Perhaps this is my single most significant discovery from the stored relics of Baby Joy Johnson’s documents about her female conjurer and shape-shifter ancestors.

I have discovered, among the treasures in Joy’s antique coffins full of her papers, a chart of sorts. Joy uses this chart to trace not only the women’s relationships to each other (mother-daughter and sisters) but also their continents of origin and the identity of the women or girls who actually made the trans-Atlantic passage.

Joy drew her chart on a rather sturdy parchment that has resisted the erosions of time and dampness in the stone corridor and rooms.

Joy labels the chart, in what I consider her remarkably elaborate calligraphy, Blood of Angels & Chain Dance (referring, no doubt, to the titles she gave her first two notebooks about her ancestors’ folkloric lives), and subtitled it Tree of Ancestors.

From there – and this is what I find most perspicacious of Joy, who, if not illiterate, was nevertheless educated at home by persons who were barely literate, themselves – Joy splits the chart into two sections to represent what she calls the “Motherland” and the “New World” – the continents of Africa and North America, respectively, I have no doubt.

Under the heading that I take to be “Motherland” (really, I can’t imagine what else it might be; in my more fanciful moments, I think it says “otherland,” but that does not account for the curlicues scrolled into some kind of letter that begins this word. So, “Motherland” it must be, and for the purposes of my research, “Motherland” it is. As I was about to note - for I must not let myself get distracted - under “Motherland”), the first woman noted is called “Wingless Mother.”

Now that I have read all the stories, I believe that “Wingless Mother” is the woman chained in the tower on the Gold Coast of England’s slave-trading heyday. This “Wingless Mother” appears in the very first story of Joy’s extensive collection.

The line connecting “Wingless Mother” vertically to the “Winged Daughter” beneath her indicates that it is this “Winged Daughter” who “came running across” the Atlantic Ocean to enslavement on the plantation in Mississippi where the magical events Joy writes about take place.

Indeed, Joy’s next line cuts at a diagonal angle to “Mother Magdalen” under the heading “New World” (meaning North America), where the character Magdalen is said to have been born to a winged mother! Magdalen then gives birth to her only child, Angel.

Significantly, horizontally on a level with Magdalen but unrelated to her is Sister, already present on the plantation when Winged Daughter arrives, pregnant with Magdalen.

Sister gives birth to twin girls, Rose White and Rose Red. (We know, however, that, like most women on breeding plantations, Sister gave birth to many children who were sold away. The lost children’s names are not recorded by Sister’s owners on any documents I can find.)

Rose White is indicated as having given birth to Hope, another storyteller, while Rose Red gives birth to Willow. I have not yet found a story in Willow’s voice.

It is significant that, though Sister and Rose White definitely gave birth to more children than is indicated on the chart, none of those children’s names are recorded by Joy. This omission leads me to suspect that Joy was only interested in recording the relationships to each other of the women whose stories she told.

The only other woman indicated on Joy’s chart as having come to the plantation from the African Gold Coast or “Motherland” is “Mammy Water,” the conjure woman who inspired so much fear among the enslaved and their owners and overseers, alike. Clearly, many more women on the plantation than two or three were originally born on the African continent, but this limit of two such women on her chart is proof that Joy only recorded those women whose stories she told.

Mammy Water is linked by a diagonal line to Angel Girl. This is her daughter, who was born in the New World soon after Mammy Water arrived at the breeding plantation. It seems important to point out that, perhaps because Mammy Water was considered to be a conjure woman with strange powers, she was not forced by her owners to breed, though her husband was.

Angel Girl is indicated as having given birth to Heaven, who then gave birth to Solace, who then gave birth to Joy, who recorded the women’s stories.

Joy’s humble recording of her own birth at the center of the bottom of the chart gives me the impression that she probably originally designed the chart solely to record her own ancestry.

However, evidently, Joy later decided to use her chart to trace the ancestry of all the women whose stories she recounted in her plantation folktales. What a find!