In the backyard of 841 Rondo Avenue, the barbecue cloud floated above them, wrapped around the house like Grandma Essie’s arms. As usual, Grandpa Joe’s stubby brown cigar, clamped tight between his lips, rested in the corner of his mouth. In one hand, a sweating bottle of Grain Belt Beer. In the other, tongs turned the sizzling ribs on the steel garbage can repurposed into a smoker.
We were sweltering, the car windows only open a crack so the humidity of the Minnesota summer wouldn’t make Mama’s hair go back home, after she had her pressed and curled it all morning. We were all various colors of brown, glowing with Vaseline, our good play clothes still smelling of the heat of the iron, me in pedal pushers, matching blouse and my favorite red shoes with white anklets.
On this 4th of July, 1956, I was meeting my great-grandmother Zenobia for the first time. Zenobia was mama’s grandmother and Grandma Essie’s mother.
“She’s here to meet all of you, and you better be on your best behavior, you hear. Your great-grandma has taken the train from Oregon where she lives with your great-uncle Ollie,” Mama said. All this information went over our heads as we sat with my younger brother and sister in the backseat of the Dodge with chrome wings we called Black Beauty. Daddy kept his car polished to a blinding gloss.
*
Daddy driving along University Avenue with its shops, restaurants, car dealerships and the state capital in the distance; we were in Saint Paul, then Victoria Street. Turning on Victoria Street, we saw the new Maxfield Elementary School where some of our friends went. Built to replace the old Maxfield that was torn down, where our mama went to school.
At Grandma Essie and Grandpa Joe’s house, Daddy parked in front on the avenue. People of Rondo welcomed the sounds of summer; Chubby Checker played on turntables rigged up for dancing in the backyards. In the empty lot next to the house, the older neighborhood kids shouted, “He’s out, man, can’t you catch the ball!” and the girls’ Double Dutch ropes sang and thumped beats on the sidewalk. We kids jumped out of the car to say our hellos and meet this great-grandma. I could already taste the pungent acidity of barbecue, and my mouth watered.
“Don’t run up those steps,” Mama said. Too late, I was already through the front porch then the door into the foyer. Grandma Essie’s house was cool, dim, with the window shades pulled down and summer curtains closed to keep out the heat. The fragrance of vanilla pound cake was sealed in the house like it had always belonged there.
The mysterious great-gran wasn’t in the kitchen, where I usually found the women. Grandma Essie stood in front of the sink, washing a cake pan.
“Give me some sugar, baby girl,” said Grandma Essie, her auburn curls encased in a ponytail, dressed in slacks and flats. Only at picnics did she wear flats, otherwise it was shoes with heels, giving height to her petite frame. I remembered great-grandma was a guest.
“Is great-grandma sitting in the parlor?” I asked. That’s what my Grandma Essie called the living room. She nodded yes.
This is what I remember.
The room had old people’s smell. Grandpa Joe’s upright piano was on the wall next to the front windows; he didn’t play anymore because of the arthritis in his hands. Sitting on one of the over-sized matching chairs next to the sofa was a white woman. She was tiny like Grandma Essie, her feet on tippy toes because they barely touched the floor. I stood there. What was a white woman doing in grandma’s house? I never saw white people in this house. Her hand beckoned me to move closer.
“You’re all grown up now.”
I could feel my mama’s presence behind me, yet it didn’t stop me from blurting out, “Who’s that white woman?”
A quick thump on the back of my head prohibited me from saying more, and I heard my mother whisper, “Give her a kiss.”
*
What else was said, I don’t remember. Later, as we drove home to North Minneapolis, Mama said, “Your great-grandma Zenobia is not white, she’s colored, just like us; she’s light skin, that’s all.”
If Zenobia had light skin and was colored, why was I thumped on the back of my head? Why did we have all of these different colors in the family? Grandma Essie, colored like coffee with milk, just like Mama let us drink; Daddy, the color of honey I put on my biscuits; me, colored like a golden-brown pancake; brother Cracker-Jack brown; sister colored like chocolate fudge, like Mama herself. All of us different tones of brown. It was at this moment I began to see the differences of color.
Light and bright you all right; brown you can stick around; black get on back.
Why was this obvious “whiteness” in the family something that could not be recognized?
*
I was a twenty-something adult by the time I asked my sixty-year-old mother anything else about Great-grandma Zenobia. I was visiting home for Christmas.
“Was Zenobia ever a slave?”
“What? Why are you asking?”
“I’ve been wondering about our family. I’m thinking about writing something, that’s all.”
“Girl, she wasn’t a slave. Zenobia wasn’t that old!”
“Well, who was?”
“Nobody talked about that stuff. I think her father, Grandpa Jordan, might have been. I know his real name was Stephen. I remember Zenobia favored her father, who could’ve passed with his grey-blue eyes and brown curly hair.”
“Did you know him?”
“Not really. I was five or six. He’d used to pay us nickels for picking dandelions for him for his dandelion wine, then give us kids sips when it was ready to drink. It would make your Grandma Essie so mad.”
And that was the end of the conversation. Mama shut down, left the room to do something else.
*
In 2021, a second cousin found me on Ancestry.com and sent me a black-and-white photo circa early-1900s that confirmed the family all could have passed with their Mediterranean complexions. The entire family lookedprosperous. Standing next to her handsome father was Zenobia, with long wavy, black hair, tendrils framing her round face, all of the children—sister Fannie sitting on her grandma Fannie’s lap and brother Aucy sitting on his grandpa Alexander’s knee. Fannie looked most like she was Black child. Perhaps this was the reason no one thought of passing for anything but Black. Missing was wife and mother, Sarah Denney Lay.
*
I never forgot you, Zenobia. I searched, and this is what you left for me to find.
Zenobia, “light-skinned Negress,” is what the Grand Island Nebraska Independent Newspaper called you on March 23, 1923.
Negress Awarded Damages: Mrs. Zenobia Locke, colored, (as if you didn’t know from the word Negress) of 406 North Ruby Street was awarded damages in the sum of $150 by a jury in Justice of Peace Clifford’s court Monday afternoon against Bert Watts, a taxi owner, and Homer Brown, a real estate dealer. For injuries alleged to have been sustained when the cars of the defendants collided on February 1 at the corner of Fourth and Walnut Streets and rolled over on their sides.
To discover an account of a Black woman winning damages in a court case. The fact that Zenobia, a colored woman/Negress, sued and won damages in the primarily white population of Grand Island made for a newsworthy item; I was pleased to see that Grandma Zenobia was a woman to be reckoned with. Even in 1923, Black women had come far since the court case of Harriet Robinson Scott., also known as the Dred Scott decision. She had first filed a court case before it was joined with her husband, Dred.
In March 1857, the US Supreme Court decided, 7-2, that the Scotts would remain enslaved. The court went even further, declaring that enslaved African Americans were not citizens and had no right to bring cases to court in the first place. According to Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, African Americans “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.
Sixty-six years after that decision, Zenobia claimed her rights as a citizen to the Grand Island, Nebraska courts. The race of Bert Watts and Homer Brown are not mentioned in their reporting. In the 1920 United States Federal Census, Homer Brown and Bert Watts checked white as their race.
Negress: a woman or girl of Black African origin, a term used to refer to a Black woman or girl. The female equivalent to a Negro.
To disrupt this narrative of defining who were Black women—people don’t tell you who you are, you tell them:
Zenobia: an ancient name of the third century Queen of Palmyrene, the trading crossroads between ancient Southern Arabia, Persia and Egypt. Born 240 AD died 274 AD.
Did your mother, Sarah, find your name in an old history book, or a school book? A long-forgotten book stolen from your grandfather’s former enslaver?
Zenobia, firstborn daughter of Stephen Jordan Lay and Sarah Denney, both formerly enslaved.
Sarah Denney Lay, wife and mother, disappeared from the record. Only pieces of her story can be found.
Alexander Denney, Sarah’s father, and your grandfather. Formerly enslaved by a man named Alexander Denney. He gave the same name to his mulatto slave as he was registered in the 1860 slave census for Chariton County, Missouri.
Sarah Denney Lay. Her story, so little known.
Sarah and her daughter Fannie’s burial sites are unknown. Zenobia and her brother Aucy were left in their grandparents’ care while their father worked as a servant in homes of wealthy white families.
In the marriage records of Missouri, Sarah Denney Lay wed Stephen Jordan Lay in 1886. A year later, Zenobia was born in July 1887. Then sister Fannie, September 1889, and brother Stephen, nicknamed Aucy, June 1892. Aucy became a name passed on through the generations
My research is incomplete and will most likely remain so. I’m lucky to find what I did. To recover the legacy of the women in my family, I find only fragments of their historical record. Women who struggled to stay alive when death and destruction was around every corner. I have weaved your story together, Zenobia, the pieces of your life that made my 21st-century life possible.
*
This is for you, Zenobia. You never knew me, except for the short visit when I was a child of five and you were an old woman who left me in a confused state about whiteness in our family. I understand now, the shame of your father, mother and grandfather, why no one spoke of enslavement. I understand how the DNA of European ancestry mixed with our unknown African ancestry.
This is for you, Zenobia, the first generation born free.
This is for you, Zenobia, named by a mother who didn’t live long enough to raise you into womanhood. Grandma Fannie and Grandpa Alex, a barber, a highly-respected trade for a man of color. In 1875, Alex, ten years free, bought a home with cash for his family of orphaned grandchildren, his own children deceased. Swedes lived next door, says the 1870 United States Federal Census. An immigrant, mixed neighborhood, without the covenants of racial boundaries? Perhaps. Or maybe it was his complexion? You, raised in your grandfather’s house, simple wood frame with glass windows reflecting sunlight on polished wood floors and a piano in the parlor. Grandma Fannie chose the furniture.
This is for you, Zenobia, who married Carroll Locke at sixteen and birthed four children: Espanolia Katherine, Naline Fannie, Zerada Odell and Stephen Carroll. They all lived to adulthood.
This is for you, Zenobia, who moved with your husband from Atchison, Kansas, to the Indian Territory town of Muskogee, and finally to Grand Island, Nebraska. There was a lynching. In downtown Omaha in 1919, Will Brown was tortured, lynched and set on fire. And the colored community only whispered the news among themselves. “We are not afraid,” said your husband.
This is for you, Zenobia, a woman who stood her ground in the town of Grand Island. You were not afraid, but you never went to Omaha.
Duluth, Minnesota. In June 1920, the colored community learned of the lynching of three colored men who worked for a traveling circus. The knowledge of lynching leaves a memory in Black people that sticks. Thirty years later, my parents and siblings were not afraid—but we never went to Duluth.
This is for you, Zenobia, who read the Grand Island Nebraska Independent Daily Newspaper aloud to your husband, a machinist for the Union Pacific Railroad Company. Your son wrote in a family oral history archive, “Mother was a voracious reader and read the newspaper to father every night after dinner. She seemed to always have a book somewhere near her.” Your family enjoying the pleasure of reading aloud to each other, I say this to make it clear that you all were not illiterate.
This is for you, Zenobia, firstborn girl child of freedom, who gave birth to another firstborn daughter of freedom, and she gave birth to another firstborn daughter of freedom, who gave birth to a firstborn daughter of freedom. I am not afraid.
Debra Stone is a Minnesota writer. Currently she’s writing a series of essays and a short story collection. Her poetry, essays and fiction are found in Under the Gum Tree, Green Mountains Review, About Place Journal, Random Sample Review, Rigorous and other literary journals. She is a board member of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis.