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  To Shalini

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  FOREWORD

  My earliest memories are of Tomlinson Hill, where my parents spent their early years. Living in my father’s house and spending days at my grandma Julie’s house filled me with joy. We ran up and down the dirt roads to visit cousins or to the store to buy candy. There was no area off-limits for us and we could do whatever, whenever we wanted. No cares in the world. But what I remember most is having a lot of brothers, sisters, and cousins and enjoying great picnics and family reunions on the Hill.

  We would often go to Grandma Julie’s house, and she would always love to have us sit on her lap. I could sit there for hours and watch TV with her. She was a great cook, and the breakfasts that she used to make were unbelievable. Bacon, scrambled eggs, and homemade sausage—everything came from the Hill. She was so gentle and always enjoyed having us around. She just had that kind of soul and personality that you gravitate to and, as a kid, I always felt like her favorite. She liked to keep everyone around the Hill. Three generations after the end of slavery, she felt like they could be safe there.

  We didn’t have much, but we didn’t know that. The family did their best to shelter us from the outside world. We were very self-sufficient. I used to help my dad tend to the pigs, and there was one particular pig I felt a bond with. It became my pig, the pig that I took care of the most. As a kid, it doesn’t hit home that pigs are your food. One day, my father took my brother and me to the house of one of his friends, and the men had hung a goat in the tree. That was our first lesson about butchering an animal and making it your dinner. I must have been six or seven years old and I was the type of kid who was very sensitive about killing animals. I didn’t take to it very well. I cried, and my father sat me down and said, “Son, this is what life is about.” Even after I left the Hill, the lessons I learned there remained a big part of me. I am still a country boy.

  My father, Oliver Terry “O.T.” Tomlinson, used to tell me that Tomlinson Hill got its name from our family, because that’s where our family originated from and it was where we had always been. That made me proud, because the Hill had my name on it. It was our place.

  My father, though, was just being protective of us, trying to shelter us from a tough world with a brutal history. My paternal grandfather, Vincent, died before I was born, and my father rarely talked about the family’s history. We learned about slavery in school, but the teachers didn’t talk about the slaveholding in Falls County. The only thing my father ever told me about Grandpa Vincent was that he worked long hours tending a farm and picking cotton for a white man, and that my dad wasn’t allowed to visit. My father never talked to me about his years picking cotton. I think he didn’t tell me because he was ashamed, for whatever reason. Or maybe he felt like I wasn’t ready to know the family history. O.T. was also born after his grandfather Peter had died, so I’m not sure how much he knew himself. Now that he’s gone, I’ll never know.

  Growing up, I had white friends, and to me this was totally normal. There was nothing odd or weird about it. I can’t recall a single time where there was a white person who tried to oppress me. I think sports makes a difference in how you see race, because you see people for who they are, and at times when they’re tired and they’re hurt. And so you get to see them for who they are, rather than thinking about their skin color, especially when you’re all trying to win a game, and after that game, when you celebrate winning. It’s a happy time when you’ve all worked together to accomplish one thing. To fight, and try to break that apart, just because of a difference in skin color—I always felt that was silly.

  When I got older, after my parents divorced, I began to experience what my dad and Grandma Julie had wanted to protect me from. During one high school football game, people in the crowd started calling me “nigger” after I scored a touchdown. I couldn’t believe this was happening in the 1990s. But then I realized that they were just trying to make me angry. They were trying to belittle me, put me back in the cotton fields, where my ancestors had suffered. They wanted to make me angry so they could have power over me, just as their ancestors had power over mine. More than anything, it made me run harder. I never let them have the power to make me angry. The best way to make someone like that mad is to ignore them, so that’s always been my approach.

  The one time that felt a little awkward was at the NFL Combine, where all of the teams send their staff to inspect potential draft picks. You stand in the middle of the room, wearing only your drawers, and you have all these personnel decision makers measuring you, looking at your body structure and all types of things. Many people say it looks a lot like an old slave auction block. But the difference is that you’re getting paid a king’s ransom to play a game. And so I know if I am a decision maker, I want to see the body structure of a man who has to play a physical, rough game to judge whether he can hold up. But it does kind of make you feel strange when you stand up there.

  I have retired from playing football now and am beginning the second act of my life. In all of my years as a running back, I have never run from my past. I look back at those early years on the Hill and realize that my family gave me a great perspective on life. Growing up in the country taught me self-reliance and an understanding of the circle of life. I know how important it is to understand your past in order to discover your future.

  The two Tomlinson families, white and black, have lived and worked together for almost two hundred years. I am happy that Chris and I can work together today, as sons of slaves and sons of slaveholders, to share our common history and what it says about our nation. Our families are far from unique, and by telling the story of our shared heritage, this book also tells a larger story about race in Texas and in America as a whole. I have learned through this book new details about six generations of my family, and it gives me pride and an understanding of what my father, grandfather, and great-grandfather went through to give me the opportunity to have the life I lead today.

  I have never been more proud to be a Tomlinson, or to come from Tomlinson Hill. I understand that while the Hill’s name may have come from a white man, it belongs as much to my family as to Chris’s. I hope to one day buy a ranch nearby and continue what my family has built, because it remains a part of me. I will also make sure the next generation of Tomlinsons knows our history. My son Daylen Oliver Tomlinson was born July 7, 2010, and, like me and my father, he will never know his grandfather. But I will make sure he knows
the story of Tomlinson Hill and carries its lessons wherever he may go.

  —LaDainian Tomlinson

  INTRODUCTION

  On a hot September afternoon, I stood in a cotton field in Falls County, Texas, with Charles Tomlinson, and he taught me a skill he had learned seventy-five years earlier, almost as soon as he could walk. To pick cotton, you have to stick your fingers into the boll, trying not to scrape your cuticles on the sharp, dried-out shell around the linty white ball. He told me this was the hard method but that the cotton would be cleaner for the gin. The quicker, easier method was to pull cotton. He grabbed the entire boll, shell and all, and pulled it off the shrub. I asked Charles, a former sharecropper, to teach me these skills so I could understand exactly what my ancestors had demanded from his ancestors, the slaves of Tomlinson Hill.

  Charles was immensely patient as we walked the Hill together, allowing me to pepper him and his wife, Zelma, with questions about the legacy of slavery and the Civil War and how it affected their family. Here I was, a blue-eyed middle-aged white man, asking him to drive from his home in Kansas to meet me on the Hill he had escaped, all so I could learn about his life as a sharecropper renting land from my relatives. He agreed to fulfill my childhood fantasy of living out Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream: to have the sons of slaves and the sons of slaveholders meet in brotherhood. I needed Charles’s help to tell the story of our two families, a small part of the story of America.

  Two families who share one name: One is white, the other black. Both trace their heritage to a Texas slave plantation that bore that name. The story begins with the first Tomlinson to arrive on the Hill and ends with the last Tomlinson to leave. For five years, I researched these two families and the larger events that shaped their lives.

  From this mosaic of accounts, I found some heroes and villains, but mostly I learned about people who wanted to give their children a life better than theirs. In reading letters and articles and listening to people tell their stories, I found a full chorus to tell the story of the Tomlinsons of Falls County. I have let people speak for themselves whenever possible, because they tell their stories better than I can. I don’t intend to provide a comprehensive history; I only want to examine America’s history of race and bigotry through the paternal lines of these two families.

  I come to this story after spending eleven years covering wars for The Associated Press, most of it in Africa, but with time also spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. I risked my life in nine war zones throughout those years because I believe in the journalistic mission to bear witness. Many times, I was the only foreign correspondent for hundreds of miles, either visiting child soldiers in Congo or interviewing al-Qaeda members in Somalia. I believe in revealing the facts, no matter how dangerous, to “write the first draft of history,” as Mark Twain said. In the same spirit of exposing injustices and atrocities where I find them, I don’t turn away from those I found within my own family history.

  Every conflict I covered included an element of bigotry. In South Africa, I covered the end of apartheid, a political system based on the supposed inferiority of blacks. In Rwanda, I reported on the country’s recovery from genocide. In Somalia, the most homogenous nation in the world, bigotry was based not on clan, but on sub-sub-clan. I found that in every instance, the bigotry was based on a human drive to divide ourselves up in order to hoard power and privilege. Science tells us that race, tribe, and clan have nothing do with biology—they are inventions of society.

  On my last trip to Rwanda, I tried to understand how a country could recover from the mass slaughter of one million members of a minority by several million members of the majority. I went to the village of Mayange, where I met Cecile Mukagasana, a Tutsi, and Xavier Nemeye, a member of the Hutu majority. They lived as neighbors, and their children played together in front of their huts. The two had undergone a reconciliation program, where, among other things, they learned about the myth of ethnic difference in their culture. They were learning to not be Hutu or Tutsi, but simply to be Rwandans.

  Xavier explained to me how he’d killed six of Cecile’s friends with a machete. He described the years he spent in an overcrowded prison, hoping for the chance to kill again. Eventually, though, he came to accept responsibility for his crimes with the help of a preacher. During the day we spent together, Xavier taught me something I’d never thought about. “When you confess and ask for forgiveness, you are asking that person for something,” he told me. “To forgive is to give something, and that is much more difficult than confessing.”

  Instead of asking Cecile and the rest of the victims in the village to forgive him, Xavier went to work constructing new homes for Cecile and the other genocide survivors. Cecile told me that watching and working with Xavier, listening to him take responsibility for what he’d done and witnessing his contrition was what finally made it possible for her to reconcile with him.

  In the eleven years I spent in Africa, I learned about many different forms of justice, from sharia law to blood price. The one thing all forms of justice share is the need to establish the truth about what happened, and why. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission because he understood the futility of jailing people for decades for crimes against humanity, but he also recognized the societal value of an honest accounting of the past. Only once the truth is known can there be true reconciliation.

  My heritage as a white Texan and my identity as a Tomlinson determined who I could become and what opportunities I could enjoy. I have borne witness to enough injustice, hatred, violence, and bigotry to know that the accident of one’s gender, race, nationality, and wealth determines one’s future more than one’s personal intelligence or motivation. I left Africa feeling a responsibility to discover what happened on my family’s land, to confront the possible crimes of my ancestors, and to examine if I had benefited from them. In beginning this book, I did not intend to ask for forgiveness, but to make an honest accounting. My great-great-grandfather owned slaves, and I know there is no such thing as a good slaveholder. But what crimes had my ancestors committed to maintain their power and privilege? Did they know what they did was wrong? As an American and Texan, I wanted to understand the sins of our fathers.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  They loved us so much, they took Tomlinson as their last name.

  —Tommy Tomlinson

  When I was a child, my father told me about Tomlinson Hill. He said it was not much of a hill; just a plot of flat land along the Brazos River. But it was the place our family came from, the origin of our Texaness. My great-grandfather bought the Hill in 1856, grew cotton, and owned slaves. Yet my father never took me there. I was told it was just a boring open field, with a picnic pavilion for Memorial Day barbecues and family reunions. My parents never went to those reunions, but other Tomlinsons did.

  When I spent the night at my grandparents’ house on Twin Tree Lane in Dallas, I slept in my father’s childhood bed. Stacked on a bookshelf in his room sat some old leather-bound scrapbooks. The articles, on amber-colored newsprint, were written in English and German. Most of them were about my grandmother’s family, the Fretzes, but I wanted to know what it meant to be a Tomlinson. I already knew my middle name, Lee, was my father’s middle name, my grandfather’s middle name, and my great-grandfather’s middle name. I found a folded-up obituary for a Robert Edward Lee Tomlinson in the back of one scrapbook. He was born on Tomlinson Hill in 1861.

  The old family photos and newspaper articles talked about Texas Rangers, cowboys, and proud southerners. My father had told me I was a fifth-generation Texan, something few white people could claim. There was also talk about a Tomlinson who died defending the Alamo. The clippings suggested an epic family history, and I created elaborate fantasies about my ancestors and their exploits.

  The reality of my home life prompted much of this. My father, Bob Tomlinson, co-owned a bowling-supply shop with his father. We didn’t have much money, and Dad spent his eveni
ngs and weekends in bowling alleys. When he was home, my parents fought, usually about money and often about my father’s lack of ambition. He was overweight, wore his hair long, and had a 1970s mustache. He wore garish shirts and high-heeled boots and listened to jazz on Sunday mornings in his bathrobe. He believed in corporal punishment, usually administered with a belt.

  My paternal grandfather, Albert “Tommy” Tomlinson, was a taciturn man, and he and my father fought a lot, too. My memories of him are few, but I know he wore a small gray Stetson, which made him look like President Lyndon B. Johnson. My grandmother Mary cautioned me not to make a lot of noise or bother him while I was at their house, as he was easily angered. I spent most of my time in the kitchen with her and their African-American housekeeper, Faye.

  So I was excited to find the scrapbooks. The obituaries and anniversary notices mentioned Tomlinson Hill but provided no details. When I asked about it, relatives provided me with only one fact about the old slave plantation: When emancipation came, the former slaves had taken our name as their own. There were black Tomlinsons, too.

  To a white boy growing up in the midst of civil rights turmoil in Dallas, this was a staggering revelation. In the early 1970s, it was perhaps the most important topic in Dallas, where the school board was dragging its feet on desegregation and everyone worried about the consequences. Parents and activists, teachers and politicians, liberals and conservatives were all fighting over how to deal with generations of bigotry and discrimination. We watched race riots sparked by busing in Boston on the nightly news, and I wondered if that would happen at my school.

  Before he died, on New Year’s Eve in 1973, my grandfather tried to make me proud of being a Texan. My father tried to keep me from becoming a racist. And bringing both points home in my young imagination was the knowledge that somewhere in rural Texas there were black Tomlinsons who shared our heritage.

  My ancestors had owned their ancestors.