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Nia opens with a girl she has to imagine: ten years old, in the colored coach behind the engine, with cinders blowing through the window and a shoebox on her lap. People had a name for those trains, half a joke and half a wound. They called them the Chicken Bone Express.

Jeliba and Nia follow the eastern stream of the Great Migration up the Atlantic coast: the separate waiting rooms, the Jim Crow car, and the closed dining car. They take on the fried-chicken stereotype directly, then answer it with the story it buried.

That story is in Gordonsville, Virginia. After the Civil War, Black women known as waiter carriers met the trains with platters balanced on their heads, passing food up through the open windows. One of them, Bella Winston, said her mother paid for their home with chicken legs. Jeliba and Nia work out how much chicken might have crossed that platform in a day, ask how the women found an open door in post-war Virginia, and explain why the trade finally ended.

Then the story comes home. Kevin Bearden's family came north on these lines and went to work on them. His ancestor William Irving Bearden was a porter on the Reading Railroad, and his great-grandmother Mary Abrams Bearden kept her chickens to the end.

Chapters 0:00 Cold open: the girl by the window 1:09 Intro 1:45 The eastern stream 3:07 The colored coach and the shoebox kitchen 5:10 The waiter carriers of Gordonsville 10:38 The Washington threshold, and the family on the rails 12:12 The keeper's segment 13:57 Closing: the names

Names spoken in this episode Bella Winston · the waiter carriers of Gordonsville · William Irving Bearden, the elder · Mary Abrams Bearden · Luther White · the Bearden, Burton, and Shells families

Sources and further reading

• Psyche A. Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
• Mia Bay, Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance (Harvard University Press, 2021)
• Gretchen Sorin, Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights (Liveright, 2020)
• The Bearden Family (Rose Creek Press), Part II
• Town of Gordonsville Visitor Center and the annual Gordonsville Fried Chicken Festival

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Every episode ends the same way: Jeliba speaks the names. Tonight he explains what he has been doing all along.

Jeliba and his apprentice Nia travel back to Senegambia, the Mande and Fula homeland where the keeper's paternal DNA points. They explore Bamanaya, the old Mande religion: a creator who stepped back from the world, the nearer dead who answered a family's prayers, and nyama, the dangerous force scholars describe as moving through everything that exists.

They meet the nyamakala, the hereditary blacksmiths, leatherworkers, and griots who were ranked low and yet feared, because they handled what others could not safely touch. They stand at the graveside, where the griot sang the dead across to the country of the ancestors. And they follow the story to Kaabu, the Mandinka federation whose fall in 1867 came at the end of the same wars that filled the slave ships.

The people carried west could bring nothing in their hands. They brought what was in their mouths.

Kevin Bearden reflects on the wall in his own paternal line, his January journey to Tabato, a village of griots, and why the names of the dead are never inert.

Chapters 0:00 Cold open: a graveside in Kaabu 1:13 Intro 1:48 The Bamana way 3:44 Nyama, and those who handle it 5:52 The griot at the graveside 7:40 Kaabu, and the ships 9:48 The keeper's segment 11:19 Closing: the speaking of names

Names spoken in this episode Aaron Bearden, documented as a free person of color by 1840, in Clarke County, Georgia · Anderson Bearden · William Irving Bearden, the elder · William Bearden, the younger · Eugene Irving Bearden · Kevin Bearden Jr. · the ones behind Aaron, whose names the paper did not keep · the jeliw of Kaabu

Sources and further reading

• Patrick R. McNaughton, The Mande Blacksmiths: Knowledge, Power, and Art in West Africa (Indiana University Press, 1988)
• Barbara G. Hoffman, Griots at War: Conflict, Conciliation, and Caste in Mande (Indiana University Press, 2000)
• Sory Camara, Gens de la parole (Karthala, 1992)
• David C. Conrad and Barbara E. Frank, eds., Status and Identity in West Africa: Nyamakalaw of Mande (Indiana University Press, 1995)
• Thomas A. Hale, Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music (Indiana University Press, 1998)
• Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
• Walter Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves (Heinemann, 2003)

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Between 1936 and 1938, the Federal Writers' Project interviewed more than 2,300 formerly enslaved people across the South. Most had been children when freedom came. Their words were typed by white interviewers in the Jim Crow South, bound into seventeen volumes, and placed in the Library of Congress. Then they sat largely unread for decades.

In this episode, Jeliba and Nia open those volumes and ask how to read them honestly. What was said? What was shaped by the man holding the pencil? And what did the elders keep for themselves?

They listen to three voices from Newberry County, all recorded in 1937 by the same interviewer:

• C.B. Burton, born on the Henry Burton place, who remembered fiddles, cane whistles, and the first churches built of brush after freedom.
• Morgan Scurry, who remembered a wedding in a grove attended by more than two hundred people, and who said plainly, "I think slavery was bad."
• Emoline Wilson, who gave two interviews three months apart and told the story differently the second time.

Each carries a surname from the keeper's maternal family: Burton, Scurry, and Boozer. None is proven kin. Kevin Bearden explains what that means, and the one record that could change it.

Chapters 0:00 Cold open: Newberry, May 1937 1:32 Intro 2:07 What the Federal Writers' Project was 4:03 How to read them: the three baskets 5:51 Three voices from Newberry County 10:14 The keeper's segment 11:41 Closing: the names

Sources and further reading

• Library of Congress, Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936–1938: loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938
• Narratives of Morgan Scurry (May 19, 1937), Emoline Wilson (May 21 and Aug. 10, 1937), and C.B. Burton (Sept. 10, 1937), interviewed by G. Leland Summer, Newberry, South Carolina
• The Bearden Family (Rose Creek Press), Part II, for the maternal-line research behind this episode