In memory of George Beatty, Jr.

A little less than three years ago, in May of 2021,  I spent a day with George Beatty, Jr. down in what used to be the rice plantation district of the Lower Cape Fear.

We met at his mother and father’s farm in Cedar Hill, a rural community that is now part of Navassa, a historically African American town that is located just a few miles from Wilmington, N.C., on the west side of the Cape Fear River.

Mr. Beatty had invited me to come and see the restoration work that was underway at Reaves Chapel, a now abandoned AME church that is one of the oldest African American buildings on that southeastern part of the North Carolina coast.

Mr. Beatty had been born in Cedar Hill in 1938. He attended the local schools, then left home so that he could go to Greensboro and earn an electrical engineering degree at N.C. A&T. After graduating, he had a long and accomplished career at NASA.

He traveled all over the world, but when he retired, he came back to Brunswick County. And once he was home, he put his heart and soul into making sure that Cedar Hill’s history would be remembered.

As we walked around the farm, we talked about the orchards and gardens, and what his father and mother used to grow, and of course we talked about Cedar Hill’s history.

He told me that Cedar Hill was one of a host of rural communities on that western side of the Cape Fear River that African Americans had established after the Civil War.

Mr. Beatty reminded me that people used to refer to that tidal section of the Cape Fear as the “Rice Kingdom.” Until the Civil War, sprawling rice plantations, worked by thousands of enslaved laborers, lined that whole side of the river, a kind of gulag of their times.

When the African American men and women on those plantations were liberated, they set off to build their own communities, and Cedar Hill, Mr. Beatty told me, was one of them.

After walking around the farm, Mr. Beatty and I got into his car.  We pulled out onto the Cedar Hill Road, then followed the Cape Fear north, with him telling me stories about every little creek and settlement.

He guided me through the communities of Hooperstown, Jenkinsville, Old Bridge, Northwest, and Phoenix. He also showed me the locations of other settlements that are only a memory now.

We visited the former sites of antebellum rice fields and slave quarters. We wandered into woods and traced the paths of old roads where coffles of enslaved Africans, chained one to another, had once been driven from a landing just north of Wilmington up the Cape Fear.

We explored lost cemeteries. We walked on the ruins of rice field levees and dams. He told stories of baseball teams and hunting trips, and he showed me a creek where his mother’s church used to hold baptisms.

We passed the relics of two or three old juke joints, including one that, he said, had been run by a tough, no-nonsense woman who was always doing things to help the down and out.

At one point, when we turned onto Mount Misery Road, he showed me the former site of the Phoenix Graded School. He reminisced about his childhood years there, and he told me how much the school’s teachers had meant in his life.

Later that morning, we met Mr. Beatty’s brother Alfonso and several other community activists at Reaves Chapel. When he retired and moved back home, he and Alfonso had founded the Cedar Hill/West Bank Heritage Foundation to raise the funds necessary to restore the church.

(Alfonso Beatty still chairs the group’s board of directors.)

Survivors of the rice plantation called Cedar Hill had built Reaves Chapel sometime just after the Civil War. That was a mile east, near the banks of the Cape Fear. In 1911, rolling the building on logs, hauling it by oxen, the congregation had moved the church to its present location.

Later in the day, we all walked back through the woods to visit the church’s original site. There were still daffodils blooming in what used to be the churchyard.

As we walked through the woods, Mr. Beatty told me that they were working to make Reaves Chapel into the crown jewel of a new historical and cultural center highlighting the African American experience on that section of the Lower Cape Fear.

As part of their vision, he told me, the new center would also be included in a National Heritage Area, created by the U.S. Congress in 2006, called the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor.

After exploring the area around Reaves Chapel, we drove back to the Beatty family’s farm. Sitting out in the yard, we talked some more about Cedar Hill’s history and why he and his brother and so many other people cared so much for the old church.

Mr. Beatty was then 82 years old, and he was 85 when he passed away a few days after Christmas. I will never forget sitting out there in the yard with him, listening to him talk about why remembering Cedar Hill’s history was so important to him.

He told me that he just wanted his ancestors, their ancestors, to be remembered. He wanted them, he said, to get the credit they deserve for their toughness and for surviving and not giving up. He wanted them, he said, to be remembered for all they sacrificed for their children, and for all they gave the world.

As I listened, I realized that his feelings on the subject somehow ran even deeper, to a place beyond words, and that they were part of his bones and sinew and even the timbre of his voice.

According to his obituary, Mr. George Beatty will be laid to rest at Johnson’s Chapel AME Zion Church, in the land of his ancestors. May he rest in peace. And may those of us still living not let him down, now that the responsibility for remembering falls on us.