Waking Up To Our Common Roots

Back in 1952, Will Slayden – then almost seventy years old – was a sharecropper in West Tennessee. A folk music collector heard that Slayden played banjo, and he found the old black man working the fields with his mule.

Slayden hadn’t owned a banjo in twenty years, so the collector loaned him his five-string banjo.

Slayden played tunes in what he called "drag thumb," and Will’s wife Emma joined in to sing a few gospel songs. The folklorist recorded the Slaydens singing and playing.

The story of Will and Emma Slayden caught my attention because I, too, am a Slayden with roots in Tennessee.

When I was a child, my father on special occasions would unroll the Slayden family tree. We would all gaze respectfully at the fading blue-print, so big that it covered our dining room table.

The tree, prepared decades before by an ancient great-aunt, purported to record the birth, death and marriage of every Slayden going back to 1545.

But the old family tree, comprehensive as it was, left out not only Will and Emma Slayden, but their entire branch of the family – the African-American Slaydens. Curious, I set out to find the African-American Slaydens. Where did they come from? What connected our families?

After digging up shards of family history and scouring the Internet, I discovered that the link between the black Slaydens and the white Slaydens began in slave times. To my surprise, I learned that my great-great-great grandfather William Everett Slayden kept slaves at his homestead in Dickson County, Tennessee.

This is the story of three African-American families – Julia Slayden, Allen Slayden and Rufus Slayden.

These African-American Slaydens did not, of course, choose to be part of our family. But they did take on the family name; and for nearly a century, the Slaydens – both white and African-American – lived and worked together in the hills of Dickson County, Tennessee.

Our families are inextricably bound by this shared history. I hope that telling the story of Julia, Allen and Rufus Slayden – painful as it is – will kindle a spirit of forgiveness. Hopefully, telling this story will help us “find that common stake we all have in one another.”