When I sat down to think about the opportunity to guest edit an issue of Southern Cultures, I thought immediately about the idea of home. I am the new director of the UNC Center for the Study of the American South, the physical and intellectual home of Southern Cultures, the Southern Oral History Program, and Southern Futures. It is a campus home for students, faculty, and staff interested in innovating a new generation of ideas about the meaning of the South. It is also located in the Love House on East Franklin Street, on land and on a campus that has a long and entangled history of Native dispossession, slavery, and segregation. As the first Black woman to serve as director in the Center’s thirty-year history, I could think of no more appropriate way to start a conversation than to complicate what it might mean for people to call the South home from a variety of perspectives.
Home holds dualities and contradictions: celebration and lament; threat and safety; disaster and sanctuary; stability and mobility; ownership (heirs’ property) and displacement (gentrification, climate catastrophes); rootedness and migration; steadiness and instability; happy reunions and complicated returns.
Home for me is complicated. I’m a Black American, born and raised in New Jersey, with southern roots. Each of my grandparents was born in a different southern state. My paternal grandfather, Theodore Brooks Murphy, was born in Accomack County, on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, where his ancestors were most likely among the first people in bondage in what would become the United States. My paternal grandmother, Sarah Jane Burris, was born on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, her enslaved ancestors freed shortly after the American Revolution. Free for generations, they fled the region for Philadelphia to escape the racial terror that threatened them. Moving with her family to Philadelphia, my Nana met my grandfather there, two Eastern Shore natives who met in a city in the North.
My maternal grandfather, John Dee Duncan, was born in Elbert County, Georgia, where his ancestors had been held in bondage for generations. My great-grandfather, Solicitor Duncan, was a minister and a sharecropper who never received a fair settlement from the white man who held the land his family worked. After being cheated again and again, Solicitor and his wife and four children fled in the middle of the night in fear of their lives if they spoke up. They sought safety and opportunity in Thomasville, North Carolina. Solicitor, John Dee, and his older brother, Obbie, were carpenters, blacksmiths, and builders, their skills passed down from their enslaved ancestors over the generations. While those skills had made their ancestors valuable as chattel, as free people, their skills made them a threat. They sought employment in the town furniture factory, but there they could only get jobs sweeping the sawdust, while higher-paying skilled positions were for white men only.
My maternal grandmother, Brunell Raeford, was born in Newberry County, South Carolina, where her enslaved ancestors had been held in bondage since colonial times. There, following a wave of lynchings in the county, every generation, every relative of her family fled, also arriving in Thomasville, North Carolina. Thomasville was where my maternal grandparents would meet and my mother would be born. It was also the place where several members of my grandmother’s immediate family would die, most of tuberculosis, because the lack of childhood exposure to the bacterium in their tiny rural community left them with no resistance. Before the age of twenty-one, Grammy lost her grandparents, both parents, her sister closest in age, her brother-in-law, a niece, and a nephew. Shortly after my mother’s birth, my grandparents left Thomasville, which had become a place of so much death and disappointment, and headed off for Philadelphia.
I was born in South Jersey, but my family, with southern roots, grounded me in a Black southern sensibility. So, when I think of home, I think of my grandmother’s garden at the end of a long driveway bordered by thick marigolds grown from seed. It was in West Atco, New Jersey, but it was modeled after her idealized memories of Newberry County. My grandmother grew corn, tomatoes, okra, string beans, collard and turnip greens, kale, strawberries, and squash of all kinds. So plentiful was the bounty of her garden that she proudly set baskets by the curb for neighbors to pick up. There was a pear tree and a crab apple tree at the bottom of the hill. She’d simmer down the fruit to make the thickest, sweetest preserves I’ve ever tasted. And in her kitchen, she cooked the most amazing meals. I remember, standing at her hip as the pot rolled at a boil, fragrant scratch chicken stock swallowing up pieces of dough torn off from the strips hung over her arm to make dumplings. Her peach pies were famous, always the perfect ratio of syrup and fruit, and requested for every family and church occasion all summer long.
When I think of home, I think of my grandmothers and their Deaconess all-white dresses, hats, and gloves, ready for church on the first Sunday of each month, another tradition kept alive, despite the violences and disconnection. While many of my colleagues are fourth-generation academics, I am a fourth-generation Deaconess, keeping up the tradition in service to God and community.
When I reflect on home, I’m also mourning its violences. I’ve done research to reconstruct ancestors’ lives in the South, but I am sad that the places where my ancestors worked and lived, bled and died, still leave me uncomfortable today. There is no place of comfort for me in Elbert County, Newberry, Accomack, or Salisbury. No site to which I can easily and comfortably return, given that I know that none of these places was easy or comfortable for my ancestors. Those violences echo. And so, as I make a home in the South over the decades of my adult life as a mother, wife, churchgoer, scholar, I am sitting with all the ways to make the South a reflection of what my ancestors wished it would have been for them, seeking out the land, the safety, and the justice they were too often denied.
One of my favorite thought partners, Rhon Manigault-Bryant, happened to join the faculty as the director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Research in Black Culture and History, another historic intellectual home at unc, so I asked if she would coedit this issue with me, and I was thrilled to learn that she would. Rhon’s deep roots in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, her scholarship on the ancestral ties to the land, mourning, healing, and faith made her perspective essential to this question of home.
—Blair LM Kelley
I INHERITED A CEMETERY. I learned about that inheritance when my great-aunt Peggy called to tell me that her husband, my great-uncle Booker, had jotted my name in a note on the back of one of his land-survey documents. That call in October of 2020 was as much revelation as it was catalyst. It put things into motion that could not be undone, including our acquiring Aunt Peggy and Uncle Booker’s house and land adjacent to the cemetery. I never intended to return home. As powerful and positive a formation space as Moncks Corner, South Carolina, had been for me, I simply had not considered making a life there as an adult. My journey had taken me elsewhere—or so I thought. I now truly know what it means when elders at the church in which I grew up—Wesley United Methodist Church—would always say, “If you want to make God laugh, make plans.”
Plans have a way of changing. But there’s something different about the ways death, like our ancestors, brings plans—and home—into perspective. Aunt Peggy knew that Uncle Booker’s passing meant that someone had to fill the role of tending to the family cemetery, just as he had done. She discerned, however, that my name on his note on that specific page of the land survey of the Jingo and Sarah Manigault Memorial Cemetery (established 1929) meant that it was to be me. By my birth into the Manigault family—my paternal family—I always had the right to be interred in that cemetery, our cemetery. But upon my uncle Booker’s death, I assumed the right to be its caretaker. In that role, I am called to heal familial wounds, to soothe generational fissures . . . and trust me, there are many.
Jingo Wallace Manigault (1830–1934) was my great-great-grandfather. He had two children with his first wife, Mary, before he married my great-great-grandmother Sarah Mack (1834–1941). Jingo and Sarah were freed slaves. Jingo served the Union in the Civil War at the rank of private in Company K of the 103rd Regiment of the United States Colored Infantry. As part of their freedom, Jingo and Sarah acquired many acres of land in Berkeley County, South Carolina, and the terms of that acquisition remain a mystery. Jingo and Sarah lived for over a century and passed those live-long genes to many of their descendants. They had nine children—three daughters and six sons—who also inherited their lands. Their youngest son was my great-granddaddy Charles Sinclair (“Sinkler”) Manigault (1887–1967). Great-grandaddy Charles—”C. S.,” as he was called—was married twice. His first wife, Epheus (1890–1918), was called “Effie” and died at the age of twenty-seven. Before she died, she gave birth to my great-aunts Orrbeteen (born 1902, death unknown); Sarah (1913–2011); Virbeteen (1913–1999); and Elouise (1915–1987); and my great-uncle Charles Sinclair Jr. (1916–2014).
Great-grandaddy C. S. then married Cynthia Suicere Turner (1902–1985), whom I remember quite fondly for her sweet head pats, and whom we affectionately called “Grandma C. T.” Grandma C. T. and Great-grandaddy C. S. had Emily, called “Lil” (1919–2023), and Benjamin (1921–2019). My family tree then reveals a surprise—one of a few to come: Great-grandaddy C. S. tipped out on Grandma C. T. and had a daughter, Mary Jane Brown (1922–2013) with a woman named Alethia Brown (born 1885). C. T. and Charles reunited (or perhaps were never apart) and thereafter birthed an expansive family, most of whom were born in two-year intervals: Samuel (born 1925), Oliver (1927–2015), Phyllis (1929–2015), Daniel “Dee” J. (born 1931), Christopher (1933–2023), Barceto “Booker” (1935–2020), Geraldine “Angie” (born 1937), Delenora (born 1939), Willie J. (1941–2023), and Pauline (1943–1994). My great-uncles Sam and Dee, and aunts Angie and Del are living attestations to those Manigault live-long genes. I hope I too may be a beneficiary.
My dad, William—Bill, as everyone calls him—is technically an only child. He is named in honor of Jingo’s father and one of Great-granddaddy Charles’s brothers. Daddy was born in 1944 and celebrated his eightieth birthday on August 6, 2024. He grew up in the family home Jingo built and roamed our unprecedented inheritance of hundreds of acres. He describes growing up in Moncks Corner, in an area called Kittfield, as a life that was filled with chores that accompanied the family’s vast farmland, but that he, Angie, Del, Paula, and Willie J. were thick as thieves and loved to play. One of the great controversies in my family is that the many children of Charles, Effie, and C. T. have fought (at times viciously) over property lines and land inheritances. The other is that my daddy grew up thinking that he was one of Charles and C. T.’s children. But he was not. When Daddy went to enlist in the Marines at the age of seventeen, he had to get his parents’ permission. Naturally, he turned to Charles and C. T. to sign off on his future. But it was revealed to him that Phyllis, the woman he thought to be his sister his entire life, was actually his mother. Charles and C. T. were his grandparents, not “Daddy” and “Momma,” as he had always referred to them. Bill, the son, was a grandson. Bill, the brother, was a nephew. Home was never quite the same for Daddy after that revelation.
The refrain “mama’s baby, papa’s maybe” is a running joke between my dad, my brother Maurice, and me, and we use it at the most inappropriate times. But make no mistake, the pain of that refrain cuts deep. My grandmother, Phyllis, refused to tell my father who his father was—even when she was on her deathbed. And that none of his uncles or aunts revealed my family’s best-kept secret suggests something far more sinister than a fifteen-year-old who gave birth to a child in 1944. Was my grandmother raped? Was my unnamed grandfather a man of stature or proximity such that his revelation would cause our family shame? We are left to speculate, for while there were far too many to keep that secret, it remains. Daddy and I are convinced: his venture to the Vietnam War was the only reason he found out who he is, and still only in part. That Daddy does not, and likely never will, know who his father is is a wound with barely a scab. Home is not always the place we hope it to be.
Home is all these things: the living, the dead, and secrets. That I have long written about and studied the powerful connections between the living and the dead suggests that my calling has ancestral influence. It makes my inheritance of a cemetery and its stewardship, the acceptance of a birthright, beyond complicated. When I learned of my role to steward my family space, Aunt Peggy told me, “LeRhonda, help make this right.” For her, “making things right” means helping to ensure there are no property conflicts. For me, “making things right” means carrying on the work of tending to our family’s dead despite the ways they took the secrets of a signature truth with them to the other side. Home for me, then, is pressing on because of inheritance. It is a welcome change of plan. It is about that to which I have a right, but it is also an acceptance—or maybe better put, a reckoning—of the ways that we can in fact return to a place that made us, even when that place is riddled with dangerous silences. Home is a reminder that we can go back to a place that formed us, and do so in ways that are unexpected, that are surprising, and that are almost always complicated.
Home embodies all manner of irony, complexity, allure, loss, ritual, space, memory, change, and possibility. When Blair invited me into this editorial journey, she did so out of a desire to collaborate with someone for whom the southern roots of home run deep. As the South for Blair is a space of connection and choice, it is for me birthright and inheritance. Rootedness by way of cemetery space is something that appears and reappears in this volume, as does the sense that we cannot always anticipate or see what home will become. Throughout this volume, we learn that whether by an enriching conversation between friends, by envisioning the stories that only images can tell, by seeing things one imagines, or by finding gardens, home is always the place we make for ourselves.
—LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant
Blair LM Kelley is the Joel R. Williamson Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she serves as the director of the Center for the Study of the American South. Kelley’s latest book, Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class (Liveright, 2023), uses portraits of her southern ancestors to chronicle the lives and labors of the Black working class.
LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant is a professor of African, African American, and Diaspora studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is director of the Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Research in Black Culture and History. A proud native of Moncks Corner, South Carolina, she navigates the academy as a scholar-artist.
