Following emancipation, Jack Johnson had one main purpose: to reunite his household. Johnson had been enslaved in North Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, and had 10 youngsters with JoAnna, his first spouse, and one other 10 with Hettie Brown, his second spouse after enslavement.
Although Johnson managed to seek out 9 of the ten youngsters he had with JoAnna, the household fruitlessly tried to find the final youngster, Rufus. Johnson ultimately discovered that Rufus had been offered with two different enslaved folks to a plantation in Texas. However to this present day, Johnson’s descendants proceed to seek for Rufus’s dwelling relations.
From emancipation to reconstruction, Black households tried to reconnect after the destruction wrought by slavery. Previously enslaved folks always seemed for members of the family who, like Rufus, had been offered away. They positioned ads in newspapers, requested strangers, searched faces and returned to the lands on which that they had been enslaved in hopes of reuniting.
The custom of Black household reunions was born out of this search, and continues all through the US in the present day with lots of of 1000’s of households connecting, reconnecting and celebrating collectively yearly, normally all through the summer season.
The festivities are a time the place members of the family can meet for the primary time, catch up over the time handed since they final noticed one another and keep in mind relations who’ve handed away. They typically embrace educating and studying household ancestry and historical past, and cooking and sharing meals with conventional meals.
Practically two centuries after Johnson started gathering his household, his descendants met in New Orleans, Louisiana, for a household reunion. Persevering with Johnson’s legacy is central to the reunion’s theme. The household has a web site, began by Elaine Perryman, devoted to consolidating and spreading household historical past.
Ashanté Reese, an affiliate professor of African and African diaspora research on the College of Texas at Austin, has been researching Black gatherings for the final two and a half years, attending a number of household reunions throughout the nation.
“This can be a factor that makes reunion so particular, the custom that it comes from,” stated Reese. “Studying these ads, seeing that hope on paper, simply made me much more dedicated to this custom. These are individuals who have been utilizing the final little bit of cash or the final little bit of social capital they’ve. We have now all these things at our fingertips to have the ability to keep related. It feels essential to me to honor the longing of people that have been just lately emancipated by being invested on this custom.”
Christina McField was in command of organizing the Johnson household reunion this yr. Family who moved out of the area, similar to cousins from Colorado, California, Ohio, Oregon, all journeyed south to unite.
“All of us are nonetheless coming collectively for this household reunion and we’re nonetheless discovering out about increasingly more members of the family,” stated McField, who’s from Mississippi, the place the household originated. “It appears to unfold and get greater yearly.”
‘To the land the place it began’
The reunions Reese surveyed have been in public areas, and people who got here collectively made the areas their very own. “Black folks gathering in giant portions in parks is a radical act after we take into consideration how public area has been weaponized in opposition to Black folks,” she stated. “It by no means stopped being superb to me that 200 or 300 people would get collectively and take over a park for a day.”
One of many causes that locations have turn out to be essential for household reunions is displacement and land loss. However for households that may return to their ancestral lands, doing so may be lovely. This yr, as a result of the Johnson household was so near Mississippi, after the reunion in close by New Orleans, a number of folks determined to drive “to the land the place it began”, McField stated.
McField, an artist whose work is now on view on the Mississippi Museum of Art (MMA), stated that her artwork was derived from the land and tales her mom instructed her about members of the family who lived there. She’s impressed by folks like Isiah Jones, father-in-law of Mattie Hazeline Johnson Jones, who was the granddaughter of Jack Johnson. McField’s childhood residence included heirlooms handed down by means of the generations, together with a desk from Jones that can also be on view on the MMA.
Hiweda Jones, McField’s mom, stated that she was simply glad to have the ability to breathe within the air when she returned to Mississippi together with her youngsters who had by no means been earlier than. She final visited the household’s land about 40 years in the past, together with her sister and Mattie Jones, who shared tales about her grandfather. He had 10 youngsters born into slavery and managed to seek out all however one after emancipation. Assembly with Perryman, who McField and Jones stated confirmed the household lore with a report, has been significantly shifting for them.
“I don’t have the phrases to explain how I felt throughout that point, up on the porch round the home,” Jones stated. “We have been capable of stroll up in there and take photos all by means of the timber. It was breathtaking.”
‘Each one among us has a narrative’
In 1926, the Quander household of Virginia and Washington DC held their first household reunion in Woodlawn, Virginia, close to the Woodlawn plantation, the place family members personal land.
The Quander household is taken into account the oldest documented Black American household, with roots tracing again to the 1600s, earlier than the US was a rustic. The Quanders of Maryland, the second principal department of the household in the present day, started their very own household reunion custom in 1974.
Rohulamin Quander instructed the Guardian that he hopes these household reunions educate folks from all households the significance of their ancestors. “Each one among us has a narrative,” stated Quander. “Your story can tie you into an ancestor who labored very onerous to make it doable for the longer term generations to have one thing. It’s so essential for African People to know and perceive that the heroes and their sheroes are sometimes proper there of their household.”
Reuniting annually offers the Quander household a chance to internalize their historical past and ancestry. “We wanted to cease, have a look, recollect, and share what the forebears did in order that we perceive that grandma’s fingers could have been arthritic, could have been gnawed up, could have been very drained, she could have been stooped, however she [supported] the longer term. She didn’t essentially reside to see the success that her youngsters or grandchildren or great-grandchildren reached. However we’re standing on that bent-over again.”
Quander stated that the primary Quander reunion occurred in 1925, after the household had three deaths in fast succession. They realized they need to come collectively to have fun, not solely to mourn, and deliberate the occasion by way of letter. Forty-two folks confirmed up. Vestiges of that household reunion proceed in the present day, such because the menu: “fried rooster and all the things that goes with it”. They’ve come collectively yearly since, apart from a spell throughout the second world conflict after which once more in 2020 on the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, once they met by way of Zoom as an alternative. This yr, for the a centesimal reunion, the Quanders had a three-day occasion, which included a program at Howard College, a picnic at Mount Vernon and a sit-down dinner.
‘It doesn’t matter if it’s 5 or 50 folks’
Although common gatherings amongst Black households aren’t uncommon or distinctive, they aren’t normally thought-about a household reunion in the event that they lack some of the lasting identifiers: a reunion T-shirt. “Having that creative, inventive, sartorial alternative as part of the reunion is basically essential, too,” Reese stated. “The shirts are nearly uniformity. They let you know issues concerning the household. They let you know concerning the type and the preferences for that exact yr.”
For Sade Meeks, who instructed the Guardian that although her household meets yearly for holidays, it wasn’t till this yr, when her cousin designed shirts for the gathering, that she started to think about it as a household reunion. “It doesn’t matter if it’s 5 or 50 folks. We have now this notion like if it’s not 100 folks in T-shirts, it’s not a reunion,” she stated. “I feel we now have to shift our perspective and perceive prefer it’s not concerning the numbers, it’s actually about simply being collectively.”
Bringing household from California and Chicago collectively in Mississippi was one thing that was essential to all of the generations within the Meeks household. It allowed for intergenerational moments, like when Meeks’s mother joined within the kitchen to show her cousin tips on how to cook dinner whiting.
Meeks remembered being aggravated together with her late uncle, who would all the time take photographs at household gatherings, when she was rising up. However this yr, she was the one to take the photographs. “Someone has to do it, as a result of we’re going to look again and this can be all we now have,” she stated. “Generally we don’t notice how essential photographs are with regards to reminiscences and issues like that.”
Whereas attending varied household reunions, Reese stated that she would ask the younger folks, lots of whom have been of their 20s and 30s, round her what they thought concerning the gathering.
“One of many issues that they stated was: ‘No person ever asks us our opinion. They need us to come back, they need us to assist, however they don’t ask us concerning the planning,’” she stated. Folks she’d discuss to would have massive concepts for the way they’d run issues or simply small tweaks or additions they’d make to the schedule, however they have been by no means included when it got here to organizing the reunion.
McField, who’s in her 30s, didn’t need to go at planning the Johnson household reunion alone; Perryman, who’s a extra senior member of the household, helped act as a information and offered assist. Nevertheless it was additionally essential to McField that she tackle the accountability – and now she will be able to act as proof to different youthful those who it’s one thing they will do as effectively.
“We want extra folks to see the worth in wanting to maintain this going, the worth in studying about our household’s historical past,” McField stated. “The following era from us has already began. If we don’t take it on, there’s extra people who find themselves passing away. If it goes flat, it disappears once more. I need to construct off of what we simply did, the camaraderie and the thrill from it.”