My African-American relatives

By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor

I wanted to have African-American relatives long before I learned that, through marriage, I did. It just made sense to me that with the Stocking family in America for almost 400 years that sometime, somewhere, somehow, we had married people who were black.

In 2014 we—on the northwest coast of Northern Michigan, on the streets of Traverse City and in some of the tourist spots—are just beginning to see people of color on our streets. Sometimes these visitors are recent immigrants from India, Africa, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, Latin America and other places around the world. Sometimes they are African Americans whose ancestry can be traced to the founding of the republic in the early 1600s.

They are coming to live, work, go to school or just to enjoy the beaches for a few days like the other thousands of summer tourists. It’s a trend that will increase with time. By 2050, according to census predictions, 50 percent of the population in our country will be people of color. People of European ancestry, white people like me, will become at that time, officially, a minority.

I was born in 1945 and grew up on the northwest coast of Michigan. I never saw a single African American until my mother took the three oldest of her five daughters—ranging in age from four to 12—shopping in Grand Rapids. There I saw for the first time men, women and children with very dark brown, sometimes almost black, skin.

I was little, with few words, and remember my mother’s instantaneous, “Hush!” and the rough jerk on my arm when I asked, “Who are the chocolate people?” I can still feel the roughness as she pulled me aside and got down to my level and looked me in the face and said in a stern whisper, “They are people, just like us. We aren’t rude. We don’t talk about other people. We don’t stare.”

She was right, of course, on all counts, but I still didn’t know who the chocolate people were. They were not Native Americans. I had grown up knowing Indians. They worked in my father’s lumber camp, and although they had fairly dark skin, as did my own father and his mother, some of the people I saw on the streets of Grand Rapids were darker and their features did not look like those of the Indians where I lived. It would be years before I found out who they were or thought about them again.

If we’re living in the present moment, as most of us do, and not thinking too much about all the events in previous times, it usually doesn’t occur to those of us who live here now, that people didn’t used to have cell phones or cars, much less that this part of Northern Michigan wasn’t always populated by people of European ancestry.

In reality there were a few black families, usually mixed with Native American, in the Detroit area in the early 1600s. A classic book on this subject, Black Indians by William Katz has photo documentation of African-American fur traders, entrepreneurs and scouts who married into various tribes.

Samuel de Champlain, a Frenchman who explored the Great Lakes in the 1700s, travelled with a free-black translator, Mathieu da Costa, who knew many languages: French, Portuguese, Dutch, English and several versions of the Algonquin language.

In Michigan, as soon as the last treaty with the Native Americans was signed in 1855, the state began to give away land to non-Indian people willing to stay five years and put up a dwelling. They did this to encourage the remaining Indians to move on and to officially secure the lands the government had claimed by treaty. African-American homesteaders began to come into Michigan along with all the other immigrants.

Census figures reveal that some black Leelanau pioneers were farmers, like the Levi Johnson family on Welch Road above Glen Lake and the Boston family in Cleveland Township near School Lake. Some, like the Skinner and Hall families in the Empire area, were loggers. Some of these families were from Canada and New York State, indicating they were manumitted. Some list their birthplaces as southern states which might indicate they had come up on the Underground Railroad.

In the early years in America there were no laws affirming slavery. In the 13 colonies there were no laws against miscegenation until the late 1700s. The Fugitive Slave Act, legally requiring the return of human “property,” wasn’t passed until 1793.

It wasn’t until the late 1800s and early 1900s that ideas about white supremacy and a master race, and the concomitant anti-miscegenation beliefs were carried to extremes by Hitler and gave rise in the United States to the Ku Klux Klan and John Birch Society.

Sometimes, given our country’s fraught history regarding race, we forget that not all black people had ever been slaves or that white people, too, had been slaves. In Greece, Rome, Jerusalem, basically everywhere, there were slaves 2,000 years ago. In Russia, until the peasants rebelled in 1917, they were slaves. Many white people in the United States were indentured servants, little better than slaves. Andrew Johnson, 17th president of the United States, had been a run-away indentured servant with a $10 bounty for his arrest and return.

This country, for most of the first two centuries, was an all-bets-are-off free for all. Both white and black pioneers were married to indigenous peoples. Lena Horne, the singer, was all three races. One prominent Connecticut family of Indian, white and black people, was able to document with photos and birth and death records, their family’s long history in North America. Their book, by descendants Alene Jackson Smith and Adeline Jackson Tucker is Live, Labor, Love—the History of a Northern Family.

Michigan, an anti-slavery state, had integrated schools from the beginning. In the archival photos of schools in Leelanau and Benzie counties some of the students are visibly African American. Otter Creek was the site of the lumber boomtown, Aral, a place where there was a little one-room school. A state photo shows black and white children in pioneer garb.

Children with the last names of Skinner, Hall, Johnson and Boston were in some of the photos from the Aral, Brotherton and Springdale schools in the area now part of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. A photo of one of the Skinner men sitting atop of a pile of logs shows him looking confident, even jaunty. He’s wearing a large, fur coat with an incongruous white ermine fur collar.

“African-American pioneers on the West Michigan logging-lumber frontier,” according to the Historical Society of Michigan (HSM) spring 2010 issue, “participated in, and became able contributors to, the economic and civic life of that frontier.” Gretchen Paprocki, the author of the report, writes that one European traveler staying at a primitive lodge—pillows and bedding made of marsh hay—on the Muskegon River was awakened in the night by 10 men who took the other five beds. “In the morning we found they were all Negro lumber rafters.”

The “Negro lumber rafters” in Paprocki’s HSM article may or may not have been manumitted. They would have had skills so hard to find and necessary to the lumber company that, as with Da Costa’s skills as a translator, no one was going to ask any questions. The rafters risked being kidnapped and sold back into slavery, whether free or not, but by travelling in a group there was less risk of that.

August is when the vast and varied Stocking family gathers at the brick house above Sleeping Bear Bay. These are the offspring of my father, Leelanau lumberman Pierce Stocking, the man for whom the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive was named. His family came to this country from England in 1633, Dissenters from the King. My mother’s family, the Lee side, came in the late 1800s from Scotland. That’s the tall, red-headed side of the family.

One August about 20 years ago I went with a beloved niece and her father to Otter Creek. His mother and my mother were teachers together in the Traverse City Public Schools and it was through that connection that he and my sister met. Although the marriage didn’t last, my niece’s father is still a member of the family. He’s gay and he’s out. He’s also a good guy, a talented artist, an excellent teacher, and wonderful company.

This particular day at the beach, my niece’s father astonished us all by revealing that his brother, a genealogist, had discovered that a male ancestor on their mother’s side was part black. Enoch “Knuck” Harris, had been recorded as “mulatto” on the first property transaction in Michigan and “white” on the next one.

Harris, born in Virginia in 1784, had been educated in a Quaker area of Pennsylvania and had come into Ohio as a young man with $5,000, an extraordinary sum at that time. According to an article published in 2012 in the Ohio Genealogical Society Quarterly, there were hinted connections to James Madison and Benjamin Franklin. Whose child was he? How did he come into all that money? No one knows. He was mulatto, illegitimate, rich, educated and had secret origins. He was my niece’s great-great grandfather.

You have to picture my niece’s family. Now married, with two beautiful daughters and living in an elegant, oak-paneled home in a Canadian university town, they look like the people in a Jane Austin novel.

Tall, dark-haired, with blue eyes and fair skin, my niece looks like a young Sigourney Weaver. Her daughters are as beautiful as she is, only much taller with legs that never stop. My niece’s husband looks like a six-foot-six, green-eyed, dark-haired Brad Pitt. My niece’s father, the one with distant and mysterious black ancestors on his mother’s side of the family, looks like a black-haired, blue-eyed Mel Gibson.

When I had to do a show-and-tell about my family during language class recently while serving in the Peace Corps in Romania, this branch of the family, being the last people I’d seen before I’d gone abroad, were the only people for whom I had photos. One of my fellow volunteers said, “These people all look like movie stars.” It’s true, they do.

The rest of the Stockings do not. We are horsey-looking, with long necks and receding chins and freckles and red hair and veins that stick out (in the men) and a tendency to arthritis in old age (in the women). We are homely in that English-y way, that is a mark of distinction in its own right, but will never get us leading roles on stage.

Anthropologists tell us 50,000 years ago we were all black and very likely living on the shores of Lake Victoria in East Africa or someplace like that. We got whiter and whiter as we migrated north.

Red-haired, blue-eyed people, like a lot of my relatives, are a recent mutation, perhaps one that helped us process vitamin D from the sun in places where there wasn’t much of it. In these times, with the sun getting hotter, it’s good for people with no melanin at all in their skin to marry people who have it. That means our survival instincts are intact.

One morning in late fall this year, on a day that was particularly warm and sunny, I took my puppy, Happy, down to Otter Creek in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. There was no one there that day where Aral used to be. Aral isn’t there.

Happy is a beautiful creature. She’s cheerful and social, like a Golden Retriever. She does the zig-zag running, like a Collie. And she’s small like a Cocker Spaniel. My grandchildren, some of whom are of mixed race, just like Happy, love her. They had played with her at Otter Creek back in August when the whole family gathered for a grand family wedding.

The people at the wedding, just like all the people one now sees at weddings all over America, are from every part of the globe. They were of every shape, size, age, sexual preference, gender, and color. We looked like the 2014 version of the Coca Cola ad, “I’d like to teach the world to sing …” and why not? If Coca Cola can be available to everyone everywhere, why can’t everyone everywhere come here and be accepted? It makes perfect sense, if you think about it.

Kathleen Stocking is author of the acclaimed book, Letters from the Leelanau (University of Michigan Press, 1990). She is currently working on her next book, The Long Arc of the Universe. See more of her essays in our online archives at GlenArbor.com.