Notes on Victoria

As I await my flight to Phoenix and then the trip home from there to L.A., I think about how much and how long I will be unpacking from this trip 'deep in the heart' of Texas. It will surely be for some time to come.

Columbia University historian, Karl Jacoby, author of my great grand uncle Willie’s biography, The Strange Career of William Ellis, invited me to come speak with him at several venues in San Antonio. Karl always welcomes the family’s perspectives as a complement to his research on the life of my remarkable and exceptional ancestor.

San Antonio is where two of my great grandfathers, Dr. Greene-Joseph Starnes and Dr. John R. Moore, were practicing physicians. Significantly, Dr. Starnes was born enslaved yet died a physician, a fine testament to the brief 8 year window of the Reconstruction. As far as we are aware, these two forebears were the first African American doctors in the State of Texas. San Antonio is also where my grandmother, Marguerite Starnes Moore, a graduate of Prairie View College, was born one generation out of slavery. She went on to study at Juilliard and became a classically trained pianist.

Amazingly, just 90 minutes by car from San Antonio, near the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, lies the town of Victoria, where just a generation before my great grandmother, Elizabeth, her parents Margaret and Charles and most of her siblings, were enslaved. My great grandmother's sister, Isabelle, Aunt Belle to me, I knew as a small boy in Los Angeles. I remember clearly her high cheekbones and long neck, her coppery color, her dark age spots, her black hair net and glasses. She was the most ancient person I could imagine. That house was for us children a timepiece from another world, a massive dark wood paneled Victorian home full of things we could not touch. I dreaded the seemingly bottomless hours of boredom sitting still and quiet in Aunt Belle’s house as my mother and aunts visited her. But how grateful I am now at 57 to have touched her hand, to have kissed her wrinkled cheek, and through her to have touched that time in which her life was rooted. Today I know that I stand on those roots.

In the mid-1800s my great great grandparents, Charles and Margaret Ellis, walked - walked! - from the former Weisiger plantation in Kentucky to establish, clear the land and live and work on the 'new' Weisiger plantation in Victoria, Texas. A small corner of that expansive property is pictured here in a photo I shot while there.

During my stay in Texas a number of people asked how it felt to visit the property where my ancestors had been enslaved. In their eyes and voices I detected an assumption, and a reasonable one, that I would feel bitter or sad or perhaps angry. I didn't feel any of those emotions, however. Not because I am immune to the inhumanity of slavery. But those weren't my immediate 'go to' feelings. Instead, I felt love. I felt wonder. And I felt grateful.

I felt this way because I think of my people as family first, not as slaves. Slavery did not define who they were to themselves, it is rather what happened to them. To me, my grandmother's grandparents and their children are first and foremost my ancestors, fascinating people whose names I grew up hearing year after year for 6 decades over holiday dinners: my grandmother's mother, Elizabeth; her uncles Willie and Hezekiah; aunts Avalonia, Belle and Fannie … who we remember now as 'Granny’ because Elizabeth died not long after my grandmother was born and Fanny stepped up and raised her.

On that expansive and generous land were my ancestors once lived, I walked under the broad sweeping boughs of a 600 year old live oak beneath which they also must have walked when the tree was just 450 years old. I stood on the banks of the green Guadalupe River, watching the slow moving current make its way south toward the Gulf of Mexico. They too certainly stood on those banks watching the slow current snaking by as I did, and I imagined Uncle Willie as a boy skipping stones across its waters.

I took in swallows dipping and dashing in the sky, black and daffodil colored butterflies seemingly floating among bright blossoms, and deer darting over flowers and through the grass. Rummaging armadillos, surprised by our presence, slipped quickly under the thick brush. Waterlilies in ponds, ubiquitous clumps of grass, great billowing stands of oaks, and red Turks Cap blossoms soothed my citified eyes. My eyes saw and were comforted by the natural world that my ancestors’ eyes knew. And in this way I walked with love for them, and with wonder, on the land where they lived at a time and in a world so very different from my own.

I was grateful to come home not to an old plantation where my people were enslaved but to the land where they lived, laughed and walked, where they breathed and loved each other, and where they birthed the family I know today. They loved each other powerfully enough to give me - today - a sense of self transcending the inhumanity of this country's cruel history while also including it and in no way ignoring it.

They laid a foundation of transcendence. The Emancipation Proclamation is one thing. A paper signed by dignitaries. But the spirit of my Ellis ancestors set me free a long time ago. Long before I was born.

As I say, I will be 'unpacking' from this trip for some time to come.

I feel love. I feel wonder. I feel grateful. And I feel blessed. Blessed by my ancestors.

I am in my heart supremely free, as they are as well, because in my free heart is where they dwell now.

Robert Adan Williams
October 2018
San Antonio