Cultural Gumbo, Our Roots, Our Stories

Copyright © 2017 by Marian Olivia Heath Griffin.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2018905334

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-9845-2573-4

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter I   Origins: Our African Homeland

Chapter II   Ancestors of George Wesley Heath

Chapter III   Ancestors of Lettie Sidney Harper Heath

Chapter IV   Louisiana Is Your Home

Chapter V   Ancestors of Robichaux Griffin

Chapter VI   Our Generations of Griffins

Conclusion

Bibliography

Selected Readings

Peter Wise, U.S. Colored Troops Military Service Records

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

L ET ME SAY thanks to my little cousin, Janet Nock Moreno. I say little cousin because I diapered and fed her when she was ten months old when we visited my grandparents and her grandparents in Virginia. (Her grandmother, Annie Elizabeth Wise Jones, and my grandmother, Hattie Drucilla Wise Heath, were sisters.) I owe much of the credit to Janet for Photoshop expertise and some research about the Wise and Heath families. Thanks to her brother, Martin Anthony Nock, who reintroduced Janet to me.

To Bertrand’s first cousin Rose Brown Kelly, I say thanks for listening as a small child as the old folk talked about Jones-Griffin family history. Moreover, conversations with Nettie Harris Griffin enhanced my knowledge of the Griffin family.

To our Gillespie cousins, Saundra and Francis Gillespie (Francis died today) and his younger brother Allen Levi Gillespie for their help with genealogy charts, and to Bessie (Gillespie) Berry Lawrence for invaluable family information.

To Sallie Gillespie Newman and her daughter Brenda (Bert’s first and second cousins, who made me go dig and search for information by saying, "I better let that alone, Marian.’ Further acknowledgments go to my lovely children who put me back to work on this book: Bertrand II, Karen Griffin Phenix, and Michael Gerard Griffin are hard task masters and helped with the research on Ancestry.com. Bertrand II and Kotosha read and edited this book for which I am most appreciative.

I cannot leave out my eight beautiful grandchildren: Nia, Kiara, Christian-Paris, Michael II, AmeliaGrai, Victoria, Olivia, and Sophia, especially the three, AmeliaGrai, Christian-Paris, and Michael II, who had to do projects at their schools to trace their heritage. My sister Nancy and her husband, Albert L. Kellam Jr., my two brothers George Wesley Heath Jr. and Joseph Burton Heath and his wife Barbara Heath all helped. We had lots of laughs.

I have a young cousin, Saundra Anderson Brickhouse, and an older cousin, Dr.George Edward Heath, who still live in Virginia and lent invaluable conversations and interviews about the old days back in Virginia.

And then there is Dorothy Smith Collins, a church member at St. Mark United Methodist Church-Baton Rouge, who shared Heath family information with me. She has Heaths in her family. Another church member, Eunice Simmons from Ghana, accepted me back into the fold and we say cousins, now. I have had conversations with Melvin and Sylvia Sanders, who are also church members of St. Mark because my husband Bertrand’s gandmother and great-grandparents were Sally Sanders and Elizabeth Lizzie and Archie Sanders, all from Louisiana.

Special thanks go to Stephanie and Aristide Marshall for lending a hand and advice in publishing this book.

Conversations with James V. Haydel, our grandchildren’s apa and Leah Chase, our grandchildren’s great grandmother, gave much encouragement.

I am grateful to the genealogy staffs in the East Baton Rouge Parish Main Library on Goodwood Boulevard and the library staff, Carol, Chad, and Jenifer at the Scotlandville Branch Library on Scenic Highway, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who are to be commended for their assistance in researching data.

Last but not least, to my husband, Bertrand Griffin, who gave me love and support and stayed out of my way. I love you all.

INTRODUCTION

Historical Perspective

O VER FIFTY YEARS ago, when I was in college at Delaware State University (then college), I became thoroughly interested in African studies and the continent of my ancestors. We had African students on our campus. Every chance that I got, I questioned them about their village, town, or city. The information that I received was almost nil from all but one of these students.

Jonah was interested in me, so he was always full of talk. He was from Morocco, North Africa. His description of his country made me want to go and see for myself, as my mother constantly told my brothers and sisters and me as children. I was always picking up books, maps, and geography points and history about Africa and America to get a better understanding of my family and myself.

My mother, Lettie Sidney Harper Heath, was my first storyteller, musician, and travel agent. She read to us when we were very young children and told us stories that her grandfather, John Fountain, a freed slave, had told her about peoples far and near. She taught us how to read storybooks, maps, magazines, and newspapers. Daddy had the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper and New York Times mailed to our house in Greenwood, Delaware ever since I can remember.

Mother wished for us to know how to play a musical instrument as well. We always had a piano in our home, but Mother insisted that my siblings and I learn more than one instrument. She wanted us to learn everything this world had to offer.

Go and see for yourself and You are no better or worse than anybody else as well as You are too mixed up to hate anyone were her favorite sayings to us.

I did not understand my mother’s words, but I sensed that she was trying to teach us to love God and love thyself, as well as love your neighbor as yourself.

My mother was trying to tell us that our roots are buried in every race and nation known to mankind a cultural gumbo, a mixture of our roots and blood under one God. This is our heritage.

In college and graduate school, I took several courses in African studies and archeology. My sociology and psychology majors revealed much about the sociological, psychological, physical, economic, and cultural stance of my people. I started several books about my family lifemy mother and father’s relationship with each other and with their children.

I finally realized that I could not write a book as a documentary but as a narrative about our lives. And so I do want my grandchildren to know that we are not just a part of history and from several countries, in fact continents. We are human too. The anecdotes in this book prove that we are a proud people, human with greatness within us.

I said to my grandchildren, "My mother, my grandmothers and grandfathers as well as other elderly persons in our communities (I say communities because my folk lived in the Mid-Atlantic states) were wise beyond their years, and we reaped the benefits of their knowledge, thoughts, and understanding.

It is amazing how much one learns, remembers, and experiences as a small child. It is even more amazing how much one remembers when old age creeps up on you as it has done me."

THIS IS HOW IT ALL STARTED

W HEN MY THIRD granddaughter, eight-year-old Amelia Grai Griffin, came home to her parents, Tracie and Michael Griffin, with a third-grade assignment to trace her heritage and ancestry and my two grandsons, Christian-Paris and Mike, had the same basic assignment a year earlier, I started gathering pictures of myself, my husband, Bertrand, and our parents and grandparents to make photo albums. I realized that Amelia and my other grandchildren deserved more than just pictures. They deserved the oral tradition of our family-our roots and history. I began writing this historical novel because I felt that they had a right to know what and who their people were and where they came from in light of history.

I want to emphasize that this book contains an autobiographical, subjective, and oral history of my family. I have attempted to keep an open mind about my subjective oral tradition, but was in fear of hurting family members. Therefore, many names and incidents have been deleted due to the violent and terrible times and events that have happened over the decades and even centuries.

Our extended family is a cultural gumbo, a blend and mixture of African, European, especially English, French, and Irish, Asian, Native American,South and North American ancestry.

In 1997, I became Director of International Student Services at Southern University in Baton Rouge. Realizing the need to assist these students have a more cohesive life, I founded a group called Cultural Gumbo and worked with therapy groups. Each semester, we sponsored programs that flourished as a close-knit group of students from China, Africa, Canada, France, England, and the Middle Eastern states as well as students from the United States. Thus it was incumbent upon me to study their culture and form a bridge between these students, nurturing them and activating a sense of pride in who they were, no matter what their race.

We are considered Negro, colored, Afro-American, and now black Americans. In my large extended family, intermarriage or mingling was imminent. We can be very proud of our ancestry. I am instilling in my children and grandchildren that although there were slaves in our background, we are heirs of African empires. We were flourishing as kings, inventors, builders of homes and ships, scientists, doctors and healers, religious leaders, teachers, merchants and businessmen in Africa.

We are to be accepted as strong, resilient human beings because our people subdued severe hardships, physical and mental anguish, illnesses, conflicts and war in our own homeland. We were courageous enough to survive.

Our World Travels

We as a family have traveled the world over searching for family history, but the most important experience we had was the missionary tour to West Africa.

For almost three months-April, May, and June in 2005-my sister Nancy, my husband Bertrand and I went to Senegal, Western Africa to serve as missionaries along with five other missionaries from the Louisiana United Methodist Church, United States.

We toured Senegal, Modern Mali, Senegal River, Niger River, and the fascinating, yet depressing Goree Island. City-states, villages, nomadic peoples of many races, languages, and religions were seen and heard in the marketplaces, on ships, in the airports, on buses and trains. Our modes of transportation were widely varied.

The whole time we were there in Western Africa, my feelings were raw. I had odd sensations. I felt home. I was home. I felt a strange kinship with these people. They were in such a state of depression I felt a calling to reach these people because my grandmother Hattie had told me about her great-grandmother who had come from Mali, West Africa, as a young girl to the colonies.Grandmom Hattie explained to me that our ancestors had traveled on a ship as slaves several centuries ago, never to return to their family in Africa.

My search for family history and family names has taken my travel partners and me to all fifty of the United States of America, six of the seven continents, throughout the Holy Land: Jerusalem, Israel, Sinai Cana, Sea of Galilee, Palestine and the Wailing Wall, to name a few. So many beautiful as well as tragic sights to see!

European countries traveled included England, France, Rome and Naples, Italy, the Vatican, Russia, Finland, Turkey and Greece, Spain and Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.We were in a tour club from Southern University.

Australia is a beautiful country, seemingly very rich. Sidney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Queensland and Victoria, Great Barrier Reef, New Zealand, and Phillips Island were places our travel group from Southern University went.It was a great experience, but we did not see any aboriginal people except on a ship as crew members.

Further, we entered Canada from several different United States borders, including Washington State borders into Vancouver, from Detroit border into Windsor, from New York borders into Niagara Falls and Montreal. Our main interest, however, was to enter Canada through Portland, Maine into Digby and Halifax, Nova Scotia, to trace the Underground Railroad from the southern states of North and South Carolina to New York and Portland, Maine into Canada.

We have taken tons of cruises into Central and South America, Bahamas, Jamaica, Yucatan, Belize, Honduras, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Venezuela, Columbia, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Cayman Island, Costa Rica, Panama, St. Thomas.

Then there are the African nations-Kenya, Egypt and the Nile River, Senegal and the Senegal and Niger Rivers, Modern Mali, Morocco and Togo-which we visited to name a few. We set out to see the world and to find from whence we came.

Suffice it to say that a part of our background came from European nations, which will be discussed in later chapters. I have accepted the task of attempting to reconstruct my family history. I have traveled near and far with my family, my sister, Nancy, and her husband Albert and my husband Bertrand to look-see at places that directly or indirectly have some bearing on our roots, our stories.

My Sources

I have sought a variety of sources and materials from oral tradition and history, interviews with older relatives, museums, and libraries. Others include the African American Resource Center in New Orleans, Family Source, Place Keeper (East Baton Rouge Library Genealogy Section), and Ancestry.com. I have attended genealogy classes in the East Baton Rouge Parish Main Library, Louisiana, and have sought help in the Louisiana State Archives in Baton Rouge, searching for my husband Bertrand’s ancestors. Further, I have looked at birth certificates, marriage certificates and death certificates, and United States Federal Census Reports. We visited grave sites in Louisiana and Delaware and have researched genealogical records in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in search of family members who may have been a part of the Underground Railroad from the southern and northern states into Canada. When we started out on this venture, there was no DNA or Ancestry.com or Wikipedia to assist in this type of adventure.

I have learned from historical and traditional accounts that Africans did not come to the United States of America empty-handed or empty-headed. We have made contributions and have given of ourselves for the betterment of humankind.

We have always aimed to protect our civil rights, our right to vote, to encourage intellectual and educational development and enhance social and economic advancement. We are proud of our black heritage and have always fought for justice and dignity within our ranks.

Dr. Yosef A.A. Ben-Jochannan wrote in his bookBlack Man of the Nile and His Family that the African people need to re-identify with their great ancestral heritage. The Black man must return to his temples in Ethiopia and Egypt and read his age old reminder which emphatically states to him and the world these prophetic words, Man Know Yourself.

I have read numerous books and articles, gone to grave sites, visited fifty states of the United States of America and traveled to six of the seven continents because it is all God’s country and I feel that this world belongs to all of us.

I have taken courses in undergraduate and masters degrees studies about Africa, Afro-American slavery, Underground Railroad and genealogy. I was looking for names of my family members, places and locales, and ancestry through genealogical research. This was before I was made aware of Ancestry.com.

One thing I learned through the years as I did research in documents and books and did not find my family names is that slave families have to write their own history. I searched and searched for family names and narratives that I had heard mentioned since I was a child and after I became married. Very little is written on paper about my family or my husband’s family. This is why names became so important to me,both first names and last names. Much can be learned about yourself and the person who named you.

I realized that the black man, the indigenous African and his descendants, must write about himself, his culture and his continent Africa (Alkebu-lan). Ben-Jochannan relates that no one cares about another man’s history to the point where he can feel the value of the inheritors. When a man’s history is written by his master’s religion or economic philosophy, such history is distorted to suit the master-slave relationship.

Such paternalism that this relationship develops apparently forces one to feel superior to the other. If the history of such a relationship is of a long duration, the captured begins to accept the status of inferiority" Ben.p.3.

We went out each morning from a big beautiful three-story home in Senegal, West Africa, to minister to the children and adults alike, feeding infants and children, dispensing medicine, teaching music and vacation Bible school, whatever was needed in a particular community.

Several tour guides on this missionary trip expressed that there were at least twenty million Africans pressed into servitude or slavery during the three or more centuries of the Atlantic slave trade.

This early prehistory of mankind is called the Old Stone Age, dating back over a half million years ago.

For centuries, African groups learned to travel up and down the Nile and Congo Rivers and smaller waters such as the Niger and Senegal Rivers. Scientists and archeologists have dated mankind back to inhabitants of Africa over two million years ago. In that long period of time African peoples made canoes and ships which allowed them to travel farther from home, our tour guide John explained to us. He asked us to call him Beloved John.

The Africans learned to live in clans and tribes, which developed the family life and relationships. They went in groups to Asia Minor, China, Arabia, East Indies, Japan, and Europe and from the Strait of Gibraltar where Nancy and I and thirty five other tourists from Baton Rouge stood on April 26, 2015.

Africans went into Spain, Portugal, France, England, Wales, and Ireland. There was a pre-Columbian presence of Africans in the New World. The first Africans to enter the New World were not in bondage. They participated in some of the first explorations along with Spanish people into what is now the United States of America.

John G. Jackson gave much insight to us in his book, Introduction to African Civilization: Moreover, studies of archaeologist revealed sightings that large stone heads dating back to the second century B.C. were of African physiognomy which have been unearthed in Mexico by several archaeological parties. The first of these large stone heads to be brought to the attention of the outside world was found in Veracruz. Our early background throughout the world pre-dates slavery in this country by almost a million years. Jackson, p.20.

Thanks, Amelia Grai, Michael, lI and Christian-Paris for asking us to continue the search for generations of hidden family history, which our children, Bertrand II, Karen, and Michael have been hounding us to do for years.Also, thanks to Kotosha and Bertrand II for editing and proofreading the galley!

It has been a pleasure to contact relatives that we have not seen in many years, in fact since childhood. It has brought me more in touch with myself and the actual existence of mankind. I realize that it is biblical that a little child shall lead us.

CHAPTER I

Origins: Our African Homeland

Mali/Ghana/Senegal

D EAR GRANDCHILDREN, NIA, Kiara, Christian-Paris, Michael II, Amelia Grai, Victoria, Olivia, and Sophia

It is New Year’s Day, January 1, 2017. It is a beautiful snowy day, which is unusual in Baton Rouge. This is the capital city in Louisiana, and it seldom snows. The snow fell heavily last night on New Year’s Eve. Today is so special to me because I have all eight of you with me.

Several of you have asked me to tell you about your ancestors and where we came from, I said.

Let me move forward and give you the scoop on our African heritage. We are from West Africa. This is where it all began, where life began for us. You see, you came from a noble tribe of Africans from Segu, which is on the Niger River. Many facts and fables were handed down orally to introduce children and adults alike about the traditions and heroic narratives of the Bambara tribe, I said.

Grandma, my oldest beautiful granddaughter, Nia, asked, are you going to give us a world history lesson?

Yes and no, I said. We are going to delve into our own background and see where our forefathers and mothers came from and how they got here.

You see, the African American’s genealogies are, at best, fractured and dismembered due to the separation of families through slavery. There are stories, histories, truths, and myths to be discovered and recognized as much as possible. Slavery crosses centuries and time lines, continents and waters, and main lands, I told my little ones.

Basically, all the continents, especially Africa, Europe, and the Americas were interwoven with the onslaught of African slavery. We should look at African history and the whole concept of slavery as it is related to world history, I said.

Grandma, I want a story, my little Bandit, Victoria, said.

I’m going to tell you a story. It’s a long, long story. I’m going to learn from you and you will learn from me, I quipped. "I will tell you the story in parts.

There was a man named Harold G. Lawrence who asserts in his infamous monograph African Explorers of the New World" that Africans were in the Americas before slavery periods," I said.

"That the Africans voyaged across the Atlantic Ocean before the era of Christopher Columbus is no recent belief. The Mandingoes of the Mali and Songhay Empires crossed the Atlantic to carry on trade with the Western Hemisphere Indians and further succeeded in establishing colonies in the South and North Americas, said Lawrence.

"Our forefathers from Africa once lived in a society where university and higher educational life was fairly common and scholars were revered. In fact, Africans were cultured before they came to the Americas. The upper-class systems were the nobles, kings, chiefs, lords, magic makers, and djeli (storytellers and music makers),we were told by tour guides in Senegal.

"Victoria, Olivia, and Sophia, you would have loved the dieli because they told stories and played and sang music for family events," I told the little children.

"I mentioned the Bambara Tribe, which founded and established the Mali nation in the seventeenth century. Moreover, Africa has always had a caste system. There was forever the lowest class -the slaves. In Africa the slave class as it was then, may not even have been a part of history. Slavery in Africa developed as probably elsewhere, as a result of contact between different and varied cultures and civilizations.

The institutions of war, trade and power were conditions ripe for slavery that actually developed in Africa. Tribal lords were constantly in battle in the city-states of Mali and the Gold Coast. The indigenous peoples migrated, merged and intermarried within these tribal villages. Jealousies and strife were common occurrences of the day. However, there were peaceful times too.

"Studies and oral history revealed by tour guides in Senegal, Mali, Kenya, Morocco, and Egypt (I took very good notes on these tours while we were in Western and Northern Africa) that slavery began developing well before the seventh century. For example, in such states and empires as Baisa, Silla, and Ghana, then the Gold Coast, there was a considerable number of children stolen, captured, and carried off and exchanged or sold for wool, glass, copper, and gold.

"Even the kings’ palaces were not exempt from having children taken from their homes. When the capture of slaves necessitated long journeys, such warring countries as Ghana supplied horses, supplies, and