The Black family has been a source of scholarly debate for decades, particularly after the 1965 publication of the Moynihan Report, a federal document that rooted the contemporary problems of Black Americans in slavery’s destruction of the Black family. In part to disprove this thesis, much of the scholarship on Black families since the 1970s has focused on the formation and composition of family during slavery, specifically whether enslaved individuals understood themselves as part of a community or kinship network rather than nuclear families. But beyond the actual makeup of the family was the imagined composition, including how individuals imagined their family’s past. Enslaved Americans looked not only to the future but also to the past as they struggled for freedom. And once that freedom came, Black Americans would seek to rebuild their families in the present in part by rebuilding their families’ histories. Writing a family’s history (including names and vital dates) was a common practice in nineteenth-century America, but was especially important for formerly enslaved peoples. Long denied the right to keep one’s family intact, newly freed peoples regarded genealogical records as documentation of their great strength in overcoming extreme obstacles.
Douglass’s assertion, then, was not completely accurate. Even with widespread familial disruption, illiteracy, and limited time, resources, and documentary evidence, enslaved Americans did have family histories. But they wanted more than to just know the histories; they wanted to showcase them for all to see. So enslaved individuals, and later their descendants, created material representations of those histories, their own kind of family trees. These might not have taken the shape of actual trees, like the ones so many of us create in grade school. In one remarkable case, though, a formerly enslaved man made his own kind of family tree out of wood. As the man’s daughter, Cornelia Winfield, described in 1937, “All the planks eny of our family was laid out on, my father kep’. When he came to Augusta he brought all these planks and made this here wardrobe.”
Cornelia’s father, who had supervised the plantation workshop during slavery, managed to store pieces of wood that his family members were “laid out on.” This phrase could have two meanings: either they were beaten with these planks or lay upon them in death. Either way, this wood had been seeped in his family’s blood, tears, and bodily fluids extracted through the violence and death that accompanied slavery. It was with this wood, containing literal fragments of multiple generations, that Cornelia’s father made a wardrobe.