The Chavis Chronicles

I'm Dr.

Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., and this is "The Chavis Chronicles."

What does it mean to be family, right?

And how many ways are there to family?

I am descended from a family that owned my family.

Major funding for "The Chavis Chronicles" is provided by the following.

At Wells Fargo, we continue to look for ways to empower our customers.

We seek broad impact in our communities, and we're proud of the role we play for our customers and the US economy.

As a company, we are focused on supporting our customers and communities through housing access, small-business growth, financial health, and other community needs.

Together, we want to make a tangible difference in people's lives.

Wells Fargo -- the bank of doing.

American Petroleum Institute -- our members are committed to accelerating safety, environmental, and sustainability progress throughout the natural gas and oil industry.

Learn more -- api.org/apienergyexcellence.

Reynolds American -- dedicated to building a better tomorrow for our employees and communities.

Reynolds stands against discrimination in all forms and is committed to building a more diverse and inclusive workplace.

At AARP, we are committed to ensuring your money, health, and happiness live as long as you do.

We're very honored to have one of our nation's award-winning journalists, distinguished author Lonnae O'Neal, to "The Chavis Chronicles."

Thank you, Dr.

Chavis.

Thank you so much for having me.

Listen, we could spend hours talking about your family.

You're from one of the oldest families in the United States.

Mm-hmm.

Tell us about the Bibb family.

And then we're gonna get to the book that you've written about Bibb County.

So, the Bibb family is a story in black and white, right?

A true story.

A true story.

Yes, sir.

Yes, sir.

The white Bibbs, you know, came over in the 17th century and had a wealth that was foundational to the United States.

It's Governor Bibb, you know, Senator Bibb, US Treasury Secretary Bibb.

There's US Coast Guard Cutter Bibb, right?

All of that.

I am descended from folks that Major Richard Bibb, a Revolutionary War general, enslaved and emancipated in a place called Logan County, Kentucky, western Kentucky.

And he emancipated 65 of his enslaved people in 1839, gave them land, money, and essentially a head start.

And so the book is... In Kentucky?

In Kentucky.

Now, they didn't stay there, and that's what the book does.

It traces the migration, along with the sweep of American history, what was happening to folks as they were moving around the country.

But Bibbs were also in early Virginia.

Yes.

Oh, absolutely.

The Piedmont area of Virginia and then moved over the Appalachian Trail.

Some, you know, remained in Virginia.

But they spread out across the nation.

They fought in every war and just made their fortunes, like I said, but it's a story -- it's a tale of two families, right, Black and white.

Yes.

You know, there's a 250th anniversary of the United States, and your family is over 200 years old.

That gives you a real grounding.

You know, there's a debate today about, "What is an American?

Who is an American?"

Right.

And, of course, with the browning of America, diversity is becoming part of the DNA of America.

But as you reflect back on your family, share with our viewers some of the things that gave impetus to later writing the book.

I mean, you raised just all the existential questions of the nation, right?

It is a question of America, not only is it, "What does it mean to be an American?"

What does it mean to be family, right?

And how many ways are there to family?

I am descended from a family that owned my family, right?

And even before I knew and explored this history, right, it's always back there.

It's always the -- the -- the -- the context for everything that's happening, everything that's going on.

And I've always known, as as a long-time reporter, hey, you got to go back in the vault.

You got to go back in the stacks.

You have to get underground, subterranean to be able to understand where we are now, right?

And so I would do that in my writing.

And this book is an outgrowth of a question that I initially didn't ask, right?

Because what is also true, for all my training and going back in history for my day job as a reporter, it hits a little different when you're talking about family, when the people with the price tag on the tax rolls are, you know, your great great great somebody, you know, your grandmothers and your aunts.

And then it's like all that rushes in, right?

And it rearranges you.

It rearranged me in all kinds of ways that I'm still coming to terms with it.

And that's what writing this book was.

It was an effort to come to terms with this history.

Our nation is still coming to terms with the evolution of what is now known, the United States of America.

It takes a lot of courage to do what you've done, not only to kind of open the world up to your own family, but what it took to do this research and then to document it and then to publish it.

What has been the feedback from some of your It turns out people were pent up.

They were trying to make sense of their own stories and their own lives and, you know, their own arrangements, right?

"How did I end up here?

What is going on?

"And what led to that?"

Right?

And that's what opening up, that's what telling the truth, that's what telling our stories does, right?

Because not only does it tell a deeper, personal story.

It tells a deeper story of America.

So, you can not only think about, "How do I fit in this family?"

How does my family fit in against the sweep of American history, right?

And so that was the first part.

And that was -- That went well.

You talk to people who would say they didn't have anything to talk about, and then hours later, you're still talking, right?

They open up.

Plenty of talking, plenty of tears, plenty of revelations, right?

The challenge for me was to hold that, though, right?

Because I had to let it sit with me.

I had to digest it.

I had to make meaning out of it before I could start writing.

And so it's a layered process.

So then you get to the writing, and these stories come out.

And, you know, by and large, people have been so receptive and so gratified to have not just this story -- because it's a million different stories, right?

It's stories of migration.

It's stories of families, stories of trauma.

It's stories of education.

It's stories of desegregating public schools.

It's stories of dying too soon, of getting shot and killed and brutalized and the next generation, you know, coming back and earning a PhD.

It's a lot of connected stories.

And so both in black and white, as they've come out, the feedback has been that, "Yeah, that's the way it was, and that was my part of it."

And you're weaving together not just this part or this part or this part, but it's a tapestry.

And the whole says something.

And it says something about our family, but it says something about America, even more importantly, right?

And it's a tool for indexing ourselves.

And so that has been very gratifying to people.

And they've been very generous.

Well, you know, first of all, you're blessed to be a great writer.

Yeah.

Thank you.

There are a lot of stories out there, but the reason why a lot of the stories of families are not well known -- because they're not written about.

And everything you did at the Washington Post or ESPN and other ventures you wrote, you now employ that to tell your own family story.

So it's interesting that you've been a storyteller reporter for a while, but now you're telling your own intimate family or family stories.

Yeah.

That's profound.

You know, maybe that's one of the things.

It's a lot of things.

And I'm not sure that all of them are -- you know, can be talked about on a family program because I swear there were so many times that you almost feel like you wish you could turn away.

If I could have, I would have Because even going into the story, it was heavy.

My grandmother was Susie Bibb, a woman named Susie Bibb.

I write in the book she could have passed for white until she opened her mouth, and then folks got really, really clear, right?

And she was born and raised in Southern Illinois, grew up in a place called Centralia, Illinois, which was a railroad town.

It is where her people, her grandfather, migrated after the Civil War after coming from Logan County, Kentucky, right?

And... And so there have always been these stories in our family.

She believed in nothing so much as she believed in education.

She was -- And she and my grandfather ran a restaurant/tavern that was regionally famous.

People came from miles around.

They called my father Chef.

These were hard-working folks, built a business.

Black Centralia was made up of all these businesses and community and churches.

And as I said, they desegregated the public schools back at the turn of the 19th -- of the 20th century, right?

And so kids went to school together in black and white, but Centralia was surrounded by all these sundown towns, right?

And there were racial tensions.

There weren't the signs, but we obeyed them anyway.

For our audience, explain.

What is a sundown town?

"You better be gone by 5:00" is a sundown town.

So they don't allow you -- No Negroes after dark.

Okay.

The sun should not find you in this town, right?

And so "Bibb Country" ends up being a story from within and without, right?

And so there are all the pressures, all the downward pressures on the community as they are trying to make their way in the world, right?

And some of the -- some of the abuse happens because we're in too close, without enough elbow room.

And of course we've had these traumas handed down.

And so one of the places I begin the book is where this history begins, in 2019, when I first saw, at the Bibb House plantation, the Bibb townhouse plantation in Russellville, Kentucky, an advertisement for two likely Negro boys about 10 years old, right?

[ Breathes deeply ] And so you see these things in history.

But now, because your grandmother was Susie Bibb and you're in the Bibb House plantation, those two likely Negro boys were -- were blood of your blood, right?

And so it's not an abstraction anymore, right?

And so every time I see the shackles or I'm reading the advertisements or the tax notices or the sales notices or the valuations right next to the horse valuations and all of that, that is -- that is hitting me.

And that is something that I am internalizing, along with the people who are talking to me, right?

We're all on this journey.

We had not chosen to take it, just like we were not -- we had not chosen to be stolen.

But this reunion came up in 2019.

I decided to go.

I decided to go under my own agency.

And really, from then until now, I was sifting through the history and wanted to turn away from it.

But I say, as much as anything, what I wrote was a ghost story.

How would you describe that family reunion that you went to?

Oh.

[ Chuckles ] It was tense.

Was it polarizing?

It wasn't polarizing so much as it was new for all of us in black and white.

And so we were having two different conversations.

First of all, the Southern Gothic of it all, the spectral feel, right?

At one point, the skies opened up, and it's raining sideways, which forced us all indoors.

So we're talking to white folks, and this self-selects.

Only certain white folks are going to be interested in a descendant between -- in a reunion between the descendants of the enslavers and the descendants of the enslaved, which is how this 2019 Bibb reunion was billed.

And so we're in the house and, you know, they're coming up asking perfectly reasonable questions about, "Where are you from?

Your family?

What do you do?"

You know?

"When did you get here?

Oh, by the way, did you know such-and-such -- that restaurant has a great happy hour.

We could go there."

They're having that conversation.

We're sitting up there like, "Uh, uh," seeing ghosts, you know, imagining chains around our neck, looking at advertisements for 10-year-old boys for sale, right?

So we're having a completely different conversation and experience of the house, right?

And I wrote in the book... you know, I wanted to escape.

I wanted to flee.

It was very, very challenging because I walk through the world as an educated woman and a professional who imagined that I was taking life on my own terms, right?

Mm-hmm.

Well, you go into a plantation house, and the script is flipped, right?

And I don't even actually have the script for that, along with the rest of us.

And so when I got home -- I came back, I wrote a story about that first reunion, and when I got home, I thought I was leaving that history behind.

But thing after thing after thing happened.

I called them breadcrumbs, but they were ghost stories, right?

These -- I don't believe in coincidences, but you're watching a network zero in on the Equal Justice Initiative's wall of names, where the names of the enslaved -- that the enslaved took, and they zero in on "Bibb."

You get a book.

You know, you order Imani Perry's book, right, you know, "South to America."

You just open it up to a random page.

It's the narrative of Henry Bibb.

You can't tell me there's not some haunts and haints and ghosts at work, compelling me to tell this story.

Well, sometimes it takes a long time, but truth always comes out.

Mm.

When I listen to it, there seems to be a therapeutic quality of writing your book, "The Bibb Country."

People have said that.

I don't know if it's... It might be therapeutic.

It might be cathartic.

What it was, was I simply grew into the story, Dr.

Chavis, right?

There was a point I wasn't telling this story because I couldn't Mm-hmm.

And so you have to be ready.

You start digging up in the DNA, going back in the US census, slave schedules, going back in tax records, reading wills.

You have to be ready for what you're going to find, right?

And once it catches a hold of you, it doesn't let go.

Um... It just made me get bigger.

And so in that way, that part was therapeutic, right?

I didn't shrink away from the hard stories and the hard conversations with family.

I'll tell you this.

There was a white family that was very instrumental to that first reunion and continuing.

And they did a documentary, "Invented Before You Were Born."

There were nothing but kind and reaching out and wanting to have these conversations, and I kept them at arm's length for years, right?

And why did I do that?

Because if I had allowed myself to get close to them, then I would have tried to take care of them.

I would have pulled my punches.

I would have not written all the things I needed to write for -- out of a desire to not hurt their feelings.

And what I came to is, if white folks are taking care of themselves and we're taking care of white folks, who's speaking for the descendants of the enslaved, right?

Right.

And so that was my mission.

That was my -- my guiding star.

That was my challenge from Susie Bibb and from Mama Minnie and Mama Pocahontas and Mama Rachel and Mama Keziah Bibb.

In the records of the enslavers, they called her "Old Keziah," right?

But, Dr.

Chavis, there was a moment where I'm looking at this tax schedule and I'm reading "Old Keziah" and I was thinking to myself, "Don't nobody Black call their elderly relatives 'old.'"

Right.

Right?

And when I changed it to what I called my grandmother, which was "Mama Susie," when I changed her to "Mama Keziah," for the first time since I had ever heard tell of white Bibbs, I had not lost an ancestor to slavery.

I gained a big mama, a woman who -- who I could name, who imagined me and had to call me free with every step she took along the Appalachian trails.

It changed the history for it, and I found my entry point.

This was my history and something that I could take pride in.

Your book, I believe, is making a contribution to the understanding of the oneness of our humanity.

That sounds like a great term, but as you expose in your book, the journey to affirm one's humanity has been very tragic, very traumatic, and still begging from some of them slave graves for the truth to be told.

How about that?

How about that?

Absolutely, and that is it, Dr.

Chavis, right?

We can get here, but now, finally, will we decide to get here in truth?

'Cause seemed like we tried everything else, and that didn't work right.

So I actually have to be able to show up in my full dimensions, with my full truth, and then, you know, let you do -- let us do what we need to with that, which is to speak it, which is to mourn it, which is to celebrate it or grieve it or however it falls, right, but to have it all out there.

And then folks -- Then we can build together, right?

But we can't build together if you need me to lie.

And that I cannot do.

The ghosts that were talking to me, keeping me up, wagging their fingers, shaking their chains, playing their records till I just didn't want to hear them anymore, right?

They wouldn't allow me to do anything less, right?

I think there was a reason I was given this charge, along with the tools I had learned to do the research and render this story that needed to be told and needed to be told in the fullness of it -- because it's the fullness of the nation.

You are answering questions the way you write.

It's straightforward.

It's clear.

People almost now speak in codes.

How about that?

You know?

And you're trying to decipher, "What is the truth in this code?"

Isn't that an exhortation from the church -- "make it plain," right?

Thank you for saying that, Dr.

Chavis.

I have to say, honestly, I don't know what I think till I write it, right?

Writing is a process of thinking things through, and that's why it took me years for this.

I didn't know where I was going when I started this book, but I had a starting place.

And that's so much more than so many of us get, right?

And my timeline was so much earlier than I had been told in history class or even came to imagine, right?

Well, you got to -- Like, with all of this stuff, you got to get subterranean.

You got to get under the dirt to understand who does the labor, intellectual and physical, and who gets the credit, and most certainly the cultural and reputational shine and the economic rewards.

From all of what you've experienced, from all of what you've learned about your family, what gives you the greatest hope today?

I am hopeful because the Bibb family, in black and white, it took some doing.

But we were convened, and we answered that call.

And it was not by any means comfortable, right?

Some of us raged because we had that in us, but we kept coming back and we kept talking.

I am hopeful that if we can get to a place of actual truth -- right?

And it may take a while.

But if you let us tell our truth, then we can build together.

I am hopeful that there's enough people out there that want that version of America.

Lonnae O'Neal, thank you so much... Thank you.

...for joining "The Chavis Chronicles."

Dr.

Chavis.

Thank you for having me.

For more information about "The Chavis Chronicles" and our guests, visit our website at TheChavisChronicles.com.

Also, follow us on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

Major funding for "The Chavis Chronicles" is provided by the following.

At Wells Fargo, we continue to look for ways to empower our customers.

We seek broad impact in our communities, and we're proud of the role we play for our customers and the U.S.

economy.

As a company, we are focused on supporting our customers and communities through housing access, small-business growth, financial health, and other community needs.

Together, we want to make a tangible difference in people's lives.

Wells Fargo -- the bank of doing.

American Petroleum Institute -- our members are committed to accelerating safety, environmental, and sustainability progress throughout the natural gas and oil industry.

Learn more -- api.org/apienergyexcellence.

Reynolds American -- dedicated to building a better tomorrow for our employees and communities.

Reynolds stands against discrimination in all forms and is committed to building a more diverse and inclusive workplace.

At AARP, we are committed health, and happiness live as long as you do.