“Lumbeeland” isn’t a term you’ll find on a map, but for those of us who call the swampy borderlands between North and South Carolina home, it’s shorthand for a place unlike any other. It’s a homeland, not a reservation, etched in stories and relationships, not just lines on a map. For a Lumbee woman navigating love and loss, Lumbeeland is the stage where life’s dramas unfold, where personal history intertwines with the enduring strength – the rock – of her community. This is a story of Girl Meets Rock, not in a geological sense, but in the human form, within the rich tapestry of Lumbee life.
Defining Lumbeeland: More Than Just a Place
When I first ventured beyond Lumbeeland, trying to explain my home to college friends, the name “Lumbeeland” was born. It was a way to encapsulate the unique character of this territory, a vast historical homeland stretching back to the James River in Virginia and the Great Peedee River in South Carolina. While officially defined today by Robeson County and its neighbors – about thirty-two thousand square miles – Lumbeeland’s boundaries are more than just political lines. They are lines drawn over centuries of struggle, as European settlers encroached, yet never fully succeeded in taking our land or our identity.
The Lumbee people have been here all along, shaping the very essence of what would become “the South” long before that term existed. Southern hospitality? That’s woven into our DNA, born from our practice of self-determination. We navigated newcomers – sometimes fighting, sometimes ignoring, sometimes trading, and yes, sometimes starting families with them. Making strangers into kin is our way, as long as politeness prevails.
Lumbeeland defies easy categorization. It’s not a reservation, yet it’s distinctly ours. My friends, picturing a theme park with a monorail when I described it, weren’t entirely wrong. Lumbeeland is both entertaining and utterly exhausting. Try explaining to someone outside our community that your half-siblings are also your cousins because your mothers are double first cousins – watch their minds reel. “Only in Lumbeeland!” I’d laugh. It’s a place where kinship and place, not skin color, are the true bonds. It’s where we hold onto ourselves, even as outside forces try to tear us apart.
For Lumbees, place is a vessel for stories and relationships, not just a pin on a map. We experience our homeland in layers, a living memory, a feeling, rather than a collection of landmarks. Lumbeeland is a relationship between people and their places, both seen and unseen. It’s the bedrock of our identity.
Summer, 2002: Meeting Willie, the Poet Rock Star
My first encounter with a “rock star” in Lumbeeland came in the summer of 2002. Willie, a Lumbee boyfriend, introduced me at a party as “one of our career girls.” At twenty-nine, focused on my profession rather than marriage and children, I was, in Lumbeeland terms, an anomaly. But Willie was unique too – the Lumbee national poet, a singer-songwriter with a number-one single. If I was a career girl, he was a rock star, a solid figure in our community’s cultural landscape. He understood the duality of striving to make your people proud while feeling somewhat distanced by that very ambition.
Willie and I later married. I earned my PhD in history, became a professor, and eventually returned to North Carolina. But life took a tragic turn. The year our daughter Lydia was born in 2007, Willie became ill. By May 2012, when Lydia was four, Parkinson’s-related dementia claimed his life. His decline, though evident to others, was a shock to me. Lydia’s early years were interwoven with his last. Love blurred the lines of reality, and I desperately wanted to heal him, while her new life distracted me from the finality of his. Holding his lifeless body, I repeated, “I love you to death,” not yet understanding that our life together, our love, transcended death. His life, his very being, taught me that death can be a form of healing, a passage to a new beginning.
Winter, 2012: Grayson, the Sheetrock Rock Star
Suddenly, I was doubly rare: a forty-year-old widow, still a career girl. Yet, Lumbeeland, paradoxically, offered a new kind of belonging. Single mothers are common here. At a Christmas Eve party in 2012, I met another kind of Lumbee rock star: Grayson. He worked construction, specializing in sheetrock. Lumbee men, famed throughout the Southeast since the 80s for their sheetrock skills, are indeed our “rock stars” of construction.
Grayson didn’t offer the usual Bud Light, Lumbeeland’s national beverage. He brought me bourbon. Instant connection. After the usual getting-to-know-you pleasantries, I asked the quintessential Lumbee question: “Who’s your people?” A vital question, especially when attraction sparks, to ensure you’re not inadvertently related.
Instead of answering directly, he said, “I’m from Chapel,” referring to the Union Chapel community. Chapel, one of Lumbeeland’s oldest, most deeply rooted settlements. To be “from Chapel” is to be enmeshed in a dense family network. If he was from Chapel, the odds were high that most of his family was too.
I had no close Chapel relatives. He could pour another bourbon.
But Grayson, though a talker, still hadn’t answered my question about his family. As a historian, I craved details, context. If he was Chapel-rooted, his family tree likely ran deep, like mine. So, I gently persisted.
Again, he deflected. “Here, feel my hair. See—it’s real good hair, the best.”
I laughed. No one had ever asked me to touch their hair as a way of introduction. Was he incredibly vain? No, he was serious. He removed his baseball cap, leaned in, offering his hair as a clue to his identity. His hair was short, smooth, slightly wavy.
I didn’t reciprocate the hair-touching invitation. My own hair, wildly curly and bordering on unruly, isn’t mysterious. Too much touching just makes it frizz. A past encounter in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where a stranger’s insistent request to touch my hair felt pushy, still lingered in my memory. Grayson’s gesture was different – a polite invitation, respectful, no pressure. He understood boundaries.
Lumbee hair is diverse – straight, coarse, smooth, wavy, frizzy, curly, thick. Texture is a key identifier; color is too varied to be significant. Grayson’s hair itself revealed nothing concrete about his family, but the gesture, his words about it, were a distinct Lumbee marker. Little did I know this was Grayson’s way of slowly revealing himself, detail by detail.
Through stories, I learned Grayson became Lumbee. Born in Charleston to white South Carolina families, his Lumbee identity was adopted, nurtured by his Lumbee stepmother in Union Chapel. Yet, everything about him – his speech, his demeanor, his family stories – proclaimed his Lumbeeness as authentic, as ancient as our tradition of making strangers into kin. He was as Lumbee as any of us.
We met at life’s crossroads, both needing space to grieve. He had lost a daughter; I, a husband. Our hearts were still tethered to those we’d lost. Lydia anchored me to the present; Grayson sought connection. This shared need drew us together, a gravitational pull, yet with a distance. Others might not understand our connection, but we knew we shared something deeper, something beyond the tangible, a sense of shared space in the universe.
Fall, 2013: Porch Talks and Shared Histories
As our connection deepened, I yearned to understand the tangible things we shared – places, land, ground. Our dates unfolded on porches, bourbon in hand, cigarettes burning, conversations flowing. We talked about my American Indian history classes, my Lumbee research. Grayson, a rock star in his own right, respected my academic pursuits. I valued his lived experience. I felt safe sharing the messy, complex, even illicit aspects of our history. My “career girl” absorption in details didn’t deter him.
One night, explaining the complexities of the 17th and 18th-century deerskin trade to my students, I recounted how kinship cemented trade bonds, political alliances followed, and the trade itself was fueled by alcohol, guns, and tragically, slaves. Betrayal of reciprocity fractured trade and political alliances, leading to violence, displacement, death, and forgetting. The shift to the African slave trade diminished the political power of Southern Indigenous nations.
Yet, Lumbees adapted, embracing informal economies, especially in Union Chapel, a polite term for the black market shaped by the deerskin trade’s legacy. Guns and alcohol remained central, liquor becoming highly profitable, especially after North Carolina laws gave the liquor trade monopoly to whites. Our economy, born of survival, became criminalized. Not a point of pride, but the truth.
My students, raised on sanitized history, struggled to grasp these messy realities. They believed “knowledge is power,” a neat, optimistic phrase. I struggled to convey the nuances, but Grayson understood instantly.
“Knowledge isn’t power,” he stated. “Knowledge is trade. Trade is power.” Success in trade – trust, reciprocity, violence, indulgence, wealth – that’s power. Experience provides the knowledge to navigate these elements, but knowledge alone isn’t potent.
His words resonated. The next week, I shared Grayson’s insight with my students, explaining the deerskin trade’s significance. They needed more than just knowledge; they needed to understand systems, test their knowledge, and apply it effectively.
Spring, 2014: Midnight Cruises and Lumbee Geography
Dating Grayson meant late-night drives. He loved driving, not the Lumbee “cruising” in Pembroke to see and be seen, but backroad cruising, seeking invisibility. Our soundtrack, a reflection of us – a spontaneous mix of Dirty South hip-hop, mainstream pop, country, rock: T.I., Plies, Hank Williams Jr., Led Zeppelin, Kid Rock, Luke Bryan. Diverse, loud. Our aim: to move through the darkness.
One night, history surfaced again. He casually remarked that Pembroke was part of Union Chapel, not the reverse.
“What?” I questioned. “Union Chapel is outside of Pembroke.”
“Nope,” he insisted. “Ask the old heads. Union Chapel ain’t in Pembroke. Pembroke’s in Union Chapel.”
The historian in me stirred. He echoed an older understanding of place, one I pondered constantly, but hadn’t realized he grasped. I, perhaps naively, overvalued Pembroke, a century-old hub for Indian and non-Indian commerce and trade, a visible center of power. But Grayson saw beyond that. He saw how our ancestors built community independent of outsider notions of importance. He was both insider and outsider, like me, and I wanted to understand his Lumbee geography.
I asked him to show me Union Chapel’s borders. We left Pembroke, driving into Union Chapel’s heart, to the “intersection of knowledge and trade.” Driving meant stories, the lifeblood of my profession. He spoke of the hostility outsiders faced there, how before cars, strangers were beaten for trespassing. This aggression protected the informal economy, allowing trade to flourish.
Two Lumbee churches and a Lumbee school marked this crossroads. Our ancestors gathered, worshipped, learned there long before buildings existed. Standing there, Lumbees feel the presence of their history. Buildings aren’t needed to define our history or its significance.
We turned west, towards Union Chapel’s edge, a remote road past Buie. Crossing that road, Grayson declared we were entering Red Springs territory (a town historically white and Black, now home to Lumbees too). I strained to read road signs, seeking orientation relative to familiar places. Useless. This was land you felt, not read on a sign. I doubted I could find it again alone.
Circling north, then east on a familiar highway, we turned south after Union Chapel Road, which led back to the “intersection of knowledge and trade” and Pembroke. We reached Jamestown, gateway to Saddletree, another ancient Lumbee community. “Red Springs to Saddletree, back to Pembroke – all Union Chapel, back in the day,” Grayson explained. Turning south, we reached Chicken Road. Family lived there. Knowing the Union Chapel-Saddletree border was useful. A historical reference to Chicken Road? I could ask: Union Chapel or Saddletree family? Crucial for accurate storytelling. The drive confirmed Pembroke’s position on Chapel’s periphery.
Our midnight cruise revealed Union Chapel, not Pembroke, as the true “intersection of knowledge and trade.” Community power was pervasive, invisible, encompassing Pembroke. Long before outsiders arrived to exploit Lumbees and our land, we had established our networks, generated our own power. Grayson unveiled a Lumbee geography that defied outsider categories.
That night, the future of our “career-girl-meets-rock-star” love story remained uncertain. Our attraction was undeniable, yet our orbits were cautious, the gravitational pull fragile. Instead of a straight path to happily-ever-after, my attachment deepened as his shifted. Love, I learned again, persists through separation, separation isn’t death. Shared places, shared teachings, eventually drew us back, the layers of place and identity allowing us to begin again. Lumbeeland, and the rocks within it, remained constant, shaping and reshaping our lives.
