The right to voice and agency is long overdue for a Mississippi woman who was unprotected and maimed 122 years ago.
It’s been nearly three years since I sat in my parents’ carport with my dad, listening to his patchwork of recollections surrounding our family’s history on the land where we both grew up in Lincoln County, specifically Brookhaven, Miss. Property that he, his brothers and his deceased sister’s sons now own originally belonged to his great-grandfather, Jacob Hilson.
Dad introduced me to pieces of the Hilson-Black lineage, prompting my interest in researching our ancestry. Soon afterward, I learned that the Hilson side of my family is more well-studied than I would have ever imagined. Every resource I read nurtured the familial interconnectedness I’ve always felt. One name, however, kept appearing in artifacts: Hannah Kelly Hilson, my third great-aunt who, born in 1865, was married to Grandpa Jacob’s brother, Eli Hilson Jr.
Perusing census records, newspaper articles, museum exhibits, a Congressional record, a National Park Service report and blog posts, I noticed that each time I saw her name, she was only briefly referenced; no documents focused on her in particular. The obscurity surrounding her life remains deeply unsettling.
An Ancestral Connection
I am a mother. It is my single, most favorite thing about myself. Through my maternal gaze, I found Hannah to be more compelling than any other ancestor.
An article published on Dec. 23, 1903, in the Brookhaven, Miss., newspaper The Leader says that Hannah gave birth to her 11th child on Nov. 18 that year. She was 38 years old at the time. Just a few hours later, as she lay in bed holding her baby, bullets riddled their home. Whitecaps, members of a violent movement organized to intimidate Black farmers into selling or abandoning their land, had fired at the Hilsons in an act of unjustified retaliation. They were sending a message to Hannah’s 39-year-old husband for ignoring their prior warnings to leave his 74-acre farm, which he owned.
Instantly, Hannah took a front-row seat in my heart. If nothing more, she and I are interwoven through our shared experiences of giving birth, and we were stitched together through Hilson land.
Otherwise, our stories diverge.
Centering the Voices of Survivors
That November, Hannah didn’t get a chance to heal from pain that childbirth inflicts or to absorb the joy it evokes, nor did she harvest crops from the life she and her husband built together.
About four weeks after gunshots terrorized her family, Whitecaps continued to ravage their lives.
On Dec. 20, 1903, Eli dropped off one of the couple’s younger daughters at a relative’s home for the holidays, but when the family’s horse trotted home pulling Eli’s buggy, Hannah discovered his lifeless, mutilated body inside. The young farmer had been lynched. In a final act of retaliation, Oscar Franklin, a Whitecap, had shot him. The Leader reported, “The bullet which killed him entered the side of his head near the ear and came out at the mouth. Death seems to have been instantaneous.” The Whitecaps had psychologically eviscerated Hannah and the rest of Eli’s family.
A congressional record, dated Feb. 6, 2002, reflects Hannah’s struggle to raise their children and work the farm. She could not manage without her husband and lost the property through a mortgage foreclosure in 1905. Land records reveal that S.P. Oliver, a member of the county board of supervisors, purchased the farm for $439.
Outside of family lore, which suggests that Hannah died shortly after her husband’s lynching and was found frozen to death with one of their younger children, no other documentation exists about her, to my knowledge.
Since returning home to Mississippi from Detroit in 2017, I have celebrated my known ancestors by putting flowers on their graves at the start of spring, summer and fall.
Traveling the paths of our history, I became familiar with ancestors whom I never physically met. I learned that Uncle Eli Jr., his father (Eli Hilson Sr., my third-great-grandfather), and his brother (Jacob, my second-great-grandfather) are all buried at the church where my extended family gathered throughout my childhood, the Greater Mt. Olive M.B. Church in Brookhaven.
Their graves are unmarked, but at least I have the comfort of knowing that when I take flowers to my grandparents, I am also in the resting place of other relatives who came before them—people who undoubtedly played major roles in building the foundation on which I stand.
In Uncle Eli’s case, I found peace in learning that his story was heard across the country and that Judge James Wilkinson sentenced the man who lynched him to life in prison in 1904.
In addition to making my routine flower deliveries, I can visit monoliths honoring Uncle Eli at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson, Miss. For him, there was some justice to an extent. His life is still publicly acknowledged to this day, and I will forever celebrate that.
For Hannah, though, there are no monoliths or tangible representations of her humanity. I couldn’t even locate any records of when she died or where she is buried.
The best way that I can give her flowers is to #SayHerName as often as possible: #HannahKellyHilson.
Special thanks to Linda Durr Rudd (genealogist) and Carolyn Betts (Hilson family griot).
This MFP Voices opinion essay does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.