Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(3)
As a member of the so-called Loving generation, those mixed-race Americans born after 1967 when miscegenation—that is, marriage between races—was no longer a crime, Meghan felt she had to find her place, where she belonged, in both the black and the white worlds. In the hierarchy of color that still defines place, position, and proximity in American society, she was light-skinned and therefore seen as “whiter” than her black cousins. From birth she loved both white and black skin, not a familiar occurrence in American society. So, along with her perplexity came a fluidity, a readiness to view the world from different perspectives, from both sides.
She had listened wide eyed as her uncle Joseph had told and retold the story of the Raglands’ cross-country drive from Cleveland, Ohio, to Los Angeles in a borrowed car when her mother, Doria was a babe in arms. Their adventure turned nasty when they pulled into a one-horse town in Texas in the teeth of a blizzard. They were looking for a room for the night, but soon realized they were not wanted in the redneck town. One guy pointed off into the snow and yelled: “The highway is that way. Get going. You are not welcome here.” Another version of the story has them picking up Kentucky Fried Chicken from the “colored” door at the rear of the restaurant.
While it may be family lore—the road from Cleveland to Los Angeles goes nowhere near the Lone Star state—for Meghan’s uncle, then around seven or eight, it represented his first real experience of racism. As Meghan was to learn, the history of her mother’s family was one of exploitation, discrimination, and injustice. Some of it she would experience firsthand, such as when she felt the rush of blood to her cheeks when someone in a parking lot used the N-word to her mother because she did not leave briskly enough. It was a word that her humble ancestors—slaves who worked on the cotton plantations of Georgia—would have heard on a daily basis.
It is no wonder that Meghan was left bewildered by her family tree. Tracing her family back through her mother’s line is a difficult business. Prior to emancipation, evidence about the lives of black people in the South was inevitably scarce. There were few written records, and most information was passed on by word of mouth. What we do know is that for years the family was the property of a Methodist, William Ragland, whose family originated from Cornwall in the southwest of England, before emigrating to Virginia and then North Carolina. Ragland lived in Chatham County, North Carolina, with his slaves before moving to the rural town of Jonesboro in Georgia, where land was regularly given away by the authorities in lotteries to encourage settlement. Traditionally, slaves were only known by a first name, given to them by their owner, and on occasion they also took their owner’s surname. The scanty records that are available show that the first “black Ragland”—that is to say, a direct ancestor of Meghan—was born in Jonesboro in 1830. This was Richard Ragland, who married a woman named Mary. Though much of his life was spent in enforced servitude, at least his son, Stephen, who was born in 1848, lived to see the emancipation that came when the Union, the anti-slave Northern states lead by President Abraham Lincoln, triumphed over the pro-slave Confederacy in 1865. At the end of the war, Stephen Ragland became a sharecropper and remained in Jonesboro, according to records unearthed by Massachusetts-based genealogist Elizabeth Banas. But this was merely slavery by another name, as the overwhelming majority of what was produced by sharecroppers was taken by the white landowners in rent and other dues, leaving an average sharecropper such as Stephen Ragland constantly in debt.
Though freed at the end of the Civil War, it was not until the 1870 census that former slaves could officially register a name for themselves. Stephen Ragland stuck with his former master’s surname and his given name—not quite as romantic as “Wisdom,” the name Meghan believes her great-great-great-grandfather Ragland chose when he was given the chance to make a fresh start. As she wrote: “Perhaps the closest thing to connecting me to my ever-complex family tree, my longing to know where I come from, and the commonality that links me to my bloodline, is the choice that my great-great-great grandfather made to start anew. He chose the last name Wisdom.”
Sadly, the professional genealogists and researchers who have carefully investigated her history point out that the records, albeit sketchy and contradictory, show that he kept his original name. They also reveal that his first wife was named Ellen Lemens, and that the couple married on August 18, 1869, and went on to have four children: Ann (who was also known as Texas), Dora, Henry, and Jeremiah, born in either 1881 or 1882, who is Meghan’s great-great-grandfather. Based on census and tax records it seems that for some years Stephen and Ellen continued to live on the plantation of white former slave owner Lemuel Ragland and his wife, Mary. In fact, when Lemuel Ragland died on May 19, 1870, Stephen Ragland was recorded in the census as working for the widow Mary, then age sixty. Other family members living in the vicinity, probably in the same plantation bunkhouse or rough-hewn wooden shacks, included Vinny and Willy Ragland, as well as Charles, Jack, Jerry, Mariah, and Catherine Lemens.
For a time the extended Ragland family lived in the vicinity of Jonesboro, the town now famous as the setting for the epic novel about the American Civil War, Gone with the Wind, before moving the short distance to Henry County, an agricultural district noted for its rich soil and premium cotton. Stephen and his sons, Henry and Jeremiah, worked the land as either sharecroppers or hired hands. However, beyond the cotton profits, Henry County also had a darker reputation, as an outpost of the Ku Klux Klan, which was formed in Tennessee in the spring of 1866. The Klan’s first action in the county was to lynch former slave Dave Fargason during a local conflict centering on educating black children. Stephen’s son Henry Ragland was also later confronted by a gang of armed white men but managed to escape with his life. Local historian R. H. Hankinson observes that soon afterwards the KKK was disbanded—although it remained hazardous to be black in the vicinity.