Category: “N” word

Corrections to Grandma’s Nanny Story and Tales of Slavery in the Womack Lineage

    
In my last post, I shared a brief memory of my grandmother and the woman she always referred to as her “nanny.” I was inspired to write it after reading a troubling post on Facebook where someone recounted a family using the N-word for their household caregiver. It shook me, because in my very large family, I have absolutely no memory of anyone ever using that word. My grandmother never used it. She spoke of her nanny with fondness and respect, and that was the standard of decency she passed down to us.

However, as a professional archivist, I know that oral family histories are beautiful but imperfect things. They have a way of compressing time, blending generations together until the timelines blur.

Shortly after publishing that post, I received a note from my dad’s cousin, Carolyn. She is the oldest living relative of that generation, and she is wonderful at keeping our history straight. Carolyn gently pointed out a major flaw in my timeline: because slavery was abolished in 1865, and my grandmother was born well after that, she could not have had an enslaved nanny.

Carolyn was entirely right about the timeline. The woman my grandmother remembered so fondly from her childhood in Kentucky was undoubtedly a hired domestic servant or worker.

But Carolyn’s correction got my archivist wheels turning. While the nanny of my grandmother’s youth was free, I knew the stories I grew up hearing about our ancestorstoal tales of vast tobacco crops and prized racehorses in Greenup County, Kentucky. My historical intuition told me that an operation of that scale required a massive amount of manual labor. I decided to dig into the archival records to see exactly what kind of world my grandmother’s people came from.

What I found was a heavy, complex history.

The Womack line in Kentucky was established by my great-great-great-grandfather, James Tignal Womack, who moved his family and his wealth from Prince Edward County, Virginia, to the Little Sandy River around 1812. When he passed away in 1827, his will divided twenty-three enslaved individuals among his heirs.

His son, Archer Tignal Womack, settled in Oldtown, Greenup County. The federal slave schedules show that he held eleven enslaved people in 1850 and seven in 1860. In the hilly terrain of eastern Kentucky, owning that many people made him a substantial slaveholder. This labor force directly matched the stories of large-scale tobacco farming and horse breeding.

Because Greenup County sat right on the Ohio border, it was a hotbed for the Underground Railroad. Local newspapers from January 1859 even document a “panic among the slaveholders” after two young enslaved men successfully escaped from Archer Womack’s farm, prompting him to sell others further south for security.

My great-great-grandfather, William Archer Womack, grew up directly inside this environment. When the Civil War broke out, he held intense Southern secessionist sympathies. He was eventually arrested by Union forces, treated as a prisoner of war, and sent north to Camp Chase, a notorious military prison in Columbus, Ohio, before returning home to Oldtown as a businessman after the war.

Discovering this census and military data didn’t change the timeline Carolyn corrected, but it gave the story a much deeper meaning.

My grandmother was raised by people who had actively participated in, profited from, and fought to defend the slaveholding South. Yet, somewhere along the way, she made a choice. She broke the cycle of prejudice. She refused to carry the dehumanizing language of that era into the ears of her children and grandchildren.

“From dust we came, and to dust we will go”, she oft-repeated. and perhaps it is in recognizing our shared dust that my grandmother found her grace. The woman she loved as a child may have been a hired servant rather than an enslaved nanny, but the true miracle of the story is that my grandmother chose to look backward at her family’s history, and then chose to walk forward with love.

I will be bringing a great deal more history in subsequent posts. Stay tuned if you dare.

In bringing this historical documentation to light, I have gratefully utilized AI as a digital tool and editorial assistant to help research, structure, and refine the narrative. However, the intellectual framework, the emotional weight, and the driving motivation behind this work are entirely my own. This remains, above all, a direct reflection of my own voice and my deeply personal desire to ensure this history is remembered.

Grandma’s Nanny and her Twelve Children

I listened to a story on Facebook, I think it was, that was much like this story but also was different. And I’ll tell you why. But it reminded me that I should probably write this down because I’ve already forgotten so much of it.

My grandmother told me this story countless times. I never tired of hearing it because it was so strange and so different from anything that I knew as a white girl, living in the Pacific Northwest. I would picture, in my child’s mind, their nanny, washing clothes outdoors in a wash tub, on a washboard. I don’t even know if that’s an accurate picture.

I believe it was her great-grand parents who  owned slaves in Kentucky on a plantation they built themselves. According to Grandma, Grandpa was infamous for “being as kind to his slaves as he was to his race horses”. They grew sugar and tobacco. And I don’t know what else.

There were nine kids in Grandma’s family, but their house slave had twelve children. Grandma grew up with this house slave. She knew her house slave’s, name, and all twelve of her children’s names. This is where the story I read on Facebook differs from my own. They called their nanny the “N” word but not thinking they were saying anything wrong. (Translate: racist).

Grandma and her siblings would dance around their nanny singing, “tell us the name of your children, “nanny”, but using her real name. I guess it was because her children’s names sounded strange to them.

The nanny would go along with grandma and her brothers and sisters until she tired of it. She then shood them away, saying that she would “soap them all up with a bar of soap and swallow them whole”.  Then, they would all run away, screaming as though their nanny had turned into a monster.

Grandma told this story to me over and over again. Among other stories, never, I don’t think, realizing the racism of having only black people working for them. Grandma thought of this nanny as one of the family.

But after her work was done, scrubbing their clothes, cooking, cleaning their house, watching after all the children, she went home to her own home, which was more than likely a “house” on the plantation grounds and do all the same things for her children.

I don’t ever remember her talking about any of the other slaves. Her grandfather’s father had come to Kentucky from England. He moved to Kentucky with a black man, either slave or friend, I do not know. They first built a small cabin. Then grandfather or both   built a home and then built the plantation. This black man had a name. And it’s written down in history, but right now, I don’t remember it. Grandpa became a wealthy man on the backs of his slaves.

Still, our family is the wealthiest family in that countyl. I must say that wealthy is a relative term in this day and age. When grandma’s father and mother decided they wanted to move west to Rainier. Oregon, Grandma would tell the story of leaving their nanny and all nine children gathered around her, crying and tearing at her apron and trying to hold on to her. Say what you may, they believed they loved her. And they believed that she loved them.

When Grandma would tell me this story, tears would always come to her eyes. She never ever used the “N” word nor did any of her brothers and sisters speak of their nanny in any negative way. But the story of dancing around her and pulling at her apron strings and chanting “tell us the name of all your children” she didn’t see as racist.

At one time, I wrote this story down. But I can’t find that story any more, and my memory does not serve me as it should. I forgot the nanny’s name long time ago. The only one of the children’s names that I can remember is, Ethelial”… her oldest boy and the name that she would tell them first.

This is by no means the story of my grandma and her ancestors. It’s just a thought I had when I heard the story of this other person who used the “N’ word to talk about their black nanny, and I remembered grandma never doing that ever. I’m not saying that she was any less racist. I’m just saying they didn’t use the “N” word.

I still have a living relative, my dad’s cousin, who reads my blog. She has a wonderful memory for these things. And she might read this blog post and make corrections. I welcome them.