FAMILY TREASURES -- A Family's Journey from Slavery to Freedom

     Recently I drove 371 miles and traveled nearly 170 years back in time in search of a family treasure. The odyssey was a veritable Baskin & Robbins of ironies in flavors ranging from sweet to bitter, and far beyond. At the end of it, not only did I find a greater treasure than I could ever have imagined, I also found a piece of myself and learned important lessons about what it means to be an American in this still not-perfect union.

A Productive Trip -- Treasure Hunt Included
     When I learned that the annual meeting of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel (ACTEC) http://www.actec.org/about/description-of-the-college/ was going to be in Florida, it seemed like a perfect way to do some personal research while brushing up on my continuing education. It is a sweet irony that I’m the only African-American fellow in the College despite the good intentions of the College, and that my membership in the organization allowed me to tap Florida contacts among the 2700 esteemed trust and estates lawyer’s group to help track down the original 1846 will of my great-great-great-great grandfather, John Sutton. John, a white man in Duval County Florida had used the will to emancipate my great-great-great-great grandmother, who was described in the Will as Lucy, a mulatto slave. John’s will also emancipated John and Lucy’s eight children and six grandchildren.

     It was an apparent miracle that the will had, against all odds, survived the great fire of Jacksonville in 1901 that had destroyed most of the town including most public records. As a result of digging by ACTEC friends, I had obtained a photograph of the will over a year ago and had read it searching for, but not finding, any sign that John had a white family as well. The lack of a white family suggested to me that John and Lucy had made a household together though he owned her as property, solemnizing their relationship in the only way they could, at a time and place where it was flat out illegal and downright deadly to treat interracial liaisons as real relationships.

     Deciding to drive to Jacksonville as long as I was going to be in Florida at Marco Island seemed to make sense -- until I looked at a map and discovered that it is virtually impossible for two cities in Florida to be further from one another.

Preparing to Count the Lynchings Along the Way 
     My lover, Jeffrey, who is white, and I decided before we began our adventure that a fitting way to break up the tedium of the drive across the relentless flatness that is Florida, was to make note of the number of lynchings that took place in each county we’d pass through, and pledge to make a donation for each of those lost souls to the Equal Justice Initiative. EJI’s work on issues of justice and race was featured in a recent New York Times article about the 4,000 lynchings belying America’s promises of equality and justice, and so we were aware of a goal of the EJI to raise funds to place markers for each of them.  http://eji.org/

     As I showered that Wednesday morning (the day the US Justice Department was to release its report on the Ferguson police department), I wondered how I would react when I put my hand on the place where John Sutton had marked his “X” on January 24, 1846, and changed forever the course of history for the hundreds of his and Lucy’s descendants. Would I cry? Was I prepared for the emotional surge I might feel when I touched the paper?

     The image that kept coming to my mind as I stood under the steaming water was a scene from the movie “Selma”. In that scene, Coretta Scott King, who had largely stayed away from the front lines of the battles led by her husband, fretted over whether she was adequately prepared to meet with Malcolm X as her husband was sitting in jail. Amelia Boynton Robinson, who had been actively involved in Civil Rights agitations, linked arms with Mrs. King and the two elegant ladies strode together toward Mrs. King’s rendez-vous with history. “I’ll tell you what I know to be true. It helps me at times when I’m feeling unsure, if you’d like,” Mrs. Boynton said to Mrs. King. “I know that we are descendants of a mighty people who gave civilization to the world. People who survived the hulls of slave ships across vast oceans. People who innovate, and create and love despite pressures and tortures unimaginable. They’re in our bloodstream pumping our hearts every second. They prepared you. You are already prepared.”

Two Conspicuous Gay Guys Go To the Courthouse 
     Jeffrey and I started the drive from Marco Island on the Southwest coast of Florida and as we drove Northwest, we got further “Down South”. In the end, we arrived at the Duval County Courthouse, having marked 125 lynchings in the counties we’d crossed, replete with place names like “Cracker Crossing.” I should have been exhausted after 5-1/2 hours in the rental, but instead I was buzzing with excitement. I felt like we stood out, two obviously gay men, complete with jaunty summer fedoras, casually sashaying up to the metal detectors. At the time I had forgotten that Duval was one of the Florida counties where the clerk has defiantly refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

     Once inside the probate records department, and after struggling with dismissive functionaries who initially insisted that they did not know where to look for the file that I’d arranged to retrieve the week before, the file was located on a supervisor’s desk. I was handed a small redwell file the size of ladies’ clutch purse.

Hand To Hand Across the Ages
     My hands trembled as I undid the elastic band around the file and I pulled out the four dozen or so pages that made up the probate file of John Sutton. Jeffrey videotaped me nearly hyperventilating as I pulled out the ancient will, handwritten in elegant calligraphy on tea colored parchment with ink faded brown over the last century and a half. The envelope in which the will had been filed was sealed with scarlet wax, still vibrant after all this time. I put my finger on the “X” that my ancestor had made, and felt a vortex of time envelope me. But my reverie was short, as my lawyer’s mind suddenly wondered what were all these other pages in the file? A probate file is like the biography of a death. It begins at the end of a life and lasts until all that was left has all been given away.

A Diversion for Important Personal Facts 
     I put the will aside and began leafing through the other documents. At this point, I have to provide two personal facts that highlight a perfect irony of this story. The first fact is that I am by profession and over two decades of experience, a trust and estates litigator. That means that one of my main jobs is challenging and defending will contests.

     The second personal fact is that after discovering John Sutton’s Will a year ago, I had written an article about the discovery and been contacted by a legal studies professor who read it and told me of a book she’d written called, “Fathers of Conscience: Mixed Race Inheritance in the Antebellum South”. https://www.amazon.com/Fathers-Conscience-Mixed-Race-Inheritance-Antebellum/dp/0820329800  Her book was about white men, typically single or widowed, who’d created families with black or mixed slaves, and sought to emancipate the women and their shared children by their last wills.

     Many of the wills were challenged by white relatives who made various claims – that the men had been unduly influenced by the predatory "jezebels", that the men were too old or sick to have the capacity to free their slaves, or even that the laws of the states prohibited emancipation. Some wills were upheld, others were not, as southern judges and appellate courts struggled to find the balance between fulfilling testamentary intent, and doing damage to the fraying underpinnings of antebellum culture and economy.

A Family’s Journey to Freedom
     I had decided to write a novel, and eventually a screenplay, based loosely on my ancestors’ story and the insights I’d gained from reading “Fathers of Conscience”. I understood that my great grandmother X4 Lucy, and all 14 of her children and grandchildren, down to little Mahalie, a toddler at the time of the will, had made it up from Jacksonville to Savannah, Georgia, boarded a boat that took them down around the Florida keys into the Gulf of Mexico, through New Orleans and up the Mississippi to Pope County, just across the border from Kentucky in the free state of Illinois. At the time I believed they had made it there less than a year from the will’s drafting, and a few months after John died, largely unchallenged and unmolested, holding John Sutton’s will before them like a shield and a beacon, lighting their way to freedom. To make my version of the story more compelling, and relying on the adage to, “write what you know”, I had determined to include a Will contest. And I had decided that Lucy’s daughter would be stolen and returned to slavery by her evil uncle, whom I named Eustace Sutton, and Lucy would have to venture back into the south to defend the will.

     As I scanned over the probate file documents I held in my hand, I almost lost my breath as it dawned on me that my professional training had prepared me to immediately recognize what I was holding. Flipping quickly through the 44 pages, I exclaimed to Jeffrey, “Oh my God. There was a will contest!” If a probate file is the biography of a death, then a will contest turns it into a mystery. “And the name of John Sutton’s next of kin who challenged the family’s freedom was Shadrack Sutton!” Shadrack Sutton?!? How delicious can irony be that the true contestant’s name seemed so much more villainous and venal than my lugubrious “Eustace”?

     I was amazed to find that the file included the handwritten notes of Duval County Probate Judge William (I am not making this up) Crabtree as he presided over the trial and summarized the direct examinations and cross-examinations of the witnesses including of the drafting lawyer, Gregory Yale. Yale had even testified that Lucy had been afraid of falling into Shadrack’s hands as Shadrack had warned that he would beat her if he owned her.

     At the bottom of the stack of forty-four pages that the clerks photocopied for me, was the final decree by Judge Crabtree signed on Wednesday March 10, 1847, denying Shadrack’s contest and ordering him to pay court costs of twenty-eight dollars and eight cents.

Proof of Love and Freedom In a Racial Crucible 
     By the end of the day, a final bitter irony emerged as Jeffrey and I began the 371 mile journey back to my meeting. We left with a copy of the Will that proved, and a copy of the final decree overruling the contest that proved again, that love can surpass boundaries of law, even in this place where clerks today defy the law by refusing to issue marriage licenses to loving same-sex couples.
My journey continues as I write my novel and further my research into the stories of my ancestors and others like them -- people like Celia Bryant, a mulatto slave who was the first woman executed in Florida. She was convicted of killing the white man who was here owner, and likely her father and also father of her children. As a result of his murder, his deed of emancipation, that was intended to free Celie’s family, was challenged by his white heirs. The same lawyer who wrote my ancestor’s will and testified in support of it, represented the white heirs in that case before the same Judge Crabtree who upheld John Sutton’s Will. And then there is the story of a free woman of color in New Orleans from the Mandeville family, whose first name, like those of most of the women in these cases, is lost to history. She was in a long-term concubine relationship with a white man named Eugene Macarty. Such relationships were legally recognized in Louisiana. Nonetheless, this shrewd businesswoman, who made a fortune selling dry goods, and who was worth $155,000 in the 1840s, was deprived of her own property when her partner died and his heirs successfully claimed it should pass to them.
So many threads, visible and invisible, bind us all together in the tapestry that is America. The injustices that tore at so many of those threads also tie us to a history that seems so long ago, but still echoes today -- in voter suppression cases, and in racist fraternity chants, and in places like Ferguson, Missouri.


(Originally published March 2015)