From High Tea to Big Cotton to Jim Crowe

Discovering a Bit of My Immigration Story

John Sparkman –Director of Music Ministries

Throughout the season of Lent, HSLC is celebrating journeys of immigration—in the Bible, in the world around us, and in our families. While I obviously knew that my ancestors came from somewhere besides the US, all I have ever known of my family’s background is that we were Southern. All of my relatives that I am aware of come from Eastern North Carolina back about 4 generations, beyond which, until recently, I didn’t know anything.

We had some guesses and hunches, though. Once, on a trip to Disneyworld, when I was about 8 or 9, in the middle of nowhere Georgia, my family passed abridge over “Sparkman Creek,” did a quick U-turn in the deserted country road, and shot this picture.

I’ve always had a thing for dramatic poses, clearly. So, we wondered if we might have some roots there. Also, for several years, we were invited by mail to a Sparkman Family reunion in Georgia, but the photo included only folks that were African-American, so we figured that, at best, we might feel a bit out of place were we to attend at the time. Still, my family thought we might have some distant connections to one of the original penal colonies of Great Britain! Outlaws from way back!

Now being from the South, like any place, has its positives and negatives.

There is great food, like pork BBQ made by my Dad, David, who is an expert pig pickin’ preparer for all kinds of community events. This comes with his secret spicy apple cider-based vinegar sauce(that is the right kind), fried everything and SWEEEEEEEET tea. There are long, warm sandy beaches with an ocean that is warm as bath water in the summer. There are ancient, worn-down, green mountains that would be considered hills if in Seattle. People smile and wave on the street and from cars.

Also, while not limited to the South, there is the legacy of slavery and segregation. Not unlike most religious communities across the US, Sunday morning is probably the most segregated time of the week in my hometown of St. Pauls, which remains mostly self-segregated by neighborhood too. I have clear memories of racial slurs said to Black students at school and several friends whose parents had collections of minstrel dolls and figurines. When February’s Black History Month assemblies took place each year, I recall many white kids openly refusing to sing the Black National Anthem Lift Every Voice and Sing. Also, though I never risked the chance of being open, the church communities I served in my home state before moving to Indiana and then Washington almost certainly would not have accepted my calling as a Christian musician who embraced his gay orientation. So, behind the often-so-earnest veneer of friendly smiles and waves, there is also a sense of deep separation, a halting acceptance of differences, and a violent history of centuries of discrimination.

I haven’t lived in my hometown since I was 18, and visited only rarely–preferring that warm sandy beach on most trips home-so hopefully most everyone gets a wave now, and fewer people are left out. So, I knew I was Southern and was aware pretty early-on of many great things and the deep pitfalls of that heritage, probably cause some of the pitfalls affected me personally, more than any great awareness of how it affected others. Still, I wanted to learn more, especially knowing that HSLC would be exploring our immigrant stories this season, and had no clue what my “old country” was. So, by special request, Santa delivered an AncestryDNA test kit this Christmas (Thanks Mom!), and I just got the results not long ago.

Below are some images that show the movement of my ancestors over time.

Circa 1700

Circa 1750

Circa 1775

So, through the mysterious magic of modern DNA science, I have learned that all my ancestors immigrated to Eastern NC and SC prior to the Revolutionary War. I have no immigration to the US past 1775 and very little inter-US movement...though it does look like somebody went to live it up in the Big Easy, probably even prior to the Louisiana purchase. This explains why I didn’t know much about where I was “from” prior to North Carolina. We’ve been there a long time!

Learning this has been eye opening. With 87% of my lineage coming from Britain during the colonial period with immigration to Southern colonies has some obvious implications. Calling on my excellent US History teacher, Bette Fulghum, RIP, I learned that such folks were probably landed gentry active in plantation life, with all the terrible history around race, slavery, and exploitation that history carries with it.

Still, learning this has opened gifts to me as well. It has reinvigorated and deepened in me my long-held desire to seek honest racial reconciliation. Conversely, it has made me proud to know that it is likely that at least some of my ancestors fought as scrappy underdogs in a dramatic revolution against an empire ruled by an overbearing and unfair king. However, many Southerners were loyalists, so much more research is needed to validate that dream.

It has taught me that no matter how far back one’s history in the US and its predecessor colonies may lead, almost everyone still came from somewhere else, even if doing so displaced vibrant Native American cultures with disease and warfare, and built its economy on the backs of people brought here in bondage against their will, legacies that continue to this day.

So, while many in the HSLC community might have lutefisk, lefsa, and Aquavit in their culinary heritage, I get to enjoy pig pickins, collards, and anything you can imagine that is fried when I go home. Plus, moonshine really isn’t all that different than Aquavit after all. And maybe I know why I enjoy The Crown so much, too.

But more important than any food heritage, I also now carry the knowledge that I am positioned, by the inherited, definitely not wanted, underlying privilege of my race and immigration history, to be a force for change in a country that is still so clearly divided by walls created even before the nation’s founding—walls of our own making from long, long ago that still cry to be torn completely down. I pray that God might guide me to live into that gift of my immigration story.