Griot: a member of a class of traveling poets, musicians, and storytellers who maintain a tradition of oral history in parts of West Africa.

Curtis Hardison’s new book Griot: The Evolution of Edgecombe tells the story of a little African American community near Topsail Island called Edgecombe. Hardison grew up there, and his book chronicles his extraordinary journey in search of the community’s roots.

It is a journey that takes him back to the North Carolina coast in the early 1800s, then to the British colony of Jamaica and ultimately all the way to the shores of Africa.

The community that he calls home is the kind of place that most of us drive by without a thought. Edgecombe is located in the southeast corner of Pender County, just off U.S. Highway 17 and a few miles from Topsail Sound. It is not even a spot on the map.

Edgecombe may be small, but Hardison’s story is not. Griot is one of those rare and special books that looks closely at the history of one place, but sheds bright light on much of North Carolina’s coastal history.

Edgecombe’s Griot

Hardison builds the book around his visit to the woman who was the keeper of Edgecombe’s history when he was younger. He and his family called her “CunHuldaJane,” and she was nearly 90 years old when he sought her out back in 1987.

CunHuldaJane was the Rev. Hulda Jane Alexander. But in Edgecombe and the African American community just up the road, Woodside, everybody referred to her as either “CunHuldaJane” or “Sister.”

Back then, when Hardison was in his early 40s, he had told his mother that he wanted to create a “family tree” charting his ancestors.

He especially wanted to know more about “Uncle Tuney” and “Aunt Janey,” his great-great-great-great grandparents.

From the time that he was a child, his elders had told him that Tuney and Janey had been his earliest ancestors on the North Carolina coast. They told him that the couple arrived there in chains, and he was instructed that nearly everybody in Edgecombe and Woodside was descended from them.

His mother told him that if he wanted to know more about Janey and Tuney, he should go see CunHuldaJane.

In West Africa, the Mande, Fula, Hausa and many other peoples have traditionally had individuals who act as griots, meaning that they serve as keepers of a people’s oral traditions. In the eyes of Hardison’s mother, the Rev. Hulda Jane Alexander was the griot for the community of Edgecombe, though she was far from Africa in both time and space.

In Griot, Hardison recalls how CunHuldaJane welcomed him into her home. She was happy that a younger person was interested in Edgecombe’s history. She told him that she would be glad to tell him what she knew.

The old woman then reclined on the couch in her parlor. After he took a seat on the floor near her, she began to tell the story.

“Now Curtis, I was born on April 4 in 1898,” she told him. “That was thirty-three years after slavery ended. Now everybody knows that Aunt Janey and Uncle Tuney, they came here on a slave ship from Jamaica and was brought fresh off that ship up near Norfolk, Virginia.”

Janey and Tuney were CunHuldaJane’s great-grandparents. And that was just the beginning of the story. She went on to tell young Hardison about Janey and Tuney being sold on an auction block in Norfolk.

She told him how the couple was shipped south to Sloop Point, in what was then New Hanover County, N.C. (now Pender County), 5 miles south of where Edgecombe is today.

She told him how Janey and Tuney arrived in chains and were confined on a plantation owned by a white man named Jessie W. Batts.

CunHuldaJane went on to say that Batts treated Janey and Tuney like livestock and forced them and more than 40 other enslaved laborers to grow peanuts and tobacco for him.

She told him that Janey and Tuney had eight children. She remembered all their names: Dempsey, Burrell, Stoke, Praw, Peggy, Hetta, Polly, and Willis. The first of them, Dempsey, was her grandfather.

“He was born in 1810,” CunHuldaJane told young Hardison. “His wife . . . Hulda, who I was named after, was born in 1831 over in Rocky Point, where they grew rice, but the slave master brought her down here and put her with my granddaddy.”

That phrase of CunHuldaJane’s—”put her with my granddaddy”—says a lot. Her grandmother was not allowed to choose her own husband, and her grandfather was not allowed to choose his own wife. Yet they made a life together, and a family.

While CunHuldaJane spoke, Hardison sat at her feet and scribbled away in his notebook. Reading his book now, I get the feeling that he breathed in her words, holding them deep inside his chest.

A Journey to West Africa

That was just the beginning of Hardison’s odyssey. CunHuldaJane passed away in 1991, but for the next 30 years he continued to build on the gift of knowledge that she had given him.

His life took him far from Edgecombe. He served in the U.S. Air Force, and he had a long career in the U.S. Secret Service Uniformed Division in Washington, DC.

But whenever he had a little free time, Hardison returned to Edgecombe and talked with other elders about the community’s history. He did extensive genealogical research. He studied census records, deeds, and other historical documents.

Through DNA analysis, he even traced Janey and her ancestors to the Tikar people in what is now Cameroon. And he traced Tuney and his ancestors to the Umbundu people of Angola.

He also identified another key ancestor, whom he calls Sangho Shook, as being descended from the Biaka people in what is now the Central African Republic.

She was his third great-grandmother on his mother’s side, and the name he gave her—because history does not record her name– means “mother of many” in Bantu, the Biaka’s tribal language.

According to his family’s stories, Sango Shook was an enslaved house servant at the Sidbury plantation next to the plantation owned by Jessie W. Batts. Those stories also say that the owner of the Sidbury plantation routinely raped Sango Shook in the plantation’s cookhouse.

Relating Sango Shook’s story, Hardison describes how the rapist eventually impregnated Sango Shook. She gave birth to a daughter by him in 1858.

That daughter, Harriette, grew up and married one of Janey and Tuney’s grandsons. They had 10 children, one of whom, Fanny, had a daughter named Minnie, who had a daughter named Ethel, who had a son named Curtis, who grew up and became the kind of man that listened to the stories of his elders and wrote a book called Griot: The Evolution of Edgecombe.

He became, in short, a griot himself.

Curtis Hardison wrote this book to honor his ancestors, but he has given us all a gift not to be taken lightly: the privilege of spending a little time in the presence of those ancestors ourselves.

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You can order Griot: The Evolution of Edgecombe at Amazon and other leading booksellers.

Curtis Hardison will be reading and signing books in Pender County later this spring:

At the Pender Arts Gala in Burgaw on Saturday April 29th.

At the Hampstead Branch Library on Thursday May 4th at 6 pm.

At the Burgaw Main Library on Friday May 5th at 5 pm.

And at Springfest in Downtown Burgaw on Saturday May 6th.

You can call the Pender Arts Council to confirm times and dates at (910) 259-1200.