In LA County, there’s an effort afoot to redub a mountaintop as “Ballard Mountain,” after one of its 19th century settlers. The peak’s current name? Negrohead Mountain.

John Ballard, by the way, was a “former Kentucky slave who had won his freedom and come to Los Angeles in 1859. In the sleepy, emerging city, he had a successful delivery service and quickly became a landowner. Soon he was active in civic affairs: He was a founder of the city’s first African Methodist Episcopal Church.” In other words, he’s an American success story.

Reading about this today took me back to a bit of my own history. I grew up in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey (or, perhaps more accurately, Pine-Barrens-adjacent). That translates into lots of woods and great stretches of isolation. My family had (and still has) part ownership of a tract of land deep in the Pine Barrens where my father and some other men had a cabin. Somewhere in my mother’s house may be a photo of my father as a small boy in the 1920’s sitting on the crosspiece of the doorframe as that cabin is being built; if not, that image nevertheless lives in my mind as a memory shared to me by my father, because that’s one of the perches he claimed as he watched my grandfather and other men build that cabin. That cabin was at the corner of a triangular set of trails (or unpaved roads) deep into the woods known all through my own boyhood as “The Flat Iron,” because it was shaped like a traditional pressing iron for clothes. If you took the flat iron to its northerly corner and turned right (rather than left) and walked or rode your dirtbike the five miles or so toward the next actually paved road, you would pass the ruins of what looked to have been at one time a prosperous small ranch of sorts, with a ranch house and a farming area and a fenced field out back. The name of that road, leading to that farm? Nigger Farm Road.

This was the name by which it was called all my boyhood. This was the name by which it was called by previous generations. This was the name I once saw when I looked on an actual government-printed map of this rather remote area. “Nigger Farm Road.”

My father told me once that the man, or “nigger,” after whom the farm and therefore the road was named was a man who had come back from the war (a war, whatever war this was) and who had achieved a high rank and who had bought this parcel of land to make his own and to be left alone upon it. I remember thinking that this man was a colonel, but at this remove of almost 40 years later, I cannot remember if that’s for certain what my father said, or if it’s something I invented, or even if he was right in any case. But I do know that everyone all about knew this road as Nigger Farm Road. And that I saw it printed as such on a map. I can’t speak for the other men, but I don’t believe my father meant any ill by that name. It was just the name of the road.

I noted today that Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a public official I respect, gave deference to the era in which Negrohead Mountain was named, as I make allowance for the unenlightened but well-meaning people who gave me directions by way of Nigger Farm Road:

“I believe in not altering history, but in this case the way to honor [Ballard] is to do it appropriately. The mountain wasn’t named that because of its shape. It was named after him,” Yaroslavsky said. “I’m certain that some people back then thought they were honoring him by using that name, as strange as it seems.”

Strange indeed. And it’s just one of the things I was reflecting upon tonight as a good friend and I sat in a bar drinking drinks and toasting our friendship, white men both, and  looking at the television with our new president on it and being awfully glad to see him up there rather than the gang that just left. We don’t care if he’s white or black or purple.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 11:10 pm and is filed under On reading, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.