A Learning Journey To Victoria

A grandmother is someone who has a special place in one's life, with whom you often share fond experiences. I was one of those who was lucky enough to get to spend overnights, as a little girl, with my grandmother Fanny Ellis Starnes, from whom I acquired my name Fanny. Some times my older sisters Susie and Joan were there too.

Laying in bed with her many nights during the 1940s, in her 2 story house on 42nd Place in Los Angeles, California, was where fascinating stories unfolded and brought images of family life long ago in Victoria, Texas. Reaching out to me from those sepia portraits on the wall in vintage oval frames was a curiosity that elicited questions about those stately dressed individuals of various skin hues staring down at me.

Granny, as I called her, told me how her parents Charles Ellis and Margaret Nelson Ellis were brought to Victoria, Texas from Kentucky as slaves with the Weisiger Family plantation owners around 1850, lured by the opportunity to embrace the production of cotton. Born in 1869 (the 3rd child) she described how as a young girl she would take a sack out to the fields and try to pick cotton along with her elder siblings Elizabeth and William. Carrying buckets of water to the house was another task in the sweltering heat of the summer. Soon the birth of other siblings, Avalonia, Hezekiah, and Isabell followed her, as did the Emancipation of Slavery.

But, I wanted to know how my ancestors, all dressed up in those antique frames on the wall, appear to have acquired such a position of accomplishment? So I listened intently to Granny as her slow deliberate answers unfolded, explaining that after emancipation the family remained and worked on the massive expanse of land until her father Charles Ellis and his brother William (whom WHE was named after) were able to purchase a parcel of land for themselves. As freed slaves during this period of Reconstruction, family, church and education became the centerpiece of their existence, hope and aspirations. Elizabeth received basic education from the Methodist Church where she met and married her husband, Dr. Greene Joseph Starnes who was a teacher there. All of Granny’s siblings pursued an education, either from the church or the schools set up by the Freedmen’s Bureau; which provided a path later in life for William Henry to become a wealthy entrepreneur, Fanny a teacher of Tailoring, Avalonia a Home Economics teacher, Hezekiah a Policeman, Isabel a Secretary.

When I was invited to accompany Professor Karl Jacoby to present his book at the University of Houston/ Victoria in March, 2020, we were able to visit the former Weisiger plantation land in Victoria. As our truck entered the road right off the highway, we slowly made our way down the long bumpy road until the vastness of this land became apparent to the eye. I was a bit apprehensive at first, contemplating my connection to this solemn ground covered with fields of grass, groves of pecan trees, running vines, grazing cows, a 600 year old oak tree and the Guadalupe River rippling through on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. As I stepped out of the truck I was struck with the reality that I was standing on the soil where my ancestors were enslaved and my very existence was rooted. There was a sense of reverence for this space with each footstep I took across the land while speaking each of the names of my ancestors.

I realized that their toil and labor had created a future for the descendants who begot me. I also realized that though they labored through the sizzling sun of each long day, they also found a way to live, love, play and pray intensely as family. I imagined them gathering at the river to cool off from the evening breeze, or the young ones playing games like “Little Sally Walker”- (a game I used to teach my first graders), or evenings gathered to tell Bible stories; then huddled together at night to sleep in their slave quarters, only to wake to another toiling day. Theirs is a unique legacy of survival. Given the disdain for the cruel intolerable institution of slavery, my soul filled rather, with honor and appreciation for the lives they lived, the sacrifices they made, and dreams for a better future. Walking this land I have learned a sense of who I am and comfort in my being within my ancestral history.

Fanny Moore Johnson-Griffin
Great Niece of William H. Ellis