Episode 2: Myths of My Mother
I am trying to go back to where I can remember any first thoughts of what motherhood actually was. Your first notions of mother are so inseparable to ideas of self as a child. You are an inextricable extension of your mother in those early years, and it is researched that when a child first enters that period of seeing oneself and not nearly as an extension of the mother they mark it with “I”, “mine” and yes the terrible twos.
I personally have returned to the concept of motherhood repeatedly throughout my adulthood. I have reflected on the motherhood of my mother and the mothers of friends around me, and in contemplation as a mother as I define my own child’s childhood with experiences. When I began to put together an anthology a few years ago that examined Black womanhood, motherhood was a central theme, but not an only theme as all women are clearly not destined nor desire to be mothers. Yet, we are all shaped by the concept of motherhood, fairly and unfairly our womanhood by society is so deeply framed by the value we elicit as mothers.
For Black women, this has been an incredibly complicated thing. Our motherhood has often been a beleaguered one, and it has been beleaguered in the “New World” since we were forcibly brought to these American and Caribbean shores. Historically, our value in society as women has been little regarded for more than our ability to produce offspring, and profits controlled by those who did not see us as human, but rather conduits to personal and family wealth. Since enslavement that value socially has been desecrated by notions that Black women give birth to what the nation does not see as desirable. Stereotypes of the unloving single mother populated the Moyinhan report creating notions that the urban centers of the United States were filled with women who were at the center of urban decay. A reclamation of Black motherhood is therefore is related to a reclamation of Black womanhood.
It is from this introduction, that I step wholly aside from the societal constructions of Black womanhood and Black motherhood and write from the intersectional experiences of Black women who are citizens, but often at the margins of citizenship, who are mothers, but often not socially celebrated for the historical and contemporary reasons outlined above. Black women as mothers longed for freedom, opportunity, safe physical, emotional and financial spaces for themselves and for the people that they loved. It is through the work of scholar Kimberle Crenshaw whose groundbreaking theory of intersectionality visibilizes the oppression and the resilience of Black women socially-situated at different points throughout American history in vastly different ways. It is her work that privileges my look into the often untold stories of the Black women both historically and contemporarily. This episode is tribute to the complexity of Black motherhood overtime starting with my oldest known mother, Betty Lawson.
“I got Indian in my family.”
These 6 words have been uttered around Black family cookouts and to strangers alike when they have inquired about families and family origins. So when I came upon the narrative written by a Dr. James Hamilton tracing his family line, which is also partly my family line, I was deeply excited. Dr. James Hamilton now deceased had done extensive familial research, coming back and forth between Massachusetts and Rappahannock County, Virginia where he had formerly grown up. Dr.James Hamilton and I shared a great-grandmother, my fifth great- grandmother - his 3rd great-grandmother, Betsey Lawson. His great-grandmother was Mary E. Frances, a woman who had 15 children with the white slaveowner, Elias Chappalear who was also his great-grandfather. Elias Chappalear, the French Hugenot descended aristocrat, never officially married, but cohabitated with Mary E. Lawson, my 3rd great-aunt. Elias Chappalear was disinherited for his decision and according to Dr. James Hamilton’s account, this disinheritance was made due to to his great-grandmother’s Native American lineage. This will be covered in a later blog. His research had led him to believe that Betty Lawson was a Native American woman born during the time of the American Revolution, and who was enslaved thereafter. It was one of the first written stories I had encountered looking through the family files of the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County.
When I first visited that April 2015 from Miami, Florida, I remember being riveted by Betty Lawson, this unexpected twist. I became obsessed with the notion of who the oldest known woman on my family tree might have been. Who was this Native American woman? How did her legacy become an African-American one? This only caused me to look deeper and deeper into my family roots, from various angles. There seemed to be an infinity of stories that I just wanted to get close to. At the top of my known family tree, was this woman who created various unknown courses for those thereafter assuredly both intentional and unintentional. Yet, I knew so little, just a neatly typed description of a woman whose granddaughter would later be impacted by her heritage.
But, I longed to know her and in February 2018, I was at the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County when something just spoke to me and propelled me to ask the question to Karen White, “ Do you have a copy of the Free Negro Register of Rappahannock County, Virginia?
She answered, “yes.”
Once she answered yes, I excitedly sat down and took a look at the Free Negro Register. I am not sure why I had expected to find anything. I was not so sure what to expect. Somewhere between Native American Betty and I, Blackness would have become the identity marker, and during those long years of the 19th century pre-Civil War, finding a family member on the Free Negro Register would mean that there was some opportunity for a distant relative to escape the daily humiliations of slavery, the chains, the whips, the pickling, the slaps, the whips, the selling and the thousands of indecencies that took place from day to day to in enslavement.
Free Negro Register of Rappahannock County, Virginia. 1838
