May 19, 2023
Transcript
[RADIOLAB INTRO]
LULU MILLER: Hello, I'm Louisa Miller, though I go by the name Lulu.
LATIF NASSER: And I'm Latif Shiraz Abdul Fazal Nasser Bhaloo. And here at ...
LULU: Is that ...?
LATIF: That's my full name.
LULU: Wait, is that true?
LATIF: That is my full name.
LULU: It is stately and ringy and wonderful!
LATIF: Yeah, it's my name, my dad's name, his dad's name, his dad's name, his dad's—it's basically it's all the dad's names.
LULU: Okay. And anyway, here at Radiolab, we are talking about this because we kind of are a little obsessed with names it turns out.
LATIF: Yeah, it's—it just keeps coming up..
LULU: I mean, in addition to the oh, six-part series that you did, Latif, about sharing a name with a Guantanamo detainee, we have done stories about names that computers go haywire.
LATIF: Names that seem to influence a certain life path.
LULU: Like a study that shows that if you're named Dennis, you're more likely to become a dentist.
LATIF: But today, we have a very different kind of name story.
LULU: Mm-hmm.
LATIF: Because our editor Alex Neason recently got some kind of confusing news about her name.
ALEX: Whoo! You see these wasps? [laughs] Be careful.
LATIF: And this news sent Alex on a kind of odyssey ...
ALEX: Ooh, stepping in mud. Ooh, it is squishy.
LATIF: ... down to New Orleans, where she sloshed and slogged ...
ALEX: All right!
LATIF: ... through swampy cemeteries ...
ALEX: Some of these headstones you can't even make them out because they're just so old and weathered.
LATIF: ... sweaty basement archives ...
ALEX: Yeah? Nothing?
LATIF: ... trying to pin down where her name came from.
LULU: And not only did Alex take that search further than anyone thought possible, she ended up confronting a much deeper question: is your name just an arbitrary string of letters pinned to you at birth? Or is it the thing that can help you see yourself—and how to move forward in life—most clearly?
ALEX: Hello, hello? Can you hear me?
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: Why are you so blurry?
ALEX: I don't know. The internet.
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: Okay.
LATIF: And we're gonna start off ...
ALEX: I'm just gonna have you introduce yourself.
LATIF: ... with the person who gave Alex her name.
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: Clarence Neason, Jr. I'm an army veteran. I'm a retired US army colonel.
ALEX: And your relationship to me?
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: You're my daughter. My oldest daughter.
ALEX: So my name was this big character in my life as a kid.
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: And one of the things I used to tell you and your sister, "Hey, that's my name. That's not your name. It's on lease."
ALEX: The thing you say, like, basically once a day. [laughs]
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: Yeah, yeah. Right. So I mean, because it is important, right?
ALEX: I grew up in a military family. My dad was in the army.
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: You know, 28 years of my life in the army.
ALEX: We moved around a lot. Didn't have, like, a traditional hometown. And I think I had a lot of anxieties as a kid about, like, not having roots.
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: And part of that life of being in the military where everything is your last name. Your last name or your last four, right?
ALEX: Mm-hmm.
ALEX: So in the military, your last name is sort of you.
LATIF: Hmm.
ALEX: People are addressed by their last name. Living on base, your name goes on the outside of your house. On ours it always said "Team Neason." I saw it every day on my dad's uniform when he would get up and go to work.
LATIF: Right.
ALEX: Your identity comes completely absorbed into your last name.
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: I make sure that my name has value to me, and then as you and your sister were growing up, transfer that to you so that you can understand that hey look, take care of this name. This is what I got. This is—this is something that I own as my identity.
ALEX: And I just totally internalized that sense of connection to my name. And, you know, I have a name plate ring. It says "Neason." I never take this thing off. Certain friends, I'm not known as Alex, I'm just known as Neason. It's just a deep part of how I think about myself in the world. And then about a year and a half ago, all of that got blown up. In 2021, my grandfather, my dad's dad, Clarence Neason Sr., he passed away.
LATIF: Aww.
ALEX: And he lived in New Orleans, which is where my dad and his whole family are from. And this was, you know, peak COVID, so I wasn't able to go to the funeral, but my parents went. And they brought me back a program from the funeral that has, like, the obituary and everything. It's got my grandpa's name and his birthday. And it lists who his parents were and what their names were. And so it says—I'm just gonna read it to you: "Our beloved Reverend Dr. Clarence Neason Sr., Sanko, Daddy, Paw Paw, Uncle, Rev, Doc—" so they're nicknames— "entered this world as a gift to the late Edna Jackson and Wilson Howard."
LULU: Howard?
ALEX: Yeah, not Neason. Howard.
LATIF: What?
ALEX: And I was just like ...
LATIF: "Howard?"
ALEX: ... "Howard? Who's Howard? What is a Howard?"
LULU: [laughs]
LATIF: Huh.
ALEX: And also, where did Neason, this name that was such a big part of how I thought about myself, where did that even come from?
KAREN NEASON DYKES: Let me—oop!
CHERYL ANN NEASON-ISIDORE: Hello?
ALEX: Hey.
KAREN NEASON DYKES: Hello, can you hear me?
CHERYL ANN NEASON-ISIDORE: You can hear me?
ALEX: Yeah.
ALEX: So I called up some of my aunts: Karen, Cheryl, and also my dad ...
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: Right.
ALEX: ... and started asking questions.
ALEX: Did you ever learn anything about who your paternal grandfather was?
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: I mean, that's one of the ...
ALEX: So they all knew that Edna Jackson was their dad's mom and Wilson Howard was their dad's dad.
CHERYL ANN NEASON-ISIDORE: Oh, yes. I mean, we saw him whenever he was in town.
ALEX: And my Aunt Cheryl, she had met him. But my Aunt Karen and my dad ...
KAREN NEASON DYKES: Um ...
ALEX: ... they didn't really remember him at all.
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: It's a very sparse memory. I, you know—yeah.
CHERYL ANN NEASON-ISIDORE: I don't know. 'Cause like I say, we didn't spend much time with my father's people.
ALEX: Okay. And did you ever ...
ALEX: And when I asked do you know why we're called Neason ...
KAREN NEASON DYKES: Um ...
CHERYL ANN NEASON-ISIDORE: Um ...
KAREN NEASON DYKES: ... no.
ALEX: ... nobody knew.
KAREN NEASON DYKES: Mm-mm. Mm-mm.
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: I have no idea.
LULU: Really? Nothing?
ALEX: My Aunt Cheryl told me at one point she actually asked her grandmother's sister the same question.
CHERYL ANN NEASON-ISIDORE: If Wilson Howard is my dad's dad, why isn't our name Howard and not Neason? And she said that was adult business.
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: There's sort of like kids' business and then there's adult business, right? You know? We never really talked about it.
CHERYL ANN NEASON-ISIDORE: And I don't think my dad really knew either because every time you talked to him about it, he was like, "Well, it's a situation." And we were like, "What's the situation? "Well, you don't need to know that, but you are a Neason." Like, okay.
ALEX: So nobody knew much about Wilson Howard, and they had no idea where the name Neason came from. And the weird thing was while my dad and his sisters all feel very much like Neasons, are proud of the name, when it comes to where it actually came from ...
CHERYL ANN NEASON-ISIDORE: No.
KAREN NEASON DYKES: I haven't known this far in life. So ...
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: It's not gonna necessarily change anything, you know?
ALEX: ... they just didn't seem to care.
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: I just—I just never had a desire or an intense interest in it.
LATIF: Really? Why not?
ALEX: I don't know. Maybe it was just, like, Neason, like, you know, this is a variation of an Irish name. Like, that doesn't make sense in my context.
LATIF: [laughs]
LULU: [laughs]
ALEX: So—and so I always knew that, like, for Black families, the whole idea of tracing your history through your name? It just doesn't take that long before you get to the generation where whatever name it is that your people were going by was imposed on them.
LATIF: Hmm.
LULU: Hmm.
ALEX: So it's easy to—to look back and see all that mess and just decide not to step into it.
LULU: Right.
LATIF: Huh.
ALEX: But for me I was like, this is my name. I write it down on everything. I wear it on my ring. It's how I think about myself, and I do care about where that name came from, about who it came from, about all of the people who have carried this name through time all the way up to me. So ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Like, I'm totally in my closet.
ALEX: Hi! [laughs]
ALEX: ... I found a genealogist to help me out. Her name is Nicka Sewell-Smith. And the first thing she told me ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: One of the sort of hallmarks of genealogy is that you have to literally, like, go down a rabbit hole.
ALEX: This is not gonna be easy.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Genealogy keeps you in a perpetual state of being Alice.
ALEX: [laughs]
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: And particularly when you're focusing on African-American people, people who descended from the formerly enslaved.
ALEX: Because government documents or records of those family histories, sometimes they're messy, often incomplete, and a lot of times they were never even made at all.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: The archive and the historical record has never really truly been kind to us.
ALEX: But I was just like, "Look, let me tell you what I do know."
ALEX: And then this is my grandfather, Clarence Neason, Sr.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Mm-hmm.
ALEX: October 13. I know that's the day he was born.
ALEX: And I gave her the whole rundown.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: So, like, what's your great-grandfather's name supposed to be?
ALEX: Wilson Howard.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: But the Neason—but the Neason comes from ...
ALEX: Dunno.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Okay.
ALEX: I've never—like, there's no first name. Like, no—like, Neason is basically a ghost.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Okay. So ...
ALEX: And right off the bat, Nicka was like, "Look, you just gotta start by figuring out who were all the people that were around back then?"
KAREN NEASON DYKES: My mother, she was born in the city. New Orleans.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Parents, aunts, uncles.
KAREN NEASON DYKES: And my father was born in St. Bernard Parish.
ALEX: Get more information. Get all the little pieces.
CHERYL ANN NEASON-ISIDORE: So she got pregnant on her honeymoon.
ALEX: Mm-hmm.
KAREN NEASON DYKES: I lived with my grandparents.
ALEX: And pretty quickly, the people, the relationships, the names ...
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: Everyone knew you by your mother's name. You know, my mother's name was—was Marjorie.
ALEX: ... it all starts to get pretty confusing.
CHERYL ANN NEASON-ISIDORE: Cheryl used to say that they had this lady that's our grandmother.
ALEX: And nobody really knew that much about that side of the family.
CHERYL ANN NEASON-ISIDORE: But I don't think the lady really was. [laughs]
ALEX: Okay. Um, try to keep, like, paper and stuff away from your phone so it doesn't pick it up on the mic.
CHERYL ANN NEASON-ISIDORE: [whispers] Oh, okay. [laughs]
ALEX: So I went back to Nicka and I was like, "Okay, the family tree, it has some holes."
ALEX: Less of a tree, more of a branch. [laughs]
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: That's okay. We've got—hey ...
ALEX: But she was like, "Look, let's just start looking for documents."
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: The census, birth, marriage and death certificates.
ALEX: Mm-hmm.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Anything where a father's name could be captured.
ALEX: And so over the next seven months, Nicka and I started checking in every week.
ALEX: The week felt really long.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: It did?
ALEX: We'd look over documents together.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: So go—go up to the top.
ALEX: Uh-huh.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: This document spans across two different pages.
ALEX: And some days there wasn't that much to report.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Yeah, we sound like little old ladies. That's what happens to old people. All they do is call each other and talk about their illness.
ALEX: [laughs] Talk about what the doctor said this week..
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: What the doctor said. "You know, he told me I had to get rid of my bunions."
ALEX: And then one day ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Um, so ...
ALEX: ... Nicka's looking over this old newspaper clipping, something about the draft and my grandpa being sent for a medical exam.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Okay, so ...
ALEX: And she zooms in on this and points to a little tiny "JR" right next to my grandfather's name.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: It looks like your grandfather was a "Junior."
ALEX: But my dad is Clarence Jr.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Based on what I'm seeing, it looks like your dad should be the third.
ALEX: That's very strange.
ALEX: So all of a sudden, it looked like there could be not just a person named Neason around, but a Clarence Neason. Clarence Neason Sr. Sr.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Correct.
ALEX: So, you know, we started looking for a guy by that name around 1937, which is when Edna gave birth to my grandfather. And pretty quick ...
ALEX: I have never seen this before.
ALEX: ... a possible candidate popped up.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: So for this, these are convict and conduct registers for the State of Texas.
ALEX: A form that was filled in by hand, dated 1942.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: They're noting that this man is 25 years of age, 5'6" and a half, 139 pounds. They note him as being Black. Of course at the time, he's a Baptist who wears a size nine shoe. [laughs] Like, okay. And robbery, that's what they claimed was robbery. Let's see, date of birth, 1917. Birthplace in Louisiana. He's a resident of New Orleans.
ALEX: Okay.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Here's another Clarence! He's old enough to be your great-grandfather, out here robbing folks—allegedly.
ALEX: For the record, he pled not guilty, but he was convicted and he did do jail time.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: The plot is thickening.
ALEX: Okay. It is.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Who is this Clarence Neason?
ALEX: But, you know, now we had a guy and he had the right name. He was in the right place at the right time. And maybe he could possibly be my actual great grandfather, or for some other reason, it's just the guy whose name my grandfather got.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: So I would research him, and have him in his own kind of like tree so you have all his details together.
ALEX: That meant more research, more phone calls. I now had two possible family trees.
ALEX: Hil-stinkin-larious.
ALEX: And then Nicka finds a key detail in the El Paso Times.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: This is Thursday, August 27, 1942.
ALEX: Tucked into another article about this Clarence Neason's robbery.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: It says, "Robbery charged. New Orleans Negro."
ALEX: Like a specific brand of Negro? The New Orleans Negro.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: [laughs]
ALEX: Like I'm watching a nature documentary.
ALEX: The article mentions that a few years earlier, this Clarence had married an Octavia Jackson in New Orleans in 1938.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: So we've got a marriage record, but let's—because Family Search is who has ...
ALEX: So we go looking for the marriage license.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: See, this is pulling up a million and one things. Okay, see? Here we go. Octavia. This is the right person. Ooh! She was 17. Look at him robbing the cradle.
ALEX: How old was he?
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: He was 21.
ALEX: Hmm.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Whoa! Oh, oh, oh!
ALEX: Oh no. Oh no! Wilson Howard?
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: What? What?
ALEX: On the marriage certificate, listed as one of the witnesses is Wilson Howard.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Well, okay. Wait a minute.
LULU: Wait. The other great grandpa contender?
ALEX: Yeah.
LATIF: Whoa!
ALEX: He would've been 20 years old at the time.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: No—what? Okay, wait a minute, wait a minute.
ALEX: Wilson Howard witnesses. [gasps] Oh, no. They were friends? Oh, no. Oh my freaking gosh. Okay.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Were they—were they friends?
ALEX: We can't know for sure if they were friends or not, but on November 19, 1938, it was a Saturday, these two men stood in the same room in New Orleans, maybe it was a church, maybe it was at City Hall. Probably they were both dressed to the nines. And Wilson Howard watched Clarence Neason get married. And this would have been just a year after my grandfather was born.
ALEX: Like, I cannot—Grandma Edna? Like, girl!
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Yikes! What is going on? I'm kind of paralyzed because I don't even know. Was it like a—was it like a Wilson and Edna creeping on the low situation?
ALEX: Oh my goodness.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Or ...
ALEX: It could be the other way around, right?
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: I don't know!
LULU: Okay, so what—like, what are you thinking, Alex? Like, what's what?
ALEX: So at this point, there's a bunch of stuff going on in my head. I wanted to know more about this Clarence Neason Sr. Sr. guy, who is maybe the reason my name is my name, but I also was like, what's going on with Wilson Howard and Edna Jackson and Clarence Neason Sr. Sr., and is there a way for me to figure out who actually is my great grandfather?
ALEX: Whoo! You see these wasps? Be careful! [laughs]
ALEX: And at that point I decided we gotta go to the place where it all happened.
ALEX: Do you think there are snakes in here?
ALEX: And so a few months later, Nicka and I, plus ...
ANNIE MCEWEN: Whoa, it is warm!
ALEX: ... producer Annie McEwen, found ourselves in Louisiana.
ALEX: All right.
ALEX: Because first of all, there's only so much you can do online. A lot of things have not been digitized, and we were gonna have to go into archives and dig them up.
ALEX: Snakes?
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: I saw a few of them down there.
ALEX: And second of all, I just had this feeling that I wasn't going to truly understand these three people, that I wouldn't really get it until I went to the place where they had lived their lives.
ALEX: The sign says "Walk-In Hours."
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: This looks like a decently old cemetery.
ALEX: First stop, we knew that Clarence Sr. Sr. was buried in Texas, so we weren't able to visit him, but we thought it only right, while we were in the neighborhood ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Oh, Wilson, Wilson. Where art thou?
ALEX: ... to visit the resting place of the other man who might be my great grandpa, Wilson Howard.
ALEX: Where are you Wilson?
ALEX: In a cemetery just southeast of New Orleans.
ALEX: Kind of a squared field. It's next to a baseball diamond. It's pretty crowded. All of the crypts are above ground.
ALEX: And ...
ALEX: I am just walking kind of aisle by aisle.
ALEX: ... while we thought this was going to be a quick stop ...
ALEX: Ooh, stepping in mud!
ALEX: ... it was the first clue we had that things down here were going to be ...
ALEX: Ooh, it is squishy.
ALEX: ... way less straightforward than I thought.
ALEX: Ugh!
ALEX: Because even though this is where his obituary said he was buried ...
ALEX: Yeah, interment at Merrick Cemetery, August 10, 1988.
ALEX: ... and ...
ALEX: Here's a Frank Santiago.
ANNIE: Clayton.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Williams, Nelson.
ALEX: Next to Liza Santiago. Right.
ALEX: ... even though we combed through the entire graveyard ...
ALEX: [whispers] Where are you?
ALEX: ... we just couldn't find him.
ALEX: Hmm.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Yeah.
ALEX: In fact ...
ALEX: All these people are supposed to be buried here.
ALEX: ... there was supposed to be a whole bunch of Howards in that graveyard.
ALEX: And we can't find pretty much any of them. [sighs]
ALEX: So then we thought wait, could the obituary be wrong?
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Do y'all know where the Howards are?
ALEX: Then Nicka asks these guys who were there mowing the grass.
GROUNDSKEEPER #1: Wilson Howard.
GROUNDSKEEPER #2: I don't think they're in here, mama.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: They're not?
ALEX: And they tell her that guy's not buried here.
GROUNDSKEEPER #1: Yeah, we knew him.
ALEX: He's buried at a different cemetery down the road.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: They said you can't miss it.
ALEX: And this tip sent us on this frenzied goose chase ...
ALEX: He said to go to the red light and turn right?
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Oh, wait. No, he said there's a fork and you go to the right.
ALEX: Ah! Okay, I'll turn around.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: We gotta turn around.
ALEX: ... into more and more graveyards.
ALEX: [sighs] Howard!
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: We're looking for some Howards.
MAN: Talk to that guy right there.
ALEX: Where we talked to more and more locals.
MAN: Oh, I mean, they got some Howards back there, but Wilson?
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Yeah, Howard.
MAN: Ask that lady right there on that porch.
WOMAN: I don't know no Wilson Howard.
ALEX: [sighs] Okay. Y'all, the mosquitoes are mosquitoing.
ALEX: And encountered more and more ...
ALEX: [blows] I can feel them biting me. It's crazy.
ALEX: ... local wildlife.
ANNIE: I don't feel any.
ALEX: Oh, wow. There's a lizard. It's, like, lime green. Hey, friend!
ALEX: After an entire day of grave hunting ...
ANNIE: Okay, so that—yeah. Well, that was ...
ALEX: Sort of anti-climactic.
ANNIE: Yeah.
ALEX: We never did find his grave.
ALEX: Ugh! [sighs] Well ...
ALEX: And as this fishing expedition for any sign of Wilson Howard or Clarence Neason Sr. Sr. and any clues at all ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Just anything.
ALEX: ... on which one was my great grandfather, or why would've been named Neason, continued into the archives ...
[car door slams]
ALEX: ... and libraries ...
[car door slams]
ALEX: ... and courthouses of Louisiana ...
[car door slams]
ALEX: Here we go.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: We're trying to find two people who have been extremely elusive for us.
ALEX: ... even though we were doing all the right things …
MAN: What do you want to start with?
ALEX: ... casting a wide net, looking for anything from property records to wills ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: What can we look at here?
MAN: Anything you want. [laughs]
ALEX: ... felt almost impossible. Like we were looking for a couple of teeny, tiny needles in a gigantic haystack.
WOMAN: Mama always said if you start doing family history pull out the pruning shears.
ALEX: We went through shelf after shelf of these ...
MAN: [book slams down] Okay.
ALEX: ... massive old leather-bound books filled with transaction receipts.
ALEX: Neason is the last name.
MAN: Okay, well we do it by vowels in here.
MAN: What is his—what is his name?
ALEX: Neason.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Neason.
MAN: Neason.
ALEX: And a lot of this stuff was organized in this bizarre system from the Civil War era that they're still using that is ...
MAN: That part of '75. You go into the 'NE' section. And then ...
ALEX: ... very hard to follow.
WOMAN: A through Z, and then A2 through Z2 and so on.
MAN: And you have to look line by line.
ALEX: Okay.
WOMAN: What are you doing?
ANNIE: [pauses] We're recording audio.
WOMAN: I'll have to approve that with my boss.
ANNIE: Okay.
WOMAN: What last name are we looking for?
ALEX: But every so often ...
MAN: What is this here?
ALEX: ... there were these little clues, little breadcrumbs about these two men and who they were to my grandfather.
MAN: Succession of Wilson J. Howard, yes.
ALEX: ... like we eventually found Wilson Howard's succession, for instance.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: The succession is super important because that tells you who the heirs are.
ALEX: I see Geraldine, who was his wife.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Mm-hmm.
ALEX: And then Darlene Howard and also Thelma Howard-Jones. "Hereby recognized as the only lawful heirs, and as such they are hereby placed into ..."
ALEX: On this document, Wilson's two daughters are mentioned, but not my grandfather.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: It did not include him. So what does that mean?
ALEX: And we were like okay, maybe that means even though we have all these other documents where he is listed as my grandfather's dad, that Howard secretly knew he wasn't. But also, there was just no way to know if his name was left off that page for some other reason, or if it was just a mistake or a mishearing or a clerical error.
ALEX: Damn!
ALEX: And sitting there in that archive ...
ALEX: I just thought that there would be some kind of trail through the documents that ...
ALEX: ... I was realizing that we'd come all the way down here for some hard, simple facts ...
ALEX: But honestly, I feel like we're still—we've still wound up back in the speculating about a dead man's feelings.
ALEX: Maybe it was impossible in 2020-something to just swoop in, scan a document and understand the world even just a few generations back.
ALEX: You know?
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Right. Right.
ALEX: But there was one person who had touched that world and moved through it.
JOHARI NEASON: My dad has a cousin named Orelia.
ALEX: Someone who is still alive, lives near New Orleans, and who I'd heard about from my aunt, Johari Neason.
JOHARI NEASON: She knows all the business.
ALEX: And they would have actually known Edna.
ALEX: Does that person go by, like, Rhea or Rea?
JOHARI NEASON: Yeah, Orelia!
ALEX: Rhea Jackson.
CHERYL ANN NEASON-ISIDORE: Yeah, I know Rhea.
KAREN NEASON DYKES: Rhea could tell you more.
CHERYL ANN NEASON-ISIDORE: Yeah, Rhea.
KAREN NEASON DYKES: She grew up in the parish and she stayed in the parish. And she's still in the parish 'til this day. That's how she knows a whole lot.
ALEX: If anyone could tell me what was going on between Edna and Wilson and Clarence Sr. Sr. it was her.
KAREN NEASON DYKES: Mm-hmm.
ALEX: And I'd been calling her for months, leaving messages on her phone saying I'm coming to New Orleans, I'd love to see you. Never heard back from her until ...
[door knocking]
ORELIA AMELIA JACKSON: How you doing?
ALEX: Hi!
ALEX: ... a few days into my trip ...
ORELIA AMELIA JACKSON: I finally meet you, huh?
ALEX: I know.
ALEX: ... I finally heard back from her.
ORELIA AMELIA JACKSON: My name is Orelia Amelia Jackson. I am Edna Jackson's niece.
ALEX: Edna had been Rhea's aunt. She'd actually known her, and so right away before we even got settled for the interview, actually ...
ALEX: Do you know why ...
ALEX: ... I asked her the big question ...
ALEX: ... well, who was—who was Clarence's, my grandfather, who was his father?
ALEX: ... which she answers immediately.
ORELIA AMELIA JACKSON: Wilson Howard.
ALEX: So I'm like, all right, Wilson Howard. But then ...
ORELIA AMELIA JACKSON: And at that time ...
ALEX: ... she started saying things about Howard being the real father, but his job took him away to sea a lot, so some other man stepped in to help raise my grandfather.
ORELIA AMELIA JACKSON: That had to be somebody in the family, so I think that'd be family people, because that's a lot of kids too, so that's family people.
ALEX: Okay. I guess what I'm trying to understand is why she wouldn't have given him the last name Howard.
ORELIA AMELIA JACKSON: She probably was in a relationship with somebody, and they just named the son after him.
ALEX: So it's possible then that Edna might have been, like, dating someone whose name was Neason and ...
ORELIA AMELIA JACKSON: I don't think she was dating nobody. I don't think so.
ALEX: So isn't—or—or just—so ...
ALEX: Talking to Rhea, I started to realize that we were both speaking English, but we weren't really speaking the same language when it came to family.
ORELIA AMELIA JACKSON: Okay, so for instance, like, if you was to fall right now, and I come and I pick you up and bring you by my house, I didn't put you there because I hate—I put you there because I love you.
ALEX: She would use terms like "family people." And I think her idea of what our relationship is was more expansive than mine.
ORELIA AMELIA JACKSON: But you're gonna remember what I did when I pick you up. So that's the way it was with Clarence Neason.
ALEX: So do you know that there was somebody named Neason who did all those things? Like—like ...
ORELIA AMELIA JACKSON: It had to be.
ALEX: Or else why would she give him the name?
ORELIA AMELIA JACKSON: That came out, you know? Nobody ain't gonna just give your name just like that, they gotta be somebody that really knew you and cared for you.
ALEX: Mm-hmm.
ORELIA AMELIA JACKSON: Well, we take care of each other in the family. Let me put it that way to you. Because we family that take care of each other.
ALEX: Mm-hmm.
ORELIA AMELIA JACKSON: Yeah, and that's all I know, sweetheart.
ALEX: Even though after talking to Rhea I was still kind of confused ...
ALEX: [groans] My head hurts.
ALEX: We ready?
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Yeah, we're ready.
ALEX: ... it felt like Howard and Clarence Sr. Sr., they were who Rhea called "family people." Howard was at Clarence Sr. Sr.'s wedding. It sounded like maybe they'd both taken care of my grandfather at different points.
[car door slams]
ALEX: And they both clearly had some kind of connection with the woman at the center of this story, Edna.
ANNIE: We're at Ellen Cemetery?
ALEX: And the gate's open.
ALEX: Who was buried at this grassy little courtyard cemetery surrounded by industrial buildings across the street from some houses.
ALEX: We're here to look for my great grandma Edna. And I'm hoping we can find her. So much of this, we just didn't have a whole lot to go on and we're, like, grasping at straws so much of the time it has felt like. [sighs] I sincerely hope there's not poison ivy in here. [laughs] Because that would friggin' suck!
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Oh, here she is!
ALEX: You found?
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Yup.
ALEX: This is Edna?
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: That's Edna.
ALEX: [whispers] Let's see. "Edna Jackson. January 4, 1904 to October 1, 1991. Forever in our hearts. And there's an angel." Here she is. I have a lot of questions that more and more I suspect only she can answer. She had a son and gave him a name.
ALEX: Standing at Edna's grave, I felt like it was clear that when Edna gave birth to my grandfather and named him, it wasn't a ploy or a cover-up or a random name lifted out of a baby book, it had meaning. It said something about the community of people she came from. Like my name came out of this mix of family people. But that still leaves me at a crossroads, basically, where it's like okay, if there's two paths I can only walk one at a time, so which is it?
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Wait! Hold on. What you got? Wait a minute! Wait a minute!
ALEX: And then through the slow but eventual good grace of the state of Louisiana, I got my hands on a very precious document.
ALEX: Okay.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Drum roll. We've got all the anticipation.
ALEX: My grandfather's birth certificate.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: We're hoping that this envelope is giving us something.
ALEX: If anything is gonna tell us who his actual parents are ...
ALEX: Okay, here we go.
ALEX: ... it's gonna be this piece of paper.
ALEX: Okay. So "On the 13th of October this year, 1937, at Charity Hospital was born a male child named Clarence Neason, Colored." That's my grandpa. "Illegitimate issue of Clarence Neason and Edna Jackson."
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: I knew it! I knew it!
ALEX: So it says Clarence Neason.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! I knew it! [laughs]
LATIF: So Clarence Neason—so Clarence Neason Sr. Sr. was your great grandfather. And—and so you really, truly are a Neason.
ALEX: Yeah. I mean, well so first, this is just a document. It's a piece of paper like an obituary or a succession like all the others. But it just felt like as soon as I'd gotten this affirmation, another question popped into my head: who was the Neason before Sr. Sr.? And who was the Neason before that? Actually, who's the first Black person to get this European name?
LULU: Hmm.
ALEX: Who gave it to them? What did it mean to them, and why did they hang onto it?
LULU: After the break, Alex catches a break and stumbles on the person who is going to lead her like a straight path through the woods all the way back to the beginning of her name.
LULU: Lulu.
LATIF: Latif.
LULU: Radiolab.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Crab crumbs.
LATIF: Back from break.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: And then I'm like, "Ooh, this is the best cookie!"
ALEX: Yeah.
ALEX: Okay, quick refresher: I've always felt very attached to my last name, Neason. And despite the fact that there's sometimes scant documentation about Black people living in New Orleans between Emancipation and World War II, I had decided to try to figure out where my name actually came from. And after a detour into trying to figure out whether I was biologically related to Wilson Howard or Clarence Neason Sr. Sr., I'd come across my grandfather's birth certificate, which said his father was in fact Clarence Sr. Sr. And it could be wrong I guess, but it gave me the permission I needed to finally go hard ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Let's go.
ALEX: ... at the name Neason.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: I'm ready. Get in.
ALEX: Let's do it!
ALEX: Next step was finding out where this name was from.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: So Reverend Clarence, grandpa.
ALEX: Mm-hmm.
ALEX: And we thought the simple thing to do is to just follow the family tree as far back as it goes ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: His father ...
ALEX: ... and then push from there.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: ... is Clarence Neason.
ALEX: So we traced a line from me to my dad to my grandpa to his dad, [trumpet sound] Clarence Neason Sr. Sr.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Yeah, let's go!
ALEX: And then we got his dad ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Israel Neason. And Israel Neason's father is Levi Neason.
ALEX: My great great great grandfather, Levi. And then after Levi, the Neason trail seems to dry up.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Dang it!
ALEX: Which means next we need to find out as much as we can about who this Levi guy was ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Okay.
ALEX: ... over here.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Right. And so Levi ...
ALEX: We learn he was born as best we can tell in the 1840s, pre-Civil War. Which means he could've been enslaved. But as we begin to gather documents on Levi, we start to notice misspellings.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Leasum.
ALEX: We find his last name spelled Leasum. Also Neeson. Also ...
ALEX: Hold on.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Neasum!
ALEX: Neasum with an M.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: They're just all over the place with this name, I really gotta say.
LULU: So wait, I mean, there—is there a chance these could all—this could be a different person entirely?
LATIF: Yeah, because Leasum, it feels, like, so different from your name now.
ALEX: Right. But whenever we came across a misspelling, Nicka would always say ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Number one, spelling doesn't count. We're looking for phonetics.
ALEX: Because these forms are often filled out by white clerks who may or may not have heard right or even cared to pay attention to how the person in front of them was pronouncing their name. So what do you do? You collect all these different names, and then ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: We need them to be at the same place at the same time.
ALEX: ... match up other life details.
LULU: Got it.
ALEX: And so now we knew we needed to widen our search to include a whole bunch of different spellings of Levi's last name.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Let me see.
ALEX: And ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Where did the—wait!
ALEX: ... when we did ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Wait wait wait wait! Wait, what? Oh! Okay.
ALEX: Nicka gets really cr—like, she's excited, she's pumped.
ALEX: Wait.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: [laughs] This is the best news of the freakin' week, dude!
ALEX: And I was like, "Why?"
ALEX: Tell me what did you—what is happening?
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Look at this Black man who was in the Civil War, and we got, like—ah!
ALEX: She found documents that said that Levi had fought in the Civil War.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Oh my gosh! Okay, this, like—this opens up—I'm telling you. Oh, you don't even understand!
LATIF: Wait, why is she so excited?
LULU: Why is this such a big deal?
ALEX: Because while documents specifically for Black people in this era of history were quite scarce, if there's one thing that the United States does well, it documents its military obsessively.
LULU: Hmm.
ALEX: And so ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Oh, this is great! We needed this break!
ALEX: ... after six months of exhaustive digging ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Oh my gosh, I might actually do a cartwheel!
ALEX: [laughs]
ALEX: ... and just basically picking up crumbs ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Yes!
ALEX: ... all of a sudden ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: There's a ton of information on this card!
ALEX: ... we'd learned that when he was 20 years old ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Black hair, black eyes, black complexion, 5'7".
ALEX: ... he found his way to an enlistment office.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Enlisted in New Orleans, November 4, 1864.
ALEX: He joined the Union army. 11 days later he was mustered in.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Look: bounty paid, $100.
ALEX: Which is almost $2,000 today. So ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: He's ballin'. He is out someplace getting his life.
ALEX: We learned he joined as a private in the 92nd United States Colored Troops Infantry. There were random details of things he did in the army.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Repairing roads from Baton Rouge to Clinton.
ALEX: We learned he died in 1921, and ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Emile Labat. He was one of the early Black people that had a mortuary in New Orleans.
ALEX: ... we even learned the name of his mortician.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Like, where else are we getting this information about Black people? We never—like, now we're getting it.
ALEX: We find out where he's buried.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Veterans Cemetery. Oh my frickin' God!
ALEX: We find a picture of his headstone.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Ah! There it is! Yes!
ALEX: Wow!
ALEX: And finally, we learn two super important facts about Levi. We learned his mom's name.
ALEX: M. Viney.
ALEX: Which pushes us a little further down the Neason family tree. And we learn the name of the Parish where he was born: East Feliciana Parish, which is a little over a hundred miles northwest of New Orleans.
ANNIE: It's like 8:00am. The sun is, like, peeking through the—the forest that's lining the highway.
ALEX: It's foggy. Lots of crows everywhere. And a lot of roadkill.
ALEX: Finding the general area where Levis was born is such a big deal, because if Levi was enslaved, he probably was born on his enslaver's land.
ALEX: It feels colder here too.
ALEX: And one possible reason that all of these Black people—including me—are named Neason is because there were white people named Neason who owned Black people.
ALEX: I mean, it's kind of beautiful, but it's also a little ominous. Yes.
ALEX: So Nicka goes into the archive.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Let me just see if I can find any Black or white Neason, Neasum, anything close in East Feliciana Parish.
ALEX: And she finds them.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: 'Nesom' with an 'M' on the end.
ALEX: This was a white family with the last name 'Nesom.' N-E-S-O-M, the same spelling that's in a lot of Levi's documents. And the patriarch was a man named Abraham. He was a veteran. He had served in the War of 1812. And after the war, as part of an act that created West Florida, the government gave him a plot of land.
ALEX: The sun is up, so should be starting to warm up.
ALEX: 600 acres just outside of Clinton, Louisiana.
ALEX: And I actually feel the closer that we get to the coordinates that we're going to, the colder it gets and the darker it gets.
ALEX: He spent 20-some years on this land, raising a family, growing his business. And then in 1857 he died.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: All right! Here we go!
ALEX: And when he died, his entire estate was auctioned off.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Succession of A & L Nesom.
ALEX: And in a small courthouse in Clinton, we found the papers for that auction.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Light blue delicate paper, bound with, like, a little rope.
ALEX: The auctioneer had kept this incredibly detailed diary.
ALEX: "Be it known and remembered that on this 25th day of June in the year of our Lord one thousand, eight hundred and fifty seven at the hour of eleven o'clock a.m. at the last place of residence of said deceased Abraham Nesom ..."
ALEX: Where he carefully wrote down ...
ALEX: And this where you get the bed stands and tables and safes.
ALEX: ... every single piece of property that was being auctioned.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Looking glass.
ALEX: Axes, wagon.
ALEX: Farm stuff.
ALEX: Blankets, quilts, curtains.
ALEX: All the stuff that you have in a house.
ALEX: Clothing.
ALEX: And also documented in this auctioneer's diary ...
ANNIE: Each of these is a different person?
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Mm-hmm.
ALEX: ... were 33 enslaved people.
ALEX: Negro woman, Amy, aged 60 years old.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Margaret, Dick, Hilary, Spencer. You've got Sam. Robin.
ALEX: And this is how we learned that the Nesom's were slave owners.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Hannah and her four children: Sophia, Negro girl Mary, Negro boy Alfred, Negro boy Lewis, aged seven.
ALEX: And this whole time we're reading, we're also scanning to see if we can find the names Viney and Levi.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: 21. Negro boy ...
ALEX: Because if we can, then we'll know that this is where my name comes from.
ALEX: Yeah, Viney.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Okay.
ALEX: And we do find a woman named Viney ...
ALEX: Nelson Nesom being the last and highest bidder.
ALEX: ... bought by one of Abraham's sons.
ALEX: This Negro woman Viney, aged 59 years and her child, girl Sophia aged 11 years.
ALEX: But this Viney was being sold with a daughter named Sophia.
ALEX: For the sum and price of $1,720.
ALEX: There's no sign of Levi.
ALEX: [sighs]
ALEX: So we were like wait ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Argh!
ALEX: ... it's possible that this is not the right Viney and these are not the right Nesoms.
ALEX: I'm fast approaching delirium.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Alex is almost nearing her end. So she's getting delirious.
WOMAN: We do close at 4:30.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: I know. I mean ...
ALEX: The archive was closing soon, and we'd gone through the entire auction without finding Levi. But we had about 30 minutes, so we pulled these giant, old leather-bound books off the shelves that were filled with hundreds of handwritten transaction records, and just sort of manically flipped through, scanning the pages for the name Nesom.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: "Whereas hereby aforementioned"—like, what?
ALEX: Which was a wild and nauseating experience, because while a lot of these transactions were about land ...
ALEX: One spotted horse.
ALEX: ... or animals or farm equipment ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Dogs. Oh, I love dogs.
ALEX: ... amongst all this stuff, we would periodically stumble upon ...
ALEX: Oh, 153 enslaved people.
ALEX: ... these giant lists of people.
ANNIE: Bill Williams.
ALEX: Humphrey, Peggy.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: There's a two year old. There's an Alfie and an Eppie or two.
ALEX: Age nine, age eight, age five, age 11. Yeah, these are all kids up here.
ALEX: And even though we were short on time, it felt like we couldn't not read these people's names.
ALEX: And then the list continues on the next page.
ALEX: Because we knew that for some of these cases, this was probably one of the only official records that these people had ever existed.
ALEX: William, five. Anthony, eight. Little P, eight. Henry, 11. Cornelius, three. It looks like Hamilton, three.
ALEX: And then the next page would be ...
ALEX: Corn and fodder.
ALEX: ... back to farm stuff.
ALEX: Seven head of horses and mules. Land.
ALEX: After scanning as fast as we could through as many of these pages as we could, and just as they're about to kick us out of the archives ...
ALEX: [gasps] 1851. October 10, 1851.
ALEX: ... we find a transaction dated six years earlier than the auction when Viney was sold.
ALEX: Abraham Nesom and William Franklin Nesom.
ALEX: Abraham, the patriarch, is selling to his youngest son ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Six hurt Negroes of the names, sex and age ...
ALEX: ... six enslaved people.
ALEX: Harriet. Valued at $650.
ALEX: A woman named Harriet and her four kids.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Tilda, a Negro girl aged about six, valued at $250.
ALEX: And tacked onto the end of this group, we find this small, barely legible, so tiny we almost missed it, very, very precious name ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Levi.
ALEX: ... Levi.
ALEX: Levi. A Negro boy, raised by hand and sickly.
ALEX: About seven years.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: About seven years. At $250.
ALEX: At $250.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Which said—okay, wait a minute. So ...
ALEX: We learned here that Levi had probably had a wet nurse. That's what "raised by hand" means, rather than being breast-fed by his own mother who probably had to work. We learned that he had been owned by Abraham, and we learned that this is why he wasn't in the auction papers six years later with his mom and his sister.
ALEX: A Negro boy raised by hand ...
ALEX: Because when he was a sick little boy he was sold away from her. Finding Levi here was like finding the last link in the Neason chain.
ANNIE: Interesting to have that ring right next to this sale here.
ALEX: Yeah. Yeah. This is where my name comes from, from Abraham Nesom, from this family.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Yeah.
ALEX: Growing up, one of the big reasons why my last name was so important to me was because, even though we had moved around so much, I felt like the name Neason anchored me to a real place—somewhere where my family was from, where I was from.
ALEX: Sounds like a gravel road.
ALEX: And that place had always been New Orleans, but now that I learned where this name had really come from, and where we had really come from, down to the actual coordinates that we found in Abraham's government land grant ...
[GPS: In a quarter mile turn right.]
ALEX: ... I had to go there.
ALEX: We should be pulling up.
ALEX: And after driving about two hours northwest of New Orleans ...
ALEX: It's just a big open field to the right.
ALEX: ... we arrive at this meadow sort of on the edge of the forest. And park in front of this short bit of fence and this massive real estate sign.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Becky and Becky. There's two Beckys.
ALEX: Where two smiling white ladies both named Becky were selling this meadow in plots of land. And it's gonna be a housing development eventually.
LULU: Oh, wow.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Hi Becks.
ALEX: I know.
ALEX: But for now ...
ALEX: Whoa!
ALEX: ... if you hop the ditch ...
ALEX: Whoo!
ALEX: ... step around the fence and kind of climb through the weeds, the field just opens up in front of you. It was filled with tall grasses, wildflowers. You could imagine cows or sheep grazing peacefully on it under this big blue sky.
ALEX: Yeah, I mean ...
ALEX: It was beautiful. This was the land where Levi was born. And it was here that as a little boy he was sold away from his mother. And now here I was, his great great great granddaughter. And what I wanted to do was think of something important to say, something worthy of these people. But instead ...
ALEX: [sighs]
ALEX: ... I just wandered around feeling extremely overwhelmed ...
ALEX: I don't even know what to say.
ALEX: ... and not able to articulate why.
ALEX: An orange butterfly just passed. It just landed near me. I just feel uneasy here.
ALEX: And the longer I was there, the more and more aware I became of the ring on my finger.
ALEX: I'm walking around with this name on my hand, on every paper I sign, on every credit card I have. And the name, part of it represents a horror. And this is where it starts.
ALEX: Like, especially being on that land, the name, it does start to feel gross.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Should we have expectations of feeling whole when we go back to these—these forced workspaces? Were you seeking wholeness by going to Abraham's land grant spot plantation? Or was it just to see what happened?
ALEX: I don't think I've thought about wholeness because I haven't—I feel very overwhelmed and, like, I can't—like it's—like it's hard to process everything this whole week right away. So when I try to think, like, how do I feel, a lot of the times the answer is I don't know. So I don't—and—and I feel a lot of pressure to have—to have a feeling, you know? But a lot of the time, the answer is just like—it's just soup in my head. My brain feels like it's reaching its CPU capacity. [laughs]
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: [laughs] All of—all of the fans are spinning. It's—it's getting hot, right?
ALEX: It's hot, like you can't keep it on your lap anymore. Burning, brain is struggling.
ALEX: How do you move on from this land and from Abraham? How do you keep being a Neason after you know where the name came from? When Levi left this land, when Viney left this land, what did they do? Well, for Levi, after he's sold as a seven-year old sickly boy, the next time we find evidence on paper that he ever existed is when he pops up in New Orleans as a 20-year-old runaway enlisting in the Union army. And as for Viney, four years after she was sold with her daughter Sophia to Abraham's son, the Civil War begins. There's no trace of Sophia, but as we move forward in time from there, on the 1870 and 1880 censuses you can see ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: ... a couple of Vineys living in East Feliciana Parish.
ALEX: There's a Viney Rogers. There's a Viney Doherty. And there's also a Melvina Banks, who sometimes goes by Viney. And Nicka thinks that any one of these women—maybe even more than one of them—could be our Viney.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: These people are walking into their lives choosing how they want to be referred to.
ALEX: So Viney could have used one last name for a while, and then just changed her mind.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Yeah!
ALEX: Anyway, maybe the bigger clue ...
ALEX: Gosh.
ALEX: ... that one of these is our Viney ...
ALEX: We're going through all of the enslaved people one by one.
ALEX: ... is that that list of people who were sold on the same day she was ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: Some of those people are in the same community as these Vineys that I found. Offered for sale, Negro woman, Amy, age 60 years old.
ALEX: Like, one of these Vineys has a neighbor named Amy who's the right age to be the same one from the auction.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: And I'm completely positive that it's her because her name is listed as Amy Nesom.
ALEX: There's also a Susan and a Louisa and a Millie living nearby, and all three of these people were sold in the same auction that Viney was.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: It's still the same community of people.
ALEX: And it's in this community that Viney made a home and grew old. And actually, for a long time we could find almost nothing about her, until in 1890, Melvina or Viney Banks submits a pension application for Levi Nesom.
LULU: Hmm.
ALEX: Okay, so this is the thing that I want to show you.
LULU: Okay.
ALEX: So if you just click this link, it's an image.
LATIF: Okay, I see it.
LULU: Looks like an index card kind of.
ALEX: Yeah. This is from a collection of military documents that we found online. Viney hasn't seen her son Levi since he was a little boy, but 25 years after the end of the Civil War, as a very old, very poor woman, she must have somehow heard that Levi had served as a soldier in the Union army and thought ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: If he died in the war, then let's apply for his pension.
ALEX: And the kind of small but incredible thing here is that since she's been free, there's been no documentation that Viney's ever used the name Nesom.
LATIF: Hmm.
ALEX: But here on this form it says, "Name of Dependent: Mother. Nesom, Viney."
ALEX: She uses this old name, the name of her enslaver. Why would she do that?
DAINA RAMEY BERRY: Oh, that's a great question. So one of the things that we see with enslaved people is the name that the enslavers had is often an identifier for their relatives that were sold away from them or separated from them to find them.
ALEX: This is historian Daina Ramey Berry, and I called her up because this is the kind of question she thinks about every single day.
DAINA RAMEY BERRY: People ask, "Well, why do people keep their quote-unquote 'slave' name?" You know, you hear that in contemporary conversations.
ALEX: Mm-hmm.
DAINA RAMEY BERRY: But often, enslaved people, until they could reconnect with their biological family or their family that had become a biological family for them, sometimes they chose to keep that name ...
ALEX: Or in Viney's case, use the name.
DAINA RAMEY BERRY: ... as a marker in space. And sometimes the only way they could trace after being sold or separated, you know, across county lines, across state lines, was a name. One name.
ALEX: So Viney puts down this name—the last name she ever knew her son to have. And she files this application, and she waits for a reply from the government. But ...
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: There wasn't a certificate granted.
ALEX: ... her application was declined because it had already been granted to someone else.
LULU: Hmm!
ALEX: To Levi.
LATIF: Hmm.
LULU: Because he wasn't dead.
LATIF: Whaaat?
LULU: Whoa!
ALEX: And here's what we could find out about him: he's kept the name Nesom, he's now a man in his 40s living in a cabin on a plantation just outside New Orleans in St. Bernard Parish, where he rents an acre of land and plants vegetables. He's got some health problems: chronic rheumatism, complications from a really bad bout of smallpox. And about two or three days a week, when he can, he works for an Italian family on their vegetable farm. We also know that, living in the cabin with him was his wife, a woman named Celia Hall. We know that they ended up ultimately having six kids named Levi, Mamie, Elizabeth, my great great grandfather Israel, Harry and John. all Nesoms. And we can't know because, of course, there are no documents on this, but it's possible—and I hope that because Levi kept the name Nesom and Viney used the name Nesom—that they were able to find each other.
LULU: Wow. Wow.
ALEX: I hope they traveled the hundred and some miles that separated them. I hope than Viney got to visit Levi's cabin. Maybe they went outside in the late summer sun and picked vegetables out of his garden—tomatoes or cucumbers or zucchini—and made dinner together. And most of all, I hope that at the age of 97, Viney got to meet her grandkids.
DAINA RAMEY BERRY: It's an anchor. Like, the name has anchored your family, even if there's been some detours along the way, it still connects you to family.
ALEX: Again, Daina Ramey Berry.
DAINA RAMEY BERRY: And requests for family genealogy, as you have even experienced yourself, that's exactly what enslaved people were doing live during slavery and in the immediate aftermath in trying to connect with family. You know, your name has been important to multiple generations of your relatives.
ANNIE: Whoa, where are we?
ALEX: One last stop, one last cemetery. This one for veterans.
ALEX: The grass is green and cut and trim.
NICKA SEWELL-SMITH: I don't fear mud on my shoes. [laughs]
ALEX: No mud here.
ALEX: I've come to say goodbye to Levi.
ALEX: 12796 and 12797. Levi Nesom.
ALEX: Just a very simple headstone. Very clean.
ALEX: USCT, United States Colored Troops. Here he is. He's right underneath a big tree.
ALEX: Even though he'd been lying here all along, to find him I had to wade through the horror of one of the worst things that has ever happened in our history.
ALEX: And I keep thinking about to have yesterday held a piece of paper that documented his sale as a seven-year old-boy, referred to him as sickly, and then today to make it here. Yesterday enslaved and today free.
ALEX: And through that whole journey he held onto our name, carrying it from enslavement to freedom and onwards.
ALEX: And I keep thinking about the moment that I asked my dad why he didn't seem as hung up on the question of are we supposed to be Neasons, and if we are where did it come from, and if we're not then who are we supposed to be, and whose name are we supposed to be carrying with us forever into the future? And my dad's attitude about it was ...
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: Hey ...
ALEX: This name ...
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: ... this is what I got. Here's what it is now and I'm going to make sure that—that I honor, develop and move the ball with it.
ALEX: Maybe similar to dad, Levi thought ...
CLARENCE NEASON JR.: I'm right here. Here's my starting point. I'm moving forward.
ALEX: Looking back, I found a lot of people—my people—holding on to this name like a bright line through history, each of us for a different reason as it shifted and changed, connecting us all together, proof that we were here, that we still are here. All of us, looking forwards.
LULU: You still wearing that ring?
ALEX: Definitely. Never taking this thing off.
LATIF: This episode was reported by Alex Neason with editorial and research support from the patient yet excitable Nicka Sewell-Smith. It was produced by Annie McEwen.
LULU: And Andrew Viñales. With dialog mix from Arianne Wack.
LATIF: Most of the music we used in the episode came from an amazing group of musicians we gathered here in the WNYC studios: Paul Brandenburg on trumpet, Justin Fynn on sax, Mark Miller on trombone, Kenny Bentley on the tuba and Jason Isaacs on the drums. All recorded by Irene Trudel.
LULU: Special thanks. Alex, you want to take those family thanks?
ALEX: Yeah.
LULU: Family thanks?
ALEX: None of this story could have been possible without help from my aunts Cheryl Neason-Isidore, Karen Neason Dykes, Johari Neason, Keaun Neason, my uncles Kevin Neason and Anthony Neason, who actually recently passed away. My mom, Olivia Neason, my grandfather, the late Clarence Neason Sr.—or so we thought—and of course my dad, the person who started this all, Clarence Neason Jr.—or so we thought. And I also want to thank—I guess she's my cousin—Orelia Amelia Jackson, also known as Rhea.
LULU: Thanks also to Russell Gragg, Victor Yvellez, Asher Griffith, Sabrina Thomas, Nancy Richard, Katie Neason, Amanda Hayden, Gabriel Lee and Devan Schwartz.
LULU: And before we let you go, we wanted to tell you about a show that exists in the same orbit or realm of the story you just heard. It's from our colleagues at WNYC Studios over at the show La Brega, a show about the Puerto Rican experience. They've just released a whole second season. Each episode is about a different song from the island. I loved one that's about this unlikely salsa hit about a father rejecting his own kid, "El Gran Varón."
LULU: That episode ends up becoming this really tearjerker-y story about a father and daughter. But the story that feels like it is truly in conversation with the one you just heard is called "The Moon's Distance." And while in our story, you heard Alex clawing into the past to discover that distance can create a closeness that we had usually assumed can't be had over space and time, well this episode claws its way into the future to imagine a kind of connection between a castaway of sorts and their homeland. If that sounds a little confusing, let me just play a brief excerpt from the episode, the tippy-top where host Alana Casanova-Burgess sets up the mischievous thing that they decide to do.
ALANA CASANOVA-BURGESS: There's a poem, "Boricua En La Luna," that became a song. It was written by Juan Antonio Corretjer, from Ciales—like my mother. And it was put to music and sung for the first time by Roy Brown.
[music playing]
ALANA CASANOVA-BURGESS: It's a song about not being in Puerto Rico, as so many Puerto Rican anthems are. But the message isn't only about yearning, it's about defiance, about holding on to your Puertoricanness wherever you are. It's the ultimate diaspora song, and it gets me every time. The narrator is born in New York of parents who left the island, and who dreamed of one day returning. And it's a dream he shares as well. There's a line: he lives with the hope that one day he can reclaim what he has lost—"Un Puerto Rico de ensueño," a Puerto Rico of dreams. And then the most famous lines, the last two:
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Roy Brown: [singing] Roy Brown: Yo seria borincano aunque naciera en la luna.]
ALANA CASANOVA-BURGESS: "I would be Puerto Rican even if I were born on the moon." That line, it says so much about what it means to be from this place, and to hold on to that no matter what. Nobody can take it away from us. It's such a profound and relatable feeling, and we wanted to push it as far as it could go. And so for this episode, we asked the renowned Puerto Rican writer Sergio Gutierrez Negron to imagine a new universe for "Boricua En La Luna." The story he created is as rich and surprising as the song and poem at its heart, and I'm so excited to share it with you. And so this is "The Moon’s Distance."
[WOMAN: Hi Kelvin, this is Nanette from Jersey.]
LULU: It is such a great episode. I love that they thought to do this and that they did it and executed it so well. So go check out La Brega, "The Moon's Distance," or any of all the other episodes they have there.
LATIF: Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next time.
LULU: Catch you soon.
[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Tori Neason, and I'm calling from Augusta, Maine. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Anna Rascouët-Paz, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Andrew Viñales. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]
[LISTENER: Hi. My name is Teresa. I'm calling from Colchester in Essex, UK. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]
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