The Invisible Line (51 page)

For Gibson the question had an easy answer: blacks were congenitally incapable of having a place in American society. The Constitution might guarantee them some legal rights, and in Gibson's view the segregation statutes then being enacted by Southern legislatures actually protected blacks from ruinous competition with a superior race. But “positive legislation” alone, Gibson wrote, stood no chance against a different set of rules “to which all classes and races, in all circumstances, must finally succumb. There is no court of equity in Nature's jurisprudence. The law is unbending, universal, relentless, and supreme.” As a matter of natural fact, blacks were “sprung from a savage ancestry . . . whose fierce war cries alone disturbed the awful silence of a sleeping continent.” They would always be a blight on American life. As the United States prepared to enter the twentieth century, Gibson proposed forcibly removing citizens of African descent to “the magnificent valley of the Congo.”
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Gibson's views were nothing if not typical of his time and place. In the 1890s legions of amateur and professional race theorists were contemplating the moral and physical degradation of blacks and the imperative of keeping them absolutely separate from whites. Gibson drew his hard line on the future of blacks in the United States in part because the nation was at that very moment rapidly absorbing “vast multitudes” of newcomers. While “a single generation makes Americans of the children of the immigrant and all trace of their alien origin is lost,” he wrote, blacks “recline upon a dead level of hopeless uniformity, aliens upon the very soil of their nativity.” However common the sentiment, it was a curious position for Gibson to be taking little more than a decade after his brother Randall had faced unsettling accusations about their own family tree.
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In fact, the Gibsons' family history was evidence that, like the recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, descendants of African slaves could assimilate completely into the larger world around them. This migration from black to white had been happening for centuries and continued to occur on a daily basis. While late-nineteenth-century essays such as Gibson's may have reinforced the idea that the color line was impregnable—reflecting a landscape littered with “whites only” signs and smoldering from near-daily lynchings—the physical and intellectual brutality of Jim Crow wound up encouraging many racially ambiguous people to establish themselves as white. As Gibson surmised, other codes did operate alongside “positive legislation” to give meaning to the categories of black and white in the United States—but as often as not they undermined the idea of natural, blood-borne differences between immutable races. Instead individuals, families, and communities applied their own rules and logic to the law of racial segregation as it affected their daily lives.

In a society in constant motion—where people were continually defining themselves anew—migrating from black to white did not have to be much of a leap. Individuals could make the move; communities could accept them; and government officials and the courts could deliberately decide not to intervene. They knew and could even say aloud that race was a legal and social fiction. At the same time, this abiding sense that the color line was easily crossed did not force people to question its powerful hold over American life. While everyday tolerance enabled people to establish themselves as white, it also allowed them to assert their new identities in ways that hardened racial categories to murderous extremes. Communities that conceived of themselves as white could subscribe to the idea of purity of blood without ever having to worry that any of their members' race would be questioned. If Hart Gibson felt insecure about his place in the world, his claim to elite status grew stronger with each comment he penned championing the “splendid traditions and hereditary aptitude” of the Anglo-Saxon over the “paralyzing and remorseless barbarism” of blacks.
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The Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls lived through events that defined America. They fought in the struggles of their times, great and small. Their histories reveal how the color line ran through the heart of the nation's experience. From the colonial era well into the twentieth century, the idea of race—the notion that blood transmitted moral character and social fitness—provided a central reason why American democracy exalted some people at the enduring expense of others.

The journeys of the Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls are significant not for how they were classified and whether those categories accurately reflected their ancestry. Rather, they reveal how the very existence of racial categories altered people's expectations and behavior—how these categories were at once undermined and strengthened by the steady stream of Americans migrating from black to white. The family histories reflect how blackness became a proxy for inequality. People could escape the category because it was not real, but the inequality persisted, growing only stronger with emancipation, as the promise of liberty bred new, potent forms of discrimination. The Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls embody fundamental tragedies of our past—the vexed relationship between liberty and equality, the possibility of tolerance alongside the choice to hate. At the same time their histories offer some reason for hope. They provide an occasion to understand race in a different way and an opportunity to acknowledge our enduring, if at times hidden, capacity to privilege the particular over the abstract, and everyday experience over what we have been told to believe.

 

 

TODAY'S DESCENDANTS OF THE Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls are spread out across the United States, north, south, east, and west. They are rich and poor and getting by. They live in the country and in the city, are more and less educated, healthy and ailing, Democrats and Republicans, devout and secular, happy and sad. Gibson descendants still live in and around Lexington, Kentucky—one lives a block away from the mansion that Randall Gibson's father built before the Civil War, which still stands as a monument to classical plantation and New Orleans architecture. Many of Jordan Spencer's descendants are a stone's throw from the slopes that the old man tilled. The Walls are scattered throughout the country. Some descendants live with the same prominent status—and alternatively, the same anonymity—that their ancestors had one hundred years ago. Some have moved up in the world, and some down. They are indistinguishable from any number of Americans who regard themselves as white in the early twenty-first century.

Despite the passage of centuries and the accretion of new identities, most of the descendants interviewed for this book already knew the broad contours of their family histories by the time I contacted them. The secrets of prior generations, it seems, are no match for the Internet. In just the past decade, historical and genealogical databases have reduced searches that used to take years—scrolling frame by frame through entire volumes of newspapers on microfilm—to mere days or even hours. Popular ancestry Web sites and vast communities of online researchers have allowed millions of Americans to learn previously inconceivable truths about their roots. All it takes is one genealogy buff in the family. Far from big cities and major archives, people like Freda Spencer Goble have gone to their local public library to search census records. When Goble found her great-great-grandfather—Jordan Spencer—in the 1850 census, she slowly deciphered the handwriting on the census-taker's original enumeration sheet. Then she called over the librarian to explain the meaning of the abbreviation scrawled by Spencer's name: “mul,” for mulatto.
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If descendants of the Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls have uncovered their family histories with relative ease, their responses to evidence that their ancestors were people of color have been more complicated. Some have found it interesting but irrelevant to their lives—as meaningful, say, as finding out that a great-grandfather was a furrier—but many describe the discovery as a visceral experience and cause for soul searching, releasing a spectrum of emotions from elation to anguish. It can be a delicate matter, something to avoid in conversation with older relatives. While it has become increasingly common for white descendants of slaveowners to hold reunions with descendants of slaves and acknowledge and celebrate black kin, black ancestry is something different altogether, inverting rather than affirming old hierarchies and forcing people to examine hardwrought views of themselves, their families, and their worlds. Even in today's “postracial” society, race still functions as a remarkably fixed set of rules and expectations. As in centuries past, however, today's Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls have accommodated the rules to their own lived experience, pushing and shaping the meaning of race in the process.
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Denial is a common and understandable reaction. Members of these families have identified so closely with the mainstream of white America—and the line between black and white has appeared to be so solid—that an alternative account of their origins seems outlandish. Given the vagaries of the historical record and the well-documented shortcomings of DNA ancestry testing when it comes to measuring remote African ancestry, it is not difficult to conceive of other reasons that a family was categorized as black or reputed to be dark. After all, for centuries people migrating across the color line drew liberally on that same universe of explanations.
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Living descendants of the Gibsons, for example, have encountered public discussions of their family's “extraordinary career” ever since a 1962 article by the historian Winthrop Jordan described Gideon Gibson's “successful hurdling of the barrier” between black and white in colonial South Carolina. In the decades that have followed, Gibson genealogy hobbyists have spent countless hours attempting to prove that the family is not descended from African slaves. William LaBach, the great-great-grandson of Randall Gibson's sister Sarah and an avid genealogist, has heard just about every account of why the Gibsons were regarded as people of color: they were Gypsies, Portuguese Huguenots, Seneca Indians, Sephardic Jews, Moroccans, Turks. “Then there's the story where we [descended] from the Bishop of London,” said LaBach, a Kentucky lawyer with a Ph.D. in mathematics and a master's degree in history. “It couldn't all be right . . . There's not a lot of certain answers in some genealogy. I tend to disbelieve all of it.”
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For others the discovery has been harder to explain away. When Thomas Murphy learned that his great-grandparents were O.S.B. and Amanda Wall, he said, he marched into the Atlanta airport rent-a-car where he was employed and told his black coworkers, “You can't call me a racist because I
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one of you.” As if to prove to himself that he could not be black, he started harboring and expressing more racist feelings than he had ever felt before. There was a time when he could barely sit in a restaurant near an African American. He approached his minister with the question “Am I black?” but found little solace in the answer he got: that according to the Bible, Murphy's African ancestry was too remote to change how he classified himself. He loathed the way his grandparents and their children lied about their backgrounds. He attributed O.S.B. Wall's success in the world to his white father, the plantation owner Stephen Wall. “The way I see it, I don't descend from a black man,” Murphy said. “I descend from a white man who couldn't keep his genes in his pants.”
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Yet Thomas has worked tirelessly to learn as much as he can about O.S.B. and Amanda Wall and their children, reveling in every new piece of information. In reconstructing his family tree, he has contacted distant cousins repeatedly and posted his findings on the Web for the world to see. As much as he resisted defining himself as black, his ancestry has given him a place in the world, a claim to some of the central events in American history. For most of his life, he had heard little about his father other than that Patrick Murphy terrorized his wife and had hanged for rape. In recent years Thomas's research has given him a different, richer set of stories—preserved in newspaper articles, government records, and childhood pictures—about his ancestors and a father he never knew. Ultimately, the pull of family, the balm of knowing, drew him past the issue of race.

For some descendants, their family history provided answers to lifelong questions. When Freda Goble began researching her genealogy, her findings about Jordan Spencer became an occasion to reflect on her family's hard-fought path to the middle class. Her father was one of ten children who grew up during the Depression on a small mountain farm in Johnson County. They lived much like Jordan Spencer had, sleeping in a two-room house, raising everything they ate, and sewing their own clothes and quilts. The children were worked too hard to stay in school past the eighth grade. Despite day after day of grueling labor and horizons bounded by their mountain hollow, “every one of them wanted to be somebody and do something with their lives,” Goble said. Several went north in the 1950s, got factory jobs, and educated themselves. Her father found religion and pastored a neighborhood church in Johnson County for decades.
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Goble, who started and owned a local candle-making business, grew up surrounded by Spencers who “had to be the strongest,” she said. “They worked harder, could lift more, could do more in a day than anyone else.” Though poor and uneducated, they always wanted to be recognized as “pillars of the community.” “They demanded respect was how they got it,” she said. “They just demanded respect. There was something about it. Even my father, when he walked, he walked with his shoulders back, head in the air, he had a proud look about him.” As Freda thought about how her family kept their heads up despite daunting odds, Jordan Spencer's migration across the color line—his determination to make a place for himself and put down roots in Johnson County's rocky soil—suggested an answer. “They were a very proud people—yes they were,” Freda said. “My grandfather was one of the proudest men I ever met in my life. And they said his father was the same way. So I assume they got this from somewhere. I don't know how or where or why, but they were very, very proud.”
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