1974

House on a Hill

My father, Alphonso Williams, Sr., lived in this house built in the late '30s with his parents and sisters and brothers. The family left this home and the land on which it stood, three hundred and forty six acres, in 1945. My father was then thirteen years old. It wasn't until 1974 that he would return to the old homestead. He had been gone from it nearly thirty years. Pictured (left to right) are me, my father, and my brother.

Our family traveled to DeSoto County, Mississippi, the site of the homestead, when I was nine years old. It was a memorable trip for many reasons, not the least of which is the effect that the return had on my father. Returning south was not easy for him.

As I recall, it was morning when we arrived at the house. It was still early when this picture was taken. There are of course other photographs including one taken a few yards from the porch, my father pretending to get water from a rusty red pump. I remember a platic-covered window on the side of the house, a broken-down pickup also on the outside, tomatoes overripening on its hood. I remember also patches of grass and red, red dirt surrounding the house and, farther in the distance, tall grasses that moved softly around the facade of a shed barn. My father and, as I recall, my sister were the only two to venture that far back. The younger seemed to survive the journey; my father maybe should not have tried so hard to remember.

For me, the trip was the beginning of my deep interest in the history of this side of our family. Though some of the trip is foggy, the pictures that we took have helped me to create stories about who we once were, what we have tried to become, what we have wanted to escape--to leave behind--and relationships between all of these.

I love this picture because I am standing with my father--even matching him in the color of my outfit. I find interesting the way my brother's and my hands are somewhat dangling at our sides. We did not, it seems, know what to do with them. We were not posing but allowing the picture-taker to capture an image of us in what someone, either the picture-taker or my father, thought an important scene. As unaware as my brother and I were, however, I also see the dangling arms as an act of submission. To what I would in time learn.

I want to say something about the house itself. My memory is that someone was living in it in 1974. Unbeknownst to me (and possibly to my father and his family) at the time, our family still owned the land on which the house stood, about eight of the original three hundred plus acres. There is a complicated story connected to this. I tell that elsewhere. The only point that may be worth mentioning now is that my grandfather, the seller of the majority of the family's land, intended to sever most of his ties with the South when he moved his family north to Detroit. The small parcel that was left symbolized the fact that despite the eight hundred or so miles that separated DeSoto County, Mississippi from Detroit, Michigan, not one family member had really overcome memory of the South.

The family's history in this north Mississippi county goes back much further than the decade this particular house was built. There was another house, likely on this same spot or nearby, that burned down in the late '20s. That is the house that the family or at least my father and his siblings prefer to remember and talk about. That house, a hybrid Victorian farmhouse, was the home of slave owner James F. Walker before my great grandfather Robert Walker Williams and his two brothers bought Walker's land in 1882. Two or three of my father's siblings were born in and lived in the earlier house. My great-grandmother and great-grandfather both died there. I have no knowledge of how that house burned, only that by 1932, the year my father was born, it was gone. Not only that, but my father was the first child to be born not in a home at all but in the hospital, John Gaston in Memphis. For some reason, the family relocated temporarily to this city a relative few miles away in the early thirties. The Depression perhaps provides an answer to this mystery, yet my grandfather managed to hold on to the land in Mississippi through the '30s, and I believe the family moved into the house pictured here no later than 1936 or '37.

In terms of architecture, the structure would be classified as a farmhouse. Its condition in 1974 created a sense of poverty. However, my father's family was not poor. Certainly, they were not untouched by the depressed economy, but my grandfather's various doings, which included raising and selling bulls and keeping a store, which also used to be on this land, allowed the family to maintain itself fairly well. I have taken the specific quality of this structure as a symbol of the family's financial wellbeing. The dwellings of many farmers, particularly black ones, were at the time smaller and much less sturdy. I have studied the length of the beam supporting the porch's gable. Though it may seem a trivial thing, this piece of lumber did not likely come at small cost, and it is to be noted that it was purchased before the end of the Depression. The porch, low to the ground, spanned the entire length of the house, perhaps measuring as much as thirty feet. The porch, as a general feature, is as characteristic of a shot-gun house as it is of antebellum mansions with their enviable verandas.

Two other features--a set of double, double-hung windows, a cement porch, and a door with a large single light--make this something more than a sharecropper's cabin. The porch's foundation departs from common wooden ones set atop bricks, creating an open crawlspace. Like the wooden beam, the laying of the cement may have called for the services of someone outside of the immediate community, and my grandfather's ability to employ such a person speaks both to the family's situation at the time and to his position within and beyond the county.

One cousin, who still owns land in DeSoto, has remarked, "That was a big house at the time." He remembers it painted in a warm yellow, which he says lasted for years after our family was gone. Whether my grandfather could have afforded to build an even "better" house remains unknown, but I like to think that he built this particular style to provide a nice home for his family not too far above or below those of his neighbors, many of course who were also blood relatives.

The house was torn down in the 1980s. I suspect at that time no one was living in it nor had anyone for several years. With the house went also a way of life and a community but not memories. I am glad that my mother and father took my brother, my sisters, and me south in 1974 and that we took a picture of the homestead, an important part of our family's history. Though I wasn't fully conscious of it, I submitted then to telling the stories that can no longer be told by the material but that survives both in picture and memory.