PLEASE NOTE: This is a minimally-edited transcript that originates from a program that uses AI.
Anisa Khalifa: Juneteenth commemorates the emancipation of enslaved people at the end of the Civil War. It's a holiday of celebration for many black Americans. It's also a day of remembrance for their ancestors who fought and died for freedom. And while that can be a spiritual experience, the physical connection to a final resting place is often obstructed by poor record keeping and the neglect of burial sites.
It's a struggle that author Sade Green documented in a recent personal essay for Time Magazine. Last summer, she attended a special event commemorating a burial ground in Raleigh, North Carolina for Sade, who lives in New York. It was a culmination of years of research to find out who her ancestors were and where they were buried.
Sade Green: I knew that if I was gonna find something, it was gonna be written about. Like I always had this plan of documenting my family history. It was like, I wanna document this in some form. You know, with my writing, I.
Anisa Khalifa: I am Anisa Khalifa. This is the Broadside where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South.
Today we're bringing you something special in honor of Juneteenth Sade's story in her own words about the power of legacy and the importance of finding your roots.
Sade Green: Hi, my name is Sade Green and I am a writer, activist, and poet from Long Island, New York.
Anisa Khalifa: Thank you for joining me, Sade.
Sade Green: Thank you so much for having me.
Anisa Khalifa: So you wrote a beautiful essay about your experience finding your ancestors. Um, we're about to hear you personally read that to us, but take me back to before that, before you discovered the clues that would eventually lead you to find your ancestors.
What did you know about your family history?
Sade Green: Yeah, so I knew that my family lives from the south. I knew that my grandmother was from North Carolina, had grown up there and then, you know, migrated to the north. And then I knew of my great-grandmother. Which was her mom. But besides that, I didn't really know much. You know, I think that not knowing as much is just a testament to the information that's really lost when genocide happens. So, you know, documents aren't as accessible, and so not knowing much is what inspired me to really just dig deeper.
Anisa Khalifa: What was it like then searching for your enslaved ancestors while knowing that you probably would find very little documentation or maybe none at all.
Sade Green: It was like a puzzle. I describe it in the piece as like making a puzzle. It's what it really felt like it was. It happened over a span of like years. And so I remember during the pandemic at one point, I went to my grandmother's house and looked at like different photos just to like comb through things to make sure, okay, like this was my great-grandmother, this was my uncle on things like that. I found an old family reunion pamphlet and it had like names of people.
Anisa Khalifa: Oh, wow.
Sade Green: I was like, okay, look, this is confirmation of who I need to be looking for. That was just really, really helpful. Like one of the biggest pieces in this entire thing.
Anisa Khalifa: The ribbon cutting ceremony for the historical marker at the cemetery where your ancestors were buried, took place a year ago.
Last Juneteenth, how are you reflecting back on that experience one year later?
Sade Green: I think one of my biggest takeaways is that I write this in the piece. It's like you can never bury us because there was so many efforts to try to erase my ancestors' legacy, but it just didn't happen, and that just speaks to my people's resilience and then also the attendants resilience as well.
I think another thing that I would say I took away from it is that like the work will always live on. I don't think they would've even imagined that their descendant would write something like this. For time, I think about like my great-great-grandmother specifically, her name is Mabel, and she migrated from the south to the north for work opportunities and I.
I don't think she was thinking like, okay, look, my, my great, great granddaughter is gonna write my name in a major publication and tell the world about me. Like, that's not something you're thinking about in that moment. You're thinking about how to survive, you know, Jim Crow, anti-black racism and things like that, and you're thinking about how to live. And so it was important to me and meant a lot to me to be able to tell the world about the people who I come from.
Anisa Khalifa: And now in her voice. Here is Sade's story and just a heads up, there is a mention of an act of sexual violence.
Sade Green: On Sunday, February 25th, 2024, in the middle of the night, I finally found the North Carolina plantation that my ancestors were enslaved on. Midway Plantation, I stirred at my laptop completely in awe of the fact that all the puzzle pieces were starting to fit together. After I had spent years tracing my roots, I had read that the North Carolina State Capital officially launched an ongoing digital humanities project. That names more than 130 enslaved black men who built and maintained the state capitol between 1833 and 1865.
In hopes of finding information that could be helpful for my genealogy research, I check to see if my great, great-grandfather, Milton's surname Hinton, appeared on that list. When I saw that there were three enslaved black men with the surname Hinton, I realized that this last name was more common than I had thought and I should research, which plantations in North Carolina were owned by Enslavers with the last name Hinton.
In order to trace my lineage back to any plantation, I first needed to know the names of Milton's parents. I spent hours digging until I found Milton's marriage certificate on an online genealogical database. The marriage certificate stated that Milton was a son of Ruffin Hinton, a resident of Wake County.
What I discovered next left me speechless.
I learned that my great-great-great grandfather, Ruffin Hinton, was born on Midway Plantation in Wake County, North Carolina. He was the son of Lan, Toby, an African woman who was an enslaved cook on the plantation, and Charles Lewis Hinton, the white plantation owner who raped lan. It is crucial to explicitly call it rape because there was no such thing as consent under enslavement.
Ruffin later had many children. One of whom was my great-great-grandfather, Milton Hinton. Milton then had a daughter named Mabel Hinton. My great-grandmother, Mabel, gave birth to my grandmother, Patricia, who gave birth to my mother, Pamela, who gave birth to me.
Once I discovered this information about Ruffin and SE. It was like something in the universe shifted. I could feel it deep down in my bones that part of my life's purpose was to keep my black ancestors names and stories alive. I was determined to pick up the pen and write my ancestors into a world that was repeatedly trying to erase their existence.
It just so happened that a fellow black descendant, a midway plantation, Jill Jackson had the same goal. Jackson was raising funds to purchase a historical marker for a long, neglected unmarked cemetery where our enslaved African ancestors had been buried. And when I connected with Jackson, she told me that the historical marker would be unveiled at a ribbon cutting ceremony this year, just a few days after Juneteenth.
Immediately upon hearing the news, I blocked out time in my calendar to fly down south for the ceremony. I wanted to attend the ceremony so that I could bear witness. The late writer and civil rights activist, James Baldwin once said, I'm a witness. That's my responsibility. I write it all down.
I was intent on being a witness, not an observer, and there was in fact a difference. An observer merely watches something unfold. A witness takes what they've seen and builds a monument out of it. To bear witness is to carve out an undeniably vast space for the truth so that people have no choice but to see what you've seen and know what you know.
The preservation of the burial ground began in 2023 when Jackson was appointed to the Wide Waters Homeowners Association Board, an organization that makes and enforces rules and guidelines for Wide Waters Village, which is located in Knightdale Wake County. Jackson was tasked with the job of finding grant funding for the cemetery.
Her reply was what? Cemetery Jackson, and so many others in the Nightdale community had no idea that the wooded land behind the community clubhouse pool was a burial ground for enslaved black people. However, in 1995, the North Carolina Office of State Archeology had identified this site as a burial ground for black people who had been enslaved by the Hinden, the North Carolina Office of State Archeology.
Also noted that there were 131 graves that may be associated with the early 19th century residence of Eastern Wake County. In fact, a document from the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office mentions census records that indicate that Charles Lewis Hinton enslaved 126 Africans on Midway Plantation in 1860.
Since there wasn't any grant funding available to preserve the burial ground. Jackson reached out to members of the community for help. Together the Nightdale community cleaned up the burial ground and raised funds to purchase a historical marker, an act of bearing witness
Anisa Khalifa: after a short break. We'll return to Sade's story.
Sade Green: On Saturday, June 22nd, 2024. I stood outside of the cemetery gates with Nightdale community members and fellow black descendants of Midway Plantation for the ribbon cutting ceremony. The North Carolina sun was shining down on us from the bright blue sky, and it felt like that was my ancestors' way of saying thank you for remembering us.
I became very emotional when counselor Steve Evans, a night Dale elected official, spoke about how my ancestors were finally experiencing the peace. That they never experienced in their time living on this earth. I thought about the horrors that the Hinton Enslavers subjected my ancestors to and how my ancestors were resting now forever free in a cemetery that will never be destroyed.
After the ribbon cutting ceremony was over, I entered the burial ground. It was one thing to hear about what the burial ground looked like, but it was another thing to actually be there to see it with my own eyes, to walk through the resting place of the people whose resilience brought me into this world.
At first, the ground beneath my feet was flat, but as I continued walking, there were visible depressions in the ground. Deep pockets in the earth felt looked like mini valleys. Each of those depressions was a grave. Many of the graves were the size of an adult's body. The smaller ones I realized were the grades of children.
None of the graves had a tombstone indicating the name of the person that was buried there, the year they were born, or the year they died, both in life and in death. My ancestors were treated with zero dignity and respect by the Hinton, as if my ancestors' lives didn't matter. As if my ancestors weren't people who each had their own names and dreams and hopes and relatives who loved them, and yet my ancestors understood their worth and were fiercely determined to not be erased.
While walking through the Burry Oak ground, I noticed that some of the graves were marked with field stones. I learned from my fellow black descendant of Midway Plantation that our enslaved ancestors placed field stones near the graves of their loved ones in order to honor them. It was their way of saying we were here year.
In the same spirit, Jackson and volunteers from the community marked each grave with a bright lime green pin flag. It was their way of saying they were here and you can never erase them.
My ancestors will not be forgotten under dirt and branches and rebel. These markers force people to remember that my ancestors existed. They force everyone to bear witness to the genocide that was committed against my people here on this land. Seeing the unmarked graves reminded me of a heart wrenching truth.
I'll never know the names and stories of most of my ancestors who are buried there. I'll never know their birthdays, their dreams and aspirations. The people they fell in love with their favorite past times or the specific places where they each found refuge, but that just made the fire inside me burn brighter. I'm determined now more than ever to find out everything that I can about Seline, roughen, Milton Mabel, and so many of my other ancestors. And I won't stop there. I'm going to learn more about the elders in my family who are still living. The time to remember and commemorate is now I'll find out more about their childhoods in the south.
The meals they cooked, the songs they sang, the prayers they prayed, the dreams, they dreamt the mistakes. They navigated through the adventures that courageously went on. I will be a witness to their lives and I will share their stories with the world. This is legacy. This is how current and future generations will know that we were here.
My great, great, great, great grandmother Lanni survived unimaginable horrors on Midway Plantation. And because she survived, Ruffin existed and Milton existed, and Mabel existed, and my grandmother, my mother and I exist today. I am alive because of black people who stood firm on shaky ground and decided that despite the oppressor's greatest efforts to wipe them out.
Their bloodline would not end with them. My ancestors transformed scraps into soul food, turned the lowest of lands into the highest of mountains, turned raging seas into calm waters and refused to drown. I'll spend the rest of my life building upon their legacy and making sure it isn't buried because you can never bury us.
We are here to stay. Until the end of time,
Anisa Khalifa: if you'd like to read Sade Green's essay, we've linked to the piece in our show notes. This episode was produced by Charlie Shelton Ormond, and edited by Wilson Ser with help from Jared Walker. The Broadside is a production of WNC North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR network. If you have feedback or a story idea, you can email us at broadside@wunc.org.
If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend. I'm Anisa Khalifa. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.