“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.”
—Jeremiah 1:5 (ESV)
I was fifteen years old.
Mom and Dad took most of us kids and some friends out to dinner after church. I’m not sure how they pulled that off as much as they did, because when the Winanses went out to dinner, it was a caravan of people. As we enjoyed our dinner one night, three white people approached our table. Now, at this point my family was somewhat known in certain circles in Detroit. So it wasn’t altogether uncommon for us to be approached when we were out and about.
The three whites introduced themselves to Dad and said, “I thought you might find it interesting that our last name is Winans too.”
Dad looked surprised, and rightly so. Winans was not a popular name.
“Really!” Dad replied. “C’mon. Show me your license,” he said with a playful grin.
The gentleman pulled out his license and showed Dad.
“Well, I’ll be! I guess y’all were our slave owners!”
Cue the awkward pause in the very brief conversation.
Dad possessed the uncanny ability to say whatever was on his mind, and he really didn’t care about the consequences. The man looked surprised but laughed awkwardly along with Dad.
To Dad’s credit, he was right, at least from our limited perspective, to be skeptical. The only Winans any of us knew were, well…they were not white.
Years later, and when I say years, I mean several decades later, I was attending an event in Arizona. The white doorman at the hotel where I was staying pointed to his name tag as I walked in: Ray Winans.
“What? Really?”
I felt like my dad.
But sure enough, he showed me his license: Ray Winans. We chatted briefly and exchanged numbers, and then I went about my day.
Apparently, I didn’t know all there was to know about the Winans name. And this intrigued me. I suppose if you really think about it, we’re all related if you take the generations back far enough. But I had never met a white Winans.
* * *
If you want to really understand the Winans name, I discovered that you need to get to know my great-grandfather I.W. Winans and the church he founded, Zion Congregational Church of God in Christ, located in what is now the historic district in Detroit, Michigan, at 2135 Mack Avenue. I’ve always known who he was because of the connection to my father.
But there’s a special history there that runs deep and dark, a reminder that while history can shape us, it’s our dreams that define us.
As I reflected more on my past, I decided to visit home and talk with friends and family about growing up in Detroit. I flew from Nashville to Detroit to talk to my mom and to see old friends and to talk to my older brother Marvin. Marvin now pastors Perfecting Church in Detroit. I attended the service and visited with him afterward in his church office.
On his wall hung an old black-and-white photograph of our great-grandfather I.W. Winans, or Bishop Winans, as we called him. I noticed the picture, half whispering the name “Bishop Winans.”
“Ah yes,” said Marvin, “good ol’ I.W. God told him to come to Detroit. ‘God sent me here,’ is what he said.”
“From where? I forget the whole story.”
“He was part of the Great Migration, BeBe.1 At least I think so—it makes sense given the year he left and the supposed time the migration began. They say the Great Migration began in 1915 and continued all the way until 1970. I.W. moved from Mississippi to Detroit in 1916, and three years later he founded the church you and I grew up in. Hard to believe nearly all of the African American folks lived in the South before 1910.”
“Sure is,” I said.
The influx of African Americans in Detroit in the early twentieth century is well documented. If you know anything about Detroit, you know that it has a rich ethnic history. This was on display with the forming of the well-known Black Bottom area, where people of all ethnicities settled.
“I.W. moved his family from Centreville, Mississippi, in order to start a church.”
“In 1916? What was their life like before they came here?”
“Well, I can only imagine. But recently I did some digging on my own and discovered quite a bit of new information about our family you might find interesting.”
It’s hard to imagine what life was like one hundred years ago in our country. You hear stories on the news or watch a documentary or read a book, but all that frames the past in an almost unreal light. It’s too easy to place my own perspective and context on a time that was completely different than ours is today. I mean, think about it. We didn’t even have the first airplane until 1903, and that was only an experiment. Now, I use planes like folks back then used the train. I don’t even give it a second thought. Our technology today makes our experience in life so different; our conveniences today were mere dreams a century ago—or not even thought of yet. But technology and convenience aside, what about the realities of being a black man in the South at the end of the nineteenth century? Many of us have stories about our experiences in the South, and I currently live in the South, but the South in the twenty-first century is nothing like it was in 1886. And still nothing like it was in 1916. So I wanted to hear more of what Marvin had dug up.
“Go on,” I said.
“Here’s what we know about I.W. Winans, as far as I can tell. He was born in Mississippi in 1875 to Antonio Winans. I could not find the name of his mother. When I.W. was born, his father was a sharecropper—that’s when one family leases land from the landowner, and the landowner gets a share of the crops as payment for letting them work the land. I.W. was born after the Civil War, so naturally I was curious as to their ‘situation’ with regard to the slave culture of that time.”
“Did you find out anything more about that?” I knew my brother had taken a trip down to Mississippi to dig around, but I didn’t know what he actually discovered.
“I did. Remember, I drove down to Mississippi and visited with the folks at Millsaps College?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Well, I did that because there seemed to be a connection between Antonio Winans and this other Winans fella named William Winans. Before I get to William, all I could uncover about Antonio was that he was born in Chicot County, Arkansas, in 1838 and died in Wilkinson, Mississippi. Now today, Wilkinson is an actual community in Mississippi, but it’s also a county. The county was founded in 1802 by European settlers who wanted to set up cotton plantations along the Mississippi River. The largest town in Wilkinson is Centreville.
“But, BeBe, here’s the most interesting part: I couldn’t find a record of the names of Antonio’s parents. ‘Names’ end with Antonio; after him, it’s just numbers. So I have no idea how or why he was born in Arkansas, but eventually, and somehow, he was brought to Wilkinson, Mississippi. My only guess is that he was either taken there by slave traders or that his parents took him to Mississippi. We just don’t know.
“But remember the other Winans I mentioned earlier? His name was William Winans. And, BeBe, he was white.”
“Excuse me? Maybe I should call Ray or get in touch with those fine folks from years ago we met at that restaurant with Dad and Mom and let them know that Dad was right!”
I was laughing and also surprised and a bit taken aback, having come face-to-face with this potential reality.
“Right, I know. I can’t say for sure that there’s a connection, but it seems likely given the times and the culture of the Mississippi Territory in the early nineteenth century. William Winans was born in Chestnut Ridge in the Pennsylvania Alleghenies in 1788. His father, Creighton Winans, was a cobbler, and his mom, Susana Hopkins, was a weaver. They later moved to Ohio when William was still very young. He spent most of his adult life in the Natchez Trace in the Mississippi Territory. He moved down there on December 4, 1810. Mississippi only became an official state in 1817.
“The Natchez Trace was not a great area. I read online that it was mostly known as a trail that was forged by deer and bison and was made into the Columbian Highway. But it was so rugged, the conditions so awful and remote, that it became known as the Devil’s Backbone. William actually traveled this exact route on horseback as he traveled from Ohio to the Centreville area. It took him twenty-seven days to travel it.”2
I had no idea about any of this, and it was still fresh on Marvin’s mind—I could tell he was excited about it. It was like listening to someone talk about a treasure hunt, and all the details made the hunt that much more exciting and interesting.
“So why did William travel down to the Natchez Trace area if it was so brutal and gross?” I asked.
“Because he’d committed his life to God and wanted to be an itinerant preacher for the Methodist Church.”
“So he was a preacher.”
“He was, BeBe. He traveled hundreds and hundreds of miles on horseback—he became a circuit preacher. He was ordained by Francis Asbury, the great Englishman circuit rider who played a role in the spread of Christianity on the American frontier. William, like Asbury—and apparently this was something a lot of Methodist preachers did, going all the way back to Charles Wesley—kept a journal of his travels. I was able to look through some of his journals and letters at Millsaps College. It’s fascinating stuff.
“Early in his life he was ‘friendly’ with the ladies; I read how he enjoyed spirited women and was enamored with Rhoda Gibson for some time.”
“Yep, that sounds like a preacher,” I said, laughing.
“He started riding his circuit, the Claiborne Circuit, on New Year’s Day 1811. I can’t imagine riding a horse for ministry, let alone riding it in those conditions. He had to contend with rivers, creeks, swamps, and navigate the ferries that operated on the Big and Little Bayou Pierre Rivers, as well as the Big Black River.”3
It’s hard to imagine a time like that. Marvin told me that the place William Winans lived was so remote that differences in skin color or class didn’t matter because people were all just trying to survive. The people of the Natchez country were united simply because of the harsh conditions. Calamity unites.4
“Eventually,” Marvin continued, “William married Martha duBose, and they started a life together on a small plot of land that had eight fields, which was given to them by Martha’s mother. William built a small one-room house with a loft. Sadly, he built it with the help of two slaves who apparently came with the property. He and Martha called the house ‘Rural Retreat.’5 William’s health forced him out of the circuit-riding ministry, so his mother-in-law suggested he serve as overseer of her property. The documents say that Martha’s mom was especially harsh with her discipline of the slaves, but that William was compassionate and did not act like an overlord.6
“It’s interesting, because though William worked for his mother-in-law and managed the property along with her seven slaves, he was not ‘for slavery’ as an institution as we might think of it. He didn’t think, however, that the abolitionists provided a reasonable solution to slavery. Just freeing the slaves, he thought, would bring even more divisiveness and chaos to society. He wanted to work to return the slaves to their homeland. To him, that seemed the best solution. And yet, he ‘owned’ slaves himself. This was apparently a popular view among many in the South.7
“As I was going through the list of items in the William Winans archive, I found a ‘bill of sale for slave’ from 1859, and a ‘receipt of bequest of female negro minor’ from 1833.8 A receipt of bequest means that the personal property was given through a will. So this earlier one might have been a slave left to him by Martha’s mother—I don’t really know. The point is, I guess, that William owned slaves but was not too keen on enforcing the institution of slavery itself as a cultural norm.”
“So what does all this mean?”
“It means that our name is a slave name. And that it’s possible our four-time great-grandfather was a white man.”