Chapter Nine


The Bigamist, 1889–1915

After my great-grandfather left Chicago, he seems to have moved his family back to Farmington, Missouri. There, Susie gave birth to their third child, Aravelle, in 1889. In January 1891 Mary Corinne, their fourth child and only girl, was born.

I do not know exactly how my great-grandfather supported his family during this period. Farmington was a small rural community, and there would have been little work in town for an intellectual maverick such as John Bird Wilkins. Perhaps he taught school, though no record survives of his having done so. My great-grandfather had been a farm hand in Mississippi. He seems to have returned to agricultural work in order to support his family while in Farmington. At that time many African American men in the area supported themselves this way.1

Although he may have been working as a farm laborer, he continued to find outlets for his restless intellect, however. On April 16, 1892, he submitted drawings to the U.S. Patent Office for a new invention. He called it simply his “Agricultural Machine” and claimed his invention would combine the functions of several different machines: “My invention relates to agricultural machines: and the objects in view are to provide a machine adapted to serve as a cotton planter, scraper, and cultivator or chopper, and as a road-cart, and also adapted as a cotton and cornstalk cutter.”²

The drawings of the device are elaborate and beautiful. By making a few easy changes in the gears, my great-grandfather's machine could sow the seed, till the crop, harvest it, and then serve as a cart to carry it to market. But despite its ingenuity, the Agricultural Machine seems not to have been widely used. I could not find any evidence that its patent was ever renewed, and it is not mentioned in contemporary news accounts.

My great-grandfather had tasted the action, intellectual stimulation, and ferment of life in Chicago. By 1893 he must have found Farmington stultifying. Disgraced as a minister, John Bird had been forced to return to farm life in the provincial town he had left six years earlier with such high hopes. On top of everything else, he now had a wife and four small mouths to feed.

It is easy to imagine relations between John Bird and Susie growing strained during this period. I doubt if my great-grandmother in her worst nightmares could have envisioned her current circumstances. Nor can I imagine that her parents, founding members of the St. Paul Methodist Church, would have approved of John Bird's maverick beliefs or flamboyant behavior.

There was also the matter of Lena Murphy.

The historical record of Lena's relationship with my great-grandfather is murky, to say the least. There are no marriage licenses, birth certificates, or census records available with which to track the couple's movements before 1893. This research obstacle is further compounded by the fact that, when giving their names to census takers in Missouri and Arkansas, they both appear to have deliberately given false information. It took my researcher, Mariah Cooper, months to uncover John Bird and Lena Murphy's tracks and more months of reading between the lines in old newspaper articles and the birth records of their children to confirm her findings.

My best guess is that John Bird Wilkins and Lena Murphy first became involved somewhere between 1892 and the beginning of 1893. He would have been roughly forty years of age, while Lena would have just turned seventeen. Along with Susie Douthit's family, Lena Murphy's parents attended St. Paul Methodist Church.3 It is likely that the two women knew each other well. Although Lena was five or six years younger than Susie, the two women may even have been friends, which would have made John Bird's infidelity all the more difficult for my great-grandmother to bear.

In early 1893 John Bird moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, and set up a home at 18th and Ringo Streets.⁴ Lena most likely moved with him, and she gave birth to John Bird's son there on December 15, 1893. In a tribute to his ambitions as a public speaker and theologian, John Bird named his child Edward Everett Horton Wilkins after the famous Unitarian clergyman.

Whether Susie knew that John Bird and Lena Murphy were living together at this point is uncertain. Perhaps my great-grandmother assumed that her husband was simply away from Farmington on business. After all, John Bird had family in Oxford, and the business partner for his Agricultural Machine lived in Vicksburg. Even if she suspected that he was cheating on her, I doubt my great-grandmother knew that John Bird had already begun a new family with Lena Murphy in Little Rock.

Susie must have hoped against hope that she could win her husband back. In the early summer of 1893, she and John Bird conceived another child. When my grandfather, Jesse Ernest Wilkins, was born on February 1, 1894, perhaps Susie believed that the baby's presence would reinvigorate her marriage.

But Susie's relationship with John Bird was finished. By 1894 my great-grandfather was living in Little Rock, most likely with Lena and their son, Edward. His new family seems to have moved frequently. There is no record that they remained in any one place for more than a year between 1892 and 1900, but the birthplaces of their children give us some idea of where the couple lived during this time. The oldest, Edward Everett Wilkins, was born in Little Rock in 1893. The next, Howard, was born in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1894, the same year my grandfather was born in Farmington. Sometime around 1896 the couple moved to Drew County, Arkansas, where two more children, Henry and John Brooksy, were born.5

The federal census shows my great-grandfather and his new family living in Drew County in 1900. John Bird is now calling himself Howard R. Wilkins. He and Lena Murphy (who tells the census man her name is Susie) are working as laborers on a rented farm in Bartholomew Township.⁶ Exactly why John Bird chose to call himself Howard is unclear. But the fact that Lena also doesn't use her correct name leads me to speculate that the couple did not want too much official attention focused on them. Perhaps John Bird thought that, if his new location became public, the Baptists who set fire to his Chicago home or some of Susie Douthit's angry relatives might come looking for him. It is easy to imagine that my great-grandfather could have embroiled himself in an entirely new controversy that might have given him and Lena additional reasons to disguise their identities—reasons that, for now at least, have been lost to history.

Back in Farmington, Susie struggled to make a life for herself. I'm guessing the black folks in town knew all about John Bird's affair and his illicit family. The town was just too small for a scandal like that to remain hidden. Even if no one said anything out loud, there would have been skeptical glances when Susie went shopping on Main Street and plenty of juicy gossip to pass around with the fried chicken after church on Sundays. But Susan Olivia Douthit was a survivor. Although John Bird's desertion must have been both financially devastating and emotionally painful, my great-grandmother had five small children to feed. By the summer of 1900, Susie had found a job working as a domestic servant.⁷

I was brought up in the age of the dishwasher, the microwave, and the electric can opener, so it is hard for me to picture what my great-grandmother's daily life might have been like. In his book Seven Days a Week, David Katzman offers a detailed description of the typical week's work for a domestic servant during this period: “Daily chores for the maid of all work included lighting fires (in stoves, for hot water, in winter fireplaces or furnaces), preparing and serving meals and cleaning up, making beds, doing light dusting, sweeping or scrubbing front steps and porch, answering the doorbell, and running errands.” In addition to this daily work, Susie would have been expected to wash, iron, and mend clothes; wash and polish the dishes and the silver; wash the windows; clean out the cellar; and on Saturdays, bake bread. “Repetition of tasks made the work monotonous, but the complaint heard most seemed to be that of physical fatigue and tiredness,” Katzman states. “Over and over again women mentioned how they often collapsed in bed at the end of the day, too tired to read or even take a bath.”8

The thought of doing that much manual labor every day while taking care of five small children boggles my mind. When I first moved to Boston twenty-five years ago, I was a single mother for three years. And believe me, there were plenty of nights when, between my full-time job teaching music at a local high school, my part-time job playing gigs with an aspiring blues band, and the all-the-time job of raising my five-year-old daughter, I thought I would lose my mind.

My great-grandmother must have been one tough cookie. I know that if I had been Susie, there would have been no crying, whining, or complaining allowed when I came home from work in the evening. Although my grandfather was the pampered baby of the family, he would have been expected to shoulder his own burdens at an early age. Sitting around feeling sorry for oneself was a luxury the child of a black domestic at the turn of the century was not likely to enjoy.

John Bird, meanwhile, had moved his other family out of Little Rock again, this time to the tiny lumber town of Crossett in Ashley County, Arkansas. By 1910 my great-grandfather, now calling himself Hayward B. Wilkins, was working at the local sawmill. In this census he lives in a rented house with Lena (who is still calling herself Susie). The couple now has nine children, ranging in age from six months to sixteen years.⁹

During this period of his life, John Bird seems to have been occupied completely with supporting his second family. Although Crossett's black community boasted a Baptist church and its own newspaper, I was not able to find any evidence of his preaching, inventing, or writing anything between 1893 and 1915. Nor has history left us any clue as to how he occupied his restless intellect during these years. Perhaps he kept in touch with some of his Masonic brothers from the old days. Surely he kept up with the news and followed world events in whatever local papers were available. It must have hurt a man so brilliant and so enamored of the spotlight to have to live the life of an anonymous laborer, but this is exactly what my great-grandfather seems to have done: work hard, support his new family, and lay low.

Back in Farmington, Susie soon adjusted to the new rhythms of her single life. By the summer of 1910 she owned her own home on Cayce Street in the center of town. Her three eldest children, Charles, Byrd, and Aravelle, had all moved out and were making successful lives for themselves. The fourth child, Corinne, still lived at home but had a job working as a cook for a white family. Even my grandfather, J. Ernest, had found work as a laborer even though he was only sixteen.10

At this time, Susie was making her living as a laundress. Although it was physically demanding, many black women actually preferred laundry work to domestic service. A washerwoman could negotiate her own price, set her own hours, and work in her own home at her own pace.¹¹ At that time a woman in Farmington could earn between fifty and seventy-five cents for every load of laundry she did.¹² When I read this, I didn't think fifty cents was any money at all, but then I realized that in 1910 it was possible to buy an entire meal at a restaurant for a nickel.

In exchange for the cash she earned, a laundry woman put in hours of backbreaking labor. The gallons of water used for washing, boiling, and rinsing clothes had to be carried bucket by bucket from the pump and poured into large wooden washtubs. In addition to washing the clothes, washerwomen often made their own soap from lye and their own starch from wheat bran. Some washerwomen even made their own washtubs by cutting beer barrels in half. After getting the water, tubs, and soap ready, Susie would have had to sort the clothes into four separate categories—whites, coarse whites, flannels, and colored clothes. Each fabric type required its own water temperature and had to be scrubbed and soaked in its own separate tub.¹³

Then she would put the wet clothes through the ringer and hang them out to dry. If the weather was nice, she would have hung them in the yard outside. In bad weather, there would have been wet clothes strung across the main room of the house, occupying every spare bit of space.¹⁴

After the clothes dried, they had to be ironed. The irons used at that time were heavy as they were made of iron. Each iron was heated on the stove, and then, after she had sprayed the clothes with starch, she would have lifted this weight countless times in order to press the clothes into shape. It's little wonder that laundry work was considered one of the most physically demanding domestic chores of the era.¹⁵

By 1910, it seems, my great-grandmother had given up on John Bird and was moving on with her life. I noted with a wry smile that in the 1910 census, she gives her marital status as “widow.”¹⁶ Maybe she knew her husband was still living. But clearly, she no longer cared. He was dead as far as she was concerned.

In fact, John Bird Wilkins would continue living for another twenty-eight years, and somewhere around 1915, he and his other family moved to St. Louis. According to a brief clipping Mariah Cooper found, in 1915 John Bird (now calling himself Dr. H. B. Wilkins) was invited to participate in a “Committee of 100” of St. Louis's community leaders, to “help with the war effort.” In this brief article, my great-grandfather is referred to as the “editor” of the St. Louis Clarion.17 But as was often the case with John Bird Wilkins, I was having a hard time finding evidence of his participation on the Clarion.

No copies of the paper survived, at least not in the libraries around Boston. When I mentioned my frustrations to Mariah Cooper, she suggested that I plan a research trip to the St. Louis area. Perhaps I would find copies of the Clarion there. Copies of the St. Louis Argus, the region's major African American newspaper, were on microfilm at the St. Louis County Library; perhaps there might be articles in the Argus about either John Bird Wilkins or J. Ernest? While I was in the area, Mariah suggested, I could drive out to Farmington and see whether there were any records about my grandfather or his mother, Susie Douthit, in the local archives. Perhaps I might even be able to track a bit more of John Bird's early career as a teacher there?

But I was getting tired. After nearly two years of research, I had discovered information that had been lost to my family for two generations. With Mariah's expert help I had tracked John Bird Wilkins and Lena Murphy throughout Missouri, Arkansas, and Mississippi. I had uncovered a variety of aliases and had managed to account for much of their lives between 1894 and 1910, but each answer I found seemed just to generate even more questions.

What eventually happened to my great-grandfather? Did he know that his son J. Ernest went on to become a successful attorney? Did J. Ernest ever reconnect with his father? Had his father's presence (or absence) had any effect on my grandfather's character? And finally, what—if anything—did any of this information have to do with J. Ernest's abrupt departure from the Department of Labor in 1958?

Truth was, I was beginning to feel a bit like Don Quixote. I felt as if I was tilting at windmills. Maybe it was time to give my research obsession a rest? I returned to the rest of my life. I taught my students and played the piano, but each time I meditated at my ancestors' altar, something nagged at me. Had I really done everything I could to honor Aunt Marjory's memory and to preserve the history of the Wilkins family?

A few weeks later I got a letter from Mariah Cooper. She had not been able to find anything new about my great-grandfather's life between 1910 and 1915, but she had uncovered a woman named Ethel Porter, a distant relative on Aunt Marjory's side of the family. Mrs. Porter was the granddaughter of a slave named Jeremiah McFarland, and she was about to celebrate her one-hundredth birthday.

I was flabbergasted. All the Wilkins children had grown up hearing Aunt Marjory tell us that our family's first ancestor was an African named Jeremiah. According to Aunt Marj, he had been brought to this country from Madagascar and sold into slavery on the docks of New York in the late 1700s. At this point in the recitation, Aunt Marj would shake her head dramatically and announce: “Jeremiah was a slave. He was from Africa!” I had long ago given up hope of finding any tangible connection to this mythological figure. Since Aunt Marj's story about J. Ernest's father had turned out to be a complete fiction, I doubted her Jeremiah story would be any more reliable.

At the same time, however, I was curious. Who knows? Perhaps Aunt Marjory really did have a slave ancestor named Jeremiah. I got Ethel Porter's address and sent a birthday card telling her who I was and how I thought we might be related. As an afterthought I also sent Mrs. Porter a dozen roses. It's not often a person lives to celebrate their one-hundredth birthday, and the least I could do was to show my respect to a family elder.

A few weeks later, an envelope arrived in the mail, containing a handwritten note and a few typewritten sheets of paper: “Ms. Wilkins—Hope this finds you well. Here is a rough draft of my family History. My grandmother, Ethel Porter, has been wanting me to organize this and send it to you. I also have many old family pictures to go along with this story. All the best, ‘Chris.’”18

With trembling hands I unfolded the typewritten sheets and began to read:

Porter Family History—Jeffersonville, IN
Our family history begins with an Irish immigrant who met a Native American woman; they bore a daughter named Zoe who would become a slave. In those days, kids could be hired to work if a family owed money. She was originally supposed to work and in return for labor pay off family debts. These debts would never be paid and Zoe was sold into slavery. Zoe had two daughters, Caroline and Sarah. . . . Sarah married a field slave named Jeremiah MacFarland.¹⁹

There he was. The mythical Jeremiah! Maybe I hadn't been able to trace him all the way back to Africa, but at least he existed. My excitement mounted as I read on: “It was said that Jerry heard a voice one day while working in the fields. This voice instructed Jerry to go and read the Bible, as an illiterate slave this was a miracle. Jerry read and learned the Bible while working in the fields, he became so well versed in this that he eventually became a preacher.”

In addition, Jeremiah was also a skilled carpenter. His master was so pleased with his craftsmanship that Jerry was allowed to keep some of the profits from the furniture he made. But when Mr. McFarland went bankrupt, Jerry, Sarah, and their children were all put up for sale.

Chris's narrative continued: “It is said that at the sale Sarah was holding her baby tightly in hopes that they would not be separated. Unfortunately her attempt failed and Sarah was sold apart from her child. Due to her Sadness, Sarah raised such a calamity that the people who purchased Sarah felt sorry for her and enabled the baby and mother to remain together.”

Through all of this, Jeremiah continued to make and sell furniture, saving his profits until he was able to purchase his freedom, and a few years later, that of his daughter Carrie. Promising to return for his wife, Jeremiah took his daughter to live across the Ohio River in the free state of Indiana. According to Chris's narrative, Jeremiah ultimately returned to Louisville and smuggled Sarah to freedom with the help of the Underground Railroad.

I was getting goose bumps. Before opening the mail, I had put a teapot on to boil. Now the kettle had been shrieking for the last several minutes, but I couldn't stop reading long enough to turn off the flame. “Carrie eventually had a daughter and named her Juanita, they resided in Evansville, Indiana. Juanita married Reverend John Robinson from Jeffersonville, Indiana. . . . Juanita and Reverend Robinson had two daughters, Lucile and Marjorie. Lucile later married a man named J. Ernest Wilkins, an attorney in Chicago.”

At last my research was turning full circle. I had found a connection to Jeremiah, and one between Jeremiah and my grandfather. In a daze I turned off the flame under my teapot, fixed myself a cup of tea, and read Chris's letter all over again, savoring each sentence. In his letter Chris also mentioned that he had pictures to go along with his narrative. He didn't say who was in the pictures, but it occurred to me that Chris might even have a picture of Jeremiah. “Amazing! Absolutely amazing!” I mumbled to myself as I read.

It was only on my third time through the letter that I really looked at the return address. Chris Wright lived right outside of St. Louis. I had to laugh. Just as I am about to abandon my search, new evidence appears out of the blue, which takes me to where I was thinking of going anyway. Thank you, Aunt Marjory, I thought to myself. So I guess I go to St. Louis after all.

“We are fa-mi-ly,” I sang, gaily pounding the kitchen table.

As soon as school was out for the summer, my husband and I contacted Chris and made arrangements to spend a week in St. Louis.