Boggess Nose by Kimberly Melton

I didn't lie.

I didn't tell the truth either.

I was going to a family reunion in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Didn’t seem like the kind of announcement that was worth keeping a secret from friends and coworkers, worth mumbled replies and half-truths. But just the thought of explaining this reunion made words seize up in the back of my throat, like cotton balls were lodged under my tongue soaking up any words, contractions, prepositional phrases struggling to break free. 

My great great grandfather Oscar was born a slave on a plantation in West Virginia. His father, Richard, owned the plantation and Oscar’s mother, Phoebe, was a slave on that plantation.

Richard never married, was never a husband. Phoebe birthed seven of his children, though. I don’t know if he was a father, I don’t know whether he meant to grow his family or his property values.

Can a slave owner love those he enslaves?

I, probably like many African Americans, have wished for lineage that included African kings, queens and royalty. But what is most certainly true of my African heritage is that it is intertwined with slavery, rape and second-class citizenship.

When it came time to die, my great great great grandfather Richard Boggess loosened his grip on human ownership, upended plantation protocol and local law. He changed his will, giving freedom to Phoebe and their seven children. He also made Phoebe the sole owner of his 443-acre plantation in 1842. 

For my Black ancestors, freedom arrived 16 years before the Emancipation Proclamation. But the same court case that affirmed Phoebe and her children’s freedom also forced them from the state with nothing - no land, no wealth — saddled instead with the shackles of poverty.

**

The White Boggesses has been getting together for reunions for 26 years — going through family history poster boards in the hospitality room, visiting new locations of family history and mostly eating, sightseeing and catching up on births, deaths and family folklore.

My history/ancestry, though, had been absent from the bus tours, buffet dinners and quarterly newsletters. Until about 7 years ago.

For the first time, my immediate and extended family was going to join the group — my Dad, Aunt Marsha, family matriarch great Aunt Virginia and car loads of cousins from California — Will and Carol, Cynthia, her sister Margaret and her daughter Amber.

Some people go to reunions with a bit of trepidation about what “Uncle Dave” might say or what “cousin Cleo” might wear. But my worries about this reunion went beyond the usual fear of embarrassment. I was afraid - afraid to spend more than 15 minutes talking to them, about their family, my family, for fear that barely simmering rage and pain would belch its way out of the bubbling pot of my emotion. 

Many of the members of the Boggess Family Association had assumed that Richard (not having ever married) had no children. But that wasn’t true. I was one of his children. I was one of her children. Nearly 176 years later, I would arrive in the same town to see where one part of my American story really began.

The Boggess family sought us out.  I didn’t want to run away. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to be found.

**

March

Joanna Fox. 7th Cousin. Twice Removed. She told me she always knew she had Black relatives. It was just inevitable, she said. That was one thing upon which she and I both agreed. She wasn’t afraid to declare those largely unspoken American histories.

If there were anyone to blame — not that I’m blaming — for the situation I found myself in that spring, it was Joanna. She spent nearly as much money researching family history as she did on clothing for an entire year.

I first met her on the phone — two months before the reunion. Joanna had a smoker’s raspy voice and stubborn southern drawl. I had avoided her call for at least two weeks. I didn’t want to be rude. And something about the idea of talking to her on the phone opened a crack in my emotions that I wasn’t sure I would be able to close again. Above all things, I always strived to be diplomatic and polite. Even if that caused me to grind my teeth at night, almost never relax my jaws and occasionally binge on cheddar cheese popcorn.

Learning I was a journalist, Joanna thought she’d found a kindred spirit in research and unearthing old documents. She had been persistent, leaving me voicemails and sending me emails every few days. Finally, I called her back. 

She picked up on the first ring.

“Hi Joanna… this is Kimberly Melton.”

“Kimberly! It’s so good to hear your voice. I’ve been waiting to talk with you.”

I imagined her speaking into an extra large cellular phone — the kind of flip phone that couldn’t fit your pocket and rested only in its custom case on the belt-loop.

When she wasn't teaching driver's education classes and GED courses to adults in southern Kentucky, Joanna was researching her family history. Our lives had been as different as our distant connection until Joanna’s persistence and the city of Youngstown, Ohio brought us together.

We had an unspoken battle of wills during that first conversation. She said she often went by her last name - Fox. I should have known then that Joanna wasn’t one for flowery words, sentimentality, wasn’t one to back down or back away from the awkward or the uncomfortable. She kept referring to “our” upcoming family reunion. I referred to it as her family reunion. And she corrected me every time.  My cheeks were stiff with holding a fake smile. I ran my fingers over the cornrows in my hair, unconsciously counting how many braids there were, periodically peering out of my dining room window into my neighbors living room. Their television was turned to cable news. I thought if I could distract myself, my face wouldn’t feel so hot with frustration and I could be responsibly, appropriately polite.

"Joanna, this isn't like a normal reunion. You know that right?" I paused, unsure of how much more to say. Afraid to go further, I fell back on my journalist safety net. "Are you going to bring all the property records and Richard's will with you? I really want to see them."

"My whole backseat is full of family history papers." She laughed. "I'm glad you're interested. No one in the family has been as interested in this stuff. By the end of this reunion, girl, you're gonna know more than you ever thought you could about the Boggess family. Your family."

I tried again. Be honest with her, I told myself. You've got to manage expectations. "Phoebe was a slave, you know. She and Richard didn't have a marriage. That's not a part of the family history any of us have talked about before."

"You know, shit happens," Joanna said. "We can't do anything about what our ancestors did back then. The fact is, we're family. No two ways about it, girl."

**

April

A few weeks later, I visited the matriarch of my family — great aunt Virginia. She lived in the back half of a one-floor duplex in Oakland, California and it was filled end to end with yarn -- crocheted baby socks, afghans, wide-brimmed hats and artwork. She clapped her hands together when she saw me at the door and used the wall to help her move towards where I stood. She was making us some breakfast, she said, and fried that maple breakfast sausage until it was nearly black. Aunt Virginia told me to put two slices of toast in her rusted toaster oven and to dish up some fruit cocktail.

Without question, she said, I must go to the Boggess family reunion. I tried to share about my reservations. She kept her hands and mouth moving, as if I was present but most assuredly mute. Virginia was 89 and loved to talk. It often took me five or six attempts to leave before I could get out of her door and to my car.  Every time this happened, I was little surprised. My Grandma Opal, Virginia’s younger sister, could go an entire episode of Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune and $25,000 Pyramid without speaking more than two words to me.

We sat at her formica table and she updated me on her crocheting at the senior center. Her arthritis-laden hand gently quivered as she showed me articles about her grandfather Oscar - born on that West Virginia plantation. She added the article to the stack of things she planned to take to the reunion. Already, she’d convinced my cousins in Oakland and San Diego to go. Nine in total, so far.

“Doesn’t it bother you at all what our ancestors had to go through? Doesn’t it make you angry?” I finally ask, rushing my words together to take advantage of her pause for breath.

“My momma used to say, you never know who’ll give you your last drink of water.” She banged her fork on the plastic blue plate for emphasis. I shifted in my chair, leaned down to scoop up a cube of pear, a grape and cherry from the canned fruit cocktail in my bowl.

She was asking for a level of kindness I wasn’t sure I could muster. Every time someone reached out as if to touch my “ethnic” “exotic” hair, kindling thrown onto the fire of my indignation. When I was stopped on my prestigious university campus and asked to furnish my ID to prove I “belonged” there, another dry log heaved onto the fire. And when I covered a teacher strike in a small Oregon town at the base of a mountain and a school board member asked me if I could furnish him with a “black barbecue ribs” recipe, one more branch tossed carelessly onto the fire of my articulate exceptional “otherness.”

In one way, Aunt Virginia was very much like my Grandmother Opal. Neither liked to talk too much about the past, or at least the painful parts. Aunt Virginia told stories of growing up, of sibling squabbles, first days at school, first jobs, lost jobs, ill health. But, never did those stories carry with them the loneliness, prejudice and sadness I had expected.

I asked Aunt Virginia what she did when she thought about racism, when she felt discrimination and prejudice traveling in apartheid South Africa or even walking the often-unfriendly streets of Youngstown, Ohio’s south side in the 1960’s.

“Well, we’re all a slave to something,” she said. “For some people, it’s a negative way of thinking, of seeing other people. But I don’t have to give in to it. That’s why I have my knitting and crochet – the needles going in and out – and that can bring me back to myself. You need something to bring you back to yourself.”

I tried to take her words into myself, to make them my own. But they were drowned out the numbers: 443 acres. $500.

 

Richard Boggess’ 1844 inventory or property:

Phoebe and child (likely Phoebe Jane) –                 175 dollars

John –                                                                                200 dollars

A –                                                                                175 dollars

Nancy –                                                                                150 dollars

Lethe –                                                                                125 dollars

Richard –                                                                              125 dollars

Thomas –                                                                    300 dollars

Oscar –                                                                              300 dollars

 

Phoebe and Oscar were worth about $500 -- the cost of my flat screen television; the place where I use crime dramas, supernatural thrillers and made-for-tv singing contests to escape the pressures of my somewhat-accidental career in community organizing and education reform.

$500. Unmarked graves. Untold stories. Enough to make me silence my television, my complaining, my discomfort. So they could be heard.

*

Oscar Dunwreath Tousisant L’Oveture Boggess. The weight of his name and contribution to this earth far outshine the length of his street in Youngstown, Ohio. Boggess Street is a small one. Only two blocks long. 125 feet between Mercer Street and Hawthorne. But, nevertheless, it’s mine. And it’s no longer overgrown, with leaves and bushes obscuring the nameplate.

The city unveiled a newly minted street marker in an outdoor ceremony and the newspaper recorded the event on the front page. It was held outside in February in Ohio. Not sure if they really wanted anyone to come but we wouldn’t be outsmarted by the weather.

My aunt Marsha drove down from Cleveland to represent our family and accept the recognition.

Stefon, a full-time hospital orderly and part-time civil war re-enactor, spent much of his time researching the lives of Black soldiers in northeast Ohio and took an instant warmth to OscarD’s story. He had lobbied the city’s historical naming committee to clean up Boggess street and erect a permanent marker in his honor that better captured his impact on the community. My family knew OscarD (that’s what we took to calling him, a nickname that seemed to draw us closer to him) had fought in the Civil War, started his own business and his own church in the 1870’s but didn’t much about his life prior to the war, where he came from and never really believed we could find out.

As Stefon looked into where OscarD began his life, he came across the hundreds of pages of Boggess genealogy online authored by Joanna. I could end the story there. Theirs was a match made in family history zealot heaven. (Now, I might have to count myself a convert to their gospel of family trees, transcription and census tract analysis).

Stefon gave Joanna our information and within hours, she had contacted my aunt Marsha. She drove 400 miles in her red Jeep to the marker dedication of OscarD. Marsha was surprised that Joanna took so quickly to our family. That she was so quick to invite my family to the Boggess reunion. Now, it’s probably important to know that my family isn’t so good at keeping in contact, not so good at having get-togethers, remembering birthdays and anniversaries. I’m being too polite.

I’ve never been to a family reunion. I don’t even know the birthdays of most of my extended family. I didn’t start seeing my first and second cousins regularly until I went to college only miles from their homes. We don’t talk on birthdays or even Christmas but we’ve been getting better about texting happy face/balloons/hearts emoticons recently.

To say we were surprised by Joanna’s persistence and curiosity was an understatement. Pair that with a general mistrust and suspicion of a long lost white relative wanting to be my BFF and it’s a bit of a surprise that I ever returned Joanna’s phone call in the first place.

*

I guess it’s true that someone – that’s you Dad -- tried to interest me in my history before Joanna Fox started tracking me like a treasure hunter after gold doubloons. I remember driving around Youngstown, Ohio with my Dad. He believes any ailment can be cured with the right story. 

On our annual trips to Ohio, Dad spun tales as he drove, of the best corned beef, where he started driving at 13, where he drove off the road after taking off with his dad’s car, the old house on Ridge Avenue where my grandmother grew up, where my dad grew up. How it was across the street from his school and my dad would climb out of the windows in kindergarten and go home. He was the youngest and as freewheeling as I was restrained.

He drove me past the house that should have belonged to my family but somehow when one of my great aunts died, the neighbors ended up with the house and everything in it.

We drove past the stone quarry that my great great grandfather built, now run down, a mere shadow of the fortitude, resilience, vision and courage it took to build those things as a freeman who couldn’t read or write.

I remember going to the cemetery for the first time where my grandmother, great grandmother and great great grandfather are buried. I barely glanced at the dwarfish gray headstones. As a sulky pre-teen only child, I preferred to spend my time buried in Nancy Drew books and fictitious accounts of other worlds.

Years later, I see stories in all those places. I see pieces of myself in those places. I see missed opportunities and divine blessings.

We’d thought for years that our story started there in Youngstown, Ohio. But in 2007, that changed. I flew from Oregon to Ohio that June and drove with my aunt to the Boggess Family Reunion. Tears blurred my sight as we he hit I-271 for that five-hour drive to Northeast Appalachia. Would I see myself there too?

 **

Our hotel was a squat building across from a gas station, the parking lot connected to a Big Lots discount mart. The hallway smelled of bleach and a tinge of deep-summer humidity and must. My aunt stood at the front desk getting our room keys while I waited in the lobby, perched on the arm of a sunken beige sofa, swinging one of my orange flip flops with my big toe. To my right, there was a small group of white women. Each time I glanced around the room, our gazes clashed and we each hurriedly looked away. They might have been wondering the same thing I was — Are we related?

I curled my bottom lip between my teeth and forced my shoulders down from my ears.

There weren’t that many people clamoring to spend time in Clarksburg, West Virginia — population 16,000. Including me. Clarksburg was priceless gem during the time of mining and coal barons. It’s known for its willow and sycamore trees and now mostly for housing the FBI’s National Fingerprint and Identification Storage Center. 

Once we got into our hotel room, my aunt left to pick up our cousins flying in from California. I took out my camcorder and set it up on the bulky hotel television. I sat at the edge of the bed, ready to give my first report.

I pulled up my shoulder-length curly braids into a bun to elongate my neck or at least take some of the attention off the pouch of fat underneath my chin. I was about eight words into my description of the five-hour drive when someone knocked at the door. I opened the door and peered down at a portly white woman with round-rimmed glasses, white tennis shoes and a pack of cigarettes poking out of the top of her jeans pocket.

“I’m Joanna. You must be Kimberly,” she said in a flat voice that seemed to echo down the hallway. Then, she smiled and I could see her off-white teeth and a few chin whiskers.

Joanna first started getting interested in her history by going to funerals, listening to stories and asking questions about names, birth dates and birthplaces. Then, she started making notecards with key information that would help her make connections. That was more than 50 years ago. During the summer — when she wasn’t teaching GED or Driver’s Education classes — Joanna would take $300 and go to Virginia or Washington DC and go “spelunking for documents” she called it. During the winter, she’d read all the information she collected and set aside $50 per month to call people who might be related to her.

“Yeah, nice to meet you,” I said, hoping my lips were curved into a smile. She started talking quickly and comfortably as if we’d been old friends, not an example of America’s muddled relationship with race, class and identity.

“You can come by the hospitality room. There’s pictures and historical information there. You can meet more of the family. Yeah, you’ve definitely got the Boggess nose,” Joanna said, laughing, almost without stopping to breathe it seemed.

I also had stopped breathing momentarily, having sucked in my breath sharply at her casual statement.

The Boggess nose? I’ve been told that I resemble my dad, a Youngstown born jack-of-all-trades who is still seeking to find his place in the world. Others have said I’m a miniature version of my mother, a Cleveland-born public relations specialist who died of cancer when I was in elementary school. But no one ever told me that I resembled my white slave-owning ancestors who likely arrived from Whales in the late 1600’s.

I wanted to smile and laugh politely. I wanted to be flattered. I grit my teeth.

***

 

Bio: Kimberly grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and loves bright colors, music and college sports. She spent seven years as a reporter at The Oregonian, covering education and politics. She has an M.A. in Journalism from UC Berkeley and a B.A. in African American Studies from Stanford University. Kimberly currently works for a Portland-based education nonprofit.

 

 

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