Mary catered to white workers who were employees of the pipe manufacturer located near the Tennessee River in Chattanooga. She was tough like that, an attribute she inherited from her grandmother, Mary Coleman, who opened a food stand in her front yard after her Irish husband abandoned her. I haven’t been able to obtain the inquest report, but in court my mother called the murderer of my grandfather a liar. As he was lying near death, he told her he’d overheard the doctor say, “Let that n-r die.” Years later, when I received a copy of the death certificate, his cause of death was listed as “shock,” with the sentence, “stabbed by some man.”įour years after my grandfather’s death, I was born in the hallway of the same hospital.īook jacket for 'Black Girl from Tannery Flats,' by Thema V. My mother was 17 when she visited my grandfather in the hospital his clothes were soaked with blood. It’s bad enough that the capitalist system has opposed Blacks acquiring assets, but the murder of Black men compounds the loss, depriving their survivors of assets these victims might have accrued. About a dozen rabbits, a source of protein, are strung up. My only photo is of him posing in front of a car. My grandfather, a laborer, supplemented the family’s food supply by hunting. There was an inquest, and the white man went free.

One version of the murder was that my grandfather knocked on the wrong door. My grandfather Mack Hopkins was murdered by a white man who said my grandfather had threatened him with a knife. Like many Black southern families, there exist cold cases.

The first phase of my family’s Tennessee history was marked by abandonment, murder, mental illness and alcoholism. Mary moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where my family lived from the late 1800s to 1941 during the first phase of their inhabiting the state a younger generation returned to Tennessee in the early 1990s. She must have been a resistor because her daughter, Mary Coleman, would weep when recounting the lashes Lucy received during her involuntary entrapment. My family’s history in North America begins in North Carolina, where an ancestor, Lucy Hardiman, was enslaved.

My ishmael book