Mother of Joshua, Daniel, Robin, Judy, Venus, Kitty, and Dilcey. Born about 1775. Died date unknown.
I have a special affinity for any of these folks who lived or worked at Lower Bremo, where I have lived and worked. While I love the people who worked at Upper Bremo and Recess, I adore the people who called this place home as I do. That seems silly, probably, to anyone not from here since the space we’re discussing is small in the larger world’s eyes—just 3,500 acres. But on this piece of land—Lower Bremo—I can wander freely. I walk and drive these roads—the phrase “like I own the place” comes to mind—but of course, I don’t own the place, and neither does my dad. But Lower Bremo is the place I call home. I don’t have the same freedom of movement at Upper Bremo or Recess. A phone call will grant me access, and I can walk there anytime I’d like, but still. It’s not the same. Lower Bremo is special to me in that way.
I have cried over heartbreak as I walk the trails by the old slave quarter. I have put my face close to the boxwood on the big house’s front lawn so that I can get washed over with the smell of home. I have put my hand on my mother’s just-cooling face moments after she died. This land—it’s filled with my stories.
So when I read that Anaky lived at Lower Bremo, I feel a special pang of wanting to know her. The feeling is akin to homesickness or something like that feeling I get when I meet someone who went to my same college at another time; we share a place, a sense of geography, a knowing that is unusual and rare. The sharing is precious because it ties us together, people of one space.
The first mention I can find of a woman named Anaky (pronounced Annie-ka with a stress on the first A) is in the will of Hartwell Cocke, The General’s grandfather. A woman named Anaky is left to his son Benjamin, The General’s uncle, but Hartwell’s wife is given “use” of her until Benjamin comes of age: “I give to my wife the use of Isaac, Annacay, and her child Hannah.” The year of this will is 1772, so it’s possible that this is the woman I know as Anaky—the years aren’t that far off—but if it is, her daughter Hannah does not come to Bremo. This Hannah doesn’t appear in the records here at all.
The first sure mention I have of the woman I know named Anaky is on an inventory for The General’s Bear Garden Plantation. The General inherited this land from another relative, perhaps his uncle Benjamin, and thus, perhaps this is how Anaky came to be in the central part of Virginia instead of down in the Tidewater, where she originally worked and was owned by the Cocke family. By 1801, The General has sold Bear Garden, and Anaky is now living at the plantation labeled “No 2” on an 1801 inventory. This is the plantation that came to be known as Lower Bremo.
It is likely that Anaky was a field hand since nothing on any of the inventories or other documents indicates she had a special trade and since most of her children are listed as field hands. Aside from knowing that she was a “non-professor” and that she, as the inventory from between 1834 and 1840 oddly says, “lives in doors,” I know very little else about her. She had eight children, and her son Daniel married Primus’s daughter Dinah. Her daughter Judy had five children, including Armistead, the man Lucy Skipwith married and then left with after emancipation.
Anaky lived a long life, appearing on records as late as 1842. But after that point, I haven’t found any mention of her. She doesn’t show up on inventories or in any of the letters I’ve read. We don’t have a marked stone that shows her grave or gives us an approximation of the year she died. She simply ceases to appear in the documents that tell us about this time.
It’s likely she died of old age. The fact that in 1842 she’s listed as between 55 and 100 shows that she was, by then, already too old to work, as 55 was quite old for someone doing hard field labor all of her adult life.
When I think about Anaky, I ponder her name because that is the one solid thing I know about her that is truly hers, not a fact about her children. I wonder where it comes from. Some of the sources I’ve found suggest it’s African, Igbo particularly. This possibility is intriguing because it is one of the very few African connections I’ve found related to the people here at Bremo. Because the Cocke family had been in the United States (or the colonies as the case would have been) since the early 1600s, they had likely owned slaves for much of that time.
The Cocke family had come from money, so they were not white people who ventured here as indentured servants or even those escaping persecution, at least not in the way we think of Pilgrims. So they would have come with servants, perhaps indentured ones, but almost certainly by the mid-1600s, they would have had slaves. So it is possible—given the way that slaves were passed down as property in wills like the one Hartwell Cocke wrote—that they did not buy many people who would have considered themselves African. Instead, the growth in the number of people they owned would have come through the natural process of reproduction.
So when I find that Anaky’s name may be of Igbo origin, it gives me pause. It’s rare to find something related to the people who were enslaved at Bremo and see that it might have a connection “back to Africa.” Despite widespread belief, the connections to Africa for many people enslaved in the States were slim, much like many of us who are descended from immigrants (my great-grandparents came from Italy) feel very little connection with “the motherland.” Not every slave in America was Kunta Kinte, as powerful at Haley’s story is. Many were as American as we are today, generations and generations removed from their African ancestry.
Still, that Anaky might have had an African name—that’s intriguing because it suggests a closer tie to the African continent than might be expected. It takes her story back further, maybe to the land from which her ancestors came. The source. The farthest point back that most African Americans can take their lineage. It’s a clue. A cipher. An arrow.
I wonder if she knew the origins of her name. I wonder if she cared.