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Aunt Nan
The Naming of Aunt Nan
In 1993, collecting materials for a family history I intended to write, I found myself in the South Boston Library of Halifax County, Virginia. When I eventually wrote the book, it had three sections dealing with Halifax County, the first an unripe narrative of the events of the journey by airplane and rental car, the second a story about meeting a gracious and kindly librarian in South Boston named Julia Carrington, and the third a tale about looking for the family of Aunt Nan Pounds that Mrs. Carrington told me about. She remembered Aunt Nan well, she said, because Aunt Nan had told her fortune when she was young. “Aunt Nan was very old, quiet and neat,“ Mrs. Carrington said, “and she had the most beautiful blue eyes. Now you’re going to hate me for saying this but she was colored. Though they were really light. Some of her family went north and passed."
Aunt Nan had lived about ten miles west of Halifax toward Vernon Hill, Mrs. Carrington said, and kindly marked the place on my map. The sun was going down when I left the Library, and by the time I got to Halifax and turned west it was dropping in front of me like a hammer. That journey took me through deepening darkness along narrowing gravel roads and the gravel turning to dirt, the upshot of which was that I gave up, saying to myself, “Aunt Nan, I’ll look for you some other day.” That was in 1993. Twenty-three years later, I kept my promise--though in fact by then Aunt Nan was the last thing on my mind.
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Twenty-three years later was February of 2016, in the full bloom of the world wide web and its database delirium, with the memories of the days when I drove from county seat to county seat to find records in the courthouses and libraries grown so distant in my mind as to seem like
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another lifetime. Then I came across a photograph of an elderly woman who looked familiar. I didn’t recognize her until I had studied her name and considered that her residence was in Halifax County Virginia. It was Aunt Nan.
I’d been trawling for an image of a great-great-aunt named Amanda Pounds who was born in Missouri in 1860 and died there in 1916. I found myself looking at the photo of a woman named Amanda Pounds who was born in Halifax County Virginia in 1865 and died there in 1955. My first response was blank confusion. The face was right. The name was right. She certainly looked like a Pounds. But how could she have been born in Virginia in 1865 and lived until 1955? Then I looked again at the nickname given her in parentheses: “Aunt Nan.” Slowly a rushlight of memory began to glow in the darkness. This has to be the Aunt Nan that Mrs. Carrington told me about in 1993. It had to be! And it was. What was it she had said to me? (I knew because I had written it down.) “Aunt Nan had a boy named Wilson, and you know he favors you. Kind of high in the forehead and with those sunken eyes.”
Two hundred years and more had passed since the Poundses I knew about lived in Halifax County, and in the last fifteen years the pursuit of genealogy had come to be informed by genetic science, but no science was needed here. The DNA is in the face. When you meet a blood-kin member of your family for the first time, you feel a shock of recognition, a lifting of the heart even before you learn their name. I recognized Aunt Nan, and I would recognize others as I came across their photos: her son Wilson, her father Felix, and above all her nephew Moses Belt Pounds II (1904-1993), who looked enough like my father to be his brother. Mrs. Carrington had said Aunt Nan was “colored” though “very light.” That would mean mulatto, but the word never occurred to me as I looked at her photo and
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images of her father and her son that I found. When the next day it did occur to me, it meant nothing, and today it means less. All I felt then and still feel now is that these are my people.
I wrote Mrs. Carrington a letter and sent it to the South Boston Library. After twenty-three years, she would be either retired or gone to her final rest, but someone there would put me in touch either with her or her kin. I was quite sure of this, because this was rural Virginia, I was from rural Oklahoma, and folkways don’t change, except with the slowness of mountains and rivers. Famously, the territory called Oklahoma had been given to the five civilized tribes of Indians that President Jackson and his cohorts had moved by using enormous sums of money and the threat of armed force, moving them from their homes in the Upper South, western Georgia, and the future states of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. White history books sentimentalize this journey as the Trail of Tears. The Indians call it the Trail of Death. Turning the pages of history we come to the land-runs that began in 1889 opened Oklahoma to white settlement. The white settlers came from two areas: some from the northern states like Kansas, Iowa, and Illinois, others from the south, Kentucky, Alabama, and Missouri. It was my mother’s family who represented the southern influx--her grandfather was from Alabama. It was my father’s tribe, the Poundses, who represented the northern inpouring--his grandfather came from Ohio and Illinois. But even this northern tribe had southern roots. They’d all started out in Virginia, and by the mid 1700s many of them were living in and around Halifax County. That explained what I was doing there in 1993.
Another name to mention here, though I have yet to define the family links, is that of Sarah Ellen Crummel (or Cumble, 1864-1949), who is buried about a mile from
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where I was born in Chandler, Oklahoma. She was born in Russell County Kentucky and was a relative of the mulatto Poundses who had migrated from Halifax County, Virginia, into Metcalfe and Russell counties a few years before the Civil War, led by the Halifax County-born freedman Thomas Pounds. Born about the same year as Aunt Nan, Sarah Crummel looks enough like Aunt Nan to be cousins, which in all likelihood they were.
Within about ten days of writing to Mrs. Carrington, I had an email from Cary Perkins, Mrs. Carrington’s daughter, dated 10 February 2016:
When I talked to my mother yesterday about your email she was pleased to hear from you and recounted again the story about getting her fortune told and how it all came true. I have to say how very dear it was for Mrs. Pounds to forecast such positive things for my
mother; whether she was a bona fide fortune teller or just a wise woman, I think of her as a dear woman and think of her, at this moment, very fondly.
May I suggest that you contact my mother if you want any additional recollections. She is 88 years old. I will happily pass your request on to her and make arrangements to email you or have you call her.
I recognized the light of grace that sometimes shines on us from above to encourage our endeavors when we persevere, not to mention the kindness of strangers. Cary and I have since carried on a correspondence, in which she has been as kind and gracious as her mother. Much of what follows below is either the fruit of that correspondence or was inspired by it.
In March 2016 I received a letter from Mrs. Carrington that added some details to her story about Aunt
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Nan.
She told my fortune when I was teaching third grade at Wilson Memorial High School. I was about 20 or 21 years old. Everything she predicted for me came true, except one thing. She said I would live a long time, be very close always to my mother and my church, and be very wealthy. All came true, except I am not wealthy at all!, except in things that matter, like family and loved ones still with me, and memories. I have eight children and many grandchildren.
Aunt Nan’s own story begins with her grandmother, Priscilla “Silla” Pounds, 1791-1893. The substance of what is known for sure about Silla comes from her death record, which gives the date as 30 October 1893 and her age as 102. She was born and died in Halifax County, and the information was provided by her son Felix. (The Kentucky Thomas Pounds mentioned above was her son or nephew.) This data is supplemented by the 1880 census, the only one on which Priscilla appears. In 1880 she was living alone next door to Felix and his family in the Birch Creek District, near Oak Level and not far from Sinai, giving her occupation as “Sewing & Knitting.” Since Felix is listed in the same district in 1870, it is reasonable to think that Priscilla was there also. Priscilla is buried in the Felix Pounds Cemetery in Paces, Halifax County.
It is known that Priscilla had two sons, Meshack and Felix, but before looking at them it is best to consider the one place name provided by the records--Birch Creek. Located about ten miles west of Halifax, it was the name of the census district that included Felix’s branch of the family between 1870 and 1930, and just as significantly the district included part of the sprawling and wealthy Berry Hill
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Plantation, which adjoined Sinai. At least that is the first response one hears today, conscious as everyone is of the famous plantation. Covering 3,600 acres in its heyday, it was one of the largest in Virginia. It was originally owned by Isaac Coles, who began using slaves in 1803. Twice the plantation changed owners, finally ending up under the control of James Coles Bruce in 1832. Bruce is credited with transforming the existing 18th-century brick plantation house then standing into the Greek Revival mansion seen today. The main house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1969 and today is used as a conference site. The curious reader may view it at Wikipedia.
There is an earlier history of the area, however, one we should be aware of. In 1775 Champness Terry owned all this land and more--some 20,000 acres, and that was 50 years and more before James Coles Bruce bought Berry Hill. Terry received a 20,000 acre land grant in October 1765 on the branches of Sandy, Polecat, Miry, and Birches Creeks. The significance of this fact is two-fold. This area was near or possibly even surrounded the 400 acres along Peters Creek belonging to Jane Pound, as shown on the land surveys of 1773 and 1775. And in Illinois in 1817, our patriarch Samuel Pounds married Susanna Williams, a daughter of the Revolutionary War soldier Joseph Terry Williams (1756-1834) of Halifax County. He in turn was a nephew of Champness Terry, the landowner. Adequate research on this matter has not yet been done, but it seems possible that the land on which the mulatto Poundses lived for so long may have originally belonged to Champness Terry. Aunt Nan’s son Wilson, whom Mrs. Carrington told me so long ago that I resembled, is buried is on this property too at the New Vernon Church.
Reduced to 650 acres today, the plantation still contains two slave graveyards, one (Diamond Hill) holding
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the graves of more than two hundred people, making it one of the largest slave cemeteries in Virginia. Closed to the public, these cemeteries have never been accessed, though Diamond Hill was recently cleaned and it appears to have
Stone slave quarters, Berry Hill Plantation
no legible markers. Notable too are the old slave quarters with their stone houses.
None of the Poundses were ever slaves; they were designated Freemen (free persons, that is) of Color and were probably skilled in useful crafts. Some of them may have lived on the plantation as retainers, and we know that some of their kin did, for an 1845 “list of Negroes at Berry Hill Plantation” contains the names of Darby Duncan, Lucy Alderson, and their children. One of Lucy’s daughters would marry a Pounds, and Felix Pounds (son of Priscilla) may have lived in one of the stone houses that comprise the slave quarters, for the 1860 census lists him as living two houses away from the mansion house.
In 2012 an internet magazine called SoVaNow.com published an article called “When Sinai Was Young,”
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Henderson Duncan and Anna Alderson
giving the memories of two cousins, Blondine Duncan and Elizabeth Palmer. “The couple they consider the patriarch and matriarch of their family met when both were working at Berry Hill: Henderson Duncan had been an enslaved man there, the son of the famed Darby Duncan, the chef at Berry Hill who learned his culinary skills in New Orleans; the modern-day tavern at Berry Hill Resort is named for him. In 1872, Henderson Duncan married Anna Alderson, a free woman, who may have been white, who was working at Berry Hill. Anna died in 1954 at the age of 106.”
They offered other memories of Sinai as well. The magazine reports:
They agree that the village was settled after the Civil War as formerly enslaved African-Americans left the sprawling Berry Hill plantation and looked for their own land about two miles away.
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And is the name Biblical in origin — a reference to the holy mountain where Moses was given the Ten Commandments?
They’re not sure, nor is South Boston’s Patricia Jennings, who says the lore in her family is that a relative, P. B. Ragland, actually gave Sinai its name.
As for the pronunciation: locally the three- syllable “Sigh-nee-eye,” as opposed to “Sigh-nigh” — the women don’t know [which to prefer].
I have also received a current description of Sinai’s location from Brittaney Hamilton, a Pounds relation, whose great-aunt still lives there:
So first off, the Pounds-Hamilton Cemetery is located in the area that used to be called Sinai . . . a few miles north of South Boston. If you do a google maps search for Sinai Elementary School in Halifax, that's essentially where the cemetery is. The cemetery is actually on the land owned by my great aunt behind her house. Slightly north of Sinai Elementary, you'll see Banister Lake on the google maps page. My family lived near a creek that runs off that lake, but I'm not sure of the exact section. I'm assuming it's one of the creek branches that leads into the Sinai area because that's where I've always understood the Pounds side of my grandfather's family to have come from.
The village of Sinai and the Berry Hill Plantation are juxtaposed here as a reminder, if any were needed, of the institution of chattel slavery along racial lines, which is the great historical divide in American history. In terms of my own attempt to write a continuous family history, it is an immense jagged tear across the fabric. One half of our
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Halifax County history is is the history of the white Poundses who lived in this area between 1770 and 1820, and the other half is that of the mulatto Poundses who lived here from 1770 and probably earlier under different hames, and some of whom remained to the present day. The two halves cannot be joined, but only because of color. In other respects--intelligence, literacy, family pride, protestant work ethic--they seem quite amenable.
To change the metaphor, we have two halves of a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces in each half fit together neatly, but the pieces that would join the two halves are missing. Where documents should be, there is only silence. It’s across that historical gap that I recognized my face in Aunt Nan’s. Faces constitute visible DNA, and they don’t lie anymore than the science of genetics lies (though both are open to coincidence, what the geneticists call “false positives”). But the paper trail to tell us what happened before 1850 is largely missing. Thus, in what follows I’ll be forced to speculate, but I’ll mark the speculation as such.
We’re looking at two families named Pounds, resident in Halifax County from the 1750s to about 1850, but the heart of the matter is the period 1780-1820. The question is simple enough: to learn where these two lines meet or cross. Children spring from a sexual crossing of a man and a woman, but what we’re presented with here is matriarchy: we know the names of the women but not the names of their mates. Priscilla Pounds, one matriarch of the Halifax County mulatto clan, and a second matriarch, Harriet Pounds, whom we can guess was probably the sister of the first. The most important difference between them is that Harriet’s children went to Metcalfe County in southern Kentucky, while of Priscilla’s two sons, the elder (Meshack) went to neighboring Pittsylvania County, while the younger (Felix) stayed in Halifax.
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The most important child of Harriet who went to Kentucky was Thomas Pounds (1815-1895) once he turned twenty-one and got his free papers. The gist of his story is that when he had served his indenture in Halifax County and was declared a freeman, he walked to Metcalfe County to save his three siblings from being sold as slaves. One of his children later born to him in Kentucky was Mary Marietta “Polly” Pounds (1849-1939), whose narrative was collected by the WPA in 1937 and provides the story of her father’s antecedents. Written in the third person, in part it reads as follows:
Aunt Polly’s pap was Thomas Pounds, a free born Mulatto. He was born in Halifax County, Virginia. His grandmother was a white woman and slave holder. Her name was Polly Pounds and after her husband died, she had an illegitimate child by a Negro slave. This half- white and half-colored child was Thomas Pound’s mother. Thomas’s mother grew up as a free born and had four children.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. It was a white woman who crossed the color line to find a mate. Three of the resulting children were the siblings Thomas walked to Kentucky to rescue from the threat of enslavement. Perhaps this story illustrates the perils of matriarchy. Without a father, the free children could be taken and sold back into slavery.
Matriarchy means that unmarried women most often gave their own surname to their children, so we don’t know the men’s names, and crossing racial lines means we don’t know the names of the white men because they didn’t formally marry their mates. The unions that produced the children left no records. Born in the 1790s about four years
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apart, Priscilla and Harriet, as I said, are most likely sisters, but no parents or spouses are known in either case. Six children are known in the next generation, two of them certainly Pricilla’s, three of them probably Harriet’s, and one an orphan who could belong to either of them or to a third party.
Though I identify with orphans, I’m not one myself, for I can name my father and mother. They took care of me in the way good parents are expected to, and I hope I gave signs of gratitude before they passed. But I was not the typical grateful child. I had early-on read Camus’s The Stranger and Melville’s Moby-Dick and learned to recognize myself in the figures of Meursault and Ishmael. I have been a teacher of literature now for half a century, and though it will sound naïve to my theory-minded colleagues, I still like to think that one of the functions of literature is to teach us who we are. That’s why there is this continual rumble from the campuses about race, class, and gender. Students are learning who they are, or who they might be, and in order to learn they must thresh out the categories and reshape them as recognizable images of their own faces.
The present essay contains lessons about those campus favorites, race, class, and gender. “Class” in the United States is the simplest category, and we can dismiss it because it means nothing more than the presence or absence of money. Race is the obvious topic of these pages. For myself, I recall something that Ralph Ellison says in one of his meditations on race in the U.S.A. Writing in the 1950s from the perspective of white-black issues, he says we’re all members of a mixed breed called the American. There’s a drop of white in the blackest black, and there’s a drop of black in the whitest white--a message that is given parable form in Invisible Man in a passage about the paint used to make the White House so dazzlingly white. So I
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contemplate the fact of Aunt Nan’s blue eyes and look at the DNA written in her face.
Aunt Nan also has a word to say about gender. Some of the documents the state of Virginia used to mark her progress through life give her middle name as John. Her full maiden name was Amanda John Pounds. No, she wasn’t trying to join the trans-gender club. Her mother Priscilla did what poor people have always done. She gave her child a name that would mean something to a matriarchal society. She gave Amanda the name John as a memorial and a marker, so that she and others would know who her granddaughter was. She was Amanda Pounds, descendant of a man named John. The social world is marked by immense complexity, so we all need names to get through life. They are the necessary handles by which people get a hold of us. In giving us a name, our parents perform one of their first and most essential acts of kindness. That, at least, is the charitable reading of the matter.
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Just after writing the above sentence, I walked outside to the lotus pond near our house for my morning constitutional. Pondside is where my best ideas assault me. I started reading Ruth Ozeki’s The Year of Meats, and on page nine I found this conversation between two parents, a mixed-Japanese couple whose family name is Little and who are thinking of naming their girl child Jane. Pitiful to contemplate because the reader knows that even if the girl grows to be six feet tall, she’ll never be plain Jane. She’ll always be called Little Jane.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Dad would say. “It’s just a name!” which would cause Ma to recoil in horror.
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“How you can say ‘justa name’? Name is very first thing. Name is face to all the world.”
I take the mother’s side in this disagreement. A name is indeed the first step taken as even in infancy we prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet. Fortunately for this couple and their child, they do reach an interesting compromise. They use the mother’s maiden name to create a compound family name Takagi-Little.
Something like that must have happened with Aunt Nan. “Amanda Pounds” is a fine name but, Priscilla must have felt, incomplete. It gives the father’s surname but doesn’t tell which of the many Pounds men he was. So, with no hyphen to compound the family names, Amanda becomes Amanda John Pounds. Now she has a face she can hold up and possess as her own. Maybe that confidence helps her to be a stronger. Though it may be from the long line of Pounds women I knew growing up, for me it’s a face that speaks of strength and kindness.
Sources
The sources for this essay are given intertextually.
Stone slave quarters, Berry Hill Plantation
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