The Other Madisons Read online

  In 1960, I and most of the other debs were thinking about college. Few of us were interested in marriage. But on the night of the cotillion, one by one, each deb, wearing a long white dress evocative of a wedding gown, stepped onto an elaborately decorated platform to be shown to society.

  Me at age seventeen, Links Cotillion, 1960

  I stood in the wings, more resigned than nervous, waiting to hear my name called. When my turn came, I lifted the hem of my dress and climbed the steps up to the platform. There I stood, framed by a plethora of white flowers and ribbons, the spotlights blinding me, as the announcer read off my lineage and described my accomplishments. I smiled hard and curtsied deep. I couldn’t see the audience, but I heard the applause validating my worth.

  Unaccustomed to high-heeled shoes, I gingerly stepped down a red-carpeted stairway. My proud, tuxedoed father met me at the bottom and paraded me around the ballroom. Then my proud-of-himself, tuxedoed young escort paraded me around the ballroom. When the last of the debs had gone through this ritual, we formed three circles on the dance floor to perform a rigidly choreographed minuet. We were petals on a flower. Black girls in white.

  We flaunted our American middle-classness, I now realize, and gave no thought to the time, a hundred years earlier, when our ancestors stood on platforms to be appraised and parceled out.

  Later, a photograph of me receiving a certificate for best academic achievement appeared in Jet magazine. I had done a good job of representing my father’s family, the Wilsons, and my mother’s family, the Madisons. But I thought the whole thing foolish. There was pressure not just to achieve but to broadcast that achievement. I resented being put on display.

  Oakland had a racially and culturally diverse population, and I could take a train or a ferry across the bay to San Francisco to explore the museums and shops, attend plays and dance performances, or meander through the long, narrow park that ended at a zoo with the Pacific Ocean a short walk beyond. San Francisco was one of the most sophisticated, pretty, and glamorous cities in the world, but it was too close to home.

  The family saying anchored me—I knew who my ancestors were and what they had accomplished; they had set examples for me to follow. But it also felt like a trap. It sounds banal, but I wanted to explore life unencumbered by an overprotective family and a watchful black middle-class community. I knew that whatever I wanted to try, I could find it in New York City. I also knew my parents would let me go anywhere to further my education. New York University was the perfect choice.

  I attended class faithfully and fulfilled the academic requirements, but the city around me beckoned. I arranged my schedule so I could attend Wednesday matinees on Broadway. I saw Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn dance as Romeo and Juliet; Sammy Davis Jr. act, sing, and box in Golden Boy; Sidney Poitier become Walter Lee Younger in A Raisin in the Sun; and Barbra Streisand and Sydney Chaplin portray Fanny Brice and Nicky Arnstein in Funny Girl. Judith Jamison was the dancer I had dreamed of becoming almost two decades earlier. Her performance in The Prodigal Prince with the Alvin Ailey dance company was so mesmerizing it made me cry. I loved the subway; for a nickel, it could take me almost everywhere in the big, noisy, exciting city.

  One afternoon, I attended a talk by science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who urged the audience of NYU students to “muddle around in life.” Only by exploring life’s ups and downs, he explained, could we grow as young adults. My family’s expectations were clear and binding; there was little room for me to muddle, but I gave it a try. I partied with friends in disco after disco until closing time. We often ended up in someone’s apartment, dancing until early morning. I remember sitting on the floor at a friend’s smoke-filled place as he tried to teach me what to do with a joint. I failed. It made me feel weak and dizzy and triggered my asthma, but I was delighted I had tried. My parents would not have approved of my efforts, tame as they were, had they known what I was up to.

  Well before graduate school, I’d found that being a descendant of African slaves had a significant impact on my life. Being a descendant of a president, however, did not. I came to resent the reverence for James Madison the directive demanded. He was a Founding Father and a president, but he had also owned people. And I did not believe he should be excused merely because, at that time, having slaves was the norm among landowners and the wealthy.

  It would take me years to articulate this to myself and then decades to explain to my mother that the saying she revered and lived by echoed with the abuses of slavery.

  In 1990, at the age of forty-seven, I had my own pediatric practice and had been married for twenty years to an accomplished physician-researcher. Our daughter, Nicole Elise, was a bright, beautiful, often hilarious seventeen-going-on-seventy-year-old who described herself as “spoiled but not rotted.” She loved to burst into the house shouting, “Hi, honey, I’m black!”

  Life was good. But one day, my mother called, sounding tired. “Dolly, I’ll be coming east soon to bring you the box.” Mom’s pet name for me was a reference to that little girl she once dressed up in organdy and lace to perform in piano recitals and to the elegantly gowned teenager who smiled and curtsied in the debutante ball. Mom was not referring to our ancestor’s wife. She had no fondness for Dolley Madison.

  I knew which box she meant, and I was stunned that she was giving it to me. The taped-up, saggy cardboard box, big enough to hold four or five of my childhood dolls, contained priceless family memorabilia—photographs, land deeds, bundles of letters, wills, and birth certificates. A smudged copy of an 1860 slave census listed my great-great-grandparents and their ten children by gender and approximate age.

  When I was a child, Mom showed me the list and told me, “That male slave there, age fifty-two, and that female slave, age thirty-seven, were your great-great-grandparents, and that male slave, age nineteen, was your great-grandfather. The others were his brothers.” When I asked whether the slaves had names, my mother answered, “Of course they did, but most plantation owners thought of slaves as belongings, like tables or jewelry or mules. Any favorite possession might get a special name, like the mule Ol’ Maizy. Your great-great-grandfather’s name was Emanuel, your great-great-grandmother was Elizabeth, and your great-grandfather was Mack.”

  I remember my youthful fascination with the photographs. A few were in color, most in fading sepia, some pasted on velvety black paper in albums, and others left scattered in the box. Many of the subjects, especially those in the older pictures, appeared threatening as they stood or sat stiffly in funny-looking clothes and glared right at me.

  Mom had never mentioned that I would be the next griotte. There had been a griot in every generation in my family for two centuries; my mother was the seventh one. And now, it seemed, I was to be the eighth.

  After my mother phoned to tell me she was bringing me the box, I tried to read a novel but soon put it aside. I picked up my knitting but quit after two rows. I stood on the back porch trying to persuade myself to throw down some mulch in the garden or trim the hedges, anything other than dwelling on the possible meaning of Mom’s upcoming visit. When my husband, Lee, asked what was wrong, I could only shake my head. After many anxious hours, I decided I would inquire about her health the moment I saw her. I had to know why now was the time for me to take the box into my care.

  Compounding my concern about Mom’s health was my terror about becoming a griotte. Understanding our directive, “Always remember—you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president,” had presented a daunting challenge for me from the time I first heard it, and it was even more of one now that I would be responsible for ensuring that the torch of family pride and history would not go out. I had tried to live in accordance with the directive but worried I would never be the Madison my family expected me to be. I always felt embarrassed when my mother introduced me to someone. She would say, “This is my favorite daughter”—the family joke was that I was her only daughter—“Bettye. She’s a double doctor. She graduated from
UC Berkeley, then she went to NYU, met her husband, and got a PhD in biology. She worked in a lab for a while but didn’t like doing the same thing over and over, which doesn’t surprise me. Two years after her daughter, Nicole, was born, she decided to join her husband in med school at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. It’s one of the best schools in the country. Now she’s a pediatrician in Boston and has her own practice!” As this litany rolled on, I wanted to disappear, but I understood that, for my mother, my credentials were successes not only for me but also for the family legacy and for herself, the girl who had picked cotton in small-town Texas.

  In school, I had learned a lot about President Madison, and my mother had told me stories about my enslaved ancestors, but to be the griotte my family deserved, I would have to enter my forebears’ lives and do my best to understand who we were as the “Other Madisons.” Our archives were precious, the stories inspirational, and the storytellers wise. I did not feel wise. For all of my degrees, I had only skimmed the emotional depth I’d need to face the truth head-on and tell my family’s story. What would I add to the family griot tradition?

  My grandfather John Chester Madison had contributed many lessons. He was the sixth of our family griots. I called him Gramps. His father chose him to be the griot of his generation because he cared deeply about history, especially family history, and because he was a gifted storyteller who could make our ancestors as real as if they were about to join us at the dinner table.

  When I was six years old, Gramps flew from Texas to California to spend Christmas with us. One evening, he sat me on his lap and told me his version of the traditional Negro folktale “The People Could Fly.” His face was smooth and golden brown, his mustache and wavy hair white. Tiny moles stippled his cheeks and neck like freckles. Round, silver-rimmed glasses sat precariously on the end of his nose but never slipped off, not even during the most animated parts of his storytelling. I snuggled in to listen.

  “The people were black and strong and magic,” Gramps began. “More than magic, they were wondrous. They were God’s people. Some folk way over in Africa could step up into the air and fly away by their wings. Yes, our people had wings back then. Sometimes a whole bunch of them flew together, looking like a plume of butterflies rising here, then there in the big, blue sky. Every day, they would fly someplace to fish, fly back home, feed their families, fly away again, find some berries, fly back home with the berries, and raise their babies. That’s the way it was for many, many years.

  “But one day, some white men with whips and chains came from across the ocean and shoved the people into ships and stole them far away. The black folks were so aggrieved that their wings fell off and turned to dust. The dust flew into their eyes and made tears.

  “Out in the hot, burning fields of the new land so foreign to them, the folk from Africa worked from before sunrise to after sunset, from ‘can’t see to can’t see.’ The harder they worked, the more they forgot about being strong and magic, and misery made them forget about their wings.

  “Years went by. Then one morning, an old black man came strutting down the road, swinging a hoe. He was tall and had a long white beard and long white hair that hung around his smiling, black face. His clothes were the same as what the people working the fields wore, and nobody thought there was anything special about him. Except his smile.

  “He walked over to a young woman. She was working so hard her legs shook and working so fast, she couldn’t stop to feed the baby crying at her feet. She was pretty, but her dark brown face was streaked gray with dry, salty tears, and her eyes were puffed red and sad.

  “The old man said, ‘Mary,’ and the woman looked up from her work, surprised he knew her name.

  “‘Mary,’ he repeated. ‘It’s time. Ain’t safe fo’ yo’ li’l boy.’” Gramps said this in his slave voice, as if he were the old man in the tale. “‘Ol’ Massa go’n hurt him. Best you go right now.’

  “Mary wasn’t sure what he meant, so he explained. ‘ ’Member yo’ magic. You gotta ’member now, befo’ it’s too late.’

  “Then he whispered some secret words into her ear. She stared at him, and her eyes turned bright. She did remember her magic! Mary stuck her hoe into the ground, bent down, and scooped up the baby. She stretched her neck and began to float toward the sun. Right after her feet left the earth, big silver wings sprouted from her back, and she soared up high, smiling and hugging her baby to her chest. Mary looked down and saw her hoe standing and trembling in the ground, right where she had left it. The massa of the plantation couldn’t believe his eyes.

  “Next, the old man went to Joseph, who was chopping and hoeing so hard, it seemed like the flesh might fall off his bones. He didn’t see Mary and the baby in the sky.

  “‘Joseph,’ the old man said, ‘it’s time.’ Then he whispered something to Joseph and pointed to Mary and the baby. Joseph smiled real big.

  “When Massa saw this, he ran up and threw a long whip around Joseph’s legs, cutting them, making them bleed onto the dirt. Joseph pulled that evil strap from around his legs, shoved his hoe into the ground, jumped into the sky, and flew over the fields. His silver wings cast a broad shadow, and as he flew, blood dripped from his legs and killed the tobacco.

  “Now Massa was really mad, especially when he saw Joseph’s and Mary’s hoes standing in the middle of the empty, black field, shaking like they were laughing at him. Massa stomped his feet and hollered, but Joseph just flapped his wings and flew higher until he caught up with Mary and the baby.

  “Soon, one by one, folks toiling in the fields heard the old man’s magic words and took to the sky. With all of them heading toward the sun, the sky started to get dim. Below them, the fields withered, and the ground opened up in big crevices. Now there were so many hoes standing and quaking that the earth began to rumble, and the cracks got wider and deeper.

  “Finally, the old man lifted himself up into the air and flew over Massa, who started quivering because the ground was moving, because the spread of the old man’s wings shut out more light and heat from the sun, but mostly because he was mighty scared. Then the old man flapped his wings so fast the sky turned into a wild wind that pulled all the trees out of the ground and threw them off the plantation.

  “Massa lay down on the dry, cracked earth so the wind wouldn’t throw him off too. The old man looked down on Massa but didn’t say a word. He just flew higher. When he got higher than the mountains, his ragged pants and shirt began to shimmer and glow, turning into flowing, white robes. His hoe turned into a staff of pure gold. He was a glorious angel sent by the Lord!

  “As the angel flew toward the sun, the sky got blacker and blacker. Massa kept his face hidden in the ground, so he didn’t see that when the angel got close to the sun, it shrank down and disappeared. Then, where the sun used to make its gold light in the east, a ball of silver light began to grow, silver just like the wings of God’s special people. That light grew and grew, and filled the sky. It was a big, beautiful star, the Star of Bethlehem. But Massa didn’t see it because he was still lying on the ground, shaking and hiding his face. Nobody paid no mind when a giant gap opened wide under Massa and swallowed him up forever.”

  After Gramps told me that story, he lifted my chin so I was looking into his eyes. He said: “In a way, baby girl, we all have wings. We just have to know what we want, figure out what we have to do to get it, and then do it. Christ showed us how. Nobody’s wings are any stronger than ours. That’s the way God made us. We’re the Other Madisons.”

  Later, as a forty-seven-year-old in need of reassurance, I could see his eyes and hear his voice.

  Two months after my mother told me she was giving me the box, she flew from Oakland to visit me in Boston. When she stepped off the plane, I saw nothing out of the ordinary about her, but I still searched for clues. Three decades earlier, my grandfather, aware he was dying, handed over this important role to his daughter. Was Mom ill? Did her visit mean I was about to lose her? Was this the wa
y it worked?

  Mom had on her red hat—a good sign, I decided—and she carried a carousel of slides and the saggy, taped-up cardboard box. The carousel was nine years old; the cardboard box, several decades older. My mother’s visit would last three short days, but it would change my life.

  The ride home from the airport was uneventful, and as we pulled into my driveway, the evening air, chilly in the aftermath of a late-autumn storm, was soothing. Around my house, trees with sparse leaves clinging to branches stood in black silhouette against the twilight sky. Their ethereal beauty reassured me.

  Mom entered the living room and removed her hat, revealing the smooth outline of her head through a silver mist of frothy hair. Her cautious gait and rounded shoulders made me aware that she had aged in the few months since I had last seen her.

  She took a hand mirror from her cosmetics case and turned her back to the large one on the wall. Then, as I had seen her do hundreds of times before, Mom adjusted her head and angled her wrist to create a looking-glass corridor. She stood gazing silently into the hand mirror for several moments, watching her image become smaller and smaller along an infinite reflective portal.

  What did she envision far down the passage? The young woman she used to be, the taut, golden skin framed by an arc of thick black hair? With the purpose of her visit in mind, did she imagine our ancestors and descendants lined up along the passage, slaves and their masters and the generations before them standing at the far end, and children, grandchildren, and future great-grandchildren at the other?

  Mom lowered the hand mirror, leaned forward, and placed it between the slide carousel and the colorful hat on the coffee table. The box sat on the floor beneath the wall mirror.