My family's slave-era history has survived in rich detail, thanks to my aggressively talka
tive great-grandfather John Wesley Staples (1865-1940), who was conceived in the closing days of the Civil War and became the first freeborn black person in the Staples family line. My family has always treasured these stories, but my generation is just beginning to realize the value of the gift John Wesley left us.
Most black families have found it impossible to learn even the most basic facts about ancestors who were born as slaves. That's partly because enslaved people do not appear in the public record as full-fledged human beings-with families, addresses, surnames and occupations-until after Emancipation in 1865. Even more of their stories were lost in the early 20th century, when black families reacted to the stigma of slavery by forbidding their elderly relatives to talk about it at all.
This produced a truncated view of black American history, in which slaves were seen as anonymous victims-defined only by suffering-and the heroic roles were largely reserved for their freeborn descendants.
John Wesley spoke often of his enslaved mother, Somerville, and the stories he left behind have allowed us to locate her in the public records and to piece together the basic outlines of her life. The portrait is still sketchy. But it's already clear that she was a formidable person, who had high ambitions for herself and her Son.
Somerville was most likely born in the 1820's in Virginia. Her adolescent years would have been dominated by the upheaval that followed the bloody slave rebellion mounted by Nat Turner. Fearful of being murdered in their beds, white lawmakers curtailed the already meager fights of free blacks, with the aim of driving them out of the state. For slaves, the ensuing exodus of free blacks they knew must have seemed like the end of even the possibility of freedom.
By the 1860's, Somerville had been sold to the Lowry family in Bedford County, where she became the property of Triplett Lowry, a doctor. As was common at the time, she conceived a child by young Marshall Lowry, the farm manager, and gave birth to John Wesley, whom she named after the abolitionist theologian and founder of the Methodist Church.
In the oral tradition passed down through the generations, Marshall Lowry is named as John Wesley's father. That Somerville named him - instead of keeping his identity secret as many enslaved mothers did - suggests that the truth was more important to her than traditional plantation etiquette. As a servant in an educated household, she would have had a close vantage point to observe middle-class culture and aspirations-which may account for the fact that my great- grandfather could read and write.
Born on the Fourth of July in 1865, the year of Emancipation, John Wesley was one of those freedom babies of whom much was expected. He was still a young man in February 1886, when his mother walked into the Bedford County registrar's office to record the purchase of a little under a half-acre of land, bought for the princely sum of ＄50. By then she had married a laborer named John Staples. But she registered the property in her name only, a gesture of independence that was common among free black women of the period. This purchase of land-a momentous act in the lives of former Slaves-would have set a powerful example for her son.
John Wesley lived up to his family's expectations. He and his wife, Eliza, established a large family and a successful farm in the Virginia countryside.
They joined with two adjacent neighbors to build the one-room schoolhouse where their children were educated, and hired the teacher who worked there, partly in exchange for room and board. He drove a fancy Model T Ford-and let it be known that he paid for the car in cash-while his neighbors moved about in horse-drawn carriages. At a time when the Ku Klux Kla
A．had a pure blood son
B．was educated
C．was an ambitious woman
D．had never been emancipated
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