The Department of Veterans Affairs conducted a memorial service with military honors for George B. Booker at Fort Logan National Cemetery on Friday. It’s hard to say what was more remarkable — that George B. Booker died 104 years ago or that this service was 17 years in the making.
Honor thy father and mother, Shirley Booker Rogers says. Or, as the case may be, great-grandfather.
George B. Booker was a Tennessee slave who ran away when he was 18 to join the 17th Colored Infantry Regiment of the Union Army in 1864. He fought in the Battle of Nashville and drew a monthly salary of $14.68. Shirley pondered long on that fact.
“We’d been here more than 200 years, working six days a week, sunup to sundown, and George Booker was the first person in our family to get paid for working.”
Shirley, now 75, knew none of this 17 years ago. She was the last person born on the Kansas farm her great-grandpa Booker homesteaded. Her family moved when she was a child. Shirley spent three years in college, worked as a commercial artist and photographer, joined the Navy WAVES, traveled halfway around the world. In 1994, her aunt Opal mentioned that great-grandma Nancy Clarinda “Clarissa” Booker had changed Shirley’s diapers.
“She said Grandma Clarissa had lived until she was 96 years old, and I said, ‘My God, I can go back 100 years in my family history,’ ” Shirley says. Within two years, she had traced her great-grandparents from the Kansas homestead to a Tennessee plantation.
“Now, this is going to blow your mind,” Shirley tells me. “I get all my stuff together, and I walked in the Denver Public Library, and I walked up to the fifth floor, and there was a young man sitting there. And I said, ‘Hello, I’m Shirley Booker Rogers, and I’m looking up my grandpa George Booker. He was born in Virginia, I think.’ “
The librarian stood up, beckoned her to a shelf, pulled a book on Virginia families and said, “Hello, cuz,” Shirley recalls. “He was a descendant of the Bookers of Virginia. I learned his family was related to the family that owned mine. Can you imagine, 225 years later we meet?”
That’s about right, says James Jeffrey, recalling his first meeting with Shirley. Jeffrey has been the staff genealogist in the library’s Western History and Genealogy department for more than 26 years. “My Booker ancestor was sister to the Bookers that owned Shirley’s family in the 1740s,” he says.
That was reality, Jeffrey says, a network of black and white, slave and owner, freed person of color and overseer, living among the same society, bound to each other. Genealogists have a responsibility not just to acknowledge that network of kin, he says, but to research it. Shirley did that.
“If there is a stone she left unturned, I don’t know about it,” Jeffrey says. “She had a double burden, and she did what most people did not do and do not do. She never would have found her black family without tracing the white owners.”
Seventeen years of visits to libraries around the country, following a trail of census records, land patents, military archives, freedmen’s bank accounts, wills. “To my three youngest daughters (I leave) . . . 230 acres in Madison Co., Tenn. . . . $6,000 in slaves each.”
Is it possible to draw a direct line from individual to individual, from Shirley Booker back to specific ancestors she believes wealthy Englishman George Booker bought in Virginia in 1632? It is not. But later records of the black Bookers provided birthplaces and approximate ages and names that can be matched to the movements and inheritances of the white Bookers. Oral history and inference fill in the rest.
“I have driven my family crazy for over 10 years,” Shirley says. “I think I was determined to answer some kind of calling. I don’t know what it was, but it’s not just my grandpa’s history; it’s part of the history of America.”
The memorial service seemed a natural conclusion to the search. The VA here welcomed the idea, as did local chapters of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, which helped with the arrangements.
Funeral services are always part remembrance and part resurrection. The dead are summoned to us in memory, in story, in the presence of the descendants. That George B. Booker died a century ago, that his unmarked grave lies elsewhere, its whereabouts unknown, that the granddaughter, great-granddaughters and great-great-grandson attending Friday’s service never knew him does not diminish the power of the service.
On the contrary, its pageantry, its geometry — the crack of rifle volleys, one, two, three; the mournful trumpet; the unfolding and refolding of the flag — extend not just sympathy to the family but dignity to the life now passed.
“My grandpa was a runaway slave and a Union soldier,” Shirley told the small gathering. “The word ‘slave’ eliminates a person from being human.
“They had names. George and Clarissa and Eddie and Marie and Peaches. They had names, and they were willing to serve their country with honor. What you’ve done for us, my family are no longer called slaves. My granddaughter will know all this and will hold her head up high.”
Friday’s service should be understood for what it was. More than remembrance, more than resurrection, it was an act of reclamation.
Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
