All of These People Are Cousins
Almost a decade ago, Betsy Haywood began searching for the roots of her Raleigh family. She discovered her tribe was far broader than she ever expected.
“My philosophy is that position or place can never segregate mind or soul. I sit in the Jim Crow car, but my mind keeps company with the kings and queens I have known.”
—Charlotte Hawkins Brown, author, educator, and civil rights activist, who founded the Palmer Memorial Institute, a school for African American children, in 1902 in Sedalia, North Carolina
It’s a little windy this Friday night outside the oldest private residence in Raleigh, North Carolina: Haywood House. The weather started out warm, close to 70 degrees at midday, but now it’s 7 p.m. Guests are arriving, bearing food and smiles, and the temperature has dropped quickly.
Haywood House sits at a busy intersection in downtown Raleigh, and, echoing most of the surviving older buildings, it’s surrounded by parking lots and government buildings. Directly across is the North Carolina State Bar; a block east is the Capitol building. Visible from the Haywood House’s front door is a large, long stone church that’s also an Episcopal preschool, and some studio apartments.
Most of the new arrivals hurry inside, stopping briefly to knock at the outsized double doors that lead from a Doric-columned porch to the foyer and staircase inside. A few stop short of the double-doors to take photos, sitting on a small bench on the porch, lit with a strobe light. The traffic on South Blount Street is busy tonight; another of Raleigh’s many downtown events is starting up a few blocks south, and cars rush by.
The first to sit is Emerson Foster. His ancestors were slaves owned by the Hawkins family back in the 1800s. He’s here to gather more information about where enslaved people are buried in nearby Warren County; these are often areas found near their enslaver’s family cemeteries, marked solely by fieldstones at the boundaries. His most recent find was at the gravesite of John Hall, one of the first three judges of the North Carolina Supreme Court. Oddly, one of Emerson’s ancestors, a slave woman named Hannah, was buried in the Hall cemetery. Foster wonders if that signifies a deeper relationship.
Then comes Richard Hunter, a retired clerk of court from Warren County, who’s brought along a box of seedlings to give out to the other guests. These are what he calls Montmorenci boxwoods: American boxwood shrubs, carefully cut and cultivated, from the ruins of the Montmorenci Plantation gardens. Montmorenci was built by General William Williams in the 1820s near Shocco Creek, and is survived now by its famous curved staircase, which sits in the Dupont family museum in Delaware. Richard is here to see “who’s kin to who, and where they came from.”
Eugenia Ijames, a schoolteacher from Johnston County, sits and remarks quietly that “this house is filled with history, and the people are filled with wonderful stories. I hope to be able to take some of the stories back to my students.”
Earl Ijames, her husband, is next; he’s a farmer and historian, and quick to point out his bonafides: seventh-generation North Carolinian, and the curator of African American History and Agriculture at the North Carolina Museum of History. He talks about the history of the Haywood House, and its current owner, Betsy Haywood:
“I’ve known Betsy Haywood probably 25 years at least,” he says. “Her mother, I knew even better. Her mother’s the one who used to originally invite me over to Haywood Hall (a nearby, even older Haywood family residence that the family no longer owns) for Christmas parties and all the gatherings like this.”
Earl has brought a palm tree native to North Carolina, called the Carolina palmetto or cabbage palm, for Betsy’s gathering. Sabal palmetto is a hardy survivor, one that tolerates droughts as well as cold and heat, and he’d like to plant it in the nascent garden here at the house.
The guests tonight are descendants of slave owners, former slaves, or are the offspring of mixed race marriages, all of them breaking bread together and trading histories—sharing stories.
Something like 90 percent of the dinner guests tonight are related. As Samuel Alston, another attendee, puts it: “Once you start doing the research, it really gets to be interesting. Guess what? We’re all cousins.”
And Betsy Haywood, current owner and resident of Haywood House? This dinner is one stop on her odyssey—a journey through her family history, a desire to face the past and reckon with all that it has wrought. But that’s a maudlin way to describe her motivations. This is more than reckoning with the past. There is more to Betsy than that; she moves forward with a desire to connect and change the dynamic of the relationship she has with the group she’s eating with tonight. She refers to Emerson Foster, whose ancestor Hannah was buried in the family cemetery of North Carolina Supreme Court Justice John Hall, as “Cousin Emerson.”
She’s the steward of this place, a home that’s been here since the mid-1800s, a time when there was a Haywood on almost every block near the capitol. It’s seen, and survived, antebellum Southern politics, slavery, secession, and Civil War. It served as the U.S. Army headquarters for General Francis Preston Blair Jr. in the last days of the Civil War. Betsy pulls back a curtain from a dining room window where, in April of 1865, shortly after the surrender of Confederate troops, her great-grandfather Dr. Richard Haywood, General Blair and General William Tecumseh Sherman drank a toast to the end of the Civil War. Looking closely at a window pane in the study reveals children’s scratchings in the glass: “Effie Haywood 1880; Sherwood Haywood, M. Haywood 1884.” Haywood House was officially listed in the National Registry of Historic Homes in 1970.
As Betsy sits down, taking a break from dinner preparations, she looks entirely at ease, wearing an unfailingly bright-eyed gaze. It’s her own home, after all: she grew up here.
“Each dinner is different. Each one gets more and more interesting,” she says, of the gatherings. The invite list changes from dinner to dinner, but the core group are Betsy, Rosetta Brodie and Emerson Foster.
“I was researching my Haywood ancestors, because they were better documented,” Betsy says of the days when she began tracing her family’s roots. She also believed there was a connection with Sir John Hawkins, a notorious sixteenth century English naval commander and slave trader. Over time, her research connected her to the other people at this dinner.
Almost all of the group are descendents of the Haywood and/or Hawkins families—or the people those families enslaved. Betsy is a descendent of Eleanor (Hawkins) Haywood, born in 1776 and the daughter of Philemon Hawkins III and his wife, Lucy Davis. Rosetta Brodie descends from people enslaved by Delia Haywood Williams (daughter of Sherwood Haywood and his wife, Eleanor Howard Hawkins), and her husband, Gen. William "Pretty Billy" Williams in Warren County.
Emerson Foster is related to the Hawkinses in multiple ways as well; in addition to descending from people enslaved by Delia and “Pretty Billy” Williams, he descends from the Plummer family. That family’s head fathered a single child, Frank Plummer, with a Black enslaved woman named Rebecca Hall.
It’s easy to get lost in the swarm of names and stories. Black families in this part of North Carolina were intertwined with white families—not only in master-servant relationships, but also in family relationships. White slave owners in some of the most prominent families here had children with the people they enslaved.
Over the last eight years, this group has come together, each weaving their own genealogical discoveries with others in the group.
“I believe in truth, and I believe in trying to understand each other. And I really like these people.”
“We just like each other, and we enjoy each other, and we can talk about the tough topics,” Betsy says. “I believe in truth, and I believe in trying to understand each other. And I really like these people.”
The Haywood House stores an incredible wealth of history about the area, and Betsy Haywood’s own family. It contains an amazing amount of memorabilia and important historical documents—enough to fill a museum.
A short, incomplete list:
- the medical kit of Dr. Richard B. Haywood, who opposed North Carolina’s secession (the house hosted U.S. Army Generals Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant in 1865, when Raleigh was surrendered to Sherman). The kit includes morphine sulfate, a bottle of sulfur quinine, a pap boat for feeding invalids or children, syrup of ipecac, lavender, a mortar and pestle, and even a hypodermic needle;
- Important historical documents including the Haywood family slave records;
- Two huge pier mirrors, fashionable in the 18th century, that hang floor to ceiling in the drawing room;
- A family portrait including Betsy’s great-grandmother Julia Hicks Haywood, painted by Henry Inman, a leading American portraitist of his time;
- A box piano, played by all the Haywood girls, and given to the family by the Polish ambassador to the United States.
Even more is stored inside Betsy’s head.
Lately, she’s been attempting to figure out who shares her ancestry, and since 2015 has been reaching out to people white and Black who share her last name (Haywood was the surname given to all the slaves who worked on her family’s land.). Her search also extends to the Hawkins surname (Richard Haywood, the original owner of the house, was the grandson of Philemon Hawkins III, a plantation owner in Warren County). Family myth has long held that Philemon Hawkins was descended from the slave trader Sir John Hawkins. So far, Betsy has been unable to prove a DNA connection with John Hawkins.
Sir John was one of the first purveyors of the “Triangle Trade”—a term that signified trading goods for enslaved people in Africa, then selling those people in the Americas for money and goods to be brought back to England. A bloody geographic triangle of people-as-product, the term dissociates the very real human cost and hardship of lives uprooted and families upended.
“Tears started trickling out of my eyes and out of Gary's eyes. I said, ‘I'm a little embarrassed, and I just feel awkward.’ And he said, ‘I'm not. This is the best moment of my life. I have found my whole family.’”
But Betsy has unearthed a lot of tangible, invaluable information to share with the world: the records of her own Haywood family’s slave holdings.
She began by inviting descendants of the Haywoods and Hawkins families to dine together at her home and explore the history, and the archives, inside. She calls these dinners “Hanging With the Hawkins & Haywoods.”
She describes a dinner six months ago when a retired Black attorney from Ohio named Gary Franklin, who was researching his family’s ancestry, made a long-lost connection by looking through the Haywood family slave records:
“We were over at one end of the dining room, and everybody else is having a drink and talking at the other end,” Betsy says. “He looks at it (the registry) and he goes, ‘Oh my gosh, that is my great-great-grandmother's entire family, Matilda and her children.’ I still get chill bumps talking about it. And I just stood there, and tears started trickling out of my eyes and out of Gary's eyes. I said, ‘I'm a little embarrassed, and I just feel awkward.’ And he said, ‘I'm not. This is the best moment of my life. I have found my whole family.’
“That was my favorite evening.... He found one branch of his enslaved Curtis family in our family slave records.”
Once tonight’s dinner begins, it’s lively. Everyone’s talking; small groups discuss new findings and gravesites, and names from the 1800s and earlier pop up repeatedly. Delia, Micajah, Philemon, Nathaniel, and many more—three- and four-syllable mouthfuls, monoliths of names, full of the double-vowels so popular then.
The guests dish up their own plates of food as Emerson Foster starts a livestream of their discussion onto his Facebook page. Everyone in the group determinedly records and posts all of their genealogical information, a fascinating stream of output so large and unfiltered that trying to sample it feels similar to clamping your mouth to an outsized garden hose. Betsy, after thanking everyone for bringing food for the potluck, launches immediately into a complicated description of the winding road that brought everyone here tonight.
It’s a story of a search for Y-chromosome DNA that would link the family to Sir John Hawkins. The discussion becomes more interesting as it sidesteps into shared surnames and then descendants of mixed-race relationships in Warren County. At least half of the crowded dining room table hails from Warren County, the Hawkins side, a group that began when Philemon Hawkins married Delia Martin, and moved there in the mid-1700s. DNA Y-matches (95 percent of which correspond to males in any family tree) are plentiful.
“Everyone in here, we represent just about every family that ever lived in Warren County, North Carolina.”
There are a lot of distant cousins here tonight.
Earlier in their relationship, Betsy found a match between her and Emerson, who is Black, but related to the Hawkins family. And today, Betsy and Emerson both call each other "cousin."
“Everyone in here, we represent just about every family that ever lived in Warren County, North Carolina,” Emerson chimes in.
After dinner, they begin an elaborate show and tell in the large drawing room, with its plentiful seating. Everyone tucks in to generous servings of strawberry shortcake, and Emerson fires up his phone camera for another stream. Betsy begins again: “Eleanor Hawkins Haywood (1776-1858) was my great-great-grandmother, and her portrait is in the library.” Betsy gestures to her left to the family library, which is across a long hallway and out of sight (how many people alive can encompass almost 200 years in a lazy sweep of an arm?) and then passes around photocopied silhouettes of Eleanor and her brother, John D. Hawkins.
She mentions details from a letter written to accompany the silhouettes, adding in a few details about those days, including a reference to “that long, long pipe” that ladies used to smoke with “to keep from staining their lips,” and slowly the history of this widespread and far-reaching family home comes to life.
Slavery is mentioned often, never avoided or stepped around or over. Even in the description of the silhouette, Betsy reads an accompanying note that had been passed down with the silhouette: “When she would find that her pipe had gone out, she would call Polly; Polly was nowhere near, and she would say, ‘Drat that girl.’” The Polly mentioned in that note was a young enslaved girl in the home.
Offhandedly, Betsy mentions that a miniature of Colonel Philemon Hawkins III, who was born in 1752 at Pleasant Hill Plantation in Warren County, is in the house library, and gives another 250-year-encompassing wave toward that area of the house.
Following that remark down a rabbit hole reveals that Philemon Hawkins Jr. and Lucy Davis Hawkins had 13 children. From there, following just the daughters from that coupling—and the colonels and governors and businessmen that they married or sired—is a dizzying experience.
One out of many of the notable daughters, Sarah Hawkins, who married Colonel William Polk, has been credited with coming up with the idea for the Raleigh Experimental Railroad, which carried stone for the building of a new State Capitol Building, completed in 1840, in wooden carts drawn by horses by rails.
Betsy has fought hard to secure her home. Currently single, she moved back to the home in 2005 to care for her parents. Her father Marshall died in 2009, and her mother Margie in 2015.
Since then, she’s been mostly alone in her battles. And Wake County property taxes for downtown property remains high. She’s skeptical about its future:
“The city has not expressed any interest,” she says. “I don't think that the city is very interested at all in historic preservation. The city of Raleigh could not possibly care less, as far as I'm concerned.”
In the 1970s, Betsy’s mother, Margaret “Margie” Haywood, fought to secure historic property status for the Haywood House. But she ran into a state government plan to either tear down many historic homes along Blount Street to make way for parking for workers in the nearby State Government Complex. Later, in 1986, the state proposed to move Haywood House house and rebuild it on another lot. But Margie Haywood would have none of it. And her opinion mattered, because she chaired the state’s Historic Properties Commission.
“That’s my house. Haywoods have been in [here] since [it was] built! There’s no way on Earth it can be moved. I don’t even want to hear about it.”
In May 21 of that year, she told the Raleigh Times, “That’s my house. Haywoods have been in [here] since [it was] built! There’s no way on Earth it can be moved. I don’t even want to hear about it.”
Betsy has still not found a definitive family connection to Sir John Hawkins.
“I have tried,” she says. “All of us have. All of us who claim to be descended from this Sir John Hawkins have tried to trace it back, and every single time there is a missing generation.”
But Betsy has realized that her true value is as a record keeper, since her family’s slave records are enabling people to locate their own lost ancestors.
About halfway through one of the many live streams doggedly put out by Emerson Foster that evening, one guest, former county clerk Richard Hunter, shares an anecdote that illustrates the blurry lines that are reality for anyone doing research into the history of slave owners in the South.
“I said, ‘Well, there are two Christmas families. The white Christmases and the black Christmases.’”
Betsy has just shared a story about an ancestor of hers she discovered in Franklin County, Florine Green. Florine was black, and a DNA match with Betsy; both are descendents of Philemon and Delia Hawkins.
Florine’s aunts were light-skinned—so light they could pass for white. One of her aunts was an accomplished seamstress, and sewed for Doris Duke, a family whose vast fortune was made in the tobacco fields of North Carolina. She married a white man, and lived as white for years. She was outed as black by a jealous cousin who moved to New York, and subsequently was kicked out of her own home. Betsy ends her story by asking, “Was there this compulsion to act white, look white, be white?” Earl Ijames responds quickly: “if you could pass,” and others in the room nod and repeat the words.
Richard Hunter recalls his own story of blurred genealogies, citing another family, the Christmases. William Christmas was the surveyor who laid out the town of Raleigh in 1792, carved out of a thousand acres from the Joel Lane Plantation.
“I had a phone call at the office one day,” Richard begins. On the phone was a man who was researching the Christmas family.
“I said, ‘Well, there are two Christmas families. The white Christmases and the black Christmases.’ He laughed, and said, ‘Well, they’re white now, but they used to be black!’”
Guests file out of Haywood house slowly. In true Southern fashion, everyone has something else to say to Betsy, and it’s all long goodbyes, as they leave the past to return to their 21st Century lives and their day jobs. They are teachers, farmers, writers and historians; an eclectic mix of people that have found each other, and been invited to this almost 170-year-old residence tonight.
Richard Hunter’s seedlings wait by the door, carefully plucked from a dying southern garden. And Earl Ijames’ native palm awaits transplant into the house’s currently non-existent garden. There’s talk of putting up a fence around the front.
James Booker, the late, great, one-eyed piano playing junkie from New Orleans, could have been singing about this night when he wailed in “Slowly But Surely”:
You know the world keeps a-going all around and round, slowly getting back together. I know, it's getting right back together right now.
Uncovering, replanting, growing; it’s all coming around.
Manning Marable and Leith Mullings write about the loss, and writing-over, of African history and culture, in their introduction to their anthology of black writers, Let Nobody Turn Us Around:
Those captured from Africa were not people without history and culture. They were mothers and fathers, sons and daughters…. (They) created themselves, but not just as they pleased, not under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.
Marable and Mullings are right, of course, but there’s even more to it. Black people in the South, in North Carolina, did have to create themselves, and they did it in so many ways, not only as slave labor. They were slaves, they were free people, and even, rarely in this state, manumitted people. They were parts of mixed-marriage couples (sometimes hidden as slave/master relationships) and illegitimate offspring. And in the process, they not only created themselves; they created North Carolina, and the country. They are as much a part of the history here as their more well-known white counterparts.
Look at Charlotte Hawkins Brown, a great-granddaughter of John D. Hawkins, and founder of the Palmer Memorial Institute in 1902, which began as a boarding school for African-American children, run out of a small blacksmith’s cabin, and grew into a fully accredited, nationally recognized prep school, before its closure after a fire gutted the school's administration and classroom building in 1971.
Brown also helped to convince Guilford County to open the county's first public rural school for black students. An educator, speaker and leader, she became known as the "first lady of social graces" after her national radio appearances, and her book The Correct Thing to Do, to Say, to Wear was published in 1940.
And the Haywood House itself—a sagging but still standing piece of North Carolina history, sitting among parking lots and government buildings, slowly sinking in the rising tide of Wake County property taxes? As Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote in his novel about a similarly sprawling and influential family, the Buendías:
“Things have a life of their own. It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.”
About the author
I am a North Carolina-based freelance photographer and director: most of my work is lifestyle, editorial or commercial. I come from a long line of storytellers. I grew up listening to them: tales told by all of my aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, and my own parents. My father’s Nikkormat and a 28mm lens captured my childhood with love and attention. I think listening and being a photographer go hand in hand, and that’s what I try to do when I'm working. I'm available for commissions and assignments.
The photography is extraordinary. Kudos.