For at least five generations, my family has worked and lived in Tennessee, migrating from the Western part of the state early in the 20th Century to Knoxville (pictured above, circa early 1900s), where I was born and raised. I grew up surrounded by loving people in a geographically beautiful place, but by the time I was a teenager, I was itching to see what lay beyond the vertical horizon of the Smokey Mountains, and especially wanted to visit the New York I had read about in books by writers like James Baldwin.
My career goals changed daily from florist to lawyer, writer to anthropologist. But no matter what I was to become, I felt it could only happen if I left my hometown.
Legions of African Americans have felt that their ambitions could best be achieved by moving to the North, hence the mass out-migrations written about so eloquently by writers including Isabel Wilkerson ('The Warmth of Other Suns'), Nicholas Lehmann ('The Promised Land'), Farah Jasmine Griffin ('Who Set You Flowin'?'), and even me in my book 'Up South.' But another movement is gaining steam: a reverse migration of Northern-based blacks to the South.
The most obvious reasons for leaving the urban centers of the North have to do with the shift in job opportunities and the climate -- we are largely a warm-weather people. There are, though, other forces deeper and less visible pulling us to South, which are beautifully detailed in a new novel by Lorene Cary called 'If Sons, Then Heirs by Lorene Cary.'
In her fourth book, Cary tells the story of the Needham family, specifically Rayne Needham, a Southern-reared, Philadelphia-based contractor assigned by the grandmother who raised him to lead an effort to save the family land where she has lived alone since the rest of the family moved North. Issues around property ownership are inherently complex.
I know this first hand because like Rayne, my grandparents left it up to me, a male grandson and a first cousin to make sure that three small plots of land bought by their parents stay within the family. There is a paper trail to be followed in order to probate the handwritten Wills, but greater than that is the necessary step of reaching out to family unknown for reasons of time and distance.
My great grandparents, Ben and Cynthia Crump, had two sons, Kermit and my grandfather Lavon. The former settled and raised his family in Ohio, while Lavon and Eula raised his 13 children in Tennessee. Jimmy and I, the eldest of their surviving grandchildren, and the two named in the Will, migrated away from the old home too, but now have the responsibility of reclaiming it as our ancestors intended. Accomplishing the goal will require not only an intellectual and physical effort, but a spiritual one as well.
Our situation is neither new nor rare, especially if you're black and have Southern roots. The subject of land is an important part of the African American narrative nationwide. Most of us are emotionally and spiritually, not to mention financially, connected to the land of our origins. Old home-places contain the blood, sweat and history of what our people did -- good, bad and indifferent -- to live and die.
Cary's book weaves history and imagination into a story that captures essential human truths, with the main character facing consequences that brilliantly mirror the circumstances of our own lives, no matter what region of the country we live in, and no matter what kind of life we experience today as African, or any other kind of American.
Several years ago, I bought a place in Atlanta, where I lived during and after my college days. I fulfilled the long-held desire to have a base in South again, and at least be close to Knoxville, where the complications around the heir property await.
Today, I can enjoy the warmth of the Southern sun and spend time with relatives who live there, as I carry on with my cousin to do the work of bringing even distant family together to fulfill the mission of our ancestors.