Digging Into My Family's Racist History Turned Up Truths America Is Still Wrestling With

Time

The author is with her grandparents.

I associated genealogy with the Bible and an old family tree my father showed me, as well as my reverence for the Old South. I wanted to be as little like him and his branch of my family as possible because he was an avowed white supremacist. I never expected to be interested in genealogy. I grew up hearing about the Texan misfits, so when I started researching my ancestors, only my mother's side interested me. I wonder if my maternal grandmother's father was a communist in the early 20th century. Did my mom's father really marry 13 times? Is it possible that his father killed a man with a hay hook? I slowly confirmed these stories. Granny's father was a member of the Dallas County Local of Socialists. My mom's father married at least ten times. My great-grandfather killed a man with a hay hook, though it was an accident outside a feed store, rather than the bar fight I had imagined.

I was interested in researching my father's family because they didn't want me to know things. My sleuthing began in a spirit of defiance and self-righteousness. I wanted to expose every lie, hypocrisy, and secret that my dad had to say about our blood being an honor. I had a sense of failing to measure up against our forebears when I failed him by not being as smart as I was expected to be. I decided to reject my paternal clan first because I thought they might reject you even if you were born into it.

In my twenties or thirties, I started asking about the sisters of my grandpa. When I was a child, my dad told me that Maude had trained as an architect and designed her own house, surprising accomplishments for a woman of her generation in the Mississippi Delta. He referred to her as a person of distinction, a woman of note, a family counterpart to Amelia Earhart, but he never referred to her simply as Maude. At the age of 30 I decided to start publishing stories about my family on the internet in an homage to irony, perversity, projection, and a desire to shield the innocent, and I named them "MaudNewton". My name is Rebecca. When I decided to use a pseudonym, I didn't expect to actually answer to the name.

We traveled to see our grandparents in Mississippi a lot around that time. I waited until the four of us were in the car for the drive home. I asked Grandpa if he knew anything about Maude. Was she an architect? She might have actually designed her own house.

Grandpa's silver-white hair picked up the glow of the streetlights. He spoke slowly because of his drawl but also because of his thought. The thing they used to say about Maude was precise.

They don't want to hear that old story, Richard. Her eyes looked worried as her mouth was turned down.

I said yes.

My sister said that their expression of interest in their family was rare.

Grandpa hesitated and then went crazy. He said that great-Aunt Maude designed her own house. She sat in a lawn chair and called out for things to be done.

The voice had risen an octave.

The magnolias were not looked at by anyone. Grandpa told us that Maude threw pepper in her husband's eyes because she didn't like being married.

She said that she can't believe how the neighbors have let their hedges go.

We never did because Grandpa said we would have to talk about Maude some other day. He died in the fall of 2008 and I lost my source of information. The research into her and the rest of theNewtons intensified. I was able to find out from Grandpa's first cousin that he had been a teacher, but not much more.

I searched newspaper archives for her married name. I found a photo of Maude in 1977 when she was 92 years old, sitting in a King Midget car. The World's Most Inexpensive Car was assembled from a kit and reached the Mississippi Delta. James Dickerson wrote a profile of Maude for the Delta Democrat-Times.

When she retired from the public school system nine years later, she saw a National Geographic ad looking for Midget Motor Corporation dealers, according to this article. She volunteered to be the dealer for Sunflower County, Mississippi. She was sold a car at a discounted rate by the company.

When the car was shipped down on a train from Ohio, Dickinson said that Maude was eighty or so. When Main Street arrived, it was filled with curiosity seekers. She had no idea how to use it. She said that her family didn't want her to do it. I listened to them for a while. I told the company to send me a car after I wrote the company, though I related most to the disapproving Mississippi Delta family.

Dickerson describes a house filled with stacks of books and magazines as common. She told him she met her husband in Indiana, where she worked in an architectural office.

She remembered teaching in Southern Mississippi in 1910, when Mark Twain died. When the comet came over, we all went outside to look. I knew he was born shortly after I read this. She died at the age of ninety-seven.

I was able to hope that she was a real person.

I dug deeper with this new information. I knew that her family was poor when she was a child. She was twenty years old when her father died. Four years after graduating from Grenada College, Maude obtained a bachelor of letters degree. I don't know how she was able to attend.

I have found records that show that she married Simmons in Indiana in 1912, despite the fact that she implied in the Delta Democrat-Times profile that she met her husband at an architectural office prior to 1910. Simmons & Simmons was the architectural firm that the couple ran a solicitation for in 1915. Simmons and Simmons, architects, have opened an office, according to the ad. Mr. Simmons has been in the profession for twelve years. Mrs. Simmons is a graduate of the college and has taken a course in advanced designing and engineering. A number of bungalows were designed by her.

I felt sad reading this. I thought that the Delta sucked her back in because she was so close to escaping Mississippi. It's not possible to know the real story of the end of the marriage. Maybe that was the story in the community for a time, but the 1930 and 1940 censuses indicate that she was divorced. Royal had re-marryed by 1930.

John said that the lineage produced an unusual number of old maids, a course I could easily imagine having decided on for myself. The children of JesseNewton, my fourth great-grandfather, were likely sons of an unmarried woman.

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Maude was a writer. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History has a collection of newspaper articles, local interest items, and letters. Her column dealt with a variety of subjects, including births, deaths, church and school news, politics, sports, topics of community interest, visitors, and poetry composed by Simmons or published authors.

Was the archives mostly church-supper bulletins? Is it opinion or opinion? Whatever else they might be, one thing is certain: They were civil-rights era dispatches from the very town where, in 1955, civil-rights activist Medgar Evers was murdered, and from the state where, in 1963, the lynching of civil-rights activist Emmett Till led to a

I was anxious to read her writing. I hired a researcher to look at the archives after the library said the microfilm was too badly eroded to be copied. She gave me paper copies of her writings. New Year's celebrations, customs, and superstitions from around the world were offered in the first article published in 1968. The first, published November 14, 1968, begins with a section on car trouble. Her car was out of commission for four months. The company shipped the wrong parts. A member of the shop said that she had good news for you if you didn't have enough trouble deciding how to vote. The parts were broken by the mechanic.

I chuckled. I realized the timing. George Wallace was the independent segregationist presidential candidate who won the state.

Soon came a dispatch about fishing and playing with little Negro boys on a plantation in Mississippi, until a crop failure from cutworms. After their father died, her teenage brothers started farming and later added a general store.

Everything I was worried about was in the packet. In notes for an article, she criticized Lyndon Johnson for his "fuzzy- thinking" and "wishy-washy policies". She warned readers that if they didn't, their little girl would be integrated with little Negro boys and grow up on intimate social terms. She retired in 1968.

There is a rumor that Congress is going to pass a bill that will discriminate against the white people in six Southern States. She says that Mississippi is one of them and that an average of 70 Negroes go to Indianola to register every day. In the South, a lot of Negroes don't know their ages. She writes that it will be possible for many under voting age to register and vote.