The availability of options for rural minorities in America is a shockingly fresh concept. It’s so fresh that to actively discuss the South’s transitionary period, going from Jim Crow to the New South, where the switch slowly flipped and suddenly a person of color could look past the county line, feels like a bizarre mix of appreciation and devastation to a Native American like myself. Having grown up in the South, it’s clear that the ability to openly discuss the connecting thread between the ‘60s and now is one that still needs to be talked about in hushed tones, with the occasional area search for any involved parties. People discuss “back then” as though the folks who integrated the schools and their communities aren’t going through life right alongside them this very day.
Moreover, the history you learn in high school and even in college is incomplete, unless you happen to be a Native American Studies major—and still, there’s nothing you can learn in a classroom that can adequately replace 18 years of formative cultural osmosis. The South prior to the Civil Rights Movement was a land that was fractured by race, yes. But it was not split between black and white. It was split black, white, and other—and for too long, the story of the “other,” though it has not gone untold by Native peoples, has been all but unheard by the American public.
I come from the Sappony tribe of North Carolina. O.C. Martin is my grandfather. Very early on in their marriage, he and my grandmother, Nannie, seized upon arguably the most life-changing and astonishing revelation any Sappony family has ever had: Together, they realized the societal bounds that had tied them to the fields of eastern North Carolina would not be applied to their kids, at least not like they had been applied to them. They sensed a window opening in their part of the country, one that might close before they called it quits on their tobacco farm, and they meant to get all 11 kids through that window while the air was still flowing.
But before you can fully appreciate the story of O.C. and Nannie, you need to go back—a good way back—to a time before white people had set foot on even half of what would become America. A time when the indigenous peoples that lived on the East Coast still regaled each other with tales carefully passed down among the generations of when they and they alone called this patch of land home. You’ll also have to spend time understanding how the United States government, in a rare turn, implemented changes to tobacco policy and school segregation aimed at helping the poor working class, all before turning heel. Then, maybe, you’ll be able to fully appreciate your time with O.C. in the tobacco fields, and with Nannie in her lifelong fight to be an educational lightning rod.