Biography and the Black Atlantic

Chapter 9. Remembering his Country Marks: A Nigerian American Family and its “African” Ancestor

Chapter nine Remembering His Country Marks: A Nigerian American Family and Its “African” Ancestor lisa a. lindsay In the mid-1850s, James Churchwill Vaughan accomplished a feat that no other African American had ever done: he traveled to Africa and found his ancestral family. Born and raised in South Carolina, James was the son of a Yoruba man known as Scipio Vaughan, who had been captured in what is now Nigeria in the late eighteenth century. On his deathbed in the 1840s, and perhaps having heard of the American Colonization Society, Scipio had urged his nine children to find his African motherland. When James Vaughan got the chance, in 1852, he enlisted as a Liberian colonist, leaving his siblings and widowed mother in South Carolina. Three years later, he joined a party of Southern Baptist missionaries passing through Liberia on the way to “Yoruba country.” In what became southwestern Nigeria, James Vaughan met people bearing what he recognized as his father Scipio’s “tribal marks,” who embraced him as a long-lost relative. Ultimately, however, they did not accept him into their community because he was a Christian, and Vaughan remained instead in the orbit of the missionaries with whom he was then working and living. In nineteenth-century Yorubaland, “tribal marks” (or “country marks”) were typically cut into the skin of children to show to what political and geographic communities they belonged. Drawings of several design varieties, labeled by geographic origin, appear in Samuel Johnson’s monumental History of the Yorubas, written in the late 1800s largely from oral traditions collected at the royal court in Oyo.1 Such facial scars were especially important in the 193 Remembering His Country Marks era of the slave trade, and in fact only free members of communities, not slaves, were marked. One observer wrote that “tribal marks” allowed people to trace children carried away into slavery.2 So in Vaughan’s story, tribal marks, in essence, did what they were supposed to do: they allowed kin and community members dispersed by the slave trade to find each other again. If Vaughan did not go live with the people bearing his father’s country marks, it was because of religious and cultural differences; still, he knew who his people were and how to find them. Moreover, he knew who his ancestors were. Thus Vaughan was able, in some sense, to undo the natal alienation that the slave trade had imposed on him and his family. Vaughans both in Nigeria and the United States have been repeating the story of James Vaughan’s encounter with his father’s scar-bearing countrymen for generations. In 1925, James Vaughan’s daughter Aida Arabella Vaughan Moore brought the story to the American branch of the family when she traveled to the United States to visit relatives and place her daughter in school. The cousin who hosted Mrs. Moore in Camden, South Carolina repeated the story; years later the cousin’s daughter Mabel Smythe wrote that she had heard it as a child.3 In 1975, a more detailed version was printed in a feature article on the Vaughan family in Ebony magazine.4 Since then, Nigerian and American Vaughans have made the Ebony article the authoritative source on their family’s trans-Atlantic history, and they repeat the version printed there. The problem with the tribal marks story is that it is unlikely to be true. In 1869, James Vaughan’s American niece Maria Sophronia Lauly began compiling an extensive family history in the front pages of a stately new Bible. Her first entry, under “Marriages,” was the 1815 union of her grandparents (and the parents of James Vaughan), Scipio Vaughan and Maria Conway. On the next page, under “Births,” she wrote of her grandfather, “Sippio Vaughan was born March the 26th in Richman [sic] Virginia 1780.” 5 Other evidence also casts Scipio Vaughan’s alleged African origin into doubt. In the documentation from South Carolina where Scipio Vaughan’s name appears, he is described as a “negro,” not an African. His master, Camden planter and newspaper publisher Wilie Vaughan, wrote in his 1814 will “that the annual Labour of my negro man Scipio be appropriated as a fund for the education of my Children.” Eight years later, the executor of Wilie Vaughan’s will listed sums earned through the hired labor of the “Negro Scipio.”6 Finally, very few Africans from the Bight of Benin (the broad region encompassing Yorubaland) arrived in Virginia or the Carolinas...