Going Back to Find Lavinia

“Ellen’s father was a white man named Jerry Dial . . . “ is how the story of my family opens, a bitter ancestral version of “Once upon a time . . . “

It is followed by the tale of a Scots-Irish Southerner who fathered a daughter with his neighbor’s slave woman, Lavinia--my great-great-great-grandmother.

Enslaved until age 35, when she was freed by the Civil War, Lavinia lived in Sumterville, Ala.--deep cotton country. There, the birth of her child Ellen, in 1849, would splinter my family into fragments that would remain separated for 150 years.

Lavinia lived and died a servant. But in death she has attained a power that life never granted her. She is my family’s Eve, our beginning and the person to whom we can furthest trace our roots. As generations of her children from that union now seek the details of her life, back she leads us. To find her--and our own origin--we must look in places we have avoided for more than a century and see our family as never before: in black and white.

The Family Reunion

More than 150 years after Lavinia gave birth to Ellen, their family--my family--is close. Like many African American families, we meet not only at funerals and weddings, but also hold formal reunions. For the past decade we have gathered every two years, anywhere from 50 to 80 people. Last time we gathered in Houston.

Wearing T-shirts with the Richardson name, we have steamed down the Mississippi in New Orleans, grieved at the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and toured a house on the underground railroad in Memphis.

Mainly, however, we reaffirm our sense of belonging.

Ours is called the Richardson family reunion in honor of Lavinia’s daughter Ellen and her husband, Anthony Richardson, from whom about 150 people descended.

We know a great deal about the couple, thanks to a biography written by two of their granddaughters.

After the Civil War, the young, newly freed slaves owned nothing and sat in borrowed clothes for tintype portraits, which show a small, dapper man and his lovely bride.

The biography recounts how Anthony’s white father and owner, Thomas Knight, had sold him from his mother when he was 4, to a Dr. Chambers. After a succession of sales, he came to live at age 14 with the Richardsons.

That sale, ironically, would lead to one of the most important legacies Anthony would leave to his family: literacy.

Before the war, a Richardson taught Anthony how to read and write. Ellen also was literate. The two prized this ability, sending all seven of their children to college.

Matched by their extraordinary capacity for work, their literacy allowed a measure of success to Anthony and Ellen that few newly freed slaves could dream of achieving. On their farmland, if the moon was bright and full, Anthony and their three sons would plow into the night. In time, Anthony would buy the blacksmith shop where he also worked, the house and surrounding four acres of land. Eventually, he and Ellen owned 1,300 acres in the area--much of it from the plantations of white slave owners.

Last July in Houston, about 50 of their descendants gathered in a conference room at the swank Westin Galleria, sitting at round tables sipping coffee and polishing off the last of the pastry. Before the prayer that ends every reunion, we have a family business meeting.

The agenda:

1. Where to hold the next reunion? New Orleans.

2. Who will publish the family newsletter? A cousin in Boston has volunteered.

3. Should we, for the first time since the Civil War, try to contact the Dial family--the white descendants of the man who impregnated Lavinia--to see if they have records of her captivity? Should we also try the Fultons, the family that owned Lavinia and Ellen before emancipation? Such contacts are our only chance of finding her.

Silence seizes the room.

Then: “It could open a can of worms!” . . . “Think of the ramifications!” . . . “Look at that mess with the Hemingses and the Jeffersons . . .”

And, only half-joking: “Do they have any money? ‘Cause they owe me!”

As well as we know Anthony and Ellen, we are mostly ignorant of our family one generation before them. Anthony’s mother, Rosa Knight, is virtually untraceable because of her common name, lack of family history and the dearth of documents on her or her master.

About Lavinia, we have only wispy details: She was a copper-colored woman, possibly part Cherokee, whose daughter was Ellen and who, after slavery, took the name of her black husband, John Emanuel.

In old age, Lavinia loved to hide behind the curtains in the front hallway, springing out to scare her great-grandchildren. My grandmother, who was one of those children, would later tell me that story. After her death in 1914, Lavinia was buried in the cemetery just a short walk from the Presbyterian Church on 11th Street in Birmingham.

But who were her parents? Where was she born? Was Lavinia bought at auction or inherited as a gift? Could she have come lying down in shackles on a slave ship from Africa?

Africa.

Tracing our family to Africa would give our story a beginning both new and ancient; our time in chains on this shore would be just a short chapter in a history reaching back thousands of years to freedom.

“Caucasians are so quick and able to say where they’re from, while I have no idea, absolutely no idea where I’m from,” said Terri James Solomon, 34, a cousin in Boston. “Then there’s hurt from knowing why you don’t know where you’re from.”

The cousins’ reservations are best expressed by my cousin Rose Marie Rushin of Huntsville, Ala.

“As long as we make sure the goal is to find some information about Lavinia. As long as it’s clear that we’re not trying to ally ourselves or expand our family in any way; we don’t want them at our family reunion.”

We do not seek to add white branches to our family tree. I wondered: How could we ever unite with people whose kinship exists only because of Lavinia’s pain?

Cousin Judy Arrington from Atlanta dispels the momentary anxiety.

“We are descended from Anthony and Ellen Richardson, and they are not,” she points out.

So yes, we decide. We will contact the Dials. And in the end we will find far more family--and a far different family--than we had ever imagined.

The Dials

If our family is substantial, the Dial family is massive.

Old Jeremiah Dial Sr. and his wife Margaret emigrated from Ulster, Ireland, to South Carolina in 1772. More than 6,000 people are documented descendants from that union. That just counts the white folks.

There are Texas Dials and Tennessee Dials, Alabama Dials and Arkansas Dials.

Among these descendants was Jeremiah’s great-grandson, Jeremiah H. Dial. He was Ellen’s father, our family history says--though I have always resisted thinking of him as my great-great-great-grandfather.

Suddenly, I see the Dial name everywhere.

I ponder Dial liquid soap; behind its cleansing suds could there lie the sticky secret of a plantation past? I don’t know. I switch brands anyway.

But if I don’t know which Dial to contact, I do know where to look.

Two years ago my mother, Minnie-Rose Richardson, had typed the name she knew--Jerry Dial--into her computer and there he was, hit after hit. He and a few hundred other Dials popped up on family Web pages, a surname board, genealogy query forums and other Web sites.

As publisher of the Richardsonian, the family newsletter, my mother has kept Lavinia ever before us, reminding us that memory of Lavinia’s life keeps the joys and sorrows of our own lives in perspective.

“When I think of people having a bad day because their hair didn’t turn out right or something like that, I stop and think of Lavinia,” she said. “A bad hair day? A bad day because of hair? A bad day is when your children are sold away, or when a man treats your body as though it is his property.”

As little girls, my sister Ellen and I were drilled, Kunta Kinte fashion: “There once was a little girl named Lavinia who grew up and had a little girl named Ellen. Ellen had a little girl named Rosa Jane, who had a little girl named Theodora and Theodora had me . . .”

But my mother was uncomfortable about contacting the families that once owned ours.

“What’s the problem? Why don’t you just ask them for help?” I asked.

“Well, why don’t you?” she fired back. “I think that’s something for your generation to take on.”

I go to the Dial Surname page again and again. There, Dials across the country write in with questions about their ancestry.

“I’m trying to find out any info on a John William Dial D.O.B. 02/19/42 born in Arkansas, I think. Any info would be appreciated.”

“Looking for information about my Great Grandmother Mary Elizabeth Dial who married William Jackson Sanderson and had nine children. If anyone has a connection I’d love to hear from you.”

I write on my computer screen: “Jerry H. Dial fathered a daughter with my great-great-great-grandmother Lavinia when she was helpless and in his power. Can any of you misbegotten descendants of a slaveholding rapist help me find her birth or sale records?”

But I don’t send it. Not just because the query is worded nastily. I know it is.

I do not want to post anything on a Web page where Dials rejoice in making family connections--as though I were a long-lost Dial.

The page shows an obvious family pride and hints of Southern rebel spirit. One Dial refers to the Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression.”

This baffles me. Growing up, I always thought it far superior to be descended from the oppressed than from the oppressor. To be the descendant of a slave master would be like having Nazi relatives: a shame not of your own making, yet inescapable and permanent.

As a teenager, I realized that mine had been a delusional superiority. I am descended from both slave and master. And I was ashamed. Not of her, but of him.

After reworking four or five versions of a message, I finally send one to the Dial Surname board, explaining our search for Lavinia. Another query goes off to the surname page of their neighbors, the Fultons--the family that owned Lavinia and Ellen.

I worry about an explosion similar to that of the Jeffersons and the Hemingses. DNA tests all but assure that the third president fathered at least one child by his slave Sally Hemings, yet many of his acknowledged white descendants reject the idea of kinship with the Hemingses. Only two months before our Richardson reunion, Jefferson’s two lines of descendants were denouncing each other to the media.

Yet I need not have worried. To this day on those Web sites, there are no responses to my query, “Looking for Lavinia.”

Contact

I e-mail a couple of Dial descendants directly, and two weeks later they send me a warm, affectionate message. Their cousin Jerry Freeman of Cleburne, Texas, might be able to help, they tell me. Freeman, 65, is the great-great-great-great-grandson of Old Jeremiah Dial of Ulster and a crack genealogist.

I e-mail an explanation of the relationship between Lavinia and Jerry Dial and ask for help with my search. I acknowledge the topic’s sensitive nature.

“I’m not sensitive about it,” he says, and he means it.

Freeman bears no trace of racial guilt. Nor is he put off by the idea of kinship with black people. “Besides, did you hear my last name? There is no one named Freeman who wasn’t at some point a slave,” he said.

Within days, Freeman too is searching for Lavinia, poring over library and archive records, e-mailing other Dial cousins for help and offering tips.

Genealogy has been his passion for the past 20 years, and in that time he and a core group of Dial cousins have documented the 6,000 descendants of Jeremiah Dial Sr.

Using census records, county records, family bibles, letters and every resource short of DNA testing, sometimes they add 25 names a month to the Dial family.

“Do you want to take a DNA test?” he asks me. “Isn’t that what those families, the Hemingses and Jeffersons, did?”

No, I don’t. Not at all. My goal is to trace my family back to Africa, not Europe.

“Well, I absolutely do believe your family history and frankly, I’m ready to add you all to the rolls of the Dials,” he said. “After all, why would Lavinia lie about that? It’s not like he was Thomas Jefferson.”

In other ways, Freeman’s advice shapes my records search.

Lavinia was a lifelong Presbyterian, and attended church faithfully until her death in 1914. Her ardent Christianity means she was probably at least two generations--maybe even 100 years--removed from Africa, Freeman said.

“The Africans didn’t convert real quick,” he said.

Freeman suggests that I go to the local branch of the National Archives to check census records, land deeds and Freedmen’s Bureau information.

The local archives office, one of 13 nationwide, is housed in the federal building in Laguna Niguel. It is aptly nicknamed the Ziggurat for its concrete-locked resemblance to an Assyrian temple. No microfilm will be escaping from this place.

In the genealogy room, the yearning for kinship is audible. Dozens of people sit hunched over whirring microfilm viewers.

The 1870 census is the first in which African Americans are listed by name, not number. The rolls, for both blacks and whites, read like an index of Old Testament prophets and patriarchs--Shadrachs, Obadiahs, Hezekiahs and Jeremiahs. As if for balance, however, a goodly measure of Bubbas, Brothers, Sisters, and Girls were slapped down by the census taker where children’s proper names should be.

Three hours later, the scrawled penmanship of one census taker changes into the elegant script of another, and Lavinia Emanuel scrolls into view.

My great-great-great-grandmother was about 40 years old in 1870, the census recorded, and she could read and write.

I envy the census taker. I want to talk to Lavinia too, to ask questions about her life, about plantation life and freedom, about her mother and father, about Jerry Dial.

Through tears, as though I’ll be able to feel her, I run my fingertips over the black lines on the screen.

Family Secrets

Ellen is not listed with Lavinia. Already married to Anthony Richardson, she was in her own home and is not counted in the household of Lavinia and her husband, John Emanuel. But beneath Lavinia’s name is a shock.

She had a whole family of other children: Martha, age 17; Nora, age 15, Sam, Jim, Sarah, Dick and a 4-year-old child with an undecipherable name.

How is it that we, with such a vigorous and detailed family history, know nothing of these brothers and sisters of Ellen’s? Did we separate from them, or they from us?

The census offers some tantalizing but frustrating clues. Some documents suggest that Lavinia and John Emanuel were married before Ellen was born, in a union that lasted more than 50 years. Some indicate a later marriage.

It is an inexpressible comfort to find that throughout her long life, Lavinia had a husband who sustained and stayed with her. But if Jerry Dial fathered Ellen while Lavinia was married, her arrival must have caused great pain within that marriage--and possibly a rift between Ellen and the siblings that would follow.

The estrangement would go on for 100 more years. Those younger siblings would never make it into our family’s ancestral story, and their descendants would remain unknown to us.

Everyone, including myself, is repulsed by any suggestion that the relationship with Jerry Dial could have been desired by Lavinia. I want to believe it happened against her will.

“So basically, he raped her,” said cousin Jean Jackson, on the phone from Selma, Ala. “If she had a husband at the time, that means he raped her.”

Anger whips through the family.

“I’m not surprised, I never figured it could be anything but rape,” said Terri James Solomon. “The thing that just overwhelms me hearing that story is certainly the powerlessness of Lavinia, but also of her husband. I cannot imagine emasculating a husband any more than that.”

Regardless of whether she was married, my mother grieves for Lavinia. “My thought is even when it may not be the violent rape in every situation, it still is rape, because she can’t say no. Since she’s owned as a piece of property, what else can you call it? A slave cannot give nor withdraw consent.

“This must have been a huge, painful embarrassment for the Emanuels.”

But what happened to that family? To our family?

“I’m thinking they shunned her,” said cousin Ricki-Lynn from New Orleans. “I’m thinking the reason we don’t know anything about Lavinia’s other children is that they shunned Ellen.”

Suddenly the family portrait I have carried in my mind begins to shrink and warp. I see us not as the Richardsons, a large core group of relatives--a main stem of family--but as an offshoot.

On one side is a white family we do not accept. On the other is a black one we know nothing about. Like a species of rootless ivy that survives by sipping the air, we have existed for generations by clinging only to each other.

My Other Family

The 1900 census shows that Lavinia eventually had 12 children, but that six had died. Of the remaining, Ellen and two others are accounted for.

Three of Lavinia’s children, including Ellen, married Richardsons. My name is Richardson by coincidence, through my father’s family.

“Three Richardsons and then you’re a Richardson too?” Jean Jackson asked. “You keep up this digging and you’re going to find out you’re your own grandmother!”

In a flash, I trace one of Lavinia’s sons, Sampson Emanuel. He also named his son Sampson. A death certificate for Sampson Jr. places his address in Birmingham in 1959.

One more generation and I should find Emanuels of my parents’ generation--alive.

A sympathetic archivist at the Birmingham Public Library in Alabama stays on the phone for 25 minutes, poring through city directories from the 1950s. She finds a Robert E. Emanuel, possibly a son, living in Sampson Emanuel’s home.

Before she finishes speaking his name I type the name into a computerized directory assistance program and up pops Robert E. Emanuel at a different address, but in Alabama. It must be my long-lost cousin.

In just five days, I exult, I have undone 100 years of estrangement.

It is a total Alex Haley moment. A genealogical triumph. From records and documents I have found a cousin, and through him a whole new family. God willing, they will remember Lavinia, maybe even have a photo of her or letters she wrote.

I call, he answers and a drum starts beating in my heart. I explain why I’m calling. I explain about Lavinia and John Emanuel and about the Sampsons, junior and senior, who are his father and grandfather.

“Nope, that’s not me.”

“What do you mean that’s not you?” I shout at him.

I am dizzy with disappointment. There is nowhere else to turn; Lavinia’s other children have left no paper trail I can follow.

“What do you mean you are but you aren’t? Are you Robert E. Emanuel or aren’t you?”

Ending on a shriek, I add, “If you really knew who you were, you’d be who I expected you to be!”

A week later, cringing, I telegraph him a mental apology. An obituary for Sampson’s wife in the Birmingham News shows they had no children.

If I am to find the truth about Lavinia and her origins, it won’t be from Southern California. Jerry Freeman is going to Sumterville and invites me to meet him. Together we plan to trace the footsteps of her plantation life.

Selma

My cousin Jean Jackson greets me with a hug and a freshly baked peach cobbler. She lives in a rambling nine-room home that has been in the family for 90 years. The house next door belonged to my great-grandparents.

During the civil rights movement, Jean’s home was Martin Luther King Jr.’s headquarters for the march from Selma to Montgomery. The house still has a bullet hole from that time.

The next morning, I head for Livingston, the capital of Sumter County, where Jerry and his wife are staying.

“I bet I know who you are!” is how Jerry Freeman greets me.

He looks like his voice, accessible and friendly. Short black hair with some gray, gap-toothed grin, little bit of a belly--a likable guy.

“Well I’m just thrilled to be your cousin.”

Cousins. There it is. So strange to hear a white man say that to me. My cousins are the people, outside of my immediate family, whom I love and trust most in the world. Could he ever be that to me? I wrestle. I decide that I don’t have to decide; facts are facts.

“I guess we are cousins, aren’t we?” I say. He laughs: “Of course we are.”

We head to the tiny Bethel Presbyterian chapel, founded in 1835. Freeman already has sleuthed through the chapel records and discovered that Lavinia joined the church May 23, 1847.

Her master, William Frierson Fulton, was an elder in the church and clerk of the session. Many of the church records are in his flowing hand.

Jerry Dial--Fulton’s neighbor and brother-in-law--also was a member of the church.

Another gem from the records: Fulton’s spare script reports that Jerry Dial, 29, and Lavinia, about 18, were excommunicated from the church on the same day in June 1850, shortly after Ellen’s birth.

Freeman is gleeful.

“That is not a coincidence! Not if you know what you’re looking at!” he crows. “And you know what else that means? That she had high status in the household as a servant. Do you see how she’s called a servant instead of slave? The fact that they kicked him out of the church says a lot about her place in that family.”

Although they are excommunicated for different reasons--he is kicked out for swearing and dancing in public and she for “Immorality,” the documents are the first time their names are together in writing.

It’s just a quick drive to the Bethel chapel, rebuilt with pressed brick in 1907. Inside, the one aisle leads past a few dark wood pews to the simple altar. A stained glass window behind the altar exhorts members to honor their fathers and mothers.

In the late afternoon, sunlight streams in through open shutters.

Lavinia.

There she stands in the sunlight before the white congregation that morning of June 21, 1850. Ellen, far too light to be fathered by another slave, snuggles in her arms.

It was common at the time to excommunicate church members, black and white, for moral missteps after a trial before the white congregation. Almost any infraction--from fighting to not attending church--was punished with suspension or excommunication until the sinner expressed sincere repentance.

On that same day, Jeremiah Dial, 29, was unrepentant:

Fulton’s stern hand writes of his brother-in-law that “Jeremiah Dial . . . acknowledged the charges to be true and that he did not know that he was sorry, that he wanted to be out of the church any how.”

Jerry Dial never rejoined Bethel. He went to Arkansas, where he was a successful merchant after losing his right arm in the Civil War. He did, however, become a pillar of a Presbyterian Church there.

Sixteen years after Lavinia was excommunicated, Fulton writes that she made the standard profession of repentance and was readmitted to Bethel.

About a quarter-mile down the road is Farview, the white-columned Fulton plantation house built in 1835 and still a private residence.

It is here that Lavinia lived and gave birth to Ellen. Ellen returned here twice after emancipation, to have her children.

The white Grecian Revival house sits atop a slope, with a wide lawn in front and fields off to the side. In my mind, Lavinia stands on the veranda, rubbing her hands down the front of her apron. Other slaves walk across the fields carrying bushels of corn on their heads, West African style, or stoop in the sun to pick cotton.

We do not go up to the house.

According to a published family history by Fulton’s son, William Frierson Fulton II, before the Civil War, it was a land of abundance and prosperity.

He writes that neither the hogs, nor the cattle nor his father’s 100 Negroes took sick.

“My father was a model master,” Fulton II writes. “His rules were strict and had to be obeyed, but were always tempered with mercy. He controlled by being firm and not by those harsher means so often resorted to by slave owners.”

His example: The slaves had to appear in clean clothes for work Monday mornings or receive a severe scolding or whipping from the master.

A slave narrative collected by the Federal Writers Project, however, tells a more harrowing story. The Fulton place is recalled as having the most vicious overseer in the area. Preparing to shoot a slave woman for disobeying him, however, the overseer accidentally shot himself in the head.

Between the Bethel records and Fulton II’s book, one thing is clear; for Jeremiah Dial to father half-white Ellen in the household of William Frierson Fulton--the Bethel Presbyterian elder who chastised people for wearing dirty clothes or public dancing--was a scandal.

“I’m thinking that maybe he loved her,” Jerry said after we returned to Livingston. “Maybe he was ahead of his time?”

He sees me recoil. “I’m not saying she had any choice in the matter--but you know that did happen. Maybe he loved her.”

It did happen, he points out. White men fell in love with black women regardless of their color, status and the laws and customs separating them.

We agree that we will never really know.

It is dark now and time to drive the hour back to Selma.

“Can’t you stay a little longer? What if I never see you again?” he asks.

“I have cousins waiting for me,” I explain.

“Well, what am I?” he shoots back.

I laugh. Ceding the point, I promise to stay in touch.

Ancient Scars

Everyone back in Selma is waiting for a full report on my day with Freeman. Cousins from New Orleans and Huntsville will also make the journey to Selma while I’m there, to visit with me and to hear firsthand reports.

Did I like him?

Very much. I repeat his jokes and they laugh over his puns about inbreeding in Sumter County.

“I guess this may be the first time any of us have sat down with a Dial since the Civil War,” I say.

“No. This is the first time any of us have ever sat down with a Dial, period!” says cousin Juanita. Juanita Sherrod, 94, is one of Ellen and Anthony’s two surviving grandchildren. “Before the war you didn’t sit.”

That little drop of Dial blood, so greatly diluted over the generations, is not enough for some to think of Jerry as family, but they could maybe like him for himself.

Rose Marie Rushin, who had flinched at the idea of having white people attend our family reunion, decided the sheer bravery involved would be worthy of respect.

“It would take a lot of guts to show up at a black family reunion and I guess I’d admire someone for doing it.

“Ultimately, we don’t accomplish anything by preserving the attitudes that have been in operation up to now,” she said. “Somebody’s got to move outside of the box in order for any progress to be made.”

The next day, a Sunday, I take Jean to see Lavinia’s chapel.

After circling the same street three or four times, we pull over to ask a white woman for directions. To our surprise, she climbs into her pickup truck and leads us there.

Jean goes in alone and runs her hands over a pew, close to crying. The woman goes outside to open the shutters, so Jean will have the full effect of the sunlight on the one stained glass window over the altar.

We tell her about Lavinia, Jerry Dial, their daughter Ellen and the Fultons.

She is a Fulton, she says, and lives at Farview--the very plantation where Lavinia gave birth to Ellen. Her name is Margaret Ramsay Sullivan.

Jean and I are staggered. We are being led around by a descendant of the family that once owned ours. Also, because the Fultons and Dials intermarried, we are distant cousins through Jerry Dial.

Sullivan finds this exciting.

“You know, I can’t take my eyes off you,” she says, touching my arm. “You are the spitting image of my daughter!” She adds that once a year they hold a service at the chapel, a homecoming for family. “We’d love it if your family could come.”

“Won’t that be controversial?” I ask.

“I can’t imagine why,” she says and smiles at me. “Lisa, we’ve come a long way.”

It is too much. Silently I wonder, has she come a long way while I have not?

Soon, she and Jean begin to chitchat about the upcoming vote on whether Alabama should have a state lottery.

I scrutinize her as hard as I can. She seems so at ease, so friendly, but is she really? An hour passes and we’re still talking.

That night, when we are finally alone, Jean and I ponder our scars.

How is it that the white folks, Jerry, Margaret are so breezy and easy about the past, pleasant about the present and eager to invite future togetherness? Meanwhile, we envision and expect controversy and conflict.

“I’ve been carrying these scars for 60 years,” Jean says slowly. “Have I been blaming every single white person for what happened to Lavinia?”

In retrospect, though, I wonder. We carry enough scars from our own lives--children who are not allowed to play with us, school plays with parts for white students only, restaurants that refuse me service, my car being towed from a white neighborhood while I’m working on assignment.

And since my meeting with Margaret, I have been inundated with helpful family material from the Fulton family--but Margaret had said there were no documents or records for me to see. Nor did she ever invite us to the house our ancestors had shared.

The next day I drive an hour north to Birmingham, where Lavinia died. At the Birmingham Public Library, I rifle through the Tutwiler Collection of Southern History and Literature. In city directories I find Lavinia Emanuel was living in Enon Ridge in 1895. In 1908, at age 76 she was still working as a domestic, and by 1911, she was listed as a widow and living with a widowed daughter, Jeannette.

From a memoir written by my grandmother, I can determine that Lavinia attended the Miller Memorial Presbyterian church, within walking distance of her home at 816 14th St. N.

Every Sunday she walked over the hill to church. You could tell the time by Mother Emanuel, the pastor said at her funeral, the memoir recalls.

Before I go searching for her home and grave site, I check the Birmingham News for an obituary.

I see no death notice in the 1914 paper, but a little item in the corner leaps out at me.

Whites in the area vow trouble if black children from the 16th Street Baptist Church visit the new zoo. The church will consequently withdraw its request for them to see the animals.

In 1914, my great-grandfather, Charles L. Fisher, was pastor of the 16th Street Baptist Church. The church most likely backed down to protect the children.

Staying in church was hardly safer. Almost half a century after the aborted zoo visit, the church Grandpa Fisher built would be bombed by white segregationists. Four little girls attending Sunday school were killed.

Lavinia Found

The streets of Enon Ridge, where Lavinia lived and died, are a maze of mythological caliber.

Two hours of winding, backtracking and asking for directions yield nothing. The Presbyterian church, neighbors tell me, was torn down to make way for the freeway. Lavinia’s house seems to have suffered the same fate.

Only because I have stopped to bury my head in my hands, exhausted and near tears, do I see the graveyard right across from me--exactly where my grandmother described Lavinia’s cemetery as being.

There is no gate, no wall, no name.

Broken headstones and brick graves lie in short tufts of weeds.

One by one I stop at each grave, kneel and touch the marker. I reach one final broken headstone. It has been battered by rain and by time and the little tombstone has been worn blank.

I have not found the link to Africa on my journey. But I have reshaped my family in ways I never imagined. White relatives who seem eager to pull me within their family’s embrace. Black cousins I will always yearn for but may never know.

In weeks to come, some Fulton cousins will claim kinship with us, inviting Richardsons to their next family reunion, calling and offering to build an extended family. We will be flustered, some of us cynical and wary, others curious and eager to meet.

And one person is at the juncture of us all: Lavinia. On the sunny plantation veranda, in the tiny Bethel chapel, she has been there, everywhere I have traveled. From the census taker’s handwritten records in Orange County to this crumbling Birmingham cemetery.

Back in Selma, my family gathers at a hotel for a banquet the last night of my visit. Before dinner, we stop to thank God for each other, for the first baby steps toward healing a century of wounds, and for our success in finding Lavinia.

For there she is. Nowhere and everywhere. Hers was a life barely documented and a death long forgotten. Yet in the most obvious place, clear and easy to see, alive forever inside of us, there at last stands Lavinia.