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Reprint Courtesy of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram
OUT OF AFRICA / Small East Texas community
fears its heritage will be lost
By JESSIE MILLIGAN
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
 AFRICA - Mist floats among the pine boughs
on cloudy days in Africa , Texas, a poor,
rural unincorporated community tucked in the state's
eastern Piney Woods. Even the town's history
and name are foggy, and, like the mist, are
likely to disappear.
"The young ones, they don't even call
it Africa anymore," says Addie B. Clifton,
88, a woman born here and reared with nine
siblings in a four-room house of not much
more than 600 square feet.
"They are going to lose all memory of
it. And that's so sad," Clifton says.
Africa - also known as Webb, after an early
property owner, or St. John's, after Africa
's Baptist Church - is in deep East Texas
by the Louisiana border, where the culture
of the Deep South spreads across the state
line like roots flourishing under the shade
of the thick pine forests.
The town's history is largely unwritten, its
tales untold. Freed slaves with a dream of
a new home founded Africa 135 years ago.
But their stories settled into the deep thickets
and finally disappeared.
About 75 people live in Africa , which is
not much more or less than the population
has ever been, Clifton says.
They drive into the nearby town of Center,
population 4,950, to socialize or to work
at the Bruce Hardwood Floors plant or at
Wal-Mart or one of the other retail outlets,
supplementing the money they make cutting
timber.
On the way to Center, the folks from Africa
will drive along Shelby County Road 2050
and onto Martin Luther King Drive, the road
that used to be called Neuville Road. Some
people still call it Neuville Road, even
in phone book listings, because they were
opposed to changing the name to MLK Drive.
"Some of the old (African-American) folks
here just didn't want to change it," says
Eddie Logan, 70, a deacon at St. John Baptist
Church in Africa . "They just wanted
things the same."
Change comes slowly
Change has been slow to come to Africa and
its environs, which have long been neutral
ground.
In 1806, the region was declared a no-man's
land, where no one was supposed to live or
lay claim to land until the United States
and Spanish-ruled Texas could settle a border
dispute. History books say most people passed
through the area on their way to the open
plains.
By 1819, the dispute was settled and the Sabine
River was designated the boundary between
Louisiana and Texas. Although it was legal
again to live in the region, only a few planters
were attracted to clear the forests.
When the Civil War ended in 1865, freed slaves
established communities throughout the South.
A few found their way to this place, started
homes and farms, and named it Africa .
In Logan's possession is a ledger that lists
long-ago members of the church in Africa
. The first entry in the book of now-crumbling
pages is dated 1894. The Texas State Historical
Association says the once-thriving farming
and poultry-raising community consisted of
a two-story town hall, a gristmill, a syrup
mill and three stores.
Clifton attended school in Africa . The school
building is abandoned now, just the tip of
its tin roof poking out of the pines. Years
ago, much of the land was cleared. But the
fast-growing pines have grown thick, covering
up remnants of a life that used to be.
Clifton recently brought a visitor back to
her now-abandoned childhood home. The floors
of the two bedrooms sag with the weight of
the years.
"Addie, how did 10 children all fit in
here?" the visitor asks.
"And why wouldn't they?" Clifton
says. "It's what we had."
The family grew just about everything they
ate, Clifton said. They had no phones or
televisions, just the church down the street.
Her father ran a small store near the family
home, mostly selling goods to children who
attended the nearby school.
Clifton and her husband lived in Africa for
many years, raising Black Angus cattle. She
taught school and worked in a social-service
program in Center.
Clifton eventually moved to Center, mostly
because the region's rainfall averages 50
inches a year, turning Africa 's unpaved
roads into impassable mud.
The remains of old vacant buildings still
stand, scattered among the pines. A few houses
are here and there, a few mobile homes have
been moved in. But there isn't much else.
"They (the children reared here) just
moved on to better things," says Clifton,
whose siblings live in Houston, Beaumont
and Dallas.
And that may be because life on the unpaved
roads in Africa , Texas, is unglamorous enough
that it's easiest just to forget it, to give
it some new name, let the past erase itself.
Or perhaps it is easier to move far away to
Dallas or Houston or any place where your
parents didn't have to keep weeding out those
pesky yellow pines sprouting up in land that
needed to be cleared just to raise enough
to eat.
But the "old home place," as Clifton
calls the abandoned family home, is where
the family still gathers once a summer for
a reunion. About 200 people come back to
Africa to celebrate. And then they leave
the old house in the pines to sit there untouched
for another year, a memorial to a time gone
by.
Past lies buried
Clyde Lister, 68, lives in Africa , as he
has for about 30 years, but works in a mortuary
in Center on Martin Luther King Drive. In
the 1960s, during the civil-rights movement,
Lister and Logan say they admired the road's
namesake, Martin Luther King Jr., and his
work from a distance.
Logan recalls being asked by a friend to go
to one of the protests and marches taking
place in the South's larger towns and cities.
So does Lister.
"We had jobs and families to watch out
for, so we just didn't get involved," Lister
says.
The two say that back then, they worried about
a backlash from the white community or from
members of the black community who didn't
feel comfortable openly supporting King.
These days, though, they march.
"But the marches today are celebrations
of King and his good work. They aren't protests," Logan
said.
Although neither grew up in Africa , both
married women who did.
Logan says it's sad that there isn't a written
history of even the names of the people who
first had a dream of Africa , Texas. Logan
has the ledger from the church and some photographs,
but he does not have the names of the first
folks who came here. He doesn't know where
they lived before the Civil War.
He does know that the Goodwin and Goodwyn
families were early settlers. But the church
and the tombstones dating back to the 1890s
hold the only clues to the names of those
who came before.
And the stories of slavery and pre-slavery?
Stories of ancestors' memories of the real
Africa ? Those are long buried.
One of the few reminders of Africa 's past
is the bell in front of St. John Baptist
Church. Long before the arrival of phones,
its distinctive ring signaled a death in
the community - first one pull, then a pause,
then another pull.
Logan wants to gather enough history to put
it on a plaque mounted near the bell. It
could be a memorial to Africa's founders,
he said. Maybe someday. Logan went to the
bell in Africa on New Year's Eve and gave
it a couple of slow rings.
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