From These Roots

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Sankofa

“It is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind.”

Trending on college campuses and used in the names of many social justice organizations is the African term sankofa. But what does it mean? In the simplest of terms, it means “to go back and get it.” The majestic bird that presses forward while looking back, safeguarding and nurturing the promises of life, is both a visual and symbolic reminder. It represents the foretelling and prophetic message of the past that cries out to the present: “Never forget where you come from.”

On January 8, 2010, I lost my mother, Mattye Pearl Thompson-Lanier. Her death predated the popularity of Ancestry.com, 23andMe, or any of the other social media sites designed to assist families with their genealogy. But my mother was the keeper of our family story, and from as far back as I can remember, she talked of our ancestry. She talked of an African-born enslaved man named Renty, whom she fondly referred to as Papa Renty. My mother told these stories as they were told to her. Papa Renty was called the Black African; his pride and reputation were revered by all. To his children, Papa Renty was larger-than-life; he was self-taught and stubbornly insisted on two things: education and faith in God. He was a determined man who worked the fields by day and taught himself to read at night. He understood the value of education; Papa Renty learned and taught others to read using a book called the Blue Back Speller, originally published in 1783 by Hartford, Connecticut’s textbook pioneer and father of education, Noah Webster Jr., who went on to create the first dictionary in 1828. My mother called it the Blue Back Webster, as did the enslaved people who used it back then.

This is a story of generational love and perseverance. It is also a story of promises made and promises kept.

“Papa Renty was fondly known as ‘the Black African.’ ”

She repeated these stories to me throughout my life, her voice growing more urgent as she neared the end of hers.

“Always remember,” she’d often say. “Never forget.” And “Write it down.”

My mother, Mattye Pearl Thompson-Lanier, was born on June 8, 1926, in Mount Meigs, a small township in Montgomery County, Alabama. She was the fourth of six children born to Pearl Jackson and Frederick Douglass Thompson, whom everyone called “Fed.” They were sharecroppers who grew up in what she called “the cradle” of the Jim Crow South, and while she knew of the racist violence that permeated the region, she was protected from it by her family. She also talked about working from “kin” to “can’t,” or from sunrise when you can first see, to sunset when you can no longer because it is too dark. Of going into the fields to cut grass that she tied on a stick to sweep out the house. She talked about the corn husk doll that one of her relatives handcrafted for her during harvest time in the African and Native American traditions. She also talked about going to church on Sundays, and how the elders might give you a stern look or a pinch if you misbehaved.

Sitting for hours tossing multicolored “jacks” across the kitchen floor was one of my favorite pastimes as a child.

I’d play for hours; I was good at it!

One afternoon the repetitive beat of the bouncing rubber ball and the scratching of the jacks along the tiled kitchen floor caught my mom’s attention.

“You think that’s easy?” she asked. “Try playing jacks with rocks.”

Puzzled, I asked, “How do you play jacks with rocks?”

She sent me out into the yard to gather eleven rocks.

“Now, this rock is your ball, and the rest of the rocks are your jacks—starting with ‘onesies,’ let’s see how far you can get.”

I quickly mastered from “onesies to tensies” but there was one uniquely African tradition that I simply failed to grasp: the art of playing “hambone” with spoons. In many parts of the South, playing the drum was forbidden. To make music, enslaved men and women would use metal spoons, clapping and slapping their bodies in rhythmic patterns. Hambone was often accompanied by a scripted or improvised song that spoke of Black culture and the lived experiences of the formerly enslaved. Whenever my uncles and mother would play, I would look on in amazement. My girls would often joke, “We inherited Grandma’s stories, not her rhythm.”
The recounting of our oral history always began with Papa Renty. Over time, we would come to learn that there are five generations of men named Renty in my family, four directly descending from the African-born Papa Renty. My grandfather Fred was the youngest of Renty Taylor Thompson’s ten children, all of whom lived in Mount Meigs. The story my mother told was that Renty, her grandfather, was the grandson of Papa Renty, the “Black African” and our first ancestor to set foot on American soil. My mom’s oldest brother was also named Renty, but everyone called him Bubba.

“The old folk gave their children unusual names because families were so often violently separated during slavery,” my mother explained. “This was how kinfolk could keep track and later found their loved ones.”

She’d also say, “Always remember, we are Taylors, not Thompsons.” This was our oral history, and she knew it because her grandfather, Renty Taylor Thompson, told her these stories when she was a child. Specifically, that he was born into slavery on the Taylor Plantation, but then he and his mother, Tena, were separated from their family and sold “south.”

My mother was our family historian and chief storyteller. One of her favorite stories was that Papa Renty taught himself to read using the Blue Back Speller during a period where it was still illegal to teach slaves how to read in parts of the South. “A literate slave is dangerous” was the common thinking among slave owners, which explains why this book was so highly in demand among enslaved people. My mother often said, “Back then, finishing the Blue Back Webster was the equivalent of graduating with a PhD today.”

She was especially proud that Papa Renty had mastered the entire book. “If you had a desire to read, Papa Renty would teach you,” she’d say proudly.

Judging from her conviction, I concluded that Papa Renty’s children had no choice but to embrace learning. “Education has always been a priority in our family,” she’d say. She also loved to tell childhood stories of how she walked “country miles” to school, which was a one-room, dirt-floor shack with hand-me-down books that already had the answers written in them and pages torn out. She graduated from high school with honors and in 1942 entered Alabama’s Teachers College, where she helped her schoolmate, the civil rights icon Ralph Abernathy, with his class work. During the summers she participated in a popular work exchange program where students from the South would migrate to the Northeast to work in hotels and restaurants, or on farms. In 1944 my mom got a job in a hotel in Connecticut, the same summer that Martin Luther King Jr., through the same program, worked as a farm hand on the Cullman Brothers tobacco farm in Simsbury, Connecticut.

After graduating, my mother took a teaching position and then became principal of the Free Mount School of Barbour County in Eufaula, Alabama. She continued to spend the summer months in Connecticut to earn extra money. That was how she met my father, Ennis M. Lanier, who was stationed in Groton, on the US naval base. They met in the fall of 1949 and married on August 27, 1950. My brother, Ennis, was the firstborn, followed by my sister, Cynthia, and finally me.

While my mother stopped teaching full-time to be a stay-at-home mom, she continued to be active in both education and civil rights. She was the PTA president at my school and instrumental in starting the local NAACP chapter in Norwich, Connecticut, going as far as paying the three-dollar application fee out of my father’s military allotment to make sure people were able to join who could otherwise not afford it.

I was in seventh grade when my mother’s cousin Charles Williams sent her a genealogy book that he had compiled of his and my mother’s maternal ancestors. It chronicles the life, journey, and children of Big Mammy, my great-great-great-grandmother, who, according to the oral history, was born in Africa, brought to Virginia, and then sold south to Mount Meigs, Alabama. She loomed as large in our life as did Papa Renty.

My mother always wanted to create a family tree of Papa Renty’s roots, like her cousin did for Big Mammy.

Big Mammy’s children were part Cherokee and practiced both Native and African American culture and traditions. Charles Williams documented all of this in a hand-bound book titled From These Roots. There was a tree trunk drawn on the bright yellow cardboard cover above three distinct branches of roots, each pointing to different family names: Williams, Murdock, and Lightfoot.