This Man’s Grandma Was Raped In Prison In 1928. His DNA Revealed The Incredible Story Of Who Did It.
in Compton, California, in the 1970s, Hiram Johnson began to wonder about his father’s fine curly hair, and the light-brown skin that strangers sometimes thought was white.
Like millions of Americans mailing tubes of spit off to DNA testing companies, Hiram followed his genetic results to distant cousins and discomfiting family secrets. But unlike most of today’s amateur genealogists, Hiram also dug up evidence of two horrific crimes: one committed by his grandmother, the other by his grandfather.
Bruce went to Princeton, determined to become a doctor like his dad. But his world shattered in the spring of his freshman year when Bruce Sr., just 46, died of a heart attack. Bruce’s mother, Sophia, was pregnant. Just three weeks after her husband died, she gave birth.Suddenly without income, Sophia had to lean on her family and get a job for the first time. Bruce moved home to help her, transferring to Washington University.
The results showed that he did have some Scottish ancestry, though the Kenamore name was indeed German. On August 16, 1926, according to court transcripts, 21-year-old Bernice Johnson got into a fight with another young woman in their neighbor’s yard. Bernice, about 7 months pregnant, was mad at Carrie Berkley for flirting with her husband. Testimonies about the day from Bernice, Carrie, and other witnesses don’t match up, so it’s impossible to reconstruct exactly what happened. But at some point, Carrie slashed Bernice’s arm and hand with a knife, and Bernice struck Carrie with an iron bar.
In her appeal to the state supreme court a few months later, Bernice’s own lawyer called the incident “an ordinary negro woman fight” and said that most of the testimonies should be discounted — except for the sole white man’s — because “a so-called solem oath, has little, if any, restraining influence on this character of witnesses.”
“To be a black woman incarcerated at Parchman meant that the prison had access to you — their access to you was boundless,” Bailey told BuzzFeed News. “They had access to you physically, mentally, and then of course, sexually.”Hiram has few records of what happened to Bernice during her time in prison. But what he does have is chilling. When she arrived at Parchman, the prison conducted a medical exam.
He grew up in the 1930s with his mom and her husband, a black man named George Johnson, as well as the couple’s three other kids. Fred’s skin was much lighter than his half siblings’, and he told Hiram that he thought his mother coddled him because of it. Fred had no idea who those white girls were. Bernice told him they were his sisters. But whenever he asked his mother who his father was, “she advised him, in no uncertain terms, that he should keep quiet,” Hiram said. Even Fred’s birth certificate was a mystery, with his father’s name listed as “John Henry Luck.”
Fred, who didn’t get along with his half-sister, was skeptical of her theory. “Oh, come on, man. That girl don’t know nothin’ about nothin’,” he said, according to a recording Hiram made of the call. “I don’t think you can believe anything too much she said because she didn’t know nothin’, you know. She wasn’t even born then.”But it would make sense if it were true, right, Hiram asked. “Yeah,” Fred said, “he may have been a prison guard or something.
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