I’ve been spending a lot of time with the interviews the Work Projects Administration did with formerly enslaved people who lived in Nashville back in the 1930s. One of my favorites is Ann Matthews, who lived at 719 Ninth Ave. S. I believe her home is now under the interstate. I like Ann because she’s a great storyteller. For instance, she’s talking about how she promised God that she wouldn’t dance, but then, oops, she ends up at a dance.
Side note: All these WPA interviews are rendered in what the white interviewer interpreted as Black vernacular. So when Ann says, “I useter 'yer de folks talk 'bout de sta'rs fallin', but dat happen' 'fore I wuz bawn,” that’s a white person deciding that this is the best way to render what Ann is saying. We don’t know that Ann thought there was such a word as “useter” or if she was saying “used to” with a deep country accent. I don’t know how to thread the needle between respecting Ann’s own voice and her way of speaking and knowing that this is not Ann’s own voice and way of speaking, but rather some white person’s approximation — and that no one asked Ann for her opinion on how she wanted her words to be rendered. Where I’m ending up, for right now, is that Ann is our neighbor, and it is important for us to be able to understand each other as neighbors and to reject any rhetorical decisions not made by her that make her sound strange to us. So I’m goin to render Ann’s words into more modern English. I don’t know if this is the right decision, but the WPA interviewer’s original interpretation of what Ann was saying is available and linked above, if you think that approach is better.
OK, so back to Ann and the dance. Here’s how she tells it:
"When I was in Manchester, I promised the Lord I wouldn’t dance. But one night I was on the ball floor, dancing from one end of the room to the other, and something says, 'Go to the door.' I didn’t go right then, and again it says, 'You is not keeping your promise.' I went to the door and you could pick a pin off the ground it was so light. In the sky was the prettiest thing you ever seen, so many colors, blue, white, green, red and yellow."
Just a reminder, this is Nashville in the 1930s. Our greatest poets were sitting at Vanderbilt writing weepy paeons to how much they missed the Confederacy, a brief experiment in treason none of them were old enough to have participated in, on account of them having not been born yet. And Ann Matthews is mere blocks away saying, “I went to the door and you could pick a pin off the ground it was so light.” I wish the interviewer had asked her a million more questions about God chasing her from a dance and out into a display of the Northern Lights.
And I find the theology so interesting here. The normal structure of a story like this is: “I was doing something I shouldn’t, and God punished me.” But Ann is saying that she was doing something she said she wouldn’t, and God was like, “Um, you’re in here having this fun, and you’re almost missing out on this wonder.” No punishment, just God trying to make sure she doesn’t lose her chance at something cool.
Here, though, is the thing that Ann says that is very hard to read and comprehend. She says: “Don’t remember much about my mammy except she was a short, fat Indian woman with a terrible temper. She died during the war, with black measles.” Her father was, she says, “part Indian.” He lived through the Civil War.
The Rev. John Moore (809 Seventh Ave. S.) said, “My mammy was half Indian, and my daddy a slave. Both of them owned by William Moore.”
Famed minister and lawyer and student of Tolbert Fanning's, Samuel Lowery, was the son of an enslaved man named Peter Lowery and his Cherokee wife Ruth. Considering that the Rev. Lowery was born enslaved, it is highly unlikely that his mother was not also enslaved.
Of all the cruel things people endured during enslavement, the constant threat of losing your loved ones had to be among the most heartbreaking
Did you know that Native Americans were enslaved in Tennessee up until the Civil War? I sure as shit did not. I feel pretty dumb about that, because I knew Andrew Jackson was kidnapping Creek babies and sending them home to The Hermitage, and I just assumed they weren’t, like, sleeping in the house.
But in my mind, the history of slavery in the United States goes: We tried to enslave the Indigenous population when we first got here, but it didn’t work out, so we switched to Africans. I mean, I thought almost all Native Americans were gone from Tennessee by 1840, due to the aforementioned Andrew Jackson.
I didn’t quite put it together that if Andrew Jackson was stealing Creek babies and sending them to live in his yard, then he was enslaving them — and obviously he was not alone. But is this why so many white people in the South think they have a Cherokee princess ancestor? Is this some twisted remembrance of the Native American women enslaved in the households? We just erase any knowledge of this evil and so flounder for some alternative explanation of what that woman was doing there?
I’m always shocked — and then feel stupid for being shocked — when I learn about a way I’ve been lied to about American history. But the truth still sits there, waiting to be discovered. And I genuinely take hope in that.
