“Habitual return highlights the importance of maintaining cultural practices and history between generations to anchor one’s identity and sense of self.”

Helen canned peaches, sewed and patched quilts, and prepped her children for a cross-country trek. Her husband, J. L., had set out months ago with her brothers, joining the steady flow of people leaving rural Arkansas for California—the land of gold, military jobs, and palm trees. For these men, the Golden State held the promise of better lives for all. It was a place where their brown-skinned wives would not have to work in the homes of white men, and the names of local landmarks would not consist of racial slurs.¹

But when J. L.—my great-grandfather—finally returned, he did not announce a jubilant message of migration but sternly whispered that no one would be going back to California. Unlike Helen’s brothers, J. L. did not see Los Angeles as a safe place to rear children. He told the family that he preferred they all stay in Arkansas and face the evils they knew how to fight.

I heard this story countless times while coming of age. My great-uncles and great-aunts frequently shared it as part of the rituals that marked my family’s yearly trip to Augusta, Arkansas, in the high, sticky heat of summer. Whether shared over fried buffalo fish or greens picked by my great-grandmother, it served as something of an origin story for my family. My great-grandfather died decades before I was born, and his children and grandchildren did eventually scatter to every region of the nation, but his decision to remain in Arkansas still shapes how I understand what it takes for African Americans to make a home for themselves in this nation. My family history is one that complicates the perception of the American South as a place to flee and suggests opportunity could also be found close to home.²

Running parallel to the experiences of my grandparents is the intergenerational narrative of another African American family: the Blunts. The overlapping routes of the Blunts’ intergenerational migration expose continued attachments to the American South, frequent longings for and returns home, and economic success in the industrial cities of the American South. These are practices that I’ve come to understand as habitual return.

Habitual return gives a name to the continued deep connection African Americans have to the American South on both personal and cultural levels, and it serves as a vehicle to explore the role the region continuously played in the cultural practices of Black Americans.

---

Norma and Gray Blunt,  along with their nine children, migrated from Branchville, a small town in rural Southampton County, Virginia, to the eastern seaboard between 1940 and 1946. Like my great-grandparents, Norma and Guy faced a hard decision to leave their small, rural community. For the Blunts, this decision meant moving a large family away from support networks, including Norma’s father and two sisters, and the place where they had grown up.³

The lives of the Blunt family are detailed in a collection of letters, cards, and family photos that spans two decades, housed in the Duke University Archives. I became enamored with the collection during a trip to Duke to work with the much better known “Behind the Veil” collection, which documents the memories of African Americans who came of age in the American South during the era of legal segregation. This collection has served as a key source of numerous influential histories of the region. But I became enamored with the Blunt family because the collection provided the rare chance to glimpse the private, intimate space of Black women—women whose experiences, decisions, and emotions seemed to mirror those of my great-grandmother and her daughters.⁴

Norma and Guy were both from Branchville, a town that emerged in the nineteenth century as a transportation hub. Located alongside the Portsmouth and Roanoke Railroad, which connects Portsmouth, Virginia, to Weldon, North Carolina, the town grew to have a bustling business district where both trains and their passengers were refreshed for their journeys. On Saturday nights, passengers joined crowds of farm workers who came into town and floated in and out of the half-dozen stores, including A. B. Harris General Merchandise. This growth continued until the 1930s, when the automobile replaced the passenger train as the preferred way to travel between regional towns and cities, and most highways bypassed their downtowns.⁵

The railroad industry that fueled Branchville’s growth also laid the tracks for its disappearance. Norma and Guy, like countless others, likely left Branchville for Portsmouth by train. Their move was part of the social and economic dynamics described in Earl Lewis’s influential book In Their Own Interests. Their letters illustrate the rich dynamics of the Black home sphere that serves as one of Lewis’s key concepts for understanding how “blacks acted in their own interests” and “the strategies they devised to empower themselves.”⁶

By heading for Portsmouth instead of Philadelphia, New York, or other destinations along the northeast coast, Norma and Guy participated in stepwise migration. Defined as a series of moves to small towns and cities ending with a move to a final (often urban) destination, stepwise migration frequently included stops in southern cities and towns. Allowing migrants to make use of extended networks of friends and families, stepwise migration was a key element in the chain migration of African American families and communities.⁷

The Blunts’ journey aligns with another important migratory pattern during the Great Migration—it was likely driven by economic opportunities created by the industrial build-up for World War II. Listed as a farmer in the 1940 census, Guy likely changed occupations in Portsmouth. The Norfolk Naval Shipyard, which, despite its name, is located in Portsmouth, would have attracted him with higher wages. In the only letter between Guy and Norma in Duke’s archive, Guy wrote in January 1955 of his desire to find work if he was going to move from Portsmouth to Philadelphia with Norma, who had recently moved to the city with their daughter, Mary. Guy’s employment status in Portsmouth is not clear, but the archive reveals that he did eventually move to Philadelphia. Sadly though, by February of the following year, he died in the Veterans Administration Hospital there. It appears that his death caused financial troubles for Norma. A letter dated from July of the same year from the Philadelphia Public Housing Authority notes that they received Norma’s preliminary application.⁸

After spending about a decade in Philadelphia, Norma left to return to Norfolk. Her return seemed to coincide with increased urgings from her children in their letters for her to “take care of [her]self” and “be careful crossing the streets.” At the time, Norma was in her early sixties, having been born in 1901. Though she had resided in Philadelphia alongside some of her children, her return to Norfolk meant that she would live closer to some of her younger children, including her son Elmo and his family. In 1965, the flow of letters between Norma and her children ended, signifying the distance between them had closed.⁹

While she resided in Norfolk and Philadelphia, Norma stayed connected to Branchville through visits home, letters to her sisters, and payment to the widows’ fund in the local lodge. Consequently, it remained a key stage where scenes of Norma’s life played out even after she first left for Portsmouth. Norma died in 1988 at De Paul Hospital in Norfolk. By that time, several of Norma’s children, including her daughters Ella and Barbara, had relocated back to the Portsmouth-Norfolk area. Then, in her final act of return, Norma was buried in Branchville.¹⁰

Whether family members came home donning new suits, to visit their children, or simply because they missed the comforts and protection of their homeplace, their returns to Ports-mouth and Branchville challenge the logics of migrants’ viewing their final destinations as “promised lands.” Instead, their returns to the region suggest that hope, joy, and opportunity were ideas bounded up with African Americans’ southern homeplaces as much as they were with Chicago, New York, or Philadelphia.

---

One way to understand continued attachments to the region is through the common practice of sending children “down South.” In the case of the Blunts, Norma cared for her daughter Sarah’s two oldest children as Sarah and her husband, Wilbert, relocated from Maryland to Rhode Island to California for the military. Norma would have shared many of her cultural practices with her grandchildren, who watched her cook and listened to her stories. Similarly, my father was sent Down South to stay with his grandparents when his parents first moved to Illinois. While in Arkansas, he learned how to care for and slaughter pigs, developed a love for sopping up gravy with whatever form of bread was available, and attended a segregated elementary school. These experiences represent some of my father’s earliest memories, and they are frequently retold at family gatherings. They also helped form the foundation of the person my father would become—an excellent cook, deeply committed to the importance of education, and empathetic in response to challenges.¹¹

Anthropologist Carol Stack describes a parallel set of circumstances in Call to Home. While studying an urban African American community in the North in the late 1960s, she noticed that children occasionally disappeared from the community. When she asked where a particular child had gone, members of the community would casually answer “back south.” Some of these children returned to be cared for by family while others returned to care for family. Stack did not think much about this practice until many years later, when African Americans began to return to the South in large numbers. She rightly points out that these “missing” children foreshadowed the mass return of African Americans to a place they never stopped imagining as home.¹²

Stack’s work is part of a broader trend among social scientists to acknowledge and explicate the importance of return migration. Interested in the emotional attachment migrants have to both their natal and ancestral homelands, these scholars have strived to shift return from the margins of the “grand narratives” of migration. While migrants’ desire to return home may seem counterintuitive, their connections to their homelands provide a novel way to think about assimilation by juxtaposing the push for integration and the desire to maintain cultural values and practices. And in the case of communities for whom complete assimilation is not possible, habitual return highlights the importance of maintaining cultural practices and history between generations to anchor one’s identity and sense of self.¹³

Habitual return characterizes the conditions that create the perpetuation of African American cultural practices rooted in the customs and values of the South between generations of African Americans born and reared in the South and their children and grandchildren who were not born or reared in the South. In describing African Americans’ propensity to frequently reconnect to the American South, habitual return illuminates a larger network of cultural values that drive such practices, such as the importance of maintaining familial ties, and emotional attachments, often connected to the history of pain and endurance that marked Black life in the Jim Crow South.¹⁴

In this way, habitual return is in conversation with sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which analyzes how behavior is regulated beyond simple obedience to rules. By drawing out the habitualness of return, as opposed to simply labeling return as a habit, I am, like Bourdieu, delineating how social practices are more than a mechanical response. Rather, I see habitual return as a culturally innovative response to the challenges faced by African American migrants. Separated from the familial, social, cultural, and even historical connections that shaped their understanding of the world and themselves, habitual return served as one way to reestablish those connections and highlight their continued importance.¹⁵

Intergenerational in nature, habitual return challenges the assumptions that migration is a one-way process, that migrants are “uprooted,” and that non-South migration destinations are “promised lands.” Instead, habitual return explicates the social practices, including both temporary and permanent returns to the American South, cultural values, and emotional attachments of African Americans to understand the layered, complex, and continuous ways the region remains key to shaping and understanding African American identity throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.

Habitual return also puts the Great Migration into direct conversation with the still-emerging “New Great Migration” into the American South in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. Thus, habitual return serves as a useful analytical tool for understanding the link between two of the most massive demographic shifts in twentieth-century American history. Additionally, habitual return does not overlook the history of racial violence in the South; instead, it challenges scholars to reckon with the fact that many African Americans were able to create sustaining lives and livelihoods in the region and ultimately value it as a homeland of sorts.¹⁶

One of the most illustrative examples of habitual return are community-based reunions. These are often hosted by heritage organizations that aim to maintain and share the history of communities that oftentimes no longer exist. Thus, like family reunions, community-based reunions provide a group of people an opportunity to congregate together to reconnect. Reunion activities often include visits to historical sites associated with the community, afternoon barbecues or fish fries, and group trips to church. While the membership of heritage organizations initially consisted of people who came of age in the geographical place, attended a specific school, or even graduated in a specific year, they usually have grown to include the children and even grandchildren of the original members. This creates an intergenerational community where older generations of African Americans who share a connection to a specific southern community can cultivate a sense of belonging among younger generations who have extended family ties to a specific place.

Numerous members of my family have attended the Augusta Arkansas Club’s annual community reunions. This largely includes older members of my family, such as my grandparents and their siblings. But these days, their children and grandchildren are often convinced to attend, as the reunions are a convenient way for far-flung members of the family to reconnect. The closing banquet always offers an opportunity for distant cousins to joyfully pose for selfies together or to share news of graduations, marriages, and births.

The club hosts annual reunions for African Americans from the area and is committed to celebrating and sharing the history of Augusta, Arkansas, which its members still see as their home. Situated in the northeastern part of the state, Augusta was a busy regional hub during the early twentieth century, with a bustling downtown, a large Black high school, and even a few juke joints. In fact, many members of the Augusta Arkansas Club share a connection to the historic George Washington Carver High School—which my grandmother and her siblings attended. My great-grandmother also worked at Carver after taking night classes to receive her high school diploma, since eighth grade was the highest grade offered when she came of age. In fact, she graduated alongside one of my great-aunts in 1964. Eager to improve the educational facilities for their children, African Americans founded Augusta Colored High School in 1917, which later became George Washington Carver High School. Several prominent African American men in the community worked together to purchase the land for the school, then they deeded the land to the Augusta School District. In the 1930s, the Rosenwald Fund assisted with financing an addition to the school’s large brick building. The school continued to expand in the 1940s with a new home economics building. Operating until 1970, the school attracted students from smaller communities around Augusta, such as Gregory, Arkansas, where my grandfather lived.¹⁷

The annual reunions of the Augusta Arkansas Club are held in cities across the country, and they help maintain connections between people who remained in and around Augusta and the diaspora of migrants who left the area. The club seeks to share the history of the area with the children and grandchildren of its members. The program for one of the most recent reunions includes a page in memory of Elnora Davis Fagan, the founder of the organization and my great-grandfather’s sister. After dreaming about a celebration where Black Augustans could reunite, she created a database of names, addresses, and telephone numbers. In 1982, she held the first reunion in St. Louis, where she lived at the time; the club has since grown with chapters in cities across the country, including Kansas City, Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, Little Rock, and Phoenix. While the reunion typically takes place in larger cities, the organization periodically hosts reunions in Augusta. During these reunion weekends, which are seen as homecomings, members and their families flood the homes of their remaining family members in the area, and even book rooms in nearby Searcy, Arkansas. A recent Augusta reunion featured a historical bus tour of the area that made stops at a Black cemetery tucked in the woods and at land once owned by several families associated with the club. Organizers also hosted a genealogical presentation about the families of the women who served as early leaders in the organization.

Another southern heritage organization is the Eastern Kentucky Social Club, discussed in sociologist Karida L. Brown’s book Gone Home. The Eastern Kentucky Social Club (eksc) was formed in the 1970s by a small group of Eastern Kentuckians who migrated to Ohio. The organization grew to include fifteen chapters in cities and states across the nation. With themes for annual reunions like “Let’s Stay Together” and “Reflections on Yesterday with Hope for Tomorrow,” the club preserves the history and culture of Black coal mining communities of Eastern Kentucky, which have largely disappeared. Like the Augusta Arkansas Club, the eksc provided African Americans from a specific geographical place an opportunity to reconnect. It also helped to create connections between these communities and the children and grandchildren of people who migrated away from them. For instance, Brown’s parents migrated away from Eastern Kentucky to New York, but her journeys “back home” allowed her to see herself as part of these communities.¹⁸

---

Whether habitual return drives the establishment of formal organizations or passing down of family stories during trips Down South, this practice anchors many African American families to their histories. And these histories can provide an invaluable lens for making sense of one’s place in the world—which is exactly what they did for me.

My Uncle Billy is the youngest son of Helen and J. L., and he is undoubtedly the one J. L. was thinking of when he said Los Angeles was not a good place to rear his children. Family stories abound about his behavior growing up. How he made a habit of sneaking into the local nightclub, a small vice amplified by his father’s position as a deacon in the local Baptist church. Or how my grandmother left him hanging, literally, after he threw armfuls of fruit down to her from their neighbor’s trees. Not so surprisingly, Billy headed for California as soon as he finished high school. However, according to his own accounting of things, he got married before he could get into too much trouble.

Like hordes of fellow migrants, each summer he saw fit to ensure that his family returned to Arkansas. And it was through these return trips that I came to know my great-uncle. As a child, I escaped from the scheduled activities of a reunion weekend in Augusta to go with my uncle and grandfather to buy watermelons straight from the field. Driving down what seemed to be an endlessly long dirt road, I listened while he and my grandfather reminisced about the South, their home. Their conversation turned into a gentle debate about when my grandfather first met my grandmother, why they had left Arkansas, and my grandfather’s promise to always be willing to drive my grandmother home whenever she asked. During this conversation, my uncle casually mentioned that his father, J. L., had made the right decision when he decided not to move his family to California, since Billy was sure as soon as he got to California he would have started “running the streets to make some cash.” As a child who was still young enough to be enchanted with the idea of Disneyland and year-round summers, I thought his comment seemed odd. Now, as a historian, I can excavate the meanings of a different set of journeys that helped define African Americans’ long and diverse searches for opportunity, success, and joy.

---

Beatrice J. Adams is an assistant professor of history at the College of Wooster. Her book-in-progress, We Might as Well Fight at Home, examines the experiences of African Americans who remained in and returned to the South during the Great Migration and the emergence of the New Great Migration.

NOTES

1. “N—-r Head Corner” was a local landmark used to denote a crossroad a few miles north of Augusta, Arkansas. Many places and geographical features in the United States have names with racial epithets. These include several sites in Woodruff County, Arkansas, where my great-grandparents lived. Max Brantley, “The N-Word: A Fact of Geography in the U.S.,” Arkansas Times, October 7, 2011, https://www.arktimes.com/ArkansasBlog/archives/2011/10/07/the-n-word-a-fact-of-geography-in-the-us; B. J. Hankins, “The Man Who Lived at N—-r Head Corner,” Arkansas Baptist Newsmagazine, July 11, 1968, Arkansas Baptist State Convention, Arkansas Baptist Newsmagazine, 1965–1969, 72, https://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/arbn_65-69/72.
2. William W. Falk, Larry L. Hunt, and Matthew O. Hunt, “Return Migrations of African-Americans to the South: Reclaiming a Land of Promise, Going Home, or Both?,” Rural Sociology 69, no. 4 (December 2004): 490–509.
3. Norma and Guy Blunt are listed in the census in 1940 as living in rural Southampton County. However, by 1946, one of Norma’s sisters, Annie Wood, would write her a letter recapping her recent trip to visit Norma in Portsmouth. United States of America, Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1940), T627, 4,643 rolls, Ancestry.com.
4. Special thanks to John Gartrell for initially suggesting that I examine the Blunt Family Papers and Olivia Nengel for transcribing a portion of the letters. Some of the historical books that use interviews from the “Behind the Veil” collection include Leslie Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Claudrena N. Harold, The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918–1942 (New York: Routledge, 2007); Laurie B. Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Blair Murphy Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Jennifer Lynn Ritterhouse, Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2006); Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and Sonya Yvette Ramsey, Reading, Writing, and Segregation: A Century of Black Women Teachers in Nashville (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008). The collection has also served as the resource base for edited collections of oral history, including William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad, eds., Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South (New York: The New Press, 2014); Anne M. Valk and Leslie Brown, Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
5. Terri Fisher and Kirsten Sparenborg, Lost Communities of Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 153, 156–157.
6. Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 5.
7. For a fuller discussion of stepwise migration, see Earl Lewis, “Expectations, Economic Opportunities, and Life in the Industrial Age: Black Migration to Norfolk, Virginia, 1910–1945,” in The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender, ed. Joe William Trotter Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 22–45.
8. Most of the letters in Duke’s collection are between Norma and her daughters. Genealogy folder, box 2, Blunt Family Papers, 1943–1965, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University (hereafter cited as Blunt Family Papers); Financial Record folder, box 2, Blunt Family Papers.
9. Correspondence, box 1, Blunt Family Papers.
10. Virginia, Death Records, 1912–2014, Ancestry.com; U.S., Find A Grave Index, 1600s–Current, Ancestry.com.
11. Letters between Norma and Sarah, box 1, Blunt Family Papers.
12. Carol Stack, Call to Home: African-Americans Reclaim The Rural South (New York: Basic Books, 1996), xiii, xiv.
13. For a review of social scientific research on return migration, see Christine Leibbrand et al., “Great Migration’s Great Return? An Examination of Second-Generation Return Migration to the South,” Social Science Research 81 (July 2019): 117–131; Fran Markowitz and Anders H. Stefansson, eds., Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return, (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2004), 5; Everett S. Lee, “A Theory of Migration,” Demography 3, no. 1 (March 1966): 47–57.
14. My framing of habitual return is informed by symbolic and interpretive anthropology, particularly the work of Clifford Geertz. See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
15. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Omar Lizardo, “Habitus,” in Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, ed. Byron Kaldis (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2013), 405–407; Nick Crossley, “Habit and Habitus,” Body and Society 19, no. 2–3 (May 2013): 136–161. My use of habitual instead of habitus is meant to highlight the “everydayness” and familiarity of these practices that is missed when invoking the sociological language of habitus.
16. Beth A. Latshaw, “Food for Thought: Race, Region, Identity, and Foodways in the American South,” Southern Cultures 15, no. 4 (2009): 107; Falk, L. L. Hunt, and M. O. Hunt, “Return Migrations,” 505. For a discussion of reverse migration to the American South, see John Cromartie and Carol B. Stack, “Reinterpretation of Black Return and Nonreturn Migration to the South, 1975–1980,” Geographical Review 79, no. 3 (July 1989): 297–310; William H. Frey, “The New Great Migration: Black Americans’ Return to the South, 1965–2000,” Brookings, May 1, 2004, https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-new-great-migration-black-americans-return-to-the-south-1965-2000/; Leibbrand et al., “Great Migration’s Great Return?”; Larry H. Long and Kristin A. Hansen, “Trends in Return Migration to the South,” Demography 12, no. 4 (November 1975): 601–614; Sabrina Pendergrass, “Perceptions of Race and Region in the Black Reverse Migration to the South,” Du Bois Review 10, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 155–178; and Stewart E. Tolnay, “The African American ‘Great Migration’ and Beyond,” Annual Review of Sociology 29 (June 2003): 209–232.
17. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, “George Washington Carver High School Home Economics Building”; James M. Smith, “History of the Black Schools in the Augusta Area,” Rivers and Roads and Points in Between 4, no. 1 (Winter 1976): 76–79.
18. Karida L. Brown, Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 182–183, 8; Eastern Kentucky Social Club Collection, 1948–2014, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.