Miss Mary's Testimony

Miss Mary tells the story of what happened in Harris Neck on July 1942 in her own voice.

What is Curious Roots?

The Curious Roots podcast digs deep in the living earth of our personal, familial and communal lives to help us understand how we exist in the world today. Though the format of the podcast may vary from season to season, be it narratives, one-on-one interviews or panel discussions, the root line is the same. What are the stories from our family and community histories that travel with us into the present? How do we understand and work with these histories as both individuals and as collectives to create the world of now and the future?

Season one of the podcast begins with the maternal story of my own curious roots, still buried, but breathing and holding fast in Harris Neck, Georgia. Each week, in six short form episodes, I’ll share the story of my mother’s people and how it informs my life today.

Curious Roots is hosted by Michelle McCrary and is co-produced by Moonshadow Productions and Converge Collaborative.

Curious Roots E5 - Miss Mary's Testimony

Malidoma Patrice Sole [00:00:00] Well, it was quite obvious to me when I look at it from the from my indigenous African perspective, I would tend to want to say that most of the problems of modernity are a direct result of a dysfunctional relationship with ancestors. The issue at hand is that for a Dagara person like me is inconceivable to think about going into the future in a reasonable and reasonably sustainable fashion without a hard look into the past. Not to suggest that the answers belong to the past. No, far from that. What I'm saying is that without a live ancestral connection, it is close to impossible to envisage a future that can be as bright as the spirit a person can wish for. And this is why it is an important thing and even a viable suggestion that most of the ills of modernity have to be traced down to what type, what the status of their relationship with the ancestors is. And you will begin to shed light into what needs to be done.

Michelle McCrary [00:01:37] A culture that is in touch with its spiritual connection is a culture that is poised to evolve. In the indigenous context, change is tolerated, even welcomed because it originates with spirit. If evolution originates in a spiritual source, then it does not disrupt stability. If evolution is seen in terms of the modern definition, concerned with ascendancy, acquisition and control and mastery over the material world, then evolution becomes destructive to stability. The modern notion of stability has a heavy load of hardware associated with it. This contrasts sharply with the indigenous view of stability, which is the state of alignment with spirit, with the cosmic rules and regulations. Malidoma Patrice Some.

Michelle McCrary [00:02:28] Welcome back to Curious Roots. I'm Michelle McCrary in episode four. We heard a bit about what life was like in Harris Neck before 1942. We also put some context to the tight relationship between land, culture and identity that defines Black coastal communities more broadly.

Introduction [00:02:49] Curious Roots is a podcast that takes deep into the living earth of our personal, familial and communal lives to help us understand how we exist in a world today.

Michelle McCrary [00:03:21] We open the show with a quote from a late Malidoma Patrice Some. And this quote reminded me that the instability that continues to plague Black coastal communities is a direct result of the political, social, cultural and economic systems of imperialism and colonialism. Those systems create forms of change and evolution that do not originate with spirit. The catastrophic changes that imperialism and settler colonialism brought to indigenous peoples around the world has fundamentally changed the earth. These changes that resulted from imperialism and colonization are born of a deep spiritual misalignment. For my ancestors, these catastrophic changes came in the form of being trafficked from their homelands to the shores of Turtle Island. Many of them resisted captivity by surrendering themselves to the water. Many of them escaped deep into surrounding swamps and woods to form fugitive communities. The ones who did not surrender to the ocean or escaped to maroon communities endured. They developed a deep connection to this new land. These catastrophes are imbued with a boundless greed and hunger that define systems of oppression. It is a hunger that cannot be satisfied because it is born of a profound detachment from spirit. When Black coastal communities are displaced and removed, it is not only a physical removal, but also a spiritual one. The people of Harris Neck and many other communities were in deep relationship with the land and all the nonhuman relatives on that land. Despite surviving the harrowing violence of slavery, my ancestors and many others chose to remain on Turtle Island, on the lands that maintained their spirit and aided their survival. And Leslie Marmon Silko's epic novel, Almanac of the Dead, Clinton, a homeless, black, disabled Vietnam veteran, articulates the complicated connection between Black folks and Turtle Island. "The only subject Clinton had ever cared about in college had been black studies in Black studies classes. They had read about the great cultures of Africa and about slavery and Black history in America. But Clinton had not agreed with Garvey and the others who wanted to go back to Africa. Clinton disagreed because Blacks had been Americans for centuries now, and Clinton could feel the connection the people had. A connection so deep it ran in his blood." Despite the circumstances of their forced migration to Turtle Island, it is clear that my enslaved ancestors, and probably yours too, forged a powerful connection to this land that was grounded in their own identities as indigenous peoples. When Reverend Frazier told the powers that be after the Civil War that the newly freed population needed land to begin their lives a new in freedom, it was more than needing a place to live. The desire for a land was grounded in a deeply spiritual indigenous understanding about relationship to the land and its non-human inhabitants. My ancestors wanted to remain in connection and communion not only with each other, but also with the land they had come to know. That is what makes what happened to Harris Neck in July 1942 all the more horrific and unjust. This is why in the late 1970s, the children who experienced the aftermath of the July 1942 expulsion came together to organize for Harris Neck and to have the land be returned to the community.

Michelle McCrary [00:07:10] You remember when the government first came in here?

Mary Moran [00:07:13] Oh yeah back in 1942, I was 19 years old.

mic [00:07:15] What'd they tell you? What'd they tell you when they first got out here?

Mary Moran [00:07:20] Well, I remember this man came by our house here. His name was Bado Dean. He was a white fella. And he had a big paper. And he said that. We had to be out there, we had two weeks notice. We had to be out there by the 27th of July, else they would have burned ya out. They did burn Evelyn and them out. Another house they burnt. But, you know, by being close, you just was dumbfounded they didn't give you but two weeks and people have to get all them thing together. Evelyn said when she was when she got when her & her mother went back in the to get some more things the chicken flying over and it was falling from the sky. Government will suffer what they did at St Mary's.

Mary Moran [00:08:08] I was born on September 24, 1921. I was 21 years old when they throw us out there. And I'm 92 years old now, and I thank God for that. But let me tell you that they treated us like animals. I had to tell my condition that I was in when they threw us out in that woods. But I'm going to tell you, because that's the truth. My son Wilson Moran, I was seven months. Not able. Mama couldn't help me. And I couldn't help Momma. We had to just drag out there. Two weeks time, tear down, get on out here, or we'll burn you up. Oh, I hate to think about how they treated us. We had to get out in a pine saffron woods. They tell us not to move far away because we would get out. We would be the first one to get out. They would put us out there. We had to put that the tents and the cooking utilities. And then black bugs, you just have to keep fighting keep the from going into your food. They didn't care. The day we moved, it rained. It was the 27th day of July. Every, all our things banked up on one side and me and Reverend Thorpe and the rest of us bank upon the other side. This young captain. He came by and he told us, I see that y'all and that the rain is real bad but y'all can come down to Mr. Livingston barn and spend the night where the cows used to be. My mother said, No. I'm gonna stay right here. Let me drown right here. But we had I hate to say this, but it's true. We had a commissioner was against us. And you know what my dad said. My dad said, he hope he was howling in hell. And I'm hope he's down there howling. He's kepts us out of there. I hope he's down there howling. My mother what last her five years camping out in the woods. And I don't know how she got rid of that cold, but they threw me out there. They had to hurry, make up some kind of thing before my baby came. Where wouldn't be out in the open. It was sad that we treated us like animals. I'll never forget. And I thank God we made it, though. And I may not be here because I'm 92 years old now, but I want the young people to get it back. It belongs to them. Our foreparents struggled for that land and the young people. They needed it back. And that to the Lord, I'm praying God give it back to them because they're working so hard and they ain't giving up. Don't give up. Keep on going. Thank you, very much.

Michelle McCrary [00:11:30] Listening to Miss Mary's testimony shows us that the reality of the Black people of coastal Georgia is the reality of Black people globally. A constant fight against the colonial and imperialist violence that seeks to consume us whole, leaving not a bone or a trace of us anywhere. It is a kind of destruction that is about complete erasure, a kind of erasure that if there is any bit of us left at all, it is frozen in the amber of a historical marker or a plaque of dubious truth. With no one left in place to tell the tale, luxury developments and beachfront properties with vanilla insides can cling to a plausible deniability that allows them to gobble up the land of the descendants of enslaved people, along with their ancestors blood and bone upturned from the earth with the jaws of industrial machinery. The work of righting the wrongs of what happened to the community in Harris Neck and the wrongs that continue to troubled black coastal communities to this day is part of a culture that does not value or even view the humanity of Black people. It is a necrotic culture so profoundly out of alignment with spirit that they would rather sacrifice all life on this planet than release themselves from the shackles of anti-Blackness, imperialism and settler colonialism. In the face of these seemingly intractable systems of oppression. The people of Harris Neck and Black communities across coastal Georgia, like their ancestors before them, mounted a fight for their communities. In our sixth and final episode, we'll dig into the history of the fight for Harris Neck and the reality of the road ahead for other Black coastal communities, continuing to fight against Herculean odds to keep hold of their homes, communities and culture.

Credits [00:13:37] Curious Roots is co-produced by Converge Collaborative and Moonshadow Productions. Our theme music is courtesy of Makaih Beats. Please rate review and subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or however you listen to your podcasts. Don't forget to check out CuriousRootsPod.com If you want to learn more about what you've heard. Big thank you to our producer, Pat McMahon. My deepest gratitude to Mr. Wilson Moran and to the community of Harris Neck. Big thank you's to Terri Ward and Adolphus Armstrong of Ujima genealogy. And thank you to my relatives who are now with the ancestors, especially Miss Mary Moran and my grandmother, Margaret Baisden White. Thank you all for listening to Curious Roots.