Chapter Two
The Research Begins, 1995
I grieved Aunt Marjory's death for months. She had been my living history book; she made me feel I was attached to something larger than my immediate family. Other family members were hurting, too. My brothers and I talked fondly of the big Thanksgiving dinners she used to give. From time to time at family gatherings, we would all burst out singing “We Are Family” in Aunt Marj's memory.
As the weeks following her passing stretched into months, everyone returned to their own busy lives. My brother David, a professor at Harvard Law School, was soliciting funding for a new center he'd created for the study of global legal issues. My brother Timothy was a partner at a high-powered law firm in New York City. My brother Stephen ran the elementary school sports department for the Chicago public school system.
As a music teacher and semi-employed jazz musician, I was the one with the most time to brood. When Thanksgiving came and went without the usual visit to Aunt Marjory's Brooklyn brownstone, I sat down and made a list of all the questions I should have asked her while she was alive:
Who were my father's people and how did I come by the name Wilkins?
Were they slaves on a plantation? If so, where? What did they do?
What part of Africa had they come from?
Were there white people in my family tree, and if so, how did they get there?
Were there Native Americans? If so, what tribe?
The list went on in this vein for several pages. When I was finished writing, I put my head down and cried. With Aunt Marjory's passing, the last and maybe the only person who knew the intimate details of our family's history was gone.
I spent hours at the piano, trying to work through my grief. I would play Aunt Marj's favorite spirituals over and over again while I pondered. Humming along as I played “Balm in Gilead” or “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” I would wonder, what was the world like when she first heard these songs? Who sang them to her as a child? Aunt Marjory had loved to talk about her father, Rev. John Wallace Robinson, who had pastored St. Mark's Church in Harlem during the 1920s. She had been so connected, so rooted in her world, her heritage, and her religion.
Sadly, I contemplated my own spotty relationship to the Christian church. The last time I could remember even going to church other than to play a gig had been for an Easter service more than five years before. Lately I had found myself yearning for a deeper connection, both to my Christian heritage and to my African roots.
More months passed. I joined a group of Cubans who practiced Santeria, an amalgam of Catholicism and African animism. We dressed in white, danced to pounding conga drums, and practiced animal sacrifice. We spent hours in the woods connecting with nature spirits, bathed naked in the river at midnight, and collected dirt from graves in the local cemetery. My family and friends were appalled at my new activities. My husband, John, seriously considered a divorce.
It was a time of intense spiritual and personal questioning for me. Surely there was a larger purpose for my presence on this earth than simply to pursue my own selfish desires? Who was I really? What was my purpose in being here?
Despite the adamant objections of my family and friends, I felt strongly drawn to African spirituality. In Santeria, as in many traditional African religions, God is not in intimate contact with His creation. Santeria's practitioners believe that there are seven major energy forces, called Orisas, that govern the material world as God's intermediaries. Every Santeria initiate is believed to have a special relationship with one of the Orisas. This Orisa is that person's Guardian Angel, guiding them and protecting them through life. When I announced my intention to learn more about my Guardian Angel, a wizened Cuban divination specialist was brought up from New York to do a “reading” for me.
After a brand new one-hundred-dollar bill ritually wrapped in aluminum foil had changed hands, a white dove was sacrificed, and I was washed in a special bath made from secret herbs. Then, dressed in a brand new white gown, I was led into my sponsor's kitchen. As I squatted on the spotless linoleum floor, the tiny old man shifted a pair of worn kola nuts from one hand to another to read the signs. Looking on, I was transported across oceans and centuries.
When it was all over, I learned that Olokùn, the energy of the depths of the sea, was my guiding Orisa. Since Santeria practitioners believe that the energy of Olokùn is too strong to be taken in directly, I would be initiated into the mysteries of Yemayà, the goddess of oceans and motherhood. Before receiving the spiritual energy of Yemaya, my Santeria elders advised me to establish a connection with my ancestors.
On the night before my initiation, the members of my Santeria group held a séance to let my ancestors know about the big step I was about to take. The ceremony took place late at night in the home of the Santeria priest who would initiate me the next day. After having received a ritual bath made from herbs and flowers, I was doused in Florida Water, a pungent cologne believed to have spiritual power. I was dressed in a long white robe and placed in the center of a circle. As I fell into a light trance, the other members of my group gathered around me, dancing and singing to the ancestors. The small inner city apartment was alive with energy and thick with the smell of Florida Water, incense, and sweat.
It was about three o'clock in the morning, and we had been going at it for several hours. Suddenly the music and movement around me stopped. My mouth opened, and I began to sing.
The voice coming out of me was completely outside my control, utterly unlike any singing I had ever done before. Someone else was singing through me, and it was beautiful! I don't know how long I sang, or what song it was, but after that moment I was never the same.
That Singer was the voice of my ancestors, and I knew then that I was deeply and inextricably connected to them. I believed that somewhere out in the ether, my ancestors were watching and helping me make this connection. And I realized that I had to find out more about who my people were and to do my part in telling their story.
Later that summer John, who had been persuaded not to divorce me after all, helped me to contact a Yoruba priest in Brooklyn who specialized in connecting with the ancestors. Baba Abu Bakr was handsome—over six feet tall with smooth caramel skin and dreadlocks that hung down to his waist. Abu was also a musician and an artist who painted brilliantly colored Afro-spiritual canvasses of his guardian angels and spirit helpers.
In his youth Abu had lived “African style” with a harem of five wives. Although this arrangement had self-destructed several years earlier, he remained close to his nine grown children. One of his daughters danced with the famous Alvin Ailey Company in New York.
Abu's Fulton Street neighborhood was a tough area, full of hustlers, pimps, gang-bangers, and dope dealers. But the toughest among them respected Abu, and absolutely nobody messed with him. Every day Abu would patrol the streets with Apollo, his attack dog. Apollo stood about four feet high, looked like a small lion, and weighed as much as a good-sized man. Once he got to know you Apollo was fine, but meeting him for the first time could be pretty scary. Whenever he encountered a stranger, Apollo would study them fixedly while emitting a soft, low growl. You could tell that with just one word from his master, the dog would be thrilled to rip both your arms off and eat them for lunch. As I said, nobody messed with Abu.
Despite his fierce demeanor, Baba Abu had a good heart. He could see that my interest in learning more about the ancestors was sincere. After some exploratory meetings, he agreed to teach both John and me.
I began to understand the Yoruba religious system. The Yoruba believe in a form of reincarnation. When a person dies, he reincarnates within his family group. This is why, Abu told me, so many people from the same family will share common characteristics from generation to generation. Our ancestors were in a position to advise and guide us from their broader perspective in the spirit world. It was, therefore, advisable for the living to honor this connection on a regular basis by praying to the ancestors and making small offerings.
The most important thing to understand, Baba Abu taught me, was the universality of the ancestor religion. A relationship with the ancestors was everyone's birthright, regardless of race, creed, or religious belief. All human beings had ancestors, and all human beings could benefit by connecting to them more consciously.
There was no need for me to give up being a Christian. Everyone had ancestors, no matter what their religion. My ancestors—generations of sober, churchgoing Methodists—would never want me to abandon my religion. Honoring my ancestors, or “eguns” as the Yoruba call them, was simply a part of connecting another level of my humanity.
By this time Aunt Marjory's ashes had been sitting in a box on top of my piano for eighteen months while my family tried to decide how to dispose of them. Some family members felt she should be buried with my father and grandparents in the Wilkins family plot in Chicago. Others favored keeping her in a nice urn on someone's mantelpiece. Aunt Marj herself had often expressed the desire that her ashes be scattered around her neighborhood in Brooklyn. In our highly proper and deeply conservative family, the idea of such a thing was quite shocking—which was, I am sure, why Aunt Marj had enjoyed suggesting it.
More time passed. Aunt Marjory's box continued to sit on the piano. From her perch up in Heaven, I hoped she was enjoying my music, but I was beginning to feel she should have a more official resting place.
One day John had a brilliant idea. “Why don't we just take Aunt Marj back to Brooklyn and sprinkle her as she requested? Nobody else seems to have a better idea. This way you are honoring the woman's last wishes.”
John and I decided to discuss the matter of Aunt Marj's final resting place with Baba Abu the next time we were in New York. As usual, Abu's answer made perfect sense.
“Bring her back to Brooklyn where she lived for the past seventy years. Bury most of her ashes during my annual ancestor celebration in Prospect Park. Then you can sprinkle the rest around her neighborhood as she requested.”
Perfect.
Two months later, with Aunt Marj's ashes in hand, John and I drove down to Brooklyn from our home in Boston. As we inched through the traffic leading to the park's entrance, we passed scores of folks dressed in African garb heading toward the festivities. Inside the park, hundreds more strolled past stalls selling Caribbean food, African shea butter, and beaded jewelry. Street venders squatted on the sidewalk hawking everything from essential oils to bootleg videos.
While a large group of sweating musicians jammed on an eclectic collection of African drums, horns, and guitars, Abu consecrated a small patch of land at the epicenter of the festivities. Hours passed. Then, while the drummers raised up a mighty call to the spirit world and dozens of white-clad priestesses whirled about in ecstatic dance, Abu began digging a hole deep into the earth.
This womblike aperture was a magic nexus point where the usual rules of this world were temporarily suspended. This was a place where, for one night only, a person could speak to their ancestors across time and space. This was the hole that would receive Aunt Marjory's ashes.
One by one, brightly dressed worshippers of all races and religions knelt down in front of the hole and prayed. The sharp smell of frankincense and the deep thudding of the drums transported me to another place and time. Hours ticked on. Finally my turn came. With John at my side, I tipped the box containing Aunt Marj's ashes over and spilled most of her last remains into the hole.
“Well, Aunt Marj, at last you are returning to Brooklyn with appropriate fanfare. There's music, dancing, bright colors, and good food. I know you will be happy here.”
As her ashes tumbled in, a spirit of peace descended over me. Though Aunt Marj had left this earth, whenever anyone sang, danced, or drummed here, she would be celebrated.
At the end of the night, Baba Abu appeared in the center of the ritual circle, wearing a heavy wooden mask and a brightly colored raffia skirt. The sweating drummers pounded out a spine-jarring chorus, and the ancestral spirits carried Abu away. His body jerked and twirled, leaped and strutted. The ancestors stayed with him, dancing, prophesying, and healing until the cops turned us all out of the park in the wee hours of the morning.
The next day John and I took the last of Aunt Marjory's ashes back to the block where she had lived on Union Street. “Goodie two-shoes” girl that I was, I was terrified someone would stop us and demand to know what we were doing. I was pretty sure that dumping a dead person's ashes on the city streets would be frowned upon by the authorities. I didn't want any hassles to mar this last ceremony. But I needn't have worried. Our only audience was a pair of druggies nodding in a doorway at the other end of the block. If we had ripped off our clothes and run naked up and down Union Street, no one would have batted an eye.
John and I drove our rented Ford slowly around the block, throwing Aunt Marj's ashes out the window as we drove. Thanks to a brisk wind that day, more of the ashes ended up inside the car than out. Although we had started this mission with our best funereal demeanor, we were doubled up laughing by our third time around the block. Finally John stopped the car in front of her house and unceremoniously upended the box. After nearly two years, my Aunt Marjory had finally been laid to rest.
As soon as I got back home, I set up a small table in my room and covered it in white cloth. On this small altar, I put water in a crystal bowl, a vase of white flowers, and a picture of Aunt Marj. Night after night I sat cross-legged in meditation, seeking some kind of connection.
“Help me, Aunt Marj. Help me to establish a deeper connection to my ancestors and to my own true nature. Help me to find out who I really am. Help me to connect with my roots.”
After I had been practicing this routine daily for a couple of months, a voice inside my head barked an irritated response. “Stop whining, Carolyn! Just look in the scrapbooks. They will tell you everything.”
Of course! The scrapbooks! The entire history of the family had been sitting right under my nose, moldering away in the basement. I dragged all ten books upstairs and randomly flipped one open.
Each book contained scores of pictures. I recognized some of the people, but many of them were complete strangers to me. Aunt Marj had befriended hundreds of people during her long lifetime, and it seemed she had photographed each and every one of them. Sorority sisters, students, family. There were musicians, people from the neighborhood. Paging through these myriad images from her past, I wondered if I would ever make sense of any of it.
Amid the pictures, taped precariously to a page near the back, were three yellowing newspaper articles from the New York Times. I could not recall ever having seen these pages before, not in all the times I had looked through these albums with Aunt Marj.
The first article read, “March 5, 1954, Labor Post Goes to Negro, First of Race in Sub-Cabinet.” Below the headline, my grandfather's face beamed out at the camera. With my Uncle John at his side and an American flag in the background, my grandfather stood ready to stride proudly forward into a new, integrated United States.
I read on. “President Eisenhower today nominated J. Ernest Wilkins of Chicago, a Negro attorney, to be Assistant Secretary of Labor in charge of international labor affairs.” The article reiterated the fact that my grandfather was the “first member of his race” to hold a subcabinet position. Mr. Wilkins, the article continued, said that “the fact that he was a Negro would be an aid in his work abroad in behalf of the United States Government. He remarked that three-fourths of the world were not white.”
My chest swelled with pride. Of course I had known that my grandfather was an Assistant Secretary of Labor. But I guess I hadn't realized what a truly big deal his appointment had been at the time.
The second Times article, taped to the opposite page in Aunt Marj's scrapbook, was much smaller. Dated October 25, 1960, its headline read, “Negro's Ouster Denied: Mitchell Assails Accusation of Making Way for Lodge's Son.” In it, Secretary of Labor James Mitchell denies an accusation made by the black congressman Charles C. Diggs that my grandfather had been forced out to make way for the son of Henry Cabot Lodge, a prominent New England politician and longtime Eisenhower supporter.
Wow. My grandfather pushed aside to make a job for the son of some well-connected WASP? Barely four years after taking on the job? Why hadn't I ever heard anything about this?
The third article was my grandfather's obituary. I read the article through carefully:
J. ERNEST WILKINS, L.S. AIDE, 64, DIES
Member of Civil Rights Unit Had Been Labor Assistant—Led Methodist Council
WASHINGTON, Jan. 19 (AP)
J. Ernest Wilkins, a member of the Civil Rights Commission, died of a heart attack at his home here today. His age was 64.
Mr. Wilkins was Assistant Secretary of Labor from 1954 to 1958. He resigned last November.
President Eisenhower issued a statement saying of Mr. Wilkins:
“As a former Assistant Secretary of Labor for international labor affairs and as a member of the Civil Rights Commission, Mr. Wilkins was a gifted and dedicated public servant. He contributed much to the public welfare of our country.”
Secretary of Labor James P. Mitchell expressed sorrow over Mr. Wilkins' death and said in a statement:
“He was an admired and able public servant. Mr. Wilkins advanced the welfare not only of our country's minority citizens but that of all our citizens.”
The article went on to describe his work in the Eisenhower administration in greater detail. The more I read, the more curious I became. What had it been like to be the only black man at the highest level of government back in 1954? My grandfather had been a true racial pioneer, blazing a trail for today's prominent blacks in government. Condi Rice, Colin Powell, and even Barack Obama could all look back to my grandfather as the man who had helped open the door.
The Times obit ended with the statement my grandfather had given the press on the day he was appointed to the position of Assistant Secretary of Labor:
“I consider this an honor not to Wilkins individually but to my race in general. I think that this is an answer, more eloquent than anything I could say to those who say that the American Government is not fair to all of its citizens.”
J. Ernest Wilkins had broken many barriers during his lifetime. But at what cost? I couldn't help observing that my grandfather died of a sudden heart attack at the relatively young age of sixty-four. And as I reread the obituary, I was struck by the fact that he died less than three months after his controversial resignation.
Had my grandfather really believed that his historic appointment as the first black Assistant Secretary of Labor Secretary demonstrated our government's fairness to all its citizens? If so, it must have been a brutal shock when he was summarily bounced from the job he had accepted in the glare of nationwide publicity barely four years before. Were the accusations true? Had he been forced to resign? If my grandfather had been a white man, would he have been treated in the same manner?
Was my grandfather shafted by the rich and powerful? If so, how did he react? Did he fight back? What did the rest of the family think about all this? From the moment I read those three articles in Aunt Marj's old scrapbook, my grandfather's life became more than ancient history for me. Discovering the truth about the life and death of J. Ernest Wilkins became an obsession.
