As I sit down to write these pages, I am reminded of a song by Bernard Ingner called “Everything Must Change”. In the three years that have passed since I traveled to Missouri, circumstances have changed for some of the people and places I wrote about. After a lifetime of community activism, teaching, and nurturing her large extended family, Mrs. Ethel Porter passed away at age 101 last summer. Her grandson Chris, who generously shared his treasure trove of photos with me in the lobby of a motel near the St. Louis Airport, has left St. Louis to work at the U.S. Navy Hospital in Pensacola, Florida.
The Farmington Public Library has begun a major renovation of its Genealogy Room, and local interest in the town's African American history appears to be on the rise. Vonne Phillips Karraker, a black attorney and community activist, has started an organization dedicated to locating, identifying, and providing headstones for all the graves in the cemetery where my great-grandmother Susie Douthit is buried. I am especially pleased to learn that the Farmington Cemetery Preservation Association plans to install historic markers around the cemetery and at what Ms. Karraker calls “little known places of historical significance” around the area.
Fund-raising to pay for these projects has already begun. Ms. Karraker tells me that “The Mayor has been talking about the Cemetery in his monthly radio address, and two of our board members have shows on the local radio station, so we're getting good publicity, which should continue to generate interest well past February if we keep at it.”1 After reading Karraker's email I get the strong sense that Farmington's “can-do” spirit is as alive and well today as it was when my great-grandfather organized the Colored Working Men's Association back in 1885.
Mr. Bill Matthews, who served as the town's first black councilman in the 1980s, is also involved in the preservation effort. Mr. Matthews's family has lived in the area for generations and has maintained Colored Masonic Cemetery for more than thirty years. To honor the contributions of African Americans to Farmington's history, Mr. Matthews plans to build a memorial garden on the site where Farmington's last black church stood before it was demolished a few years ago.
Bill Matthews knew community stalwart Ethelean Cayce well, and, like my grandfather, grew up a few short blocks from both St. Paul's Church and Colored Hall. Mr. Matthews attended the one-room Douglas school on the outskirts of town where, like J. Ernest Wilkins and every other child of color in Farmington for two generations, he was taught by the legendary Miss Daisey Baker. And like my grandfather thirty-five years before, Mr. Matthews was legally barred from attending Farmington High School because of his race. Although he never met my grandfather, Mr. Matthews actually knew J. Ernest's older brother Byrd (John Bird's second son with Susie Douthit). As I listened to Mr. Matthews's leisurely Missouri twang over the phone, I could feel a tangible connection to the Farmington my grandfather would have known as a boy. When Mr. Matthews told me he used to earn his boyhood spending money by mowing my great-uncle Byrd's lawn with an old-fashioned push mower, I got goose bumps.
Doing the research for this book has put me in touch with a number of people who are working to uncover Farmington's African American history. LaDonna Garner, a local African American genealogist, has offered to help the association create a database to list all the people buried at Colored Masonic Cemetery. Jane Turner, another African American resident, has recently published a book about her family's experiences in nearby Bonne Terre at the turn of the last century.
In my own small way, I have also helped to awaken local interest in Farmington's African American past. When Vonne Phillips Karraker learned that the Daily Journal Online was planning to run a series of articles on the town's African American community, she put me in touch with Paula Barr, the Journal's investigative reporter. As a result, I am pleased to report that in addition to the usual stories about Ethelean Cayce and Daisey Baker, those interested in Farmington's black history can read in their local paper about J. Ernest Wilkins and his journey from a one-room segregated schoolhouse to the highest government position then available to an African American.2
I have a pretty good idea what my Aunt Marjory would say about all these new developments. If I close my eyes and get quiet for a minute, I can picture her nodding her head in satisfaction, a mischievous grin lifting the corners of her mouth. She whispers: “Now you see why I used to talk so much about Jeremiah and the rest of the ancestors. I may have stretched the truth a bit here and there, but as you know, storytelling is an art, not a science. The important thing is that I sparked your imagination, got you interested, and kept our story alive!”
The arc of history is long, and some dramas take lifetimes to unfold. To paraphrase James Weldon Johnson's hymn Lift Every Voice and Sing (known to an older generation as the “Negro National Anthem”), black people in America have traveled a road bathed in blood and watered with tears. Those of us who survive must not forget the persevering spirit exemplified by our ancestors during their long march into the twenty-first century. If we fail to share our stories with the next generation, this spirit will be lost. Which is why I've begun teaching my daughter this spiritual I learned from my mother when I was a little girl:
Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around
Turn me around
Turn me around
Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around
I'm gonna hold out—
Until my change comes