Southern Cultures

Abstract:

This essay focuses on the author's search to find out more information about Phill Barkley, her great-grandfather who was murdered by a white man in Jim Crow southwest Georgia. The author uses the genealogical search as a framework to explore larger ideas of trauma and memory as grounding narratives in southern black families, the role of black women as gatekeepers to those memories and trauma, and the challenge of reclaiming black people lost and cast to the side of history in the American South.