Who Your People Are

Malinda Maynor Lowery, whom I am honored to call my friend, observes in the introduction to Lumbees in the Jim Crow South (2010) that identity within the Lumbee nation hinges largely on the question “Who's your people?” (p. xiii) The question refers to the respondant's family, her biological and affinal relatives, rather than her national identity. As Lowery and other ethnohistorians point out, of course, nationality entwines inseparably with family in most Indian nations. I have been asked versions of this question myself, but almost always in a form indicating the listener wants a short, easily-categorized answer: “Where are you from?” or “What's your background?” Pondering Malinda's question, it occurred to me that the man who asked it sought a detailed and nuanced response, generously acknowledging the complexity of people's backgrounds in a country where ethnicity so often becomes contested and one's “place” is rarely singular. And it asks the respondant to tie her or his identity to a broader human context than their education or the source of their paycheck. So, by way of introducing myself, I will not talk about my own accomplishments, but about my people, of their background and ties.

Family lore on my mother’s side claimed that my mother’s grandmother, Sarah Minton, was a fullblooded Cherokee, but subsequent research disproved the claim. It was a common mistake. “Everyone in the South,” Theda Perdue told me, “has a Cherokee grandmother.” Minton was in fact a Virginian of English descent, and the third wife of my great-grandfather Corum Bruce, an elderly veteran of the American Civil War. Family story-tellers claim the Bruces fought on both sides of that conflict, which seems likely given their provenance in eastern Tennessee. Their son, Jack Bruce, my maternal grandfather, spent his youth mining coal, then worked for the rest of his life for Union Pacific. Jack had little education but no qualms about marrying a college-educated schoolteacher, Martha Miracle, my maternal grandmother.

The Miracles’ name derived from the German “Merckel,” and the clan’s progenitor hailed from the German Palatinate, whence he and his family emigrated in 1710. Merckel’s descendents drifted down to the Piedmont South, with some making a hairpin turn into southeastern Kentucky. My grandmother was born there in 1911. Her parents, Levi Miracle and Juletta Slusher (descended from another German clan, the Schlossers) were small-town shopkeepers who, unusually for their era, resolved to send all of their thirteen children to college. Apart from a few who died in their youth, such as a great-uncle killed by hijackers in northern Kentucky, all did earn their degrees. My grandmother retained her pedagogical habits into old age, teaching me and my siblings to play Yahtzee and bridge and showing us slides of her trips to Europe. In her early eighties she taught me to drive.

From my father I take my family name, Nichols, an artificial moniker. My paternal grandfather, Leopold Nicholas Solomon, changed his name when he married, partly to increase his marketability as a writer and partly to reassure his Catholic wife, Eleanor Doucette, she wouldn’t bear the burden (in the 1930s) of a Jewish surname. Lee Nichols, as my predecessor renamed himself, worked for the the Voice of America and authored several books, including Breakthrough on the Color Front, a report on the integration of the U.S. Armed Forces which C. Vann Woodward quoted in The Strange Career of Jim Crow. His parents, Nathan Solomon and Lillian Rosenbluth, hailed from Lorraine and Ukraine, respectively. The Rosenbluths were a radical bunch: Lillian’s parents came to Oregon in the 1880s to help establish a socialist commune, New Odessa, and when it met the fate of most communes moved to New York. Lillian raised her children as social activists (also as Quakers), which shaped the life and beliefs of both Lee and his sister, Camille, my great-aunt. I remember Camille telling me of her youth as an itinerant leftist in Europe, attending meetings of the League of Nations, marching with Weimar-era German pacifists, and living in the Kingsley Hall settlement house in London, where one of her housemates was Gandhi.

Aunt Camille also shared with me a bit of family lore about my maternal grandmother, telling me my great-grandfather Frederick was part Mik’maq. When I relayed this to my father, he sneered and replied “No, he was Canadian.” (Though that's not the adjective he used.) The distinction, in Fred Doucette’s case, may have been one without a difference: his ancestors were Acadian, descended from a small group of French migrants who colonized Nova Scotia in the seventeenth century, intermarried with the Mik’maqs, and multiplied. (They had the highest population growth rate of any seventeenth-century American colony.) Some of the Doucettes avoided the ethnic-cleansing episode the French called “La Derangement,” but by the late nineteenth century my branch of the family had resettled in Massachusetts. There Frederick was born and there he met and married my great-grandmother, Frances Dougherty of Belfast. Of the Doughertys I know little, except that they were Catholics and named one of my great-aunts “Derry,” probably indicating their own provenance. I imagine they worked hard. Drank hard, too. Not all of our inheritances are beneficial.

Fortunately, most of my people have left me not only the wealth of their own experiences, but also a sense of obligation to others that extends beyond the limits of kinship and class identity. Researching and writing about the experiences of people who too often fall outside the mainstream of U.S. history, and recovering (where possible) the voices of those silenced by nationalist historians, represents for me a partial fulfillment of this obligation. Doing so also affirms that most of my people – coal miners, school teachers, Jewish socialists – don't fit into the historical mainstream either.