Outhouse Stories

Before my grandmother got indoor plumbing, we had to use an outhouse out beyond the chicken yard. Do people even have chicken yards anymore? We had one then. During the day this was precarious enough, given the obstacles. What obstacles you ask? Well, mean roosters for one. My grandma had an old Rhode Island Red rooster that wasn't afraid of dogs or kids. That damn thing attacked me enough times that I started carrying a stick.


This picture must have been taken sometime in the 40s. Sitting are Bud and Minnie Droddy, with their boys behind them: left to right: Addis, I.T., and Pert. Behind them is the house my grandpa built with the help of the boys and other members of the family.

The second obstacle of terror was chicken shit. Like so many kids growing up in rural East Texas and Western Louisiana, shoes were something worn (1) to church, (2) to school, or (3) on cold days in the Winter. As a child, there were two things I feared more than death. First, stepping in chicken shit, and second, kicking over my grandmother's snuff can. Oh, lord save me from either of those.

During daylight hours, the best defense against chicken shit was alertness. Tell that to a six-year-old. My vigilence didn't usually begin until after I'd stepped in a pile of it, and then didn't last but a week or so. That was during daylight hours.

Nighttime brought a whole new bag of terror. While the rooster was shut away in the hen house, there was still the obstacle course of chicken shit to negotiate in the dark! If you woke up in the middle of the night and had to go, there was a slop jar, sometimes called a honeybucket by more refined folk, but it had to be late at night or the weather had to be bad to use the slop jar. Let me tell you what, I learned control very early on.

Once in the outhouse, a whole new set of terrors emerged: spiders and snakes. Reckon there's such a thing as "outhouse phobia"? I'll tell you one result: to this day, I am the world's fastest when it comes to taking care of business, if you catch my drift. I am in an out in about three minutes, maximum.

Toilets came in several sizes. There were one-seaters, two-seaters, and even occasional three-seaters. I guess we were a lot more social in our business back in those days. Toilet paper existed, of course, but when you're as poor as we were, improvisation was often necessary That's where the Sears and Roebuck catalogue came in. Not the best toilet paper in the world, in fact, it ain't even the second or third best. Some people talk about dried corn cobs, but I guess we were richer than they were.

Indoor plumbing came to mama's house in 1957. Her old 4-room house built by my grandfather in the late 30s or early 40s, was deemed dangerous by my uncle I.T., so mama got a Downey Brothers house built for $5400. We were finally rich. My prayers finally had been answered. No more outhouses.

I'm Back

I haven't written much this past year or so due to other priorities. This blog gets a lot of traffic as a result of internet searches, and occasionally I get emails from distant cousins looking to connect their family lines to our core families. Those are the more gratifying. Sometimes I get emails telling me to go to hell, or calling me an asshole, some even telling me to go f--k myself. I know I must be doing something right when I get those kind.

When I started writing this blog, my hope was to remember as many stories from my grandmother that I could, and was hoping that my memory of stories would trigger the memories of others. If you remember one detail as a result of any of the stories here, then I have done well. My mother's people were illiterate for the first 150 years of their history. As a result, we don't have as many details about their lives as we might like to have. We have to resort more to oral history which gets changed with each telling. Add to that television and movies, internet legends and such, and our oral history is now so badly distorted that very little truth remains.

I don't think it matters ultimately. We Southerners are gifted storytellers. Even if much of what we remember and tell is more myth than truth, it is still shaped by our memories of our grandparents and the values we inherited from them. Many of our new stories may not be as accurate as they should be, but we tell the stories we have, not the ones we wish we had.

I have a few more tales and memories to go.

Changes

Along with changing the blog's name, I've also changed my focus. From now on I'm primarily interested in the history and genealogy of the Droddys, Ashworths, Perkins, Bunch, Bass, Johnson and Dial. There are plenty of other researchers out there equipped to do a better job worrying about the interconnectedness of the other families than am I. Good luck to them.

Part of my reason for changing focus is my evolving understanding of what or who is a Redbone. I'm glad we had the conversation, but I suspect we're all walking away with different conclusions. I tend to believe with my cousins that (1) the word is a racial slur, and (2) it's about the experience. If you grew up outside of the community, then you're not, but (3) you can call yourself anything you want; you just don't have the right to decide for anyone else.

Me? I'm going to be talking about my mother's people.

Cold Mountain, the book

by Charles Frazier. Anyone out there who imagines himself or herself to be a Redbone would do well to read this book. Speaking for myself, I was not taught the history of the South, but rather, I was taught the Myth of the South. There's a helluva lot of difference. Most of our ancestors avoided the Civil War. Some of the bucks in Texas who never accepted nor understood why they were rejected by their White neighbors, joined the Confederate Army, but most of our ancestors just stayed home and avoided the Home Guard. Some even worked with the opposition. Ask Don Marler about Copperheads.

Major Samuel Ragsdale inherited a batallion from Lt. Col. Andrew Daly. He aggressively recruited groups previously ignored: Cajuns and Redbones. Most of the Redbones who served in the Confederate Army served with Samuel Ragsdale. I'm sure he promised them acceptance as Whites after the Civil War. What other reason would have motivated them to join the forces of a political idea that saw them as inferior?

My line of Ashworths stayed in the swamps and kept on with their lives. I think that any present day Redbones who finds pride in the Southern "noble cause" to be about the same as someone who brags about his grandparents being mentally retarded. Hello?

Read Cold Mountain, and then come back and tell me how proud you are of your ancestors who were stupid. Come back and tell me about it, if you don't mind. I can't promise I won't make fun of you behind your back, but I do promise to be polite about in public. Send me an email or post in the comments here. Oh come on, now. I already make fun of most of you, which is helluva lot kinder on my part than most of you are towards me.

The South sucks. It always has. It treated our people like shit, just about the way you now treat homosexuals. Just as you wrap yourself in your half-assed, ignorant understanding of THE BIBLE, Southerners used to preach about how we, your Redbone ancestors, were less than human and justified it with that same Bible.

Here's an old Redbone saying for you to ponder: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

At the time of the Civil War, Southerners considered Redbones to be just another bunch of niggers. Nowadays, it's not so much about race as it is economic class, and let me tell you, most of you fools have digressed in social standing.

That's just my opinion. If your opinion is different, speak up. Write a comment, or better yet, start your own damn blog.

Re-Reading Marler on Redbones

I used to think Don Marler was the most knowledgeable person I knew on the subject of Redbones. A cousin, LV Hayes, is the most knowledgeable person I know in terms of our interconnectedness. He knows how we're all related. LV has been very stingy with his opinion about who he thinks is or is not a Redbone, in part, I believe, because he does not like the word Redbone and thinks people distantly related to its real meaning who find some sort of misguided pride in the idea to be idiots. I agree with him in part.

Don's book is the only one written about our families, thus far, and it was self-published, which means it was never vetted by anyone with critical knowledge about the subject. The Redbone Heritage Foundation is Don's baby. The main problem with Don's book is that he's willing to call anyone with an Indian grandmother tradition in Louisiana a Redbone. We Redbones know better.

It is noted that none of the present members of the Redbone Heritage Foundation have made any attempts at connecting with their dark, but distant cousins in Starks and Singer. Those Redbones would be my cousins.

Back to Don's book. There are a couple of areas that I thought inconclusive and felt that he made more of an issue than I thought was there. The connection between the "Redbones" of South Carolina and the "Redbones" of Louisiana was very weak. The only connection I saw was the similarity of circumstance and choice of word used by Whites.

My next issue is similar. He would make the Melungeon connection more than it is. Rhoda Mosely and Drury Bunch are thought be from Kentucky because of a census wherein they said that's where they were from. They were considered by the census taker to be not-White. Were they Melungeon? Were Melungeons a self-identified sub-group in 1840? Probably, but not conclusively. Their daughters, Anna and Mary, went on to be grandmothers of large and powerful clans. That did not make their dozens of grandchildren Melungeon. No more than Keziah make her dozens of grandchildren Indian.

My theory? If you can call it that. Their self-identify evolved just as the racial codification intensified. It took at least two generations for them to think of similarly situated people as kindred spirits. The social-anthropological question is how many generations of a group being separate is required to make the group a "people." They began as a group from many areas with many different experiences. Some had supported the American Revolution, some apparently didn't. There may be a pattern showing how they cooperated as a group and not just as cousins, but it hasn't manifested itself to me, yet. We are not a people united by a culture, we're just a borderline racial mix who continue to identify with cousins, just as their ancestors did 200 years ago. There may be an acknowledgement as between two people who identify an ill-defined kinship, but there is no value given that similarity of circumstance.

I think Marler wants to make their interactions more than they were. What Don would call "Redbones" I would call "similarly situated, mixed-race people who were White-identified, but who obviously were dark complexioned and therefore not accepted as White." "Redbone" is a more efficient word. They did not, in my opinion, ever identify with each other because of the particularness of their circumstance. I don't think the girls in Starks thought of the girls in Pitkin as members of the same tribe, just different high schools. Anyone with experience here, just weigh in.

Okay, you idiots at the Redbone Heritage Foundation, read my lips here. I'm saying outloud what others are saying about you. I just happen to have a pulpit. You can continue to ignore me and call me names amongst yourselves. That just proves you're a bunch of idiots. You still don't have any Redbones in your group, so you need to figure out a way to reach out to actual Redbones. Why is that so difficult for you to grasp?

You people are a bunch of idiots. Sorry, but you're going to need to start over.

My problem with the word "Redbone" is that it is an offensive word to many in that community. It was never our choice of descriptive adjectives. It was a word used by Whites to describe us. We never used the word in a positive way before about 1980. When my cousins and I used it, we did not use it in front of our parents. Even today, if you called my mother a Redbone, she'd slap you.

Maybe we do need to reclaim the word, but it's not for a bunch of "Wannabes" to tell those of us who are still dark anything.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm celebrating our Two Hundredth Anniversary of being in Texas and Louisiana. We are kick ass people!

My Bones are Red, the book by Patricia Ann Waak

The best I can say about it, is that it has a great title. The worst I can say about it is that she mixes her own brand of religion and spirituality into genealogy and uncritically accepts myths that support her conclusions.

Although she would be only about 1/8th Redbone if Redbone was a racially determined identity, she claims a larger spiritual identity with Redbones, or at least with her father's family, decendants of Leonard Perkins, the son of Old Josh Perkins. Also, she paints our Perkins ancestors with as black a brush she can. Maybe it's to express solidarity with her grandchildren whose fathers are African-American. I'm not sure we Redbones are all that willing to embrace our Blackness just yet. If I say there's nothing in the record that would prove our Blackness that would be accepted in a court of law today, I'd be accused of being in denial about it. But if we Perkins and Ashworths have so much Black in us, how come it doesn't pop up occasionally? Indian pops up a lot. White pops up a lot. Black hasn't popped up to my knowledge, unless it was reintroduced. Maybe you've seen otherwise, but I sure haven't seen anything that convinced me beyond a reasonable doubt.

Me, personally? I don't care. I'm more interested in their stories. Heinegg is a lot more accomplished a researcher than I and is probably a lot smarter, so maybe that's why he concluded Esther Perkins' baby was by a Black slave because she later named a child Dorcas and the guy who paid her fine owned a slave by the name of Dorcas. Could have happened that way. But if it did, the next several generations had better start marrying Indians because all the Perkins I know look a lot more Red than Yellow, if you catch my drift. Here's something I know from observation. The children of White and Black parents, DO NOT LOOK INDIAN.

I know this isn't scientific, but just look at us (those of us that are still dark, anyway). We do not look Black. We either look White or we look Indian. So tell me this much, Pat, if Old Josh married a White Scottish woman, a fact you accept in your book, why are their grandchildren being called Indians in the Texas census? Don't you think if your grandmother looked like a White-Black mulatto, that census taker would have marked the box Mulatto and not Indian?

I'm probably a lot more accepting of the idea of Black roots that almost every Redbone I know. The ones that say it don't matter are liars. Yeah, that's right. I called you a bunch of liars. Prove me wrong. Go to the First Pentecostal Church in either Starks or Singer and stand up and testify about how proud you are of your Black blood.

We Redbones are amongst the fiercest anti-Black racists I've ever encountered. Maybe that's what we were running from in North and South Carolina. I just want to know why the African disappeared so quickly from the blood. We certainly intermarried enough for it to pop up on a pretty regular basis.

Like I said, though. I'm alright with the theorhetical idea of an African ancestor. I'd just like to see the proof. I love Heinegg's conclusions regarding Esther Perkins. That's one of the grandmothers of my line. In fact, I think she's my grandmother about three or four different times. Is that possible? I know that James and Keziah are my ggggggrandparents twice. Lord, I'm probably my own third cousin, twice.

Heinegg had every librarian in the South helping him. I'm willing to accept many of his conclusions, but in theory. He showed me nothing that said Esther's sperm donor was African. And since her grandchildren and great-grandchildren sure as hell look Indian and not Black, if he was a slave, he must have been an Indian slave.

I could probably be shot down right now by someone very familiar with the Perkins Defamation suit in Tennessee. The people that gave depositions against J.F. Perkins were so blatantly racist that they tried their best to describe the Perkins as a bunch of Negroes. The thing is, all those White people who had married a Perkins sure as hell didn't think they looked Black.

My Ashworths are all dark, but then again, all my Ashworths are also Perkins. The record suggests they started out dark, the Ashworths I mean. That reference in the book about the South Carolina Regulators said that he was dark haired and had swarthy skin. Did that mean a good tan? There's so many unknown factors there that any conclusion is just guessing. Each day we learn more. That's very exciting.

If I'm in denial about it, then I stand in solidarity with my ancestors who for 250 years have struggled not to be unfairly burdened with a racial epithet not of their own choosing. If I have eight great-grandparents and one of them is rumored to be Black, three are rumored to be Indian, and four are White. What am I? In 1836 Texas I would be Black. It would be up to me to prove the non-existence of the Black and Indian great-grandparents. Anybody who's done any genealogy knows how difficult it is to prove anything in the 17th and 18th century, must less disprove something. It's my theory that we're more likely to be Indian mix because available Black women belonged to someone who didn't go around farming out their women to recent immigrants from England. Heinegg's theory about Esther's children notwithstanding, but please, Paul, show us more proof than just conjecture and conclusion.

The race discussion is central and germaine to any discussion about Redbones. It is the camel in our tent. I do know if you bring up the Black angle with most of my cousins in Louisiana, you're going to lose them as an audience. They're going to tune you out completely, if they don't slug you for suggesting they're part Black. Pat even goes so far as to suggest that our cattle instincts are from Africa. She short shrifts the obvious Indian in our genes and jumps to make us Fulani or Masai because we were cattle herders. Even though her sperm donor didn't leave us a name, he did manage to give his cattle herding instincts to his Indian-looking children.

That makes two books out about Redbones to my knowledge. Don Marler's Louisiana Redbones is still the most definitive thus far. I'm hoping for a few more in the future. The part of the story that most fascinates me and about which I would like to write someday, is the early Texas experience. The more books about Redbones, Perkins, Goins, Ashworths, etc., the better my foundation for writing about our families' experiences in Texas.

We're not in competition with each other to get these stories out. If ten of us line up and tell our story, there will be ten different stories.

Now a side note. Lucille Perkins Robinson has just published a book about her family. It's called The Descendents of Chester Allen Perkins & Ora Lee Johnson. The Perkins connection is obvious, the less obvious is that Ora Lee Johnson is the granddaughter of Winna Droddy and William "Red" Strother, and the great-granddaughter of Adna Samuel Droddy, Sr., my great-great-grandfather. I can't recommend it highly enough. She has captured the flavor of Chester and Ora Lee's legacy in the stories of their children and grand-children. She mixes old obituaries with pictures of the next generation of this family.

Lucille is an incredible woman in the greatest tradition of Redbone women. I am honored to call her cousin. She lives in Rayne, Louisiana. If you Wannabes and Usetobes want to actually meet real Redbones when you're meeting in Alexandria, go visit Lucille, and buy her book while you're there. It may not tell you anything you don't already know, but it'll show you some pictures of some of your Redbone cousins who are still Redbones.

LV Hayes has commented (scroll to bottom of page)on a couple of my posts. His comments are very important to the discussion about who and what is a Redbone. This is what LV has to say:

Your commentary ignores some crucial historical facts. In 1888, DeQuincy, Starks, Lunita, and DeRidder DID NOT EXIST (I'm not sure about Singer, but think it probably also didn't yet exist). All of these communities came into existence because of the railroad coming through the area in the mid 1890s. The shift from "mulatto" to "white" also took place at different times in different parishes. In 1840, the distinction is made in Rapides Parish, but in 1850, it disappears. In 1870, it's made in Cameron Parish, but in 1880, all the "redbones" are "white". It is sometimes hard to do, but the historical facts must be sought out and identified for what they were. There was never a "redbone" homeland in Louisiana (and probably also no where else) except in transition.

LV Hayes
Hereditary High Chief of the Sacred Mugwumps

He's just joshing us with the hereditary chief title. Our people don't have hereditary titles.

There are two points being made in his comment. The first, regarding the founding of the towns of Singer, DeQuincy, DeRidder, and Starks. I referred to them as Redbone homelands in a post. In doing so, I took romantic license. Those present day towns did not exist in the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century. Our ancestors were there, however, even before the beginning of the 19th century. For two hundred years they have lived in that general area. That is the heartland of our stories, our genealogy, our cemeteries. The towns are Redbone towns, because they were founded by Redbones as towns, not as Redbone towns, but towns.

I consider myself a Redbone. I do not consider it to be a racial term, but rather a code word for a collection of experiences unique to my ancestors with a racial factor.

There is no argument but that our ancestral families were considered non-White by the dominant society upon their arrival in Louisiana between 1787 and 1810. Although the brothers James and Moses were considered White in the 1800 census in South Carolina, in 1810 they and their families were considered FMC (Free Men of Color). We've always pointed to that fact to demonstrate the arbitrariness of the racial classifications. I think it's obvious that we considered ourselves White. Look at the many incidents of our people marrying outside of our group. In every instance we know about, Redbones married Whites. I have not seen a single instance where a Redbone married a nonWhite who was not also a Redbone. I think its obvious that most of our White neighbors also considered us White, dark white, but White. Letitia Stewart and Henderson Ashworth no doubt fought for their marriage to be recognized because they were in disbelief. We were successful in Texas in large part because we accumulated wealth during a time when there were no racial constraints on our competition with everyone else. The Mexicans considered us Americans and treated us like they treated all Americans. There was no point in law about Whites coming first.

As Texas rebelled against Mexico, 0ur ancestors lined up with the other American colonists to resist the Mexicans. When those Ashworth and Thomas boys were refused by the militia, it was a precursor of the grief that was to come from the Texans and they began adopting the Color Codes like the rest of the slave owning Southern states. After 1836, we clashed repeatedly with a dominant White society that insisted our families were Free Black. We didn't agree to it then, just as we don't agree with it now. We have never accepted without dispute the notion that we have any Black blood.

LV would quibble with me about the timing of our ancestral families change in racial classification. He mentions Cameron Parish, but avoids Beauregard and Calcasieu. In 1880, my great-great-grandfather, Thompson Lorraine Ashworth, and his family continued to be listed as Mulatto in the U.S. census. We know race continued to be an issue of contention in 1891 when my great-grandpa Amos Owen Ashworth, his brother Austin, Josh Perkins and others were in a gunfight with some White guys supposedly because the Whites called them all a "bunch of Redbones." The headline REDBONES RAMPANT on the front page of the Lake Charles paper makes the strongest case for how the dominant White society looked at our people.

I don't think any of my ancestors ever thought of themselves as anything but White. I think they told the story about being Portuguese because they believed it. We also have the Indian grandmother myth, leading me to believe in an Indian grandmother somewhere back there. We don't have an African grandmother myth, and because we have so many sources into our family, the mathematical probability of the African grandmother is great, but not absolute. She may well be in the tree, but there's little to show for it. Certainly not as much as the Whites in 19th century America made of it. It is offensive to me that even today the Whites in Texas are discounting our own story by appending our unique history to that of African-Americans. Our struggle was not the struggle of Blacks in America. Ours was the struggle of being non-White in America.

I like to compare our families' histories with that of the Cane River Creoles of Color who in 1810 were rich, educated, slave owners. To the Whites they were just a bunch of high falutin' French-niggers. Our Ashworths and Perkins were just arriving in Louisiana. We do not know why our families left South Carolina. Were they escaping increased racial animosity? Perhaps they were political refugees, since there is evidence that two men by the name of James Ashworth and of the approximate age of our ancestors, father and son, served in pro-British militia units in the American Revolution? Maybe they came to Louisiana because it had a more sophisticated appreciation of the degrees of color based on the French Code Noir which gave people of color more legal rights than did South Carolina. How much more attractive Texas must have seemed to them where they could compete without any color restrictions.

Fast forward the tape two hundred years. The Cane River Creoles are no longer rich, are no longer the rich literate culture of its slave-culture heyday. They're just Black. The present day Redbones are accepted as White by all of Louisiana's cultural groups. Why did the Cane River Creoles lose their position and get reclassified with Blacks, racially and economically? The only difference I can see is that we never agreed that we were anything but White. It took us about a hundred years of determined resistance to being marginalized into a subracial category, but we did it.

I remember Mama

Minnie Ashworth was born on September 13, 1888. She was never afforded much of a childhood. Her mother, Mary Heard, was only about 14 years older than she, and it fell to her to help her mother take care of her brothers and sister.

Her life was not easy. Her father, Owen Ashworth, went to prison in 1898 and died the same year. Her mother married another man whom she subsequently divorced for deserting her and her children. Young Minnie and her mother worked very hard to keep the family fed and clothed.

She was a pious woman. My grandmother raised me to believe the word Christian was a verb, not a noun. Christian is the way you act, not what you call yourself. My grandmother walked the Christian path all of the 40 years I knew her. She never wavered.

She wouldn't have a television in her home until well into the 1960s. She said it was a tool of the devil. I sit here 50 years later and have come to the same conclusion. In 1952, she was newly widowed, living in a 4-room frame home with porches across the back and front, each room with a door to the rooms next to it and one out onto the porch. While it had electricity, it did not have indoor plumbing. That would come at the end of the 50s, just before sputnik.

I remember my grandmother's bed which was a metal frame with slats and about six or seven mattresses piled one on the other. When cousins stayed overnight (which was often), a mattress would be pulled down to the floor around the bed, sometimes as many as three. My brother and I shared a rollaway bed, but I more often than not slept with my grandmother. Usually I would be asleep by the time she came to bed, but if I was awake when she came to bed, I would ask her the kind of crazy things a five-year-old asks his grandmother. If I cried for my mother and father, which I'm sure I did, it was into this generous bosom I was hugged. We were very poor in material wealth, but rich in family and tradition. My grandmother was genuinely loved by hundreds of people, all of them related in some way. Day in and day out, cousins, whose genealogy would be explained to me by my grandmother and her oldest daughter, Elsie, came calling on her, bringing her gifts of food and love. By the time I was ten I was convinced that I was related to everyone in the world. I believe that all of the good that I am comes from this time when I was being raised by her.

Minnie was married Joseph William "Bud" Droddy for 46 years. Minnie had told her cousins that she wasn't going to marry until someone came along and gave her a gold watch. Bud gave her a gold watch. They had eight children, my mother being their youngest.

On the night of December 7, 1952, on a foggy highway in East Texas, my father was killed along with several others in a terrible car wreck. Fate had delivered two young boys, one 5 and one 8, into her hands for raising.

When I speak about my grandmother raising my brother and me, I almost feel like I'm being disloyal to my mother for remembering my grandmother's sacrifices. My mother never abdicated her responsibility for my brother and me, fiercely protecting her rights and responsibilities as a mother. Sometimes that fierceness clouds from her vision the contributions made by others.

My grandmother grew weak and feeble the last ten years of her life, losing her eyesight, her ability to move around independently. She became so very frail. These are very painful images in my mind. That is not how I choose to remember her. This is how I choose to remember her, out in the garden working.She died on May 15, 1986, just a few months before her 98th birthday.

Melungeons and Redbones

I happened onto an article by Jack Goins writing about Micajer "Cajer" Bunch. "The first record ... on Micager was this 1749 tax list of Lunenburg County, Virginia (from Sunlight on the Southside) William Howard’s list; Gedion Bunch and tithe Cage Bunch. Note; Obviously, Cage is the son of Gedion Bunch. I am convinced this is the same Micajer “Caiger” Bunch who has such a close association with the Riddles, Collins and Gibsons. Who later moved 1790’s into Hawkins County, Tennessee."

Lee County, Virginia tax list. 17th March 1795.
Drury Bunch (1 horse)
Micajah Bunch (1 horse)
Torel Bunch (1 horse)
Clem Bunch (no horses)

The Bunches were being listed as "mulatto" as early as the middle 1700s. At this point, I'm assuming that my 4th great grandfather, Drury Bunch, is the same one listed above, and related in some degree to Micajer Bunch. Jack traces the migration of Cajer Bunch and several other families from Virginia into Kentucky. My 4th great grandfather, Drury, married Rhoda Moslear and settled near present-day Starks, Louisiana. I think on one of the censuses they said they were born in Kentucky.

Jack also appears to have reached the same conclusions about Melungeons that I have about Redbones. I'm not sure if they began their journey as an identifiable group, but rather became an indentifiable group after several generations of shared experiences. Moses Ashworth and Anna Bunch may not have been Redbones, but their children probably were. Cajer Bunch may not have been a Melungeon, but his grandchildren were. Does that make sense?

Checking Back In

I haven't written much about our families recently, and the reading I've been doing has been more of a political nature and I try to stay away from politics on this blog. Politics is for my other blog. Also, I clean up my language a bit for this one.

I have been keeping in touch with various branches of Ashworths and Droddys. A few months back I received a copy of the probated estate of William Droddy, son of Daniel, husband to Ruth, and the more probable head of the Droddy family that came to populate West Virginia, Texas and Louisiana. His father Daniel doesn't get that honor for those branches of the family because he abandoned William and his sister Margaret and brother Ezekiel.

For some reason or another, William didn't serve in the American Revolution. He did serve on the frontier fighting Indians and received credit for it as though he had served in the Revolution. In 1776, he would have been 22 years of age. Most of the American Revolution was over by 1781 when Cornwallis surrendered to Washington. There's no record of him serving before 1783 when he was listed in the Virginia militia. That's the basis by which some of my Droddy cousins got into the Daughters of the American Revolution. Why would a hot-blooded American wait until the war was over to enlist? I think it may have had something to do with the fact that he had been "bound out" to William Scott when he was six. In those days you weren't bound out simply until you were 18 or 21. You could be bound until 35, although usually it was more like 26. This is an area I'm going to investigate year after next when the National Genealogical Society has its big convention in Virginia. Inquiring minds want to know.

There are quite a few Redbone Droddys now. Three of William's grandsons, all sons of Adna Samuel, married Redbone women. Those three boys were incredibly prodigious, and now there are so many Redbone Droddys that it can easily be said that Droddy is a Redbone name. It's a third generation Redbone name, though.

William married Ruth Ellison on September 13, 1787. She was 20, he was 33. They had seven children, my great-great-grandfather, Adna Samuel, being the sixth. He was born about 1805. By the time William died in 1824 in St. Charles County, Missouri, he had lived in what is now West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Missoui. In Missouri, he had been a justice of the peace.

I don't mean to give Ruth a short shrift here, but we don't know as much about her. We know her genealogy, but we don't know about her. Frontier women left fewer records than frontier men. Seldom could they read or write. I have no doubt they left their mark on each subsequent generation, but that mark is indelible. In our hearts we know it's there.

William's three sons who came to Texas were William, John and Adna. Each of them deserve a story, but not at this late hour. I started this by mentioning that I got copies of the papers filed when William's estate was probated in Missouri. There are several interesting points I garnered from it. First, anything you hauled across the frontier from "back East" had a value. Even a broken skillet was inventoried. Second, people broke the penny down in fractions. You could owe someone $4.06 and two-thirds cents. Third, his last child, Malissa, was forced to buy her own bed at the auction when the estate was sold. Those people were tough!

The Cane River Creoles of Color

I just finished reading a romantic, historical novel about the Cane River creoles of color by Elizabeth Shown Mills, an imminent genealogist. She must have studied these people for years, so rich is her book in details of their lives in the late 18th and all of the 19th century. If you aren't aware of the Cane River creoles, they were a mix-raced group in the northern part of the neutral zone. Their mix was French and African for the most part, with a dose or two of Indian thrown in for good measure. Unlike ourselves, they never claimed to be Indian rather than part Black. They were descendants of a very impressive and determined woman who made her own way out of slavery, and was able through sheer determination to get 8 of her 10 children born into slavery out of slavery. She also had 5 kids who were born free. Jeez, can you imagine? Fifteen children. If you owned a slave, it was to your interest to see that your slaves were fruitful and multiplied. This woman rescued all but two of her children from slavery. Sounds almost Redbone to me, but no, she was not one of us. She was an African born into slavery. Her name was Coincoin, or Marie Thereze to White people.

Her focus had been to get her children and grandchildren out of slavery. Her sons and their children went on to become wealthy, much like the children of James and Keziah Ashworth. The kids were all tight with each other, helped each other out, had a strong sense of community. Just like our people.

These Cane River creoles differed from Redbones in several very important ways. One, they were literate. Our Redbone ancestors weren't idiots, but neither could they read and write from what I can tell of reading the records. I'm surprised Redbone names don't have an "x" at the end like the 'Cajun names. You know why 'Cajun names so often end in "X" don't you? It was because none of them could write and so many records had their names followed by their mark of "x" that the Anglos thought that's how the name was spelled.

The Cane River creoles were rich. It is obvious from the record that the White father of Coincoin's last ten, mixed-race children, Pierre Metoyer, helped his mulatto children a lot and often.

Although there is Indian blood in the Cane River creole lines, it's mostly insignificant. Their racial story is about French and African.

I finished Elizabeth Shown Mills' book, and now I'm reading another book on the same subject by Gary B. Mills, former husband of Ms. Mills who is now deceased. He draws a few conclusions she avoids in her book. She prefers to romanticize the relationship between Coincoin and Pierre Metoyer. He points out that Pierre's generosity to Coincoin and her children was specifically and legally designed to ensure her Black children did not prosper from his generosity.

Here's the one thing I notice immediately. These people never challenged their racial classification. They were what they were. When one of the women lived with a White person, they did so by contract which provided for them and their children from the placage, as it was called. The men never married anyone except other creoles. The Ashworths in Texas, on the other hand, were indicted over 15 times in the 1840s and 1850s in Jefferson County for illegally marrying outside their race.

In my reading and writing on the subject, I have continually pointed out my contention that we never saw ourselves as anything but White, no matter what the law said. I believe we made people enforce the law on every level. We never cooperated with it.

Within one generation following the Civil War, the Cane River creoles were no longer rich, were no longer literate, but were still Colored. Contrast that with the Ashworths, who one generation after the Civil War were beginning to be literate, were still poor, but were no longer Colored.

Hazel, we miss you already...



They buried Hazel in Miller Cemetery in Starks on Wednesday. Hazel Gillis Standley was born October 30, 1925, at home on the old homestead according to her daughter Beverly Jackson, and died at home in the arms of her family, as it should be. Hazel was a no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners straight shooter, in the proud tradition of Redbone women. I did not know her as well as I would have liked nor as long as I would have desired, but the good works one does lives long after them. We have the Starks Historical Society today because Hazel and a few others dedicated many years and countless hours to give us a repository of our families' histories. Thank you, Hazel. Blessed be your memory among the stories of our people.

Introducing Myself

My Christian name, as my grandmother would say, is Raymond Lawrence Bridges. If I were Mexican (and we almost were) it would be Raymond Lawrence Bridges y Droddy, which would be more fair because such a big part of my story comes from my mother. I think she ought to get more credit. Since I was raised by my mother's mother for so many years, I think I should also link to her name, Ashworth. So I would be Raymond Lawrence Bridges y Droddy y Ashworth. That still would not tell enough of the tale. On my own, I would add Perkins because of the essential role that name has played in my story. And I'd add Bunch, too. I have such a beautiful image in my mind of the two Bunch sisters, Anna and Mary. Because I know they added steel to my inherited character I would include their name as well. I am rich in the number of names I can claim as my own.

My father's name was Lawrence. We lost him in 1952 in a mismatch between a semi and an automobile filled with people hurrying home to Christmas late one night in East Texas. With his death though, I lost his story and his family's stories. I have since sought out and heard many of his family's stories, but I didn't grow up with them, so they don't resonate as strongly on a personal level. So the Lawrence Bridges part of my name is my father. Raymond was pulled from thin air. There is no history of it in either of my families. My father, who was only given one name when he was born, started using Raymond with the intention of making me a junior. He died before he got to do that.

Over my lifetime, I have been called at least a dozen variations of my several names. My earliest remembered name is Sonny. When I started school, I was introduced to Raymond. It took me months to get used to it. After living a couple of years in Houston, I moved to a small town near Houston. The kids at my school started calling me Houston. That lasted until I went back to Houston, a couple of years later. The kids in Houston saw me no different from themselves and went back to calling me Raymond. When I moved to California with my mother and sisters in 1963, I was called Ray. I heard Tex a couple of times, but thank God, it didn't stick. Ray sounded fine to me, cool even. I was in California now, a new person. A new name felt good.

Recently I outgrew the name Ray. I began considering it a name given to me by others and without reason. It was just laziness of language that gave it to me. I began encouraging people to use Raymond with mixed results. In writing I would use Raymond Lawrence Bridges which sounded much better to me than just Ray, but I didn't think it reflected me as I had come to see myself. I even invited a few of my cousins who have always known me as Sonny to go back to using Sonny. That didn't work either.

I decided that I could choose the name by which I wanted to be known. Looking first to all of my called names over the years, I chose r. Houston Bridges. I was born in Houston. It was used with great affection by good friends the several years it was used. I live in California, but I have retained that Texas and Southern flavor that expatriates cultivate so meticulously. As I thought about it, I started to become comfortable with the name. Within weeks of introducing the name to my close friends and immediate family, it began to take..

You can continue to call me anything you want. As long as I know you're talking to me, I'll answer. I have always been known as Sonny and will always respond to it. It identifies me from a particular time in people's lives. I will always be Raymond Lawrence to my Aunt Melvin. Most of the kids from high school will always know me as Ray. I have started signing my stories and letters as Houston. The r is retained in lower case because I'll be Ray to a lot of people for a long time, but it also has another value known only to me.

Y'all say hi to Houston.

Meeting Cousins

When I was growing up in East Texas, "cousin" was an almost magical word which filled me with joyful anticipation. My grandmother would say something about my cousins coming, and I knew that fun was imminent. I had the potential for having as many as 68 to 86 first cousins. (The number varies because I'm never sure when to count stepchildren. The Texan in me tends to go for the higher number regardless of its sustainability. So if you over heard me at a cocktail party bragging about how many cousins I had, you heard 86. Then I modestly smile, and reduce the number by 4, allowing as my siblings are not cousins, although with so many cousins marrying cousins in our family, I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me that my sister was also my cousin. And we wonder why yankees make fun of us, bless their hearts.)

When I was growing up, I bet I had over a thousand cousins within a 100 mile radius. I'm using the Southern expanded definition of how many numbers you add before someone really isn't a relative anymore. For purposes of marriage, you're not supposed to marry closer than a third cousin. For purposes of loaning money, you stop at first cousin-once removed. That means you can probably loan the children of your first cousins money. All other cases are determined on an individual relationship basis. For purposes of attending funerals, it goes to about 4th or 5th. There aren't any hard and set rules, but for purposes of playing on the school ground and having a bully give you grief, it's as far out as a 10th-cousin and possibly more. We don't let people mess with us.

The internet has brought me contact with hundreds and possibly thousands of cousins in the 5th and 6th range. Now it's as if we all share backyard fences and can walk over and talk just about anytime we have something to say. Only you don't have to put on clothes to answer the door. Well so to speak, for chrissake. I'm not sitting here nekkid, but I don't have my shoes on and my hair's a mess. With each newly discovered cousin, though, comes a rush of pleasant anticipation. I just can't wait to meet them.

Maybe I'm just curious to see what they look like. There's a bond that's already there. All you have to do is uncover it, nourish it a little, and watch it bear fruit.

A couple of months ago, I drove to Huntington Beach, California to meet with a fourth cousin, once removed, Joan Williams-Harman. (She pronounces Joan as if it were spelled Joe Anne.) She is the ggggranddaughter of Mary Bunch who is presumed to be the sister of my ggggrandmother, Anna Bunch. The two sisters, children of Rhoda Mosely and Drury Bunch, married the two sons of Keziah Dial and James Ashworth, Aaron and Moses. That makes us really close the way I count cousins. Fortunately for me, she's one of those people that both get the picture and has a grasp on the details. She's fun to "speculate" with. (None of those snide yankee jokes about cousins speculating either.)

Joan taught school and was a librarian for enough years to now be retired. This is a picture of Joan:



So, Terry, Brenda, Linda, Michelle, Jeanne, Sharon and the rest of ya', the next time you see her name on a post or a comment, say hi to her. I've told her about each of you, so she knows you a little already, too.

Your Comments are Welcome

I hope we can expand the conversation. Your opinion is always welcome.

Forgotten Past, Remembered Stories

I resist writing in the "our people" voice because I'm not sure we have such a voice. If we are a people, we are a people with amnesia. We remember bits and snippets, but not the big story. I should have grown up with stories of my ggggrandfather and his brothers forging into Texas. Even with the Texans marginalizing us to the extent they did, we should have been legends in our own minds. Nada, though. Zip. No memories of Texas. We should have had legends in our family about the American Revolution. Ggggggrandfather and gggggrandfather were both tories fighting the rebels. What was that about? Did they care about the king of England or were they still fighting their old enemies among the Regulators? Were they driven out of South Carolina? Several Ashworth researchers have written that they sought refuge in a Cherokee Indian village for over ten years? Where are our stories about our time among the Cherokees? Why don't we have stories about the Civil War? Why did Thompson Lorraine name a son born immediately after the Civil War "Ulysses"?

A lot of my cousins are having an animated discussion about whether our Ashworth and Perkins ancestors somehow sojourned in Portugal before settling in South Carolina. That somehow relates to explaining the persistent family legend about being "portygee" and perhaps our being dark complexioned at the same time. To my cousins, talking about it isn't doing the research. Go out and do some research on more immediate questions. There are a million details about our families that we need to remember. What were they doing during the Civil War? Were they being hounded by the Home Guard? Were they secretly supporting the Union? Who ended up with the plantation in South Carolina?

There is a disturbing pattern to our lack of memory as a people. Are we ignoring the obvious? This is a pattern of a people not wanting to remember the past.

Lonie and the Bear



Since I quote Terry a lot, and Terry's always talking about his great-grandma, I want to make sure anyone who just stumbled into this conversation knows about whom we speak. My grandmother and Lonie were best friends all of their lives. They were also cousins. Lonie married my grandmother's brother, Buster (he's the one standing behind the right shoulder of my grandmother, who is seated in front of her three brothers). Buster's real name is Rufus Edward and my grandmother's was Minnie. Their father was Amos Owen Ashworth, son of Thompson Lorraine. Thompson Lorraine was married to Sarah Perkins, who is from a different family of Perkins than Josh, if I remember correctly. Their mother, Mary Heard Simmons, was the daughter of Melissa Drake, whose mother was an Ashworth (Polly Ashworth, James, Jr.'s daughter) and whose father was John Drake, Jr. The Drakes were the first Mulatto family of our group to arrive in Louisiana and Texas.

But I digress. I knew Terry's great-grandmother as Aunt Loan. My grandmother always called her "Loan, my sister." I guess that about says it all. Blessed be both their memories.

Well, Aunt Loan was a real card. She had the most delightful way of speaking. Very slowly and very deliberately. "Well" became about three syllables as "We way uhl". She also had a slight vibratto to her voice. I loved taking my grandmother to visit with Lonie for a few days at a time.

This is a true story as recounted to me by my grandmother, Minnie Ashworth Droddy, "Mama." I was home from college, sitting in the kitchen with Mama, having a cup of Seaport coffee, dark roast. "How's Aunt Loan? I ask. "She's fine," Mama tells me, "but did you know she saw a bear?" It seems she was sittin' in the rocker on her porch, mama says, when she noticed a big ol' black dog across the road, and her thinking it might be one of her grandson's deer dogs, she heads across the road to collar it and put it in a pen. "Well, Minnie," she says, "I got right up on that ol' dog and it suddenly reared up on its hind legs and turned into a ba-a-a-ar," in that amazing voice of hers. Mama said Lonie didn't remember how she got back to her rocking chair on the porch, but that she did it in a hurry. Terry says he's not sure what the greater miracle was, that dog turning into a bear or Loan getting back across that road to the safety of her porch, covering about 30 to 40 yards in about 4 steps.

And that's a true story.

A Letter from Bearhead on the Origin of Names

Terry writes:

Your letter brings a couple of more short stories to mind. Whenever my birthday would come around my Great-grandmother and my Grandmother would give me a yearling. By the time I was 10, I already had about 10 head of cattle. My brand was this: RTJ, The R and J were turned backward and placed against the T. And oh my Lord yes. Every person had their "mark". If you owned any cattle or hogs, the first thing you did that was to mark their ear.

As far as the name "Bearhead," my Great-Grandmother told me that at one time there were a lot of bears around. I also read a story somewhere that there was a man who love to pull pranks on people. He knew one man that was scared to death of bears. He also knew this man had to cross BearHead creek at a certain place. Where this man crossed the creek he had to climb up a bank. Well the man pulling the prank had killed a bear, so he took the head and placed it on a stick and stuck it in the ground at the top of the bank the man had to climb. The story went on to say when the man topped the bank he was face to face with the bear head. It scared the crap out of him. And it has been called BearHead ever since.

I can also tell you of how Singer got it's name. The story I have heard all my life, is that one time a train was passing through there on it's regular route and a SINGER sewing machine fell from one of the box cars and it was in a wooden crate with the word SINGER Sewing machine on it. Well, someone picked up the plank that said SINGER and hung it on a tree and it has been SINGER ever since.

One more. I heard a story one time about how De Ridder got it's name. The story goes this way. Way back when they had the pony express, on every mail day they would send someone to the edge of town to climb a tree and to sit there and whenever he saw the pony express coming he would then holler at the towns people: "HERE COMES DA RIDER"! HHHHHAAAAAAAA now that is a good one. "

Grandmothers Peoples

My cousin Linda and I were talking about the particular nature of our collective culture, and we both agreed that if we are a people, we are a people created by grandmothers. If we ordered words according to their sanctity, God, Jesus, Holy Ghost and Grandmother would appear in just that order.

Cattlemen and women

Terry writes from Bearhead that his grandmother, Estelle Ashworth Yarborough, remembers when her grandfather, old Josh Perkins, would drive cattle from one part of a pasture to another, and the number of cattle would be so great that they would stretch out over seven miles. Driving cattle through the woods is a little different from the way Hollywood shows it. First off, cows are stupid. They take a lot of herding. The drovers would have had plenty of help, since every kid who could get on a horse would have been there at least part of the way. The other thing is there would be plenty of cow dogs. A good cow dog isn't a movie version of an Australian shepherd saving the farm from disaster, but rather a dog of undetermined pedigree that is not afraid of pushing against a half-wild cow or bull to keep them from wandering off the wrong direction. Anyways, seven miles of cattle working its way through the woods and swamp is a lot of beef on the hoof.

Linda writes about ear marking. I'm pretty sure there's a registry in most parishes and counties for ear markings, just the same as there is for brands. You can understand a lot about the history of cattle people by studying their brands. During the Civil War, several Ashworths from Louisiana and the Sabine Pass area of Texas registered brands in Brazoria County where they had Thomas and Hayes cousins. Louisiana was pretty much conquered by federal troops by 1863, and no one was safe from heavy-handed confiscation of goods, including non-White Redbones of western Louisiana. Brazoria was a little farther away from the rumors of war .I can see these very pragmatic people moving a few thousand cows down the coast just to make sure they were safe.

The One-Drop Rule, or Black Like Me

I went to a party last night and in the course of conversation with a charming and attractive African-American woman about my age, I said I was Black. She just smiled at me and said, "Yeah, right." Earlier in the day I had googled the word "Ashworth" and among the several hits was the good old Online Handbook of Texas History telling us that William Ashworth, the son of Keziah Dial and James Ashworth was black. It mentions a few details of his life and accomplishments. It goes on to say that "of of sixty-three free blacks in Jefferson County, thirty-eight were named Ashworth." Those would be my cousins. The other unnamed free blacks were also my cousins. But I digress.

Back to the party. Having garnered the attention of about half a dozen people around me, I went on to say that Whites had invented the One-Drop Rule, but that it was now maintained mostly by Blacks. William Ashworth did not see himself as black. His neighbors did not see him as black. He was married to a white woman. His nephew killed a man who called him black. No one doubts they were not legally accepted as whites. On that the record is clear. My objection to the Handbook's telling of William's story is that is doesn't really give William credit for his victories, nor does it tell the ignanimous ending in late 1856.

I wrote to the Handbook people a few years ago, and found them very receptive to my complaints. They didn't change what they have written and published, but they encouraged me to tell the tale. I've been thinking about how best to go about that task since then. I'm very encouraged by my interaction with other family members this past couple of years. I have discovered that each of us has part of the story, and that when we share it with each other, we remember more details. It's not for the Handbook of Texas to define us or to tell our story. That's our job. So let's do it.