Finding Emma

Author: Karen Sikes Collins

In the early stages of uncovering the log house, I (Karen) removed several late additions of rooms and dividing walls. But when I took boards off of a closet in the dog run, I found an older wall inside. It would have been a tiny room about 6’x8’. The boards were black with body oils of rats but I saved the boards anyway.

Late in the project I decided to use those few boards for a kitchen cabinet. When I started cleaning the boards, I found an aqua blue paint underneath the grime. Jim Bigger, historical architect, identified it as a milk based paint and quite old. As I carefully cleaned to keep the paint, I found some pencil markings that looked like a couple of attempts to make an E and then Emma and the date 1868.

By then my research on the history of this place was mostly complete and there was only one Emma connected with this place. At the Austin History Center I had found a Slave Narrative of Emma Wicks, daughter of one of John Hancocks slaves, Orange. The Slave Narratives were a project of the Works Progress Administration in the Depression years of the 1930s to provide paid employment for writers.

In that narrative Emma tells of being brought to her father’s cabin on the Judge Hancock place after slavery ended. I had hopefully speculated that maybe it was this cabin where Orange and family lived! In the interview she said she went to school for a short time. But also at the end of the interview she says she can’t write her own name. So I was worried that finding the name and date on the wall of this tiny room might not prove her presence here.

After a frenzy of searching, I finally found a descendant of Emma named Frank Wicks. He and wife Lillian came over to see the place. I pointed out Emma’s name and date and asked them to sit at our kitchen table and read printed copies of the slave narrative. Frank had never heard of this interview and he knew his grandmother Emma well; he was 22 when she died. When I pointed out she says she can’t write her own name so maybe this was not where she lived, Frank said she could read and write but when that interview was conducted she was 80 years old and had crippling arthritis. He also remembered her talking about living behind the blind school.

Finding Frank Wicks had banished doubts and we knew a family of former slaves had lived in our house. In Austin there are very few remaining places with known African American history and Moore-Hancock Farmstead is one.

Frank Wicks also told us that Judge John Hancock was the father of Orange and his brothers Rubin, Salem, and Payton. That startled me and I asked him to help draw a family tree to be sure I understood what he was saying. It seemed unlikely since Judge John would have been ten or eleven years old when Orange was born. I broached the subject with Judge John’s only white descendants, Nell and Roy McCutcheon. Nell was adamant that it wasn’t true. Nell had also said that the Judge had freed his slaves before the end of slavery. This turned out to be true for only three slaves-Judge John’s two mulatto sons and their mother Eliza. His 26 other slaves were legally freed only at the end of the Civil War.

Meanwhile oral interviews with Rubin’s descendants by Terri Meyers and John Clark had found a similar story of the Judge fathering the four brothers. They calculated Judge John would have been too young to have fathered the brothers who said they were all born in Alabama. But Judge John’s father, also named John, could well have fathered all four, and he was born in Virginia as all four brothers said of their father. Judge John was born in Alabama. That would mean that Orange was Judge John’s half brother, that Judge John “owned” his half brothers Orange, Rubin, Salem and Payton, and that they all worked on his land.

Stories from descendants report the Judge helping all four brothers eventually own land and houses in the Waters Park area near Loop 1 and Parmer. There are deed records for their land but no documents that prove Judge John helped. It is likely true that he helped in some way not reflected in legal documents. Frank Wicks also talked about family stories of the brothers’ difficulties with white neighbors who maliciously destroyed livestock and fences to discourage the black landowners.

Descendants of three of the four brothers continued to live in the Rosedale area into the early 20th century until subdivisions began to place restrictions on non-white land ownership to force black and Hispanic families to move east of Interstate 35. Emma herself in later years lived in an area behind the blind school called Negro Village on the east side of Burnet Road south of 49th Street.

Fun fact: Judge John Hancock declared he would favor giving the right to vote to Negroes (which included his half-brother slaves) when he gave it to his mules. ALL FOUR half brothers registered to vote in 1867 in Travis County as soon as it was legally possible for African-Americans to vote.