Jeanine M. Canty

CIIS – Learning Community

Genealogy Paper

October 6, 2002

 

It is my belief that the present state of restlessness that traps the modern individual has its roots in a dysfunctional relationship with the ancestors (Some, 1994, p. 9).

 

My ancestors are making me

practice my languages,

forcing me to make foreign sounds,

to turn new words over,

until the tongues in my mouth

speak in a single voice,

until the tongues in my mouth

speak the truth that no one wants to hear (Worley, 1997).

 

          I have always felt intensely connected to my ancestors.  Many cultures believe that you are born into a specific family to serve a specific purpose.  That you are in a soul cluster sorting out group dynamics, so you can move on to a common calling of healing and transcendence[1].  I believe this.  I perceive ancestral presence constantly, waking and sleeping, invisible and barely visible, always distinctly informative.  I frequently meditate – ending with a prayer that includes my “grandmothers and grandfathers, all of my ancestors and all of the ancestors of this place”.  Ancestors should be revered. 

          The oldest relatives I have known were my two grandmothers and my paternal grandfather.  They were major influences in my life, spending holidays with them and my extended family during the first 19 years of my life.  My nuclear family (Mom, Dad, brother – Greg, and myself) lived in Montclair , New Jersey , while six or seven households resided throughout Queens , Manhattan , Harlem, and the Bronx . 

 
          My paternal grandparents were both born in South Carolina .  My grandfather, Joseph Canty, was born to Josh Cantey and Mitt Bowman.  His mother died when he was 2.  His father remarried and had numerous other children.  It is said, that my grandfather changed his name from “Cantey” to “Canty” to distance himself from a black-sheep half-brother who lived in the same town.  What is interesting is that in Sumter , South Carolina , both Cantey and Canty are the largest listing of names in the telephone book, depicting people of both African and Anglo descent with mixtures between and beyond them.  My grandfather must have come to New York City sometime in the 1920’s and 30’s.  He met my grandmother at church.  He attended in order to meet her and once they were married did not go back.  He was fourteen years older than her.

 
          My grandmother, Mary Matthews, was born in Hartsville , South Carolina in 1916 to Mary MacDougal and Sun Winslow Matthews.  Her mother was Scottish, Irish, African, and Native American.  Mary MacDougal birthed seven children, possible more.  I have heard rumor that she had thirteen, many of which were lost when she migrated from South Carolina to New York City .  Five of her children were with Sun Winslow Matthews, two with a man with the last name, Sloan.  At some point, the younger children were separated from the older, the latter coming to New York with Mary MacDougal.  My grandmother was included in this migration.  Mary MacDougal was a tough woman, owing her own business (cleaning, laundry) and a house.  She lived until 1968.

 
          My paternal grandparents were married in 1941 and had six children, one of which (Richard) died during infancy.  My father, Joseph Canty, born in 1942, is the oldest. His family lived in a small apartment in Harlem .  They were very poor. In the mid-40’s, my grandfather was injured while working on the docks, becoming disabled for the rest of his life.  He never received a proper workman’s compensation and was disgruntled about this until his death in 1989.  My grandmother was a domestic worker for other families.  She died in 1998 and was buried in Sumter, South Carolina next to my grandfather. 
 

          My paternal living family is large.  My father has two brothers, Winslow and Eddie.  Winslow lives in Georgia with his wife, Ann, and son, Jamal.  They have another daughter, Jamila, who lives in New York City.  My Uncle Eddie lives in New York City as well, and is often missing.  My Aunt Louise is married to James Leslie. They live in Montclair , New Jersey and have three children, Noel, Joslyn, and Iman.  Noel is a pilot, while Joslyn and Iman are in college.  They are a very close family.  My Aunt Jane lives in the city and has 2 sons in college, Jesse and Matthew.  All of the children are gifted.

 
          My maternal grandmother, Thelma McCleary, was born January 15, 1919 in Brooklyn , New York to Leila and Bernard Sowley.  Her mother and over 20 cousins came to New York from Jamaica .  Half of the cousins decided to pass as white, while half remained West Indians.  My grandmother stayed with her roots.  She had my mother, Carol Ann Theresa Griffith, in 1941 with Horace Griffith who came from Barbados .  My mother does not remember her father.  When she was little, my grandmother told her he had died in World War II.  However when my mother was in her mid-30’s, she learned he had recently died.  She never learned the story of her father and much of her family.  My grandmother died last year.  She had a sister, Leila, and brother, Bernard.  Leila had a son, Arnie, with Jack Williams, while Bernard had three children: Bernard, Christopher, and Marie.  The youngest Bernard graduated from Yale and was killed shortly after in a drug deal. 

 
          

My mother was raised in a West African community in Harlem .  She was always very close to her mother.  My grandmother worked in the garment industry and lived with her sister until she remarried, Joe McCleary.  He was killed in the early 1970’s in an accident at work on Christmas Eve.  Apparently he drank too much at the holiday work party and hit his head.  Instead of taking him to the hospital, his employers left him at the factory overnight, someone finding him and taking him to the hospital on Christmas day, where he died in a comma.  My grandmother received workman’s compensation for the rest of her life.  She never remarried but lived with her companion, Rod Mounsey until she died.

 
My parents were married in 1963 and will celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary on June 15.  They have a somewhat fairy tale story, courting for a long time in the city while in college - dances, movies, family outings – lots of romance.  They are both, very stable, domestic, and social.  They had my brother, Greg, on December 16, 1965 and me on June 11, 1970 in Queens and the Bronx , respectively.  They moved us from inner city New York to the suburbs of New Jersey in the early 1970’s.  They achieved the American Dream.  We are a close family, all of us living in the west, Arizona and Colorado, although my brother has substance abuse problems and goes missing for long periods.  He has two children, Dallas and Chalen with Mary Ellen Hayes, and another, Jared Joseph, with someone I’ve never met.

 

At some moment, all one's imprecations, all one's pleas to ancestors, all one=s evoking of spirits, sound in the ears as the hollowness of one's own voice.  At such a moment, he would sense the most dreadful meaning in what had happened.  He was alone, abandoned by all he knew that could have given him support and anchor: village, family, and even his gods (Huggins, 1977, p.31).

 

          What’s interesting is that both sides of my family are very light skinned and we are all African Americans.  I have a mixture of African, Jamaican, Barbadian, Native American (Cherokee), Scottish, Irish, and Welsh blood.  We do not know the stories of how these mixed roots that were formed during the African Diaspora when an estimated 50 million African people were taken away from their homelands only to die or become enslaved (Zinn, 1994).  The history of my family during enslavement is unknown.  This is the case for most African Americans, as our families were consistently broken apart, “…slaves were not allowed legal marriages and all births during slavery were out of wedlock…” (Franklin, 1997, p. 18).  I did do a bit of research on the Cantey family.  As the Cantey and Canty descendants from Sumter , South Carolina are both Black and White, it makes sense that they are the descendants of both the slave holding families and enslaved Africans.  The earliest slave holding Cantey descendants (that I could find) came to South Carolina from Cork County, Ireland, via Barbados in 1672 (http:://www.mindspring.com/~jtfleming/cantey.htm).  I do not think I will ever learn this history.  I speculate that it contains obvious elements of tragedy, violence, survival, heroism, and, hopefully, love.

          One generational pattern that mirrors African American history is the period of migration that took place during the two Great Migration periods surrounding World War I and II.  The first was during 1910-1920 (Franklin, 1997, p. 72) and the second during the 1940's (p. 99).  This was a time where many White American men (and some other ethnicities) were participating in the wars leaving a labor vacuum in the industrial cities of the northern United States .  By the end of these two migration periods there were more Blacks living in the north than in the south.  Both sides of my family migrated to New York City during these periods.

My family has paralleled the histories of most African Americans who are descendants of enslavement.  I was really frustrated when Anderson disputed the authenticity of an African American cultural identity in The Future of the Self, stating:

The idea of a ‘black community’ to which all African-Americans somehow magically belong has been one of the staples of political discourse for decades, but…is partly the manifestation of a nostalgic longing for a time when blacks were clearly distinguishable from whites… (1997, p. 206).

C.H. Long states that "... [the] persisting structural mode and the common situation as slaves in America may be the basis for the persistence of an African style among the descendants of the Africans (p.26)."  Enslavement and oppression have framed the shared experience of the African Americans, creating a cultural foundation.   This oppression persists presently.

          Another theme that I picked up was the plight of the Black male.  In every generation of my family, there has been at least one Black male who was either maimed or killed at work, imprisoned, missing, and/or struggled with substance abuse problems.  The African American male has suffered greatly due to his loss of power in the family structure due to slavery and economics.  As mentioned previously, in slavery, the black male did not have the power to protect his family.  This loss of power continued through the lack of productive employment for males in all regions of this country.  Clearly, this affected the male psyche.

          Another theme is the strength of African American women.  All of the women in my family are strong, many raising and supporting their children with their husbands, others sticking with their spouses through harsh times.  I feel that I have inherited this strength.

          There are many family themes.  Some common themes my family shares are: struggle, outspokenness, faith, storytelling, violence, substance abuse, psychological trauma; music, dance, creative thinking, dream worlds, spirituality, and faith.  I resonate with all of these.  I often pattern my life through messages I perceive from my ancestors.  They communicate with me through dreams, nature experiences, visions, and collective thought.  Much of the work I do seeks to redeem the trauma of my family, I feel this is one of the reasons I was born.  I was very close to both of my grandmothers, having personal, affectionate relationships with both.  As my grandparents have died, their images have become stronger.  

 

References

 

          Anderson , W.T. (1997). The future of the self: Inventing the post-modern person. New York : Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.

 

          Franklin, D.L. & Wilson, W. J. (1997). Ensuring inequality: the structural

transformation of the African American family.  New York : Oxford University Press.

 

          Huggins, N. I. (1977).  Black odyssey: The African American ordeal in slavery.  New York : Vintage Books, a division of Random House.

 

          Long, C.H. Perspectives for a study of African-American religion. In Fulop, T.E. & Raboteau, A.J. (Eds.). (1997). African American religion: Interpretive essays in history and culture. New York , NY : Routledge.

 

          Somé, M.P. (1994). Of water and the spirit: Ritual, magic, and initiation in the Life of an African shaman. New York , NY : Penguin Books.

 

          Worley, D.A. (1997). Tongues in my mouth. In Gilyard, K. (Ed.).  Spirit and flame: An anthology of contemporary African American poetry.  Syracuse , NY : Syracuse University Press. (pp. 292).

 

          Zinn, H. (1995). A people=s history of the United States : 1492-present. New York , NY : HarperPerennial, A Division of HaperCollins Publishers.
 

[1] Sounds like what we are doing at CIIS.