Episode 1: Homelands
It is February 2015. I am in the bigger guest room at my mother’s house. There is a bluish gray casting from the perfectly painted walls and I am walking to the Jack and Jill bathroom where she does her make up and preps her already perfectly oval-shaped face. I am passing by the mahogany wood dresser with the nobs of a bygone era, when for the first time a picture that I had seen a hand full of times before overtook me. It was a picture at the intersection of who I thought I was and what would end up being a new understanding of my life’s work. The sepia photograph was at the intersection of a disconnected past and the promise of a home for the future. The photograph, the two individuals in the photograph, the dog that sat at the dark-skinned man’s feet, the woman who stood aside him, the pearls, the house dress which I understood to be her good dress not her house one - they arrested me in time. Despite seeing the photograph, it had never called me, and as they say in Spanish “no me llamo mi attencion.” It was a phrase that I had heard countless times, living in Miami, Florida. “It didn’t call my attention.” And now looking at that photo, I understood the embodiment of that phrase and how I now stood at the intersection of leaving invisibility and walking into fully illuminating.
But as I walked by the mahogany dresser, the photograph called my full name. Nichelle Marie Calhoun. I stopped mid-route to the Jack and Jill bathroom tucked front and center in my mother’s suburban Bowie home, and I picked the photo up and turned it over. It said 1921.
1921.
I had never held a photo that old before in my hands. The photograph was a picture of my maternal great-grandparents, my mother’s grandparents through her mother’s line. I had known so very little of them. Primarily because my mother was not raised by her own mother, and thus there was a severance in information to be passed on from generation to generation and secondly because they themselves had died in the late 1950s and early 1960s and I had been born roughly 30 years later. But, when I passed them by on that dresser, it was clear they knew me, and what became clear was that I would get to know them.
I picked up the photograph, and I remembered a snippet of my grandmother saying that she was from Warrenton, Virginia. I knew so little of her, but she left me enough to begin ancestral work and an uncovering. I grabbed my laptop. I looked up the county for Warrenton, Virginia. It said, “ Fauquier County.” With that information I then decided to reach out the Fauquier County Historical Society. I went to the website and as I looked through it, I saw no presence or storytelling connected to the Black experience, history or contributions. I wrote an email sharing my dismay and and offering to donate a virtual copy of the photograph to the historical society. A few days later, I received a response. The response included a digital rendering of the photo that cleared away lines and tears that were visible in the physical rendering of the photograph. It also included information about another historical society called the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County (AAHA). I immediately looked them up from my apartment living room in Miami, Florida where I had lived since 2005. Excited about the promise of learning more about how that photograph that said my name fit into a larger story, I called the number on the website to the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County. I recognize now that urgency that made me excitedly call AAHA, as I began do to the ancestral work, the ancestors had begun to work on me.
The voice that answered the phone was calm and welcoming and turned out to be a cousin as revealed when she asked the question, “what’s your family line?” I responded, “ Lawsons, Baileys, Smoots.” She even more softly, yet in a higher pitch said, “that’s my line.” She immediately began asking me if I knew family members who we shared in common. I knew some by name because of my ancestral work had begun by constructing a rudimentary family tree.
She kindly asked me if she could text me, and then she began to send me photographs. Four photographs that would entrench to me a new world - a vision of my family in the past, a creation of a new present pursuit, and an impassioned desire to assist my family’s legacy into the future. I began to travel to the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County in the Plains, Virginia from Miami, Florida. Each time that I came home, to my mother’s house in the city I grew up, Bowie, Maryland right outside Washington DC, I would make the 70 mile trek west into rural Fauquier County to the plains.
It was a world away from my Miami, Florida life where I sat comfortably in between Diasporic identities, never fully an insider and never fully an outsider. I had moved to the city of Miami to get a Master’s in International Administration in 2005. At the time, I was determined to work in Africa, doing development work, so greatly influenced by my experience growing up in proximity to the nation’s capital and influenced by my idealizing of Africa as home. My mother’s paternal stories of segregation and life in the South culturally, had always influenced my connection to Blackness, and had contributed to the understanding that home should be welcoming and the United States had clearly not been welcoming to my family. I had grown to combine my lack of feeling completely a part of the American dream, with a honed passion to work in International Administration and International Affairs. My search for the Black experience, rooted in my mother’s paternal’s stories of life growing up in the South, my experience growing up in the Washington DC area and its academic focus and rigor as well as its international connections created this profound understanding of the Diaspora as home. If I had generations of evidence of home being hostile to people who looked like me then the Diaspora would be home, and I found my home in so many ways in the Diaspora. I found it in lovers. I found it in music. I found it in traveling to far-flung provinces of Central America with majority Black populations. I looked incessantly to the Diaspora - to Trinidad and Tobago, to the Dominican Republic, to Haiti, to Cuba, to Costa Rica, to Nicaragua, to Panama, to Mexico, to Kenya, to Colombia. I learned the seminal importance of music helping me in the ancestral work of meeting contemporaries in the Diaspora two hundred years after the Trans-Atlantic slave trade of Blacks of all ethnicities was banned by the British from being traded from the Continent. My life was a a return to the Diaspora, to the Black Atlantic, where people who looked like me were traded around the Atlantic basin. My one daughter would be a part of that legacy, her father a Trinidadian who was relocated to the Greater Washington DC, area. A DJ, he facilitated my journey through the Diaspora, opening me to the musical soul of the Caribbean.
It was with this profound connection to the Diaspora, that I arrived to the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County, Virginia. It was this global gaze that I found myself in a mostly pastoral, rural county, digging through the family files of the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County with a gusto and passion that I had never thought possible. But, it was the four photos that taught me with all my global searching and residing in the Diaspora that I had a home that was much, much closer.
And here it was the unexpected trek west on I-66 50 miles West of the nation’s capital, Washington DC, where I had been born. The uncovering was a family line deep in the Virginia Piedmont in the counties of Fauquier, Rappahannock, and Culpeper, and furthest back to Stafford County, Virginia.
The home my great-grandfather Joseph Marshall Smoot built in the 1920s.
Karen White teaching me the ancestral ropes of Virginia.
