Ask the Griot

Jeliba, Master Griot — Keeper of the Line

I am Jeliba — griot, keeper of the line. For as long as there have been families, there have been those charged with remembering them. This is a place for the questions every seeker carries when they set out to find their people: Where do I begin? How do I cross the year 1870? What can the blood truly tell me — and what can it not? Each sitting takes one honest question of African American genealogy and answers it plainly, separating what the record documents from what memory carries, and honoring the ancestors without inventing crowns for them. Come sit. Bring your questions. The line is longer than you know.

Episodes

  1. Oct 8

    The Chicken Bone Express

    Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note. 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 IITown of Gordonsville Visitor Center and the annual Gordonsville Fried Chicken Festival

    The Chicken Bone Express

  2. Oct 7

    The Speaking of Names

    Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note. 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)

    The Speaking of Names

  3. Oct 7

    What Did They Remember? The WPA Slave Narratives

    Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note. 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-1938Narratives 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 CarolinaThe Bearden Family (Rose Creek Press), Part II, for the maternal-line research behind this episode

    What Did They Remember? The WPA Slave Narratives

  4. Oct 6

    What Was the Slave Trail of Tears?

    Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note. In June 1865, a woman named Hannah Cole placed a notice in a Philadelphia newspaper. She was searching for her son John, whom she had last seen in Alexandria, Virginia, before she was sold south to New Orleans. She was one of a million. In this sitting, Jeliba and Nia follow the Slave Trail of Tears — the forced migration of enslaved people from the Upper South into the cotton South between 1810 and 1860. We walk with the 1834 Franklin & Armfield coffle from Duke Street in Alexandria, through Winchester, and down the same Shenandoah Valley road we traveled in "The Wagon Road," today's Route 11. We set this trail beside the Indian Trail of Tears, with respect for both. And we find they were not two stories but one: Native nations were driven off the land, and enslaved people were marched in to work it. Some Black people walked both trails. Then Jeliba turns to the question that matters most for listeners: what records can still find the people the road tried to erase — ship manifests, bills of sale, Freedmen's Bureau records, and the "Lost Friends" notices freedpeople placed for fifty years, searching for family. Kevin Bearden, the keeper who brought us this story, joins near the end to reflect on living along that road and on his years working with a Cherokee Nation Businesses company in Tulsa. A note on voices: Jeliba and Nia are synthesized voices. Kevin's segment is voiced with his own ElevenLabs voice clone. Chapters 0:00 — Hannah Cole's search 1:08 — Ask the Griot 1:44 — The trade, the road, two Trails of Tears, and the records 13:49 — Kevin Bearden 14:52 — Closing: "Ain't you my child?" 16:46 — Outro Resources for this episode: - Lost Friends database — Historic New Orleans Collection — hnoc.org/database/lost-friends - Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery — Villanova University — informationwanted.org - Edward Ball, "Retracing Slavery's Trail of Tears," Smithsonian Magazine (November 2015) — smithsonianmag.com - Freedom House Museum, 1315 Duke Street, Alexandria, Virginia — the former Franklin & Armfield office - Enslavement in the Shenandoah Valley — National Park Service — nps.gov - Teaching Hard History: American Slavery — Learning for Justice — learningforjustice.org - Tip: if your family appears in Mississippi, Louisiana, or Alabama after the war but the trail goes cold, try searching Lost Friends by the name of the county or the enslaver your ancestors lived under before freedom.

    What Was the Slave Trail of Tears?

  5. Oct 6

    The Watkins Ferry to Bucktown

    Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note. Ask the Griot — Family Edition Prepared for the Watkins–Bazzle family It began with one small question: is Watkins a European surname? By the end of the night, it had become six generations. In this episode, Nia — Erica's friend from Baltimore and an apprentice jelimuso — brings the family's story to Jeliba. Together they follow the Bazzle line from Nace and Vinny Bazzel in Bucktown, Harriet Tubman's home ground, to the founding of Bazzel Church in 1876; through Alexander Bazzle and Ida Waters on Pine Street in Cambridge; to Aunt Ida, who carried the family's memory and passed it to her niece Charlotte. They trace Charles Bazzle from Bucktown to Morgan College, and the Watkins line from Virginia through Washington's U Street neighborhood to Baltimore, where the two families joined. And they honor the keepers: Ida Waters, Aunt Ida, Charlotte, and now Erica, whom her father calls the new matriarch. Jeliba closes by sorting what the family holds into three baskets: what is documented, what is remembered, and what is still waiting to be found. Then the names are spoken aloud. Chapters 0:00 — Cold open: the boat to Cambridge 0:53 — Ask the Griot 1:29 — The story: Bucktown to Baltimore, and the speaking of the names 18:49 — Closing '

    The Watkins Ferry to Bucktown

  6. Oct 5

    The Wagon Road: Plain People, Freedom, and the Valley

    Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note. In this sitting, Nia and I walk the Great Wagon Road, from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, down into the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and ask an honest question: what did "against slavery" really mean for the Quakers, Mennonites, and Brethren who traveled it, and for the Black people who lived beside them? We meet William Whipper and Stephen Smith on the Susquehanna, William and Eliza Parker at Christiana, Quaker teacher Rebecca Wright and Thomas Laws — the enslaved man who carried a Union general's message across Confederate lines in his mouth — and the freedpeople who bought land and built Newtown, Josephine City, and Milton Valley Cemetery with their own hands. The allies were real. But in every chapter of this story, Black people led. Kevin Bearden, the keeper who brought us this story, joins us near the end to tell where the road took him. A note on voices: Jeliba and Nia are synthesized voices. Kevin's segment is voiced with his own ElevenLabs voice clone.

    The Wagon Road: Plain People, Freedom, and the Valley

  7. Jul 11

    They Say We Descend From… — Is It True?

    Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note. Every family carries a story: that we descend from a king, from royalty, from someone the world remembers. Nia brings back the legend she mentioned weeks ago — and asks the elder, at last, if it's true. Jeliba won't answer true or false. He teaches her to weigh it: where did the story come from, and what kind of knowing is it? A tale can be false without a single liar in the chain — memory grows in the direction of dignity, and for a people whose names were taken, "we come from kings" was not vanity but armor. Then the reframe: kings are cheap in a story; to trace a real ancestor, by name, from a real record, is the harder and greater thing. One is a wish; the other is a resurrection. And a second story handled with more care still — the claim of Native ancestry — because a nation is not gone, and belonging is the nation's to grant, by their rolls and their rules, not a DNA estimate's. Honor why we carry these stories. Test what they claim. Don't crown yourself until the evidence does. Resources for this episode: Record the story first. Before testing a family legend, capture it fully — who tells it, and how far back it goes. Free interview guides: StoryCorps (storycorps.org).Test oral tradition against the record using the databases from earlier episodes: FamilySearch (free, familysearch.org), the National Archives (free, archives.gov), and Ancestry (often free at your library).On Native ancestry — start with the nation, not a DNA test. Belonging is determined by tribal governments. Learn the difference between ancestry and citizenship through the National Congress of American Indians (ncai.org) and each nation's own enrollment office.On DNA and tribal claims: a percentage or a haplogroup cannot make you a citizen of a nation, and cannot name a specific tribe. Use it as a compass, and let each nation's rules stand.

    They Say We Descend From… — Is It True?

  8. Jul 10

    What Are the Freedmen's Bureau Records?

    Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note. After freedom came, for a brief and precious time, someone wrote our names down. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands kept labor contracts, marriage and cohabitation records, ration rolls, letters, and school registers — and in them, people who had been invisible in the old records appear at last as themselves. In this sitting I show you what the Bureau left behind, where it survives today, and how to read it. These records are uneven, scattered, incomplete — the work of overwhelmed clerks in a hard season. But for many seekers, they are the bridge across 1870, and the first time an ancestor is called by name. Resources for this episode: National Archives (free) — archives.gov — Freedmen's Bureau records, Record Group 105.FamilySearch (free) — familysearch.org — digitized and searchable Bureau records.Smithsonian NMAAHC — nmaahc.si.edu — the Freedmen's Bureau transcription and search project.Ancestry (subscription; often free through your public library) — ancestry.com.Tip: search by place, not just name — start with the state and the field office that served your ancestor's county, since much of the Bureau's paper isn't name-indexed.

    What Are the Freedmen's Bureau Records?

  9. Jul 10

    Who Was the Greatest Griot?

    Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note. Who was the greatest griot who ever lived? Jeliba names Balla Fasséké Kouyaté, griot to Sundiata Keita and the one from whom the office descends — and honors Toumani Diabaté, who carried seventy-one remembered generations of kora players. Then he declines the question itself. The office of the jeli is not won; it is inherited, and Salif Keita's controversy proves it. Among the jeliw, greatness is measured not in performance but in memory: the one whose recitation of the lines can be trusted. Nia presses him on what that means for those who trace back four generations and find a wall — and Jeliba answers that the griot who remembers seventy-one and the descendant who has fought back to six are doing the same work. Resources for this episode: The Sundiata epic — Look for D.T. Niane's Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, the most widely available written version of the story Balla Fasséké carried.Toumani Diabaté — His albums Kaira and The Mandé Variations (solo kora), and In the Heart of the Moon with Ali Farka Touré. Widely available on streaming.Sidiki Diabaté — Toumani's father, "the King of the Kora"; seek out his recordings to hear the generation before.The jelimusow (women griots) — Listen for Kandia Kouyaté, Ami Koïta, and Bako Dagnon.UNESCO lists the oral traditions of the Mande (the Mandé Charter / Kouroukan Fouga) among the world's intangible cultural heritage — a starting point for the tradition's history.

    Who Was the Greatest Griot?

  10. Jul 8

    What Can a DNA Test Really Tell Me?

    Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note. The blood remembers, but it does not speak in names. In this sitting I tell you plainly what a test can give you and what it cannot. It can point toward the regions and peoples your ancestors came from, connect you to living cousins, and trace the deep paternal and maternal lines back across the water. What it cannot do is hand you an ancestor's name, or a certificate of kingship, or a nation you may claim by percentage alone. An estimate is not a person. I'll show you how to let the science guide your search without letting it flatter you — how it points toward home without naming the door. Resources for this episode: AncestryDNA — ancestry.com — the largest matching database, strongest for finding cousins.23andMe — 23andme.com — ethnicity estimates plus health; includes deep maternal (mtDNA) and paternal (Y-DNA) haplogroup information.FamilyTreeDNA — familytreedna.com — the main home for dedicated Y-DNA (father's line) and mtDNA (mother's line) tests, and their surname/lineage projects.MyHeritage DNA — myheritage.com — useful for matches with relatives outside the U.S.Free tools: Upload your raw DNA data to GEDmatch (gedmatch.com) and DNA Painter (dnapainter.com) to compare across databases and map matches to your tree.Remember: an estimate is not an ancestor. Use DNA as a compass, chase the cousin matches, and lay the results beside the documents — the paper is what proves the line.

    What Can a DNA Test Really Tell Me?

  11. Jul 7

    How Do I Get Past 1870?

    Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note. For most who trace an African American line, there is a wall, and it stands at 1870 — the first federal census to record our people by name, and for many, the last door still open. Before it, the enslaved were counted as property, not persons, entered as figures on a slaveholder's schedule. In this sitting I show you how to approach that wall without breaking yourself against it: the Freedmen's Bureau and the Freedman's Bank, cohabitation and voter rolls, and the patient work of naming the last enslaver, so the records they kept might speak. The wall is real. It is not always the end. Resources to begin your search: FamilySearch (free) — familysearch.org — U.S. census records, including 1870, plus much of the Freedmen's Bureau collection.Ancestry (subscription; often free through your public library) — ancestry.com — the largest online collection of census and family records.National Archives (free) — archives.gov — Freedmen's Bureau records (Record Group 105) and Freedman's Savings & Trust Company (bank) records.Smithsonian NMAAHC — nmaahc.si.edu — searchable Freedmen's Bureau records and research guides.Tip: start with the free sources, and check whether your local library offers Ancestry at no charge before you subscribe.

    How Do I Get Past 1870?

  12. Jul 6

    Where Do I Even Begin?

    Hey! I'd love to hear your thoughts, send me a voice note. Every search has a first step, and it is almost never where the seeker expects. In this first sitting, I answer the question that stops so many before they start. We begin not in the archive but at the kitchen table — with the living, with the names and stories already in your keeping — and work backward, one generation at a time, from what you know toward what you do not. I'll show you how to gather what your family already remembers, why the most recent records are your firmest footing, and how to write down a memory without mistaking it for proof. The line begins with you. Resources to begin: Start at home, not online. Before any database, talk to your oldest living relatives and gather names, dates, places, and stories. Photograph documents and record the conversations.Free places to build your tree: FamilySearch (familysearch.org) and WikiTree (wikitree.com) — both free — let you record what you find and begin searching records.A starter record set: the U.S. Census (1950 back to 1790) is the backbone of early research; you'll find it on FamilySearch for free.Capture the oral history: a free interview guide and prompts are available from StoryCorps (storycorps.org) and the Smithsonian's oral-history resources.Write down what's memory and what's proof — and keep them separate. That discipline is the whole of the work.

    Where Do I Even Begin?
  • 12 Episodes

About

I am Jeliba — griot, keeper of the line. For as long as there have been families, there have been those charged with remembering them. This is a place for the questions every seeker carries when they set out to find their people: Where do I begin? How do I cross the year 1870? What can the blood truly tell me — and what can it not? Each sitting takes one honest question of African American genealogy and answers it plainly, separating what the record documents from what memory carries, and honoring the ancestors without inventing crowns for them. Come sit. Bring your questions. The line is longer than you know.

Information

  • Creator
    Jeliba, Master Griot — Keeper of the Line
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    12
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 KEB Holdings LLC
  • Show Website
    Ask the Griot