Daughter of America: Secrets in the Blood

NOTE: This essay was a Sunday worship service presented July 4, 2021 to the Two Rivers Unitarian Universalist congregation in Carbondale, Colorado. To preserve the overall effect, I have left the readings and chalice lightings in with the sermon. – Nicolette

 

Chalice Lighting

“The New Colossus”, by Emma Lazarus, is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

SERMON PART 1

On July 4, 1834, my great great grandfather Robert Sommers, who was then 9, hung on the rail of the tall ship Bristol as it entered New York harbor. His three older brothers stood nearby, along with their mother Nancy Ann Summers, who was hanging on to two MORE kids, 6-year-old Anne and 3-year-old Alfred. Nancy Ann had just survived a six-week voyage from England to reunite the children with their dad, who had come to the US a year before. After a 6-week solo with six kids who had undoubtedly been sea-sick, scared and squabbling, I’m sure she was exhausted.

In many ways, Nancy Ann Somers and her kids do fit the stereotypical immigrant image: they crossed the Atlantic in a sailing ship, they came from Europe, and they arrived in a family.
In other ways, the Somers DON’T fit our image: They didn’t see the Statue of Liberty; it wouldn’t be created for another 40 years. They never heard the words of the New Colossus; that poem wouldn’t be written for 49 years. And they didn’t go through Ellis Island; it wouldn’t open for 58 years.

The Somers aren’t really typical of my family’s immigration pattern either. That’s because, aside from my Aunt Elizabeth, a WWII bride, the Sommers are the MOST RECENT arrivals I could find in my family tree!

Although I grew up in Colorado and had little contact with my father’s Slusser-
and-Downer family in Illinois, I did know that they had been in the US a loooong time. Nancy Ann Somers’ granddaughter married into the Downer family. And I HAD heard about the Downers.

Oh boy, had I heard about them! My father’s family was immodestly proud that their ancestor, Pierce Downer, had founded Downer’s Grove, Illinois. AND that the Downers had descended from Elisha Downer, who fought in the Revolutionary War.

I found the family’s snooty, self-important attitude rather off-putting, particularly where my mother was concerned. One of my father’s WASP relatives waspishly referred to my mother as “the little girl from the wrong side of the tracks,” and that moniker stuck. It continued to rankle decades after my parents’ divorce.

My mother knew next to nothing about her own family. Myra was raised by her mother Mamie and her adoptive father, Gene Toussaint. She knew the NAME of her biological father, but little more. Based on her mother’s maiden name, Gowen, Myra thought that she was Irish.
Given her dark hair and blue eyes, Myra said she was “Black Irish,” descended from shipwrecked sailors who swam ashore from the Spanish Armada. Myra assumed that her Irish ancestors had arrived during the 1845 potato famine.

As she aged, Myra had ever more fanciful theories about who she was. Perhaps the biological child of her aunt? Perhaps a child who had been abducted from a wealthy family during the Depression, but never ransomed?

Mostly, I attributed Myra’s wild stories to Grandma Mamie’s reclusive eccentricity, and to the dementia that took hold of Myra in old age. Only recently did it occur to me to investigate for myself. Last spring, inspired by Henry Louis Gates’ “Finding Your Roots” PBS program, I started building my family tree. I also took a DNA test.

My goal was to learn more about who my mother really was, and why HER family came to America. Given what I already knew about my father’s WASPish family, I was also hoping to find a little diversity. Any hopes for THAT rested solely with the mysteries hidden in my mother’s blood.

READING:

“My DNA Results Came In” by Fred Lamotte

Just as I suspected, my great-great-grandfather
was a monarch butterfly.
Much of who I am is still wriggling under a stone.
I am part larva, but part hummingbird too.
There is dinosaur tar in my bone marrow.
My golden hair sprang out of a meadow in Palestine.
Genghis Khan is my fourth cousin,
but I didn’t get his dimples.
My loins are loaded with banyan seeds from Sri Lanka,
but I descended from Ravanna, not Ram.
My uncle is a mastodon.
There are traces of white people in my saliva.
3.7 billion years ago I swirled in golden dust,
dreaming of a planet overgrown with lingams and yonis.
More recently, say 60,000 B.C.
I walked on hairy paws across a land bridge
joining Sweden to Botswana.
I am the bastard of the sun and moon.
I can no longer hide my heritage of raindrops and cougar scat.
I am made of your grandmother’s tears.
You conquered rival tribesmen of your own color,
chained them together, marched them naked to the coast,
and sold them to colonials from Savannah.
I was that brother you sold, I was the slave trader,
I was the chain.
Admit it, you have wings, vast and golden,
like mine, like mine.
You have sweat, black and salty,
like mine, like mine.
You have secrets silently singing in your blood,
like mine.
Don’t pretend that earth is not one family.
Don’t pretend we never hung from the same branch.
Don’t pretend we don’t ripen on each other’s breath.
Don’t pretend we didn’t come here to forgive.

SERMON PART 2

My DNA didn’t reveal any mastodons, but my research did deliver some BIG surprises.
My DNA is 6.8% Vietnamese!

Grandma Mamie’s family name wasn’t originally Gowens. It was “GOINS” (G-O-I-N-S). Goins is one the family names common among Melungeons. (Never heard of Melungeons? Stay tuned…)

Like Elizabeth Warren, another gal who looks as white as me, I have a Native American ancestor…

Back in the seventies, on a visit to Great Britain, I dug into records of the Somers family, the ones who arrived in New York 187 years ago today. They came from Frome, England halfway between Stonehenge and the city of Bath.

In Frome, a church historian took me up into a stone attic in St. John’s church and showed me huge, leather-bound ledgers that held vital records going back to the 1500’s. Laughingly, she commented, “I know your family. They were all preachers or publicans!” That prompted me to visit the Dolphin Inn, a historic pub owned by my family.

Before the internet, that’s how genealogical research had to be done. No longer. Although my mother spent a lifetime unsuccessfully searching for her birth certificate, this year, it took me only about 10 minutes to find it online!

My father’s family was generally rich, educated, Northern and well-documented. My mother’s family was generally impoverished, Southern, poorly-educated and left few records.

My father’s grandfather, Mazzini Slusser, was an Illinois circuit county judge. When he died at 72, his obituary was published in multiple newspapers. His widow inherited homes in Illinois and Arkansas. Mazzini’s grown sons were a physician, an attorney, the head of the University of Michigan’s art department, a college professor and a Colorado mining engineer.
My mother’s grandfather, Terry Gowens, a tenant farmer in Missouri, was illiterate. He died at 52 after being kicked in the head by a horse. He left his wife in dire poverty. Dollie struggled to bring up 6 daughters, aged to 6 to 16, on her own. My Grandma Mamie, 13 at the time of her father’s death, bore the marks of that privation her life.

Rich and poor, educated and illiterate. Urban and rural, North and South. Those divides have persisted since Colonial times. As I began researching my roots, I felt a personal connection to this nation’s history. In ways I didn’t even suspect, I’m truly a daughter of America. As the poet put it:

I am the bastard of the sun and moon.
I was that brother you sold, I was the slave trader…

Both sides of my family emigrated to colonial America. Both sides fought in the civil war and both sides owned slaves.

That last fact would have come as a surprise to my father’s Slusser/Downer family: My great-granduncle, Thomas Jefferson Slusser, died in Union uniform on Sherman’s March to the Sea. Pierce Downer’s Illinois home is a historic landmark in part because it was a Northern stop on the Underground Railroad.

But in the deeper reaches of the Downer family tree, I found Mary Lovett Tyler. A direct ancestor, Mary was born in Andover, Massachusetts in 1651, and when the Salem witch trials spread there, she was accused, along with three of her daughters: Hannah, Joanna and Martha, aged 11 to 14.

Mary’s arrest probably was ordered by another of my ancestors, the deplorable Bartholomew Gedney. A tavern owner and a land speculator, he was my 7th great grandfather. He was also a judge at the Salem Witch trials.

Between 1636 and 1637, Gedney was deeply involved in a war between the Pequot Indians and English settlers. Puritan John Underhill justified the conflict by calling the Pequots “wicked imps” aided by Satan. Another Puritan complained about how hard it was to enslave Indian captives. Pequots, he wrote, “would not endure the yoke.”

That being the case, colonials often sent captured Indians to Bermuda in exchange for African slaves! I have to assume the deplorable Gedney was part of that both because of his war record and because it was common among Puritans.

Perhaps you remember Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible? It accurately related that the first person arrested for witchcraft was Tituba, a slave owned by Salem’s minister, the Reverend Samuel Parris. Paris also owned Tituba’s husband, a Native American slave named Indian John.

In 1692, Tituba was accused of teaching fortune-telling to Rev. Parris’ daughter Elizabeth and Rev Parris’ ward, Abigail Williams, primary accusers in the trials. After the trials, Tituba remained in jail an additional year because Parris refused to free her. She eventually was sold to pay her jail fees.

My ancestor Mary Lovett Tyler fared better. After spending a year in jail and being found not guilty, her husband paid her jail fees and freed her.

Another accused witch, Sarah Hawkes, was freed by the governor on the day she was scheduled to hang. The deplorable Gedney and two fellow judges had already hung Sarah ‘s husband. Despite the governor’s action, Gedney and his fellow judges nonetheless confiscated all of Sarah’s goods and property – including land that makes up most present-day Lynn, Massachusetts.

And what, we might ask, happened to the Pequots who lived there originally?

Given these stories, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that in 1641, Massachusetts — not Virginia — was the FIRST of Britain’s colonies to legalize slavery in what would become the land of the free and the home of the brave.

READING 2

Equality in a Sea of Inequality by Rev. Peggy Clarke

When this country was founded, the aspiration was high. The men who imagined it dreamed big, casting a vision of a world where all men were created equal, where rights were endowed by our creator, transcending culture and the expectations of the day; where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness would be allowed and enjoyed without infringement. It was a radical and new vision, born from Enlightenment optimism, inspired by scientific discovery. It was an intoxicating vision, as bold as the Protestant Reformation that swept all of Europe.

And they had the hubris to believe they could make it happen. They staked their claim in the Declaration of Independence and institutionalized it in the Constitution. They elected their first President and when he stepped down, relinquishing power to return to the role of citizen, those founders believed they lived to see their vision realized. A new President ran for office and the Republic was up and running. It was done. A new world order.

Those men weren’t distracted by the genocide they inspired, or the enslavement of other people they required for this nation to be born. They declared equality while swimming in a sea of inequality. When they declared “ALL men were created equal”, they meant white, Protestant men.

They didn’t mean women. They weren’t including Black people who’d been enslaved, or those who were free. They didn’t include Catholics, Jews, or people who didn’t own land. They were so proud of their inclusivity, so inspired by their own cutting-edge philosophy, that they had no idea how narrow it was, how constrictive, how small a vision.

The men who wrote those words were calling into being a More Perfect Union. They were Establishing Justice. Insuring Domestic Tranquility. Securing the Blessings of Liberty. They believed that they, and the men of their generation, would will this new nation into being.

They would establish the structures required for such a grand vision, they would test it, and then it would be done. They didn’t realize it would require many more people, many different voices. They didn’t know how many generations would have to be part of the creation of that dream—how long it would take before the nation they imagined would be made manifest.
The soul of America had yet to be born.

SERMON PART 3

The migrants who established England’s Virginia and Maryland colonies arrived to seek their fortunes, unlike the Massachusetts pilgrims, who sought to build the kingdom of god. The Puritans were largely educated, land-owning people in England, in contrast to the thousands of unmarried, unemployed, and impatient young Englishmen who sailed to England’s southern colonies.

Many historians believe the fault lines separating what later became the North and South originated in the deep differences between the Chesapeake and New England colonies. Those fault lines certainly separated my father’s and mother’s families.

My father’s ancestors were New Englanders.

My mother’s ancestors emigrated to America by way of colonial Virginia and to colonial New Amsterdam. From there, they followed Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky and later to Missouri.

Perhaps you recall, that at the beginning of this service, I mentioned a DNA showing me as 6.8% Vietnamese?

That was so out of context for anything I knew that I spent weeks trying to concoct a plausible story for how my west European ancestors ever met anyone Vietnamese!
Finally, I thought of the Dutch East India company. My mother’s family tree does include a Dutch name: Kuykendall.

I Googled the Dutch East India Company and found out they did indeed sail to Vietnam, which at the time was called Tonkin. Founded in 1609 and remaining in business for just shy of 200 years, the Dutch East India Company was the most valuable company in the history of the world, nevermind Microsoft. It was formed when the Dutch government merged three private trading companies and infused the new entity with military authority.

The company had the right to conclude treaties with native princes, to build forts and maintain armed forces, and to carry on Dutch administrative functions. Employees of the Dutch East India company had to take a government loyalty oath, and many carried military rank.

So when I traced the Kuykendalls back to Jacob Luersen Van Kuykendaal, my 10th-great grandfather, I was excited to see that he was Corporal Van Kuykendall. Jacob was born in 1616, in the Netherlands. Both of his parents died before he was 10. and his older brother Urbanus, probably raised him.

Jacob went to sea with Urbanus; records show them both working for the Dutch East India Company. Jacob worked for the company from his teens until at least into his forties.

Jacob married Stijntje  Douwes in Holland in 1635. Five years later, in 1640, Jacob, his wife and baby daughter emigrated to Fort Orange, New Netherlands (now Albany, New York) aboard the ship “Princess” – which, not coincidentally, was owned by the Dutch West India Company.

Jacob was granted a lot near Fort Orange in October of 1653. It was little more than a contested fur-trading post at the time. He built a house and stayed there until he died in 1655. He was survived by his wife, 3 daughters and one son, Luer, who is my direct ancestor.

I suspect that Luer was half Vietnamese. Back then, there were no immigration quotas, and Jacob’s wife wouldn’t have had much to say about taking in her husband’s half-Asian child. Women in those days had no legal rights. And who was to know who was passing as white out there on the frontier in Fort Orange?

READING 3

From Beacon Press, July 2010

One of the most oft-repeated—and most puzzling—comments regarding the debate on immigration goes something like this: “I’m not against immigration, but I’m against illegal immigration. New immigrants should play by the rules, like our parents and forebears did.”

The sentiment reveals a lot about how we’ve been taught to think about U.S. history: we’ve been taught to think of this as a country of white, voluntary immigrants. The history of people who don’t fall into that category is incidental, rather than central, to the story we learn in school. “The rules,” though, were different for Europeans than for Africans, Asians, and Native Americans. For the latter, “the rules” meant enslavement, exclusion, and conquest.

What the people (generally of European origin) who point to “the rules” ignore, moreover, is that when their parents and grandparents came to the United States, they in fact did exactly what so-called “illegal” immigrants are doing today. They decided to make the journey, and they made it. All they had to do was get together the boat fare.

The rules were different then.
U.S. law explicitly limited citizenship and naturalization to white people.

SERMON CONCLUSION

We all go back to Africa, eventually, to the “original Eve” via our maternal DNA. I now know that my maternal haplogroup is J2, which emerged out of Africa via Asia and the Middle East about 30,000 years ago. But my mother’s family tree included a far more recent African connection, one that completely dropped my jaw.

For most of her life, my mother thought she was Irish — Black Irish to account for her black hair and blue eyes. Myra thought she was at least half Irish because of the surnames of her grandparents: Kirkendall and Gowens.

Neither name is Irish. Kuykendall, as you just heard, is really Dutch and pronounced Kuykendall. Gowens was changed from the original “Goins” — and it turns out to be one of the six main Melungeon family names.

The Melungeons are an Appalachian mystery. In East Tennessee and neighboring states, the word “Melungeon” is a derogatory term. At times the Melungeons have filled the place of the bogeyman with children being told, “Be good or the Melungeons will get you!” The term is applied to people who have dark skin, dark hair, aquiline noses and often, blue eyes. Being dark-skinned, they have faced discrimination, and many Appalachian families have distanced themselves from their Melungeon roots, or tried to keep them secret. Historian Edward T. Price explains why:

The Melungeons were disenfranchised by restrictions placed on free persons of color in the Tennessee’s Constitution of 1834. Legally helpless, they lost their better land and survived via several illegal, but profitable, activities: Raiding Confederate supply lines, counterfeiting gold coins and moonshining…

There is no group of people who call themselves Melungeons. Non-Melungeons, however, generally agree that Melungeons are mixed in race and comprise a small number of families known by their surnames. Prominent among them are Collins, Mullins, Gibson, Freeman and Goins..

My 6th-great grandfather was named John Frederick Goins. His son, William Shadrack Goins was nicknamed “Shade” and is described in historical documents as being “mulatto.” DNA tells me I am related to Shade. Other researchers who have traced Shade’s family shared this story with me. It concerns John Gowen, or Gaeween, who is very likely my 10th great grandfather.

The Goins family, the largest branch in the Melungeon family tree, begins in early colonial Virginia. John Gowen was born in Angola, Africa about 1615, and he arrived in Virginia prior to 1630. John was probably one of a group of prisoners stolen from a Portuguese slave ship that was boarded by pirates in 1628.

John Guy, an English privateer operating under Dutch authority, was the pirate who stole the slaves. Nine years earlier, Guy’s ship, the White Lion, had brought the first Africans to the English colonies. Although Guy’s first African captives were sold in 1619 as indentured servants, that sale is regarded as the start of slavery in America.

My 10th-great grandfather John Gaeween was purchased in 1628 by plantation owner William Evans in Jamestown. After the sale, John Gaeween was indentured for the usual term of 7-10 years.

Seven years later, in 1635, John married a black servant girl, Margaret Cornish, who lived on a neighboring plantation. Margaret belonged to planter Robert Sheppard, who served in the Virginia House of Burgess, North America’s oldest continually-existing legislature.

John and Margaret had a son, named Michael Gowen, in 1635. Margaret remained bound to Lieutenant Sheppard’s plantation along with her son Michael. John Gowen worked for Evans until he completed his indenture, becoming North America’s first recorded free black man.

Five years after Michael’s birth, Margaret bore a half-white child to Robert Sweet, owner of yet another neighboring plantation. We know about this because Margaret and the white man Sweet were exposed and brought to court. Virginia court records contain the sentence handed down on October 17, 1640. Margaret was “whipped at a whipping post” and Sweet had to do “public penance for his offence at Sunday service in James City church….” Within five months of that sentence, freed African John Gowen successfully petitioned the court for the freedom of his son Michael.

Once grown, Michael married a free black woman named Prossa. They produced at least 11 children.

One of them, Thomas Christopher Gowin, my ancestor, married Winuna, a Cherokee Indian. Thomas and Winuna are my 8th-great grandparents.

Scholars working with both DNA and historical records now think that the Melungeon community began to emerge among mulattos, blacks and American Indians in colonial Virginia, a period PRIOR TO the slave laws we’re familiar with. Fleeing racism, discrimination and the emerging establishment of a slave-based economy – free people of color like the Goins migrated to Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri. Some of the Goins passed as white; some hid in the hills, some coped by migrating to America’s expanding frontiers.

In learning all this, I have had such mixed reactions: Regret that I couldn’t share this story with my mother. Astonishment upon discovering, appearances aside, I am not the blindingly white person I thought I was! Bemusement that my grandma Mamie, the most openly-racist relative I knew, had black and Indian ancestors. Sorrow that in three prior generations, Mamie’s Goins history had either been forgotten or willfully hidden.

After reflecting for awhile, I also came to a feeling of deep connection. Although I have known very few of my family members personally, I’m even more a daughter of America than I imagined. I’m the offspring of French Huguenot refugees, Dutch Walloons immigrants, German Lutheran preachers and English Puritan ministers. The descendant of many Quakers and a Swiss Mennonite who was drowned in 1644 for his Anabaptist preachings. The descendant of oh-so-many deacons and preachers — and yes, quite a few publicans.

I am in awe of the river of DNA that connects us all: the nucleotides that bind us to Africa and to migrations that span the whole of human history. Humans have always been immigrants. In the long run, the lines we draw in the sand, the lines we print on maps mean very little.

Perhaps the poet put it best:

I am the bastard of the sun and moon.
I can no longer hide my heritage of raindrops and cougar scat.
I am made of your grandmother’s tears.
You conquered rival tribesmen of your own color,
chained them together, marched them naked to the coast,
and sold them to colonials from Savannah.
I was that brother you sold, I was the slave trader,
I was the chain…
Don’t pretend that earth is not one family.
Don’t pretend we never hung from the same branch.
Don’t pretend we don’t ripen on each other’s breath.
Don’t pretend we didn’t come here to forgive.