Image from Indianapolis Star article, credit goes to Stephen Beard and Robert King of the Star.
Thank you, Bobby King! You did a great job with a story of very tangled-up details. The front page of the Star! You forgot to mention that when we talked on Thursday, you sneaky reporter.
In fact, when I scanned the comments, I saw that a reader recommended Edward Ball's book, Slaves in the Family. My friend Laurel sent the book to me immediately when I shared this story with her back in March of 2009. I read the book in one sitting. Then, I sent the book to Mikal Saahir.
Here are some corrections marked like thas this and with more info in brackets like [this].
I want to say much, much more about this story, more than already, in an earlier post. I will do that soon.
TTFN
BOUND BY THE PAST
By Robert King on February 20, 2010
Meeting reveals shared ties to the culture of slavery
When Michael Saahir and Anne McWilliams crossed paths over coffee between Sunday services at her Northside church, they easily could have passed from each other's lives without another thought.
But Saahir noticed her nametag and made a comment that there were McWilliamses in his family.
The overture could seem odd, given that Saahir is black and McWilliams is white. And even stranger, Saahir is Muslim -- a kufi-wearing imam, in fact -- and at the time, McWilliams, was an administrator at a Christian seminary an educator by training, was preparing for a five-week stay in Guatemala to attend intensive Spanish language school. [actually, I was at CTS in 2007-8; in March 2009, I had just finished a unit of CPE at Methodist Hospital; I have been an adjunct at CTS off and on since I was Interim Associate Academic Dean at CTS].
Yet McWilliams couldn't help but come back to Saahir, who was the guest speaker at her First Congregational [United] Church of Christ, and pick up the thread connecting them. It didn't take long for them to realize they were connected by more than a thread.
Both had family in Alabama. From rural Limestone County, a place so small it's almost hard not to be related somehow. McWilliams had grown up there, she said. Saahir spent summers as a kid there and still has family there.
Then Saahir said his ancestors had been slaves, some of whom were owned by a man named James Lafayette McWilliams. She recognized the name.
It was her great-grandfather great-great-grandfather.
"I was just stunned," she said.
Making the connection
The McWilliams family -- its white and black iterations, its parts rooted in slavery and slave ownership -- had completed a long journey that Sunday almost one year ago. It was a trip that covered nearly 150 years, four to five generations and almost 400 miles.
Saahir and McWilliams have come to see it as a divine appointment.
McWilliams had just joined the church a few months earlier the previous month. Back late from vacation the night before, she considered sleeping in but went anyway.
Saahir was a visiting guest speaker. He had come to address the theme of the day: the "Spiritual DNA of Abraham" -- to speak about the common history of Muslims and Christians.
But he and McWilliams also wound up giving a brief lesson on racial history -- how a black man and a white woman in Indianapolis can learn about their shared ties to the slave culture.
"It was rather extraordinary," said the Rev. Richard Clough, pastor at First Congregational, who invited Saahir to speak. "I witnessed their conversation as it unfolded. It was really just an astounding thing."
The conversation continued after church.
Saahir realized that a black and white photo in his family history collection showed his once-enslaved ancestor, George McWilliams, circa 1928, holding a little white boy in his lap. That child, it turns out, was one of McWilliams' great-uncles father's first cousins, Thomas Martin Gilbert.
Talking further, Saahir, 53, and McWilliams, 52, realized that as kids they had walked some of the same streets. Saahir grew up in Indianapolis but spent his summers with family in Athens, Ala., where McWilliams grew up. Both went to the movies in a self-segregated [Ritz] theater -- she downstairs, he in the balcony.
And then there was Mary McWilliams Gilbert, a lively little old lady who, even late in life, lived in the "big house" on the McWilliams family's farm in Elkmont. [She was the mother of the little boy, Thomas Martin Gilbert, in the photo with George McWilliams.]
She was one of Anne McWilliams' great-aunts great aunt. But they had met briefly only once, after a family funeral after McWilliams' estranged grandfather's death in 1978 or 1979.
Saahir, though, had had an extensive conversation with Gilbert in the 1980s while on a fact-finding mission.
Gilbert told him that she had given his mother her name -- Gloria. It shows, he said, how the residue of the slave culture still held sway well into the 20th century.
It was so extensive that the last slave in the family, George McWilliams, freed as a boy [age 9] by the Emancipation Proclamation, in the 1930s still lived in the cabin behind the "big house" he had occupied as a slave.
That influence carried on, in fact, to Saahir. Much like Malcolm X or Muhammad Ali, Saahir took a new name after his conversion to Islam in 1980, dropping his Anglicized name for a new one. It was both a statement of faith and a rejection of the names his ancestors inherited from white slave owners.
Even so, when Saahir went to visit Gilbert in 1985, his Alabama relatives told him not to knock on the front door because, as a black man, he wouldn't be allowed in. Instead, they said, he should go to the back entrance, where slaves had once entered and black servants still used.
Saahir was too interested in hearing about the history to risk upsetting protocol. So he took the advice. "I had waited so long to get the interview I was afraid of being turned back," he said. "It was just the way it was."
Accepting the past
McWilliams' family research was more limited. She had once plugged "McWilliams" into a genealogy Web site and made contact with a Florida doctor judge [Alan Todd] who gave her some printouts. Mostly, though, McWilliams saw them just as names on paper.
Never did she conceive that her family had owned slaves.
Her dad, Robert Lee McWilliams, [Jr.] never talked about his side of the family. Her mother's side had been simple farmers, and she just assumed the same was true on the other side.
"It hit me with shock," she said. "And I just have to be honest with you that it hit me with shame."
Shame because McWilliams had always thought of her family as enlightened. As a child, she remembers asking her parents about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and hearing them speak favorably of it as a means to make all people equal, regardless of color. She had been taught never to look down on others.
As an adult, McWilliams chose the church where she and Saahir met in part because it was the kind of place that would be involved in interfaith work and would turn over the pulpit on the first Sunday of Lent to a Muslim imam.
Learning of the lost history forced her to re-examine much about her family's past. The fact she grew up in a house with a black maid who did all the cooking and cleaning and dirty work seemed different now. More unseemly than it had as a child.
So did the memory of being told as a child that all the [other] McWilliamses in the Limestone County phonebook were black, and of no relation. She came to feel cheated out of an important part of her past.
"I've never had an encounter so clearly, face to face, with my history as a Southerner, a white Southerner," she said.
And McWilliams began to feel some guilt.
"There's an assumption in a lot of circles that if you are white in America that you are racist because of the way racism is so systematized in this country. I sort of believe that," she said. said, "I have to take the longest step forward to bridge that gap."
To that end, McWilliams has asked Saahir and his wife if she can accompany them to his family reunion in Alabama this summer. She wants to meet the ["other"] McWilliamses of Limestone County and learn from them.
For Saahir, the lessons of this new family connection aren't about inducing guilt. He's told McWilliams she bears no burden from the distant past. But he is hopeful that their story can help heal some of the racial problems in America by encouraging people to understand their history.
"There is a lot of untold stories that we are ashamed of," he said.
Like many Southerners, Saahir's family migrated north from Alabama looking for work and a better life. McWilliams bounced around the country in pursuit of her education, and for her work in academia.
Their own lives -- the segregated movie theaters as kids, the need as adults to still respect the code of the big house back entrance -- evidence vestiges of a past not so far behind us.
But both say their willingness to put themselves in an interracial setting where they could meet is a hopeful sign, a measure of progress.
Yet they won't chalk up their meeting to simple coincidence.
"It just seems like a conspiracy of factors, spiritual and cultural, that brought us together," McWilliams said. "I'm sure you can explain it away in many different ways, but it was so efficient, so instant."
"It is the plan of God," said Saahir, the imam. "And I don't fully understand it yet."
[Neither do I, Mikal, -- neither do I!]
