Jamestown Odyssey: America's Unspoken Legacy of Multi-Racial Families From Its Founders

Jamestown Odyssey

The Unspoken Legacy Of Multi-Racial Families In America From Its Founders

By Chip Langston

Copyright 2011 by Chip Langston

Smashwords Edition

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Introduction

My hope is that Jamestown Odyssey is a ground breaking book on race and family in America. To varying degrees, most Americans have some interest in who their ancestors are. Some are content to know something about their grandparents, but never feel a need to look any further back. For others, like me, tracking down ancestors becomes an avocation. Most Americans can accept the horse thieves and rapscallions in their family history. But an odd thing happens with race. When we get the first hint that an ancestor is from a different race, we drop them like a hot potato. We bury our heads in the sand and pretend this blood-relative, even though we share DNA, doesn’t exist.

Our collective American history, with our centuries-long enslavement of blacks and Native Americans, the blistering near-extinction of Native Americans, and the oppressive bigotry of both is to blame. For our white ancestors to do what they did, they had to adopt into their psyche an overwhelming bigotry and prejudice of those they enslaved and killed. In response, many blacks and Native American had to adopt the similarly dehumanizing attitudes towards whites. Despite the intervening decades of social change, most of us, in all three races, are still emotionally chained to these events and attitudes. They rattle through our lives in small every day jabs and thoughts, and sometimes in big disgusting actions as we continue to view each other as fundamentally deficient in some way.

Every few years I'm reminded of this. Nearly every year there's a media dust up between Thomas Jefferson’s white ancestors and Sally Hemmings mixed race ancestors who are yet again denied entrance into the exclusive, and all white, Monticello Association. But the Jefferson/Hemmings family is just the tip of a very large iceberg we choose to ignore for there are millions and millions of us Americans, whether we consider ourselves white, black, or Native who are blood related. We have chosen to ignore the fact that it was not uncommon for our country's earliest white ancestors to have children with their slaves, or to take a Native bride. It's a fact we Americans need to come to terms with. My hope is that my book will open up this dialogue and allow us to heal. It will be an awkward, often disconcerting, process. Hopefully, this book will prepare those blessed with courage do some soul searching and take an honest look back.

Jamestown Odyssey is my personal journey in discovering and coming to terms with my living and dead distant cousins in the Native and black communities, and finding my living Southern cousins. This first-generation white Northerner also had to come to terms with my hidden prejudices against my slave-owning Southern ancestors, some of whom had children with their slaves. In fact, America’s most famous Langston is a black cousin who's family came through slavery, the almost-forgotten John Mercer Langston who is also the great uncle to the poet Langston Hughes. Also in the 1690's, a Langston ancestor married into Virginia’s Powhatan tribe, and his descendants have been tribal leaders since the 1700s. Nearly all of us Langstons, whether we consider themselves to be white, black, or Native descend from a John Langston who immigrated to Jamestown in 1635.

To overcome my bigotry and prejuidice, I track down and reach out to my nonwhite Langston distant cousins and start to bridge the racial divide that separates us, despite our blood-ties. In the end I also track down my living white Southern cousins and restablish our family ties.

I'll bring you along as I gum-shoe my through America’s premier genealogical research centers, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Daughters of the American Revolution library, and the Virginia State Library where I had the honor to work with America’s first historical document, the colony of Virginia’s first Land Patent Book, a hundred years older than the Decleration of Independence. I'll also bring you along when I visit Jamestown National Park, Macon, Georgia, the Pamunkey and Mattaponi Reservations, and when I lecture at Howard University.

Along the way, I uncover long-buried American history for not only is history written by the victors, it is rewritten by the victors. You'll read about John Mercer Langston’s extraordinary life, the story of Bacon’s Rebellion as the real beginning of America's revolution. Also, the history of Opechancanough, the Powhatan leader who nearly saved the Powhatans from extermination by the English settlers, will be detailed and the real story behind the creation of the first Land Patent Book.

There are tens of millions of Americans alive today whose extended families, like the Langstons and the Jefferson/Hemmings, are multiracial. Jamestown Odyssey ends with a list of several hundred surnames whose families established themselves in the Virginia colony during its first sixty years and who likely followed the same trajectory as the Langstons. Do you have to courage to look and see if your name is there? Do you have the courage to really look into your family’s past? If you do, then read on.

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Chapter 1

It was October, 2001, just weeks after the attacks on 9-11, and I was at the National Archivists Map Room in College Park, Maryland, scrutinizing Civil War-era maps of Macon, Georgia, my grandfather’s hometown. When I returned to the front desk to notify the archivist I was finished with the maps, she was talking with a nattily dressed black fellow whose skin was the color of a gingersnap.

Last name? she said, So I can mark the maps returned.

Langston.

Well, I’ll be! the fellow gasped, my wife’s a Langston.

How wonderful, I said and stuck out my hand. Chip Langston. Charles Edward Langston, really.

Jim, he said. We shook hands and a smile spread across his face. Did you know the poet Langston Hughes was a Langston?

You bet, and the almost-forgotten John Mercer Langston was his great-uncle. I’ve been researching the Langstons for a while now. Langston Hughes, the pitcher Mark Langston, and the Parkinson researcher William Langston in California are the most famous ones these days.

I mean no disrespect, said Jim, settling on both feet and looking me squarely in the eye, but do you consider yourself white or black?

Never in my life had this Finnish-American ever been asked that! Ten years earlier, before I started this odyssey, I would have been horrified. Now I burst out with laughter and said, White.

Now there ain’t nothing wrong with having things mixed-up, Jim continued. My family comes from one of Sally Hemmings’ sisters. I’ve done a lot of looking into my family. Some of the family got so white they didn’t want to have anything to do with the black side of the family. You sure you’re white?

My mother’s parents immigrated from Finland and I’ve traced my dad’s ancestors back to England. I’m as white as they come.

He smiled again. Well I’ll be. For over twenty years now I’ve been telling my wife that there’s got to be some white Langstons out there, but she kept telling me, ‘No, no, no. The Langstons are all mixed.’ She said any Langston who said they’re white just didn’t want to admit to being part Native American and part black.

She must be from John Mercer’s line.

His eyes widened. You do know your Langstons! She says Langston is really a corrupted Indian name.

I can see why she’d say that as her ancestors came through Virginia’s Pamunkey Indian tribe, but the name didn’t show up in the tribe until the 1730’s. The Langstons came into Jamestown over a hundred years earlier, in 1635, from London.

You mean you got white in you? the archivist piped in looking at Jim. She had a round African face.

A lot of us do.

Ain’t no white in me.

Jim touched a finger to her wrist. How you think your skin got so light?

I’m all black, honey, she said, pulling her wrist away.

Honey, if you were all black, you’d be as black as an African. There’s been a whole lot of mixing over the years. A whole lot. How much you wanna’ bet you got some white in you?

She glared at Jim.

Well, the day you get the courage to look, Jim said, you tell me and I’ll help you find your roots.

By then in this odyssey, I realized how much courage, and how much tact, Jim exhibited in approaching this touchy subject with someone, even in his own race. He turned back to me, smiling ear-to-ear. Can’t wait to get home and tell my wife I met a white Langston today, one she’s probably related to!

Could you give her my e-mail address and phone number? I’d love to talk with her.

Oh, you bet.

After several weeks with no word from Jim’s wife, it was obvious his wife didn’t share our excitement. Although disappointed, I now understood her and the archivist’s reaction to the thought of having white ancestors; only a few years earlier, I’d felt the same bucket of worms in my stomach when I’d discovered blood-relations in black communities and Indian reservations. There’s nothing like finding members of different races in your family tree to shake things up. Back then I wouldn’t have given Jim my phone number or address, yet, oddly, I didn’t consider myself racist, or even prejudiced. But for the two years leading up to that October day at the archives, I had uncovered some ugly and painful truths about myself that I had worked through. Perhaps, if you have the courage to undertake your own family history odyssey, you, too, will have to meet face-to-face with some ugly truths.

My odyssey began with a mustard seed of curiosity planted by my oldest brother, Lee, during a phone call one wintry evening in 1994. He’d finished a business trip to Atlanta, and on a lark, had rented a car and driven south to Macon, Georgia. We had an old family history from our paternal-grandmother, sketched out in the 1930’s, that said Macon was the birthplace of both our paternal-grandfather and great-grandfather. He went to see what he could find.

I visited Macon’s genealogy library today, he said that evening. His excitement blistered through the phone. Our great-grandfather, Jason Langston, served in the Confederacy.

My jaw dropped.

His excitement, mind you, wasn’t rooted in Confederate pride, for we were born and raised Connecticut Yankees; it was that someone had any information about our long-dead great-grandfather. We hadn’t even a picture. All we had was the slim family history, and a few dozen photographs of our Augusta-born grandmother, and one of our Macon-born grandfather. Our father took the rest of the Langston family history with him to his early grave, a thick vein of heart disease being one legacy of our Southern gene pool.

Jesus, I said, next it’ll be slaves. We laughed with incredulity. Dad was born and raised in Augusta and, when he talked about growing up in the 1910-20s, which wasn’t often, he talked of tough times. The odds of our forebears having the means to own slaves was about the same as us being struck by lightening. Little did I know how soon it would be before I got clobbered.

Lee promised to fill me in on the details the next time we got together. Half of me wanted to know what he found. Half of me didn’t.

After we hung up, I wandered about my house, stooping to pick up the odds and ends my three-year-old had strewn about. But really, I was trying to acclimate myself to my newly found Rebel blood. Although I knew of our deep-Southern roots, it never occurred to me, or to any of my siblings, that our ancestors just might have fought for The Cause. On occasion, we speculated about what happened to the family when Sherman cauterized Georgia, but somehow we never envisioned them as being part of the armed rebellion; we’d always envisioned them as innocent bystanders. Perhaps it’s just human nature to envision one’s ancestors as chaste.

As for earlier ancestors, as Georgia was England’s penal colony, we figured they were debtors or some other rapscallions whom we desired never to dig up. Although our grandfather was born in Macon, Dad, Samuel Rodolphus Langston, was born in Augusta. In his faded sepia kindergarten class photograph, most of his twenty-eight classmates, dressed in their Sunday-best, stare at the camera with hard wary eyes. They already knew how hard life was. Only four are smiling. Dad, sticking his tongue out, is the only one having fun. From what little he said about his father, it was a troubled relationship. One afternoon in 1925, for some infraction, his father whipped him across the calves and didn’t stop until he reached meat. That was the last straw, and at age thirteen, he dropped out of school and looked for a job to support himself so he could live somewhere else.

My parernal grandmother, Onie Dobbins Langston, Aunt Gladys, and grandfather Rodolphus Stillwell Langston

It was the Roaring 20’s, and some of Augusta’s families profited in America’s booming economy. Some spent heavily and conspicuously, and the allure of monied people and the beauty my father saw in horses drew him to Augusta’s stables where he found work as a stable hand.

The black barn attendants took him under their wings and taught him the world of horses. But the day he climbed into a saddle, he discovered his gift. He was a natural. Soon people hired him not to muck their stalls, but to teach them riding and to compete their horses. He mastered it all: show jumping, fox hunting, dressage, polo, carriages, and he even trained a few to do tricks.

Even though his father died shortly thereafter and his mother married a man of means, a pocket full of money trumped school, and he stayed with the horses, a decision he regretted once he became a father. By the time the stock market crashed in 1929, he was a fixture in Augusta’s stables and remained employed. By the early 1930’s, though, money was tight. To make ends meet, he joined the caravans of horses, riders, and stable hands that trucked north to the summer camps where he taught riding. It was Prohibition, and to supplement their incomes, they smuggled kegs of liquor out of Canada lashed to the bottom of the water troughs.

The summer of 1936, he found himself at Camp Ha-Wa-Ya in the pine forests of Harrison, Maine. Mom, Eevi Elisabeth Taipalus, was the child of hardworking Finnish immigrants, devout Lutherans who enjoyed their traditional Sunday sauna. Despite the terrible times, her father remained employed by US Wire in Worcester, Massachusetts. After graduating from high school in 1934, she remained living at home. The summer of 1936, the family decided to vacation at Camp Ha-Wa-Ya.

Dad cut a dashing figure, both on and off a horse, and radiated Southern charm. He was a handsome man despite having his father’s ears, the tops of which drooped down a bit, the left one more so. Mom was a Scandinavian head-turner. It was love at first sight. Two weeks after meeting, they eloped, marrying on the 4th of July in nearby North Conway, New Hampshire.

My Parents, Samuel Rodolphus Langston and Eevi Elisabet Taipalus, 1936

It was an easy decision for me to stay in the North, Dad said. People had butter with their bread here. And in the North there were still enough monied-horse people to support the large family they wanted. He stabled his round-voweled Georgia accent, and for their first year of marriage, they settled in Tarreytown, New York, where Dad taught riding at a private school. Lee, their first child, was born here, but they longed for something more rural, and the next year they moved several hours north to the Connecticut Berkshires. The small city of Watertown had a knot of well-off horse lovers, and miles of New England fields and forests to fox hunt.

Bill was born next, right before America entered World War II. Although Dad’s pernicious high blood pressure kept him out of uniform, there was enough uncertainty about his status to put more children on hold. Due to the country’s all-out war effort, Dad left full-time employment with the horses and went to work in a factory in nearby Waterbury. At the end of the war, they bought their first home in the nearby small town of Morris, where the remaining five of us were born and raised. I still wonder if any part of this move was a thumb in the eye to his Southern kin for he couldn’t have settled any deeper north: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s birthplace was only ten miles away; John Brown’s only fifteen.

All seven of us kids rambled through the stoney fields and forests of the Berkshires, played with the dairy farmers’ kids and cows, and hobnobbed with Columbia University students who summered across the road from our home. We all graduated from Morris’s school system and grew up Connecticut Yankees. Only the occasional grits, okra, and fried chicken my mother learned how