I found some of my writing from 2014 when I was a senior at Carolina. I don’t remember saving it, but I realized why I did once I opened the file. It was a class assignment where I grappled with the information gaps caused by enslavement and why mapping my genealogy was my attempt to close them. It begins with a name: Columbus Fortune.
The allure and mystery of Columbus Fortune, a distant relative whom I know little aside from his name, continue to haunt me. I think of him often. Who was this man? Who was he to my ancestors? Why can’t I stop thinking about him? There are moments when I pace the floors of my home and allow his name to roll through the corridors of my mind. Columbus Fortune. What a powerful name. Did he choose that name? Or was it forced upon him after the name his mother gave him was snatched from his tongue? Not far behind this persistent questioning are recollections of the ugly systems that flattened his memory to a name scribbled in my Nana’s bible. That assignment, and the research that went into it, was my attempt at reverence.
I’m not sharing the original piece because it was poorly written. Embarrassingly so. And while I don’t like the prose, I remain fascinated by my process.
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Google searches for “Columbus Fortune” yielded multiple Columbus, South Carolina-based Chinese restaurants with “Fortune” in the title. “Columbus Fortune slave” led me to the parables of Christopher Columbus and how he was “fortunate” enough to discover the Americas while omitting that there were people here long before he set sail. A third search for “how to trace slave ancestry” landed me on multiple sites that either claimed they could find my grandfather or refuted any possibility that discovering him in the records would occur.
Persistence proved the random websites I was clicking through wrong. Soon enough, I found his existence in the 1870 census. The names of enslaved people were much more difficult to pin down before the first census post-Emancipation. Slave schedules only recorded race, age, and sex—with exceptions so rare it didn’t feel worth considering at the time. Another way to find folks was if they were free.
Columbus Fortune was, likely, not a free man before the late 1860s. But by 1870, he was a twenty-something living in Georgia with his wife, Vina. This information set a fire sprinting through my veins. I’d finally found a faint connection. My great-great grandmother’s name was Vinnie, which could have been a derivative of Vina, and she was born in Georgia in 1908.
This glimmer of hope caused me to revisit some information I’d found earlier. Someone of a similar name—honestly, this is an assumption since the original work is poorly written and omitted any clarity here—was laid to rest in Mocksville, North Carolina, in 1920. Mocksville is where Grandma Vinnie married my great-great-grandfather, James. Their marriage records provided me with the names of her parents: William F. and Lula Jones. Her maternal grandparents were O.B. Jackson and Vina Wood.
There it was: Vina.
While I couldn’t find any formal documents connecting Vina Wood to Columbus Fortune or his wife, it’s more than plausible that he migrated up to North Carolina in the 30 years between the 1890 census and his death. Data from the 1900 census places all of these people in Mocksville. I’m also not someone who believes in coincidences—especially when there’s this much overlap.
Still, I have no concrete proof that anything I found is correct. It’s possible that Vina Wood and Columbus Fortune were related somehow. The dates are a bit too wonky to say how. But I’d learn this year while reporting a piece for NBC BLK that:
Black folks commonly named their children after other family members. The conditions of enslavement allowed for someone to be sold as many as six times. Naming — whether it was someone’s first or last — was a strategy used by enslaved people to maintain familial ties despite being forcibly separated.
Discovering our lineage can sometimes be like a game of telephone. Information is passed along by word of mouth, written within the pages of our family’s Bibles, and susceptible to the distortions of human language. Before she died in 2011, my Grandma Vinnie would have been the closet player to the source. And if I’d gotten this assignment before her passing, I would have asked her two questions: Did he choose that name? Or was it forced upon him after the name his mother gave him was snatched from his tongue?