'I saw extreme displacement of black people' – Author Morgan Jerkins on retracing her ancestral path

In America’s Deep South, Morgan Jerkins feels closer to her roots and those who fled north during the Great Migration

I was at the Festival International de Louisiane in the spring of 2018 for field research for my second book, when I had an experience that I’ve never forgotten. My liaison, Tracey Colson Antee, a Creole woman whose ancestors were at one point responsible for the country’s wealthiest community of free people of colour, told me that when I travelled to Louisiana, not to be surprised if someone recognised me. I downplayed her remark.

The truth is, I had only discovered that I was Creole from my father’s lineage some four or five years before. Both my father and I were a couple of generations removed from that place of bayous, mysticism and gumbo. I thought the distance would make my face indecipherable. But while I was at that festival in the city of Lafayette, a stranger asked if I was from St Landry Parish. I was astounded. St Landry Parish was only an hour away from my ancestral homeland: St Martin Parish.

Then another Creole woman and poet, Kelly Clayton, who accompanied me that day, said that was because of my half-moon eyes. All my life I’d been ashamed of how my eyes disappeared when I smiled too much in pictures. But this trait is what links me to my father, with whom I have a complicated relationship. And there I was, recognised right there on the same soil where my ancestors walked and laboured. I’ve never felt the same about myself since.

I haven’t always felt secure in my family tree. When I was born, my mother and father’s relationship had already collapsed and it wasn’t until I was seven or eight that I realised that my father had another family of his own: a wife, a dog, and three daughters. Though I was enveloped in love, I often felt like my existence was an aberration; I wasn’t meant to be here. The ways in which my mother raised me often collided with how my sisters were raised, and I toggled back and forth over how to behave and present myself. When I was born, my father called me the milkman’s baby because I was so light. Years later, I learnt other people interpreted this as meaning a child with a promiscuous mother. This was my first confrontation with what I had known to be true within my family, and outside information that conflicted with it.

I’d often wondered if, when it came to lineage and black histories, there were other stories and relationships that had been overlooked and devalued? I read Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, where the protagonist searches for his roots. His name is Milkman Dead. This rootlessness inspired me, because I felt it too, individually and interpersonally, as an African-American woman – so this here milkman’s baby was going to go searching.

My family was part of the Great Migration, from roughly 1910 to 1970, when millions of African-Americans fled the south because of racial terrorism, and scattered across the United States. What is often overlooked in this monumental cultural shift is what – or who – gets lost along the way. What happens to our memories, our customs, traditions, superstitions, and beliefs, if we are detached from our roots?

And where does this leave me, a descendant of those who fled? The movement has left me with countless questions as to why my family do what they do and believe what they believe.

There were often omissions and gaps that my parents couldn’t account for, and I noticed that other black families who migrated decades prior had omissions and gaps themselves. I decided to revisit the migratory route, to recover what I could on American soil and bridge the gap between those who fled and those who remained, investigating and demystifying how our identities refract and transform under state violence, land displacement and loss, and cultural erasure.

I resigned myself to the fact that I may never know from which countries in Africa my ancestors originated, their ethnicities, and languages. However, if both of my families had been in America for several generations, could it be possible that I could make some kind of significant recovery here? I attempted to discover this during the research for my second book, Wandering In Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots.

When I spoke to a historian named Tiffany Young, who is Gullah Geechee, one of the oldest micro ethnic groups of African-Americans in the country, she told me that when I travelled to the sea islands of Georgia and South Carolina, it would be “nothing like I’d ever seen before”. She was right. I saw extreme displacement of black people in that region of the Deep South, plantation tours that sanitised the truth about the brutality of slavery, and an ancestral presence in the air.

In Oklahoma, one of my guides, LeEtta Osborne-Sampson said to me, “If you were my daughter…” her voice tapering off. I asked her, “What?” She said, “I’d be scared.” That same day, we were followed by people who were suspicious about this outsider coming into their community. I was researching discrimination against black people within the “Five Civilised Tribes” (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole).

Days later, I drove from Oklahoma City to Tulsa, where I unwittingly crossed multiple “sundown towns”, places where black people were at risk of violence from white people after dark.

I finished my journey in California, where I stood at the intersection of Florence and Normandie of South-Central Los Angeles, where the Rodney King riots happened. In conversation with an underground rapper named James “Nocando” McCall, I asked if he thought such riots or uprisings would happen again. He told me that if the United States did not reckon with how much black communities have been devastated and black people have been threatened, it would. Almost two years to the day after his prophetic words, the George Floyd protests rippled across the world.

My journey through the US was a healing pilgrimage. The further I travelled and the more I documented, the more rooted I felt in my multi-layered family tree and confident within the social fabric of American history. I also recognised that African-Americans from coast to coast, across rivers and highways, were still cosmically, spiritually and culturally connected. We are a unified group within subgroups, and the triumph is that, although we may move about, we can always find a little piece of home within each other.

Black History Month runs until the end of October. For more information, see blackhistorymonth.org.uk

Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots, by Morgan Jerkins, is out now, published by HarperCollins at ￡20. Buy it now for ￡16.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514.