3X Great Grandson Remembers

cnnireport.com, GCunningham
July 2009

Lucretia Perryman was born in the Carolinas in 1836. She ended up in Mobile, Alabama by way of Missouri and New Orleans according to the birth places of three of her children on the census data. She married a man by the name of Marshall Perryman. Marshall and Lucretia purchased property on the fringes of Mobile in 1870. Their family grew quickly with children and grandchildren. After her husband Marshall's death, Lucretia Perryman, turned to midwifery to support the family and as a midwife, became a vehicle for transmitting cultural, social, and political knowledge regarding mothering performance and practice to the broader African-American community.

I am currently working at the University of South Alabama and did not know that my university was placing a statue of her in a museum on campus. Professors on my campus discovered archaeological materials recovered from a house site in Mobile. Professor Laurie Wilkie from the University of California, Berkley, explores how one extended African-American family engaged with competing and conflicting mothering ideologies in the post-Emancipation South in the book "The Archaeology of Mothering: An African-American Midwife Tale."

Lucretia died in 1917. I think it is amazing that my Great Great Great Grandmother, who was a slave and I will be on the same university campus. I bet she should have never thought that her Great Great Great Grandson, Dr. Carl Cunningham Jr. would be reconnected.