprehend. Throughout their tortuous journey, the captives were passed from the control of one set of captors into the hands of another as the distances from the comfort and familiarity of their villages increased with every step.

At the culmination of each phase of the forced movement to reinforced holding facilities, each set of captors received payment for delivering them into the hands of succeeding captors until they were eventually delivered into the hands of European slave traders on the west coast of Africa, where the relative calmness of rivers and vaguely familiar landscapes were replaced by thundering waves of angry saltwater, frothing and crashing relentlessly onto the land.

After arriving at the coastal slaveholding fortifications, they would remain in chains as hundreds of other confused and frightened captives arrived to be placed into the hands of European slave traders. The European traders would nourish them back to a marketable physical condition with fish, breadfruit, animal protein, and edible fruits and vegetation taken from the nearby jungles. Once the captives were strong enough to survive the tortuous Atlantic crossing, they would be sold as human cargo to the next available slave ship that would then transport them to the sugar islands of the Caribbean.

Armed with little more than the American names of my African ancestors and a sense of focused determination, I began my journey to learn as much as possible about the enslavement and legacy of my ancestors in the Carolina Colony, which eventually became the states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee. It became necessary for me to journey back to the origins of systematic chattel slavery and indentured servitude in the Western Hemisphere. A system born in violence and forced upon millions of indigenous peoples of Africa and the Caribbean and celebrated as acts of bravery by one of America's greatest heroes. A system of slavery that would evolve into one of the most brutal and inhumane systems of forced servitude ever perpetrated by human beings upon other human beings. The unimaginable systemic, brutal system of slavery was perfected and institutionalized on the sugar islands of the Caribbean for one hundred and fifty years before it was introduced to and became the norm for slavery in the colony of Carolina.

Acknowledgement

First and foremost, to God and the ancestors, followed by a special thank you to Avline Ava and the ARK Jammers Connection for their boundless energy, creativity, and vision that carried so many of us back to our ancestral homeland, where this amazing journey began.

To our Cameroonian benefactor, Nathan Simb, for the unbelievable hospitality and land gifts that he blessed us with.

To Dr. Mary Anne Boissiere Leach for volunteering her valuable time to assist in the initial editing of this book.

A special thank you to Andrea Bosch for the creation of a prepublication, pop-up book club to review and provide feedback and input from a diverse group of interested people, including teachers, researchers, historians, judges, and current residents of Edgecombe. Thanks also to Jenni Owen, Leslie Bosch, and Blaire Hardison, who helped organize sessions so efficiently. Special thanks to these pop-up book club participants for their timely input and reflections on the book: Jenni Owen, Tammy Proctor, Mike Taylor, Cornelia Hardison, Laura Collins, Cornelia Janake, Kim Singletary, Henry Foust, and Edd Gulati Partee.

1

Going Back to the Source

I began my forty-plus-years journey of ancestral discovery as an attempt to learn as much as possible about the first of my African ancestors who were sold into slavery in North Carolina and ultimately to know the locations and identities of the African tribes from which they were abducted.

From time to time, over the years, I had casually inquired about our ancestors to the elders of the rural farming community of Edgecombe, North Carolina, which has been home to over twelve generations of descendants of three African slaves, remembered today only as Uncle Tuney, Aunt Janey, and Harriette. Throughout my childhood, I searched for a word, phrase, name, or any identifiable tribal tidbit that might have survived slavery and could possibly connect me to my first African ancestors in America.

There was one word from my childhood that I could not find in any dictionary or in my parents' Encyclopedia Britannica, which, I was hopeful, would be the key to unlocking at least a part of the mystery of my ancestors' origins. The word juicymoke sounded to me like it could have its roots in Africa. In my community of Edgecombe, North Carolina, juicymoke referred to a prolific weed that grew around the edges of fields, along the banks of drainage ditches, and around livestock pens. Throughout the summer months, we would pull the nuisance weed from the ground and feed it to pigs that would eagerly devour its succulent stems and leaves. I remember having my hopes dashed during a conversation with my mother. She was preparing dinner when I was around the age of twenty-seven, and I asked her about the prolific weed. My mother, Ethel Hardison, was the great-granddaughter of Harriette Sidbury, the daughter of an enslaved woman who had been raped and impregnated by her owner four generations earlier.

Mother, I asked as she was preparing dinner, what is juicymoke?

It's just a wild weed that grows everywhere around here, she responded from the kitchen.

"I know that, but what does the word juicymoke mean? Where does the word come from?" I responded hopefully.

She laughed, turned to face me, and responded with a big smile, Child, that's just Jerusalem Oak, and laughed.

It ain't nothing but a weed that grows wild everywhere around here. You know how people around here either chop words up or mispronounce them all together.

She returned to the meal preparation, and after a few minutes, realizing that I was searching for clues that might connect Janey and Tuney to an African language and hopefully to an African tribe, she turned again and said, If you want to know about Aunt Janey and Uncle Tuney, you should walk over to CunHuldaJane's house and ask her. She probably remembers and can tell you more about them than anyone else around here.

The prefix of Cun (for cousin) was used extensively in my community when referring to the descendants of Janey and Tuney. Cun is attached to the first name of the descendant and pronounced as a continuous first name, such as CunHuldaJane, CunClinny, CunEthel, CunGusta, CunEstelle, etc. Three words of four syllables rapidly rolling off the tongue as a single word. Attaching the prefix is a respectful acknowledgment of kinship and respect for community elders. People who were not original residents of the community are referred to by their given names, indicating that they are not blood relatives and, therefore, do not have a genealogical connection.

So I gathered my spiral notebook, a couple of sharpened pencils and began walking across the now-overgrown fields that throughout my childhood had been filled with neatly cultivated rows of corn, tobacco, beans, tomatoes, okra, watermelon, and a multitude of other crops that my family raised to feed the family and farm animals. As I walked, I reflected on how my father and older brothers had carved those fields out of the remnants of pristine pine forest with managed annual burnings of undergrowth, cutting down trees, and removing remaining tree stumps by hand with shovels and axes.

Tree stump removal was a labor-intensive process that became the job of heavily muscled teenage boys in the community that would gather at the ragged, decaying remnants of pine, maple, and oak trees that had previously been cut down. The standard (only) stump removal procedure was to remove dirt from around the base of the stump with shovels to expose roots that radiated out from the tree.

As roots were exposed, they would be severed with a few well-placed strikes from a sharpened ax, and the digging would continue until finally, the taproot, which anchored the trees deep in the ground, was exposed. The process could take a few hours or a few days to complete, depending on the size of the tree that was once attached to the stump. Once the hole around the stump was deep enough and wide enough around the remaining root ball, the teenagers would begin to physically push and pull the partially exposed but still attached root ball from side to side to expose more roots to be quickly severed. Once the taproot at the very bottom of the root ball was exposed and severed, the stump with its now detached root ball was ready to be pulled from the earth. A mule would be brought into the field and hitched to the tree stump with heavy chains and ropes to complete the removal process.

The mule would pull until the stump was freed from the ground where it was once anchored. Immediately after removal, the stump would be pulled to an area away from the field and left to be taken care of by the elements of weather. If the stump was the remnant of a longleaf pine tree, it contained a large amount of pine resins that remained after the outer layers of the tree had rotted away, making it highly combustible and perfect for starting fires. Those stumps became a resource for harvesting what we referred to as lightwood but is known today as fatwood.

After stumps were removed, the holes would be filled with dirt, and the teenagers would move to the next stump and start the process again. There was no monetary compensation for their labor because, as relatives and community residents, it was expected of them. The alternative to removing the entire stump was to cut away the top of the stump, leaving the bulk of it several inches below ground where it would slowly decay and rot away over a period of years.

Buried, hidden, or forgotten stumps posed a hazard to mule-drawn farm implements when plowmen weren't aware of the hidden obstacles that could snag and damage mule-drawn plows. That's the way fields were cleared, and houses, barns, and other buildings were constructed. Practically any task that could not be completed by one person in a day or two became a community effort, and the only compensation to the workers was food and drink provided by the owner of the project.

Once the fields were cleared of trees, stumps, and undergrowth, they would be plowed several times to prepare them for planting crops. Prior to the final plowing, a two-wheel mule cart or, in later years, a pickup truck would be positioned at pigpens, mule stables, or chicken yards, and with shovels and pitchforks, manure-infused dirt that had accumulated over the winter would be loaded onto the cart or truck and delivered to the fields where the teenagers would spread the sour, pungent-smelling dirt by slinging it across the fields with shovels and pitchforks, further enriching the soil for planting various crops. It was an annual farm chore that both enriched the soil and allowed the landowners to become independent, well-fed, and almost completely self-sufficient.

Everyone grew more vegetables, chickens, and pigs than their families needed to satisfy their needs over the coming winter. When various crops and garden items were ready for harvest during the summer growing season, they were shared with those less fortunate. The same held true for fish, chickens, and pork; they would be shared with the elderly and less fortunate families simply because it was the right thing to do.

Community members shared to ensure that everyone in the community was well nourished. We weren't big hunters of wild game in the community, but when chickens and pigs were slaughtered and processed in the autumn, at the end of the day, everyone had a sufficient supply of meats and vegetables to see them through the winter.

Even though they raised and slaughtered all of the livestock on the slave owners' farms to survive, slaves were given the less nutritious cuts like pig's feet, tails, ears, heads, and innards to feed their families. Because they didn't have the means to grow their own vegetables or raise their own livestock for food during enslavement, after being freed from slavery, these self-sufficient and communal practices were continued to take care of their basic needs, their animals, and their land because it was their primary source for survival. These were lessons learned from our enslaved ancestors that had to ration their meager food supplies to ensure that everyone had enough to eat.

As crops absorbed nutrients from the manure-enriched soil, they grew rapidly. As young cornstalks and other crops began to grow, crops were thinned by removing all but a single plant from each growing spot in order for the remaining plant to obtain maximum nourishment without having competition from multiple plants in the same location. The young tender plants that were removed would be placed in animal pens as a highly nutritious, free, supplemental food source.

All the farm animals had abundant food during the summer growing season and well into winter following the late summer and fall harvest seasons. Once we harvested summer corn and the stalks were still green, they became animal food. Bushes that provided a wide variety of beans and legumes became animal food once the harvest was completed. When preparing food for winter storage, stems from collard greens, mustard, and turnip greens were thrown into the slop bucket and became chicken and pig food. Nothing was wasted.

The ends of string beans, pole beans, and the many varieties of legumes became chicken food because you simply would never have preserved or cooked green beans and string beans without first removing the ends or the strings that ran along the seams of different bean pods. The same was true for leafy garden vegetables: the thick center ribs of collard, turnip, and mustard greens would be removed before cooking because, while entirely edible, the ribs were tough and reduced the tenderness of the greens. When processed greens are purchased from stores today, the thick ribs are never removed because they add weight and increase the cost of the vegetables to unsuspecting customers.

2

Keeping the Tradition Alive

In the tradition of Griot, oral history passes the richness of family truths that would otherwise be lost to succeeding generations to preserve an accurate and personalized family history.

gri·ot (/ɡrēˌō)—a member of a class of traveling poets, musicians, and storytellers who maintain a tradition of oral history in parts of West Africa.

Tuney and Janey

Dempsey (1810) and Hulda King (1835)

George Batts (1870–April 23, 1949) and Alice Batts

Hulda Jane Batts (April 4, 1898–1991) and Odell Alexander

Hulda Jane Alexander

April 4, 1898–1991

When I arrived at CunHuldaJane's (Rev. Hulda Jane Alexander) house on that hot summer afternoon in July of 1987, she welcomed me in, and we exchanged the usual pleasantries before I explained the purpose of my visit. Even though she was a fourth-generation descendant of Africa, a pillar of the community, a preacher, and a fantastic cook, everyone for miles around simply referred to her by one of two names, CunHuldaJane or Sister.

I interviewed CunHuldaJane while lying on the floor of her home

CunHuldaJane, I began, opening my spiral notebook, I'm trying to construct a family tree, and I need to know as much as possible about Janey and Tuney, and Mother told me to come over here and talk to you because you know more about them than anyone else.

Well, Curtis, she began, I'm glad that you're doing this, she responded, giving me permission to continue the conversation. I'm glad you asked for my help because I think it's important, and children need to know about our history and where we came from, she continued as she adjusted her apron and settled onto the worn living room couch. I'll tell you what I can remember, but you know I'm getting older now, and my mind ain't as sharp as it used to be. She smiled broadly. So just what do you want to know?

Like I said, I'm trying to put the family tree together, and it seems like the entire community goes back to those two slaves…so anything that you can tell me will be a lot more than I know right now.

Curtis, she responded thoughtfully, I'll tell you everything that I can remember, but you have to promise me one thing, she hesitated for a moment, looking me in the eye. Whoever the momma says the daddy is, that's what your record has to show.

I looked up, smiled, and replied, Okay, CunHuldaJane, I can do that.

Because, child, she continued, those women had some babies in them, and birth control wasn't even in the vocabulary back then. If a woman got with a man, she was pretty much guaranteed to get pregnant. She smiled, shook her head, and took another sip of water. Child, she repeated herself, smiling, those women had some babies in them. She chuckled at the thought.

I didn't realize it at the time, but I was being drawn into the especially important