The Family Land, Part 1

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How long have you lived on this land? I've been on this land all my life. I am 64.
I'll be 65 in August. I've been here all my life.
And how long has your family lived on this land? 100, 200 years. We've been here all my life.
And how long has your family lived on this land?

A hundred, two hundred years. We've been here all our life.
That's all we know.

This is Mamie Reels Ellison. Her mother's family, the Reels family, has owned land on the coast of

North Carolina since 1911, when Mamie's great-grandfather purchased 65 acres.

What was it like growing, you know, in the summer here, being a kid here? Well, for me, being that little girl, always wanted to go to Disney World. So the water was just this magical thing to me because I just always had that imagination about mermaids.
But growing up here on this road, you were free. I was a little girl, but I could kick off my blouse and run like the boys, you know.
And you could run free. You had the fields to play ball in.
You could ride your bikes and you could basically ride in the road because it was a dirt road. And I remember as a little girl, there was an ice cream truck that came down.
So this was a quiet area. It was so quiet, you could hear the crickets and the frogs at night.
But the ice cream truck was coming. You could hear the ice cream truck coming, playing the music, and you run out and get your ice cream if you had the money.
And growing up in the summertime, you wanted that beach ball and that float. And you could go to the water.
You could go swimming. And then my mother would go to work and say, don't go to that water.
I had enough time to go to that water, go fishing, go swimming, and go to that water hose and shower off, get the sand off me before she got home from work. And the only thing that stopped me from doing that was I went fishing one day with her swimming pole, and she told me not to.
And I caught an eel. I had never seen a eel, but I thought it was a snake.
I let go fishing pole and all. So I paid the consequences when she got home from work.
But that was the beauty of growing up here on Silver Dollar Road. You could just run free.
Mimi Reels still lives on her family's land, surrounded by dozens of family members living on Silver Dollar Road, the road that runs along the Reels' property.

When you come on Silver Dollar Road, you might see 20 homes on Silver Dollar Road, but if

you go down a dirt road or a lane, there are probably five or six or more homes back there. Coming up here as a little girl, it was like the place to be because you didn't see a lot of law enforcement.
You didn't see a lot of strangers. And the amazing thing is you really knew who was who by the sound of their vehicle.

You knew who vehicle it was.

We lived off the land.

My grandfather had hogs and my uncles did so abatting.

But we lived off the land, so we had enough to keep us busy.

I remember my mom doing the pickles in the jar, the beaks in the jar, and staining the green beans and preserving for the winter, and shucking the corn, and them cutting the corn off the cob and preparing it for the winter. And so it sounded like hard living, but it was good living.
Mamie is the youngest of nine siblings. She was closest in age to her brother, Lye Curtis.
Their mother had ten siblings. Many of them lived on Silver Dollar Road.
There was a lot of good memory because if my mother were at work, it was that village looking out for you. You know, if she was at work, my uncle and different ones would come and say, okay, I'm making sure your kids is all right over here.
Mamie, where is LaCurtis? LaCurtis, where is Mamie? So we all looked out for one another. Mamie says at the heart of her family was her grandfather, Mitchell Reels.
My grandfather, he was a deacon for Reels Chapel for 50 years. And he had this love for people.
We would sit out under his tree, pecan tree, his yard, and if we pumped water for the hogs and his animal, our reward was to go to the store and pick out what we want and eat it. But he would sit under the tree and he would talk to us.
And he was that kind of person that it wasn't monetary for him. Now, he knew a lot of white people with businesses and money, and they respected him.
And when you say Mitchell Rill's name, it had a lot of power to it because he owned land. He was a business person.
But my grandfather was that nurturing kind of person. He was that loving kind of person.
If he loaned you money, you didn't sign a paper saying you owed him. Your word was your bond.
And he was the type that once you got out of school or got married, wanted your own place, you could tell him what part of the land you wanted to be on. And that's where you would be.
And if he didn't want you there, then he would tell you, no, you can't have this spot, but you can have that spot. And then, when Mamie was about 10 years old, her grandfather got sick.
Her mother, Gertrude, took him to Sea Level Hospital. He had cancer.

I remember the night my mother went to Sea Level Hospital to carry him, and him telling my mother he had waited too late, waited too long. Mitchell Reels was dying, and he didn't have a will.

And so I think he realized then that, you know, I didn't do what I really should have done. But I raised my children and they know to try to hold on to the land because he knew.
He had that feeling when he got sick that the family would run into some issues with this land.

He realized by not making a wheel that that was going to become a problem.

What were his wishes for the land?

What did he tell your mother?

The night that my mother took Mitchell to Sea Level Hospital,

he told my mother, whatever you do, don't let the white man have my land. I'm Phoebe Judge.
This is Criminal. Mamie Reel's grandfather, Mitchell, died in October 1970.
He was buried in a cemetery on the Reels' family land, right next to Reels' chapel. Mamie says people have been buried there since the 1800s.
The 65 acres on the North Carolina coast had originally belonged to Mamie's great-grandfather, Elijah Reels. He was born in 1866, and his family had been enslaved.
He was able to purchase the land in 1911, when he was 45. He lost it when he couldn't keep up with the taxes, but his son Mitchell bought it back from the county in the 1940s.
And Mitchell never wanted the family to lose it again. His wish was to hold on to the land, for the family to keep working the land, making a living off it.
And he knew jobs were hard for family because a lot of them, they went up north. But if they kept the water, fished the water, they could always make a living.
But because Mitchell Reels didn't have a will, the land became something known as Heirs' Property. Heirs' Property, I could sum it up, it's a hot mess.
Heirs' Property dates back to Reconstruction and Jim Crow. It's something that was especially common among black families, who weren't always able to access the legal system to make legally binding wills, or who didn't want to.
Mimi says her grandfather didn't trust the courts. With Heirs' property, when someone dies without a will, any land they own goes to their descendants, who then jointly own the land.

But the property isn't cut up and given in chunks to each descendant.

Instead, each of them gets a percentage in all of it, like owning shares in a business.

And the property title often remains in the original owner's name,

making it hard for descendants to leverage it. It's hard to apply for a loan.
And when there is a dispute, it's hard to hold on to it. The U.S.
Department of Agriculture calls Ayers' property the leading cause of Black involuntary land loss. In the 20th century, Black farmers all over the country lost over 90% of their land.

Today, more than a third

of Black-owned land in the South

is Ayers' property,

including the Reels family land.

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See Mint Mobile for details. After Mitchell Reels died in 1970, his daughter, Gertrude Reels, Mamie's mother, was able to get a judge to put it in writing.
The surviving eleven children, or descendants of children, of Mitchell Reels are the owners of the lands exclusive of any other claim of anyone. Mamie Reels was 11 when her grandfather died.
By the time she graduated from high school, some of her older siblings had already moved into their own homes on Silver Dollar Road. Mamie's brother, Ly Curtis, lived in a trailer next door, and her brother Melvin built a house right by the water.
Melvin bought a boat and made his money fishing and shrimping. Around this time, Mamie remembers her grandfather's brother, Shedrick Reels, started coming to town.
Mamie didn't really know him. He lived in New Jersey.

I remember talking to him.

And talking to him, I realized he was a, he was total opposite from my grandfather.

My grandfather had that giving, loving heart.

He had this business, money-hungry attitude about him. In the legal document Mamie's mother had secured from the court, the land was only for Mitchell's children and grandchildren, not his siblings.
But Shedrick didn't agree with that. In 1978, he claimed he owned a chunk of land on Silver Dollar Road,

around 13 acres, right by the water,

the most valuable part of the land,

and the part of the land where Mamie's brothers,

like Curtis and Melvin, lived.

Shedrick claimed that he'd had the deed to the 13 acres since 1950,

which Gertrude and her children didn't believe. Mitchell, Mimi's grandfather, had the deed for the full 65 acres, including the waterfront.
Mitchell bought it at the courthouse store. So if he bought it at the courthouse store, she wouldn't have owned it one way or another because he's not Mitchell Rill's child.

Mamie was in her late teens by this time and remembers helping her mother and father figure out what to do.

And I remember when my mother and them first started with this land situation,

I would go with them to lawyers' offices and I would help keep up with paperwork.

And so I started being like that, my own little detective, keeping the papers, reading their papers, because they were old. They didn't understand a lot of things.
And so I felt like I was the educated one to help them understand it. There was a court hearing about Shedrick's claims.
Shedrick was using something called the Torrance Act, where all you need to do is prove to a lawyer that you own the land, and the lawyer then reports it to the court. The family's lawyer, Claude Wheatley III, later described the hearing as chaotic.
But Mamie says after the hearing, they still felt sure that the land, the 13 waterfront acres where like Curtis and Melvin lived, was still theirs. But then, about three years later, in 1982, they received a trespassing notice.
The family was told that they didn't own that land anymore.

Shedrick did. During the hearing that had been described as chaotic, Shedrick's lawyer looked at the rights of the surviving 11 children of Mitchell Reels, and he concluded that Shedrick was the owner of the waterfront property.
According to the family's former lawyer, Claude Wheatley III, one of Mitchell's sons, Calvin, had given verbal authorization for Claude to sign over the 13 Acres to Shedrick, and Calvin died shortly after. Mamie says she doesn't think her uncle Calvin would have done that.
Claude Wheatley III said that Mitchell's heirs received notice of the decision, but Mamie's family said they weren't notified and didn't find out until years later. By then, it was too late to

appeal the decision. I was always told that Shedrick said when his brother passed away,

this is my opportunity to take the waterfront. This is Kim Duhon, Mamie's niece.
She didn't grow up on Silver Dollar Road, but visited often as a kid. When did you first become aware about what was going on with this land? So when I was younger, and I would say more so in my early teenage years, when we would come down for different holidays or whatever, I would always hear my grandmother speaking early in the morning about a possible situation with the land.
It was always, there's something going on with the land again, but it was always kept very hush hush. The older I got, it was still kind of talked about in secrecy.
But at one point, I knew that it was some major issues going on because it was a lot of activity, not just conversation. It was activity regarding legal stuff and documents coming in.
So I would say in my early 20s is when I realized, okay, something's not quite right. And you would come here in the summers when you were growing up.
I come here, I came here every summer as a child. My father was in the Coast Guard, so we traveled a lot.
But this was our personal safe haven. She says a lot of Black families in eastern North Carolina that had owned land on the water had lost it.
I think we're one of only few families in this, actually probably on the southern east coast, that still has some ownership to Black Waterfront. And so friends would come to the Reels Land to visit.
I mean, we walked freely on the property. We swam.
We ran. We had barbecues.
This was our personal country club, so I would have never thought there were any issues. We thought that this was our property.
Now they were being told they didn't have access to it anymore. And then, Shedrick sold the 13 acres of the family land to a developer.
Melvin and Lycurtis lived on the part of the land that was going to be sold off. What were they supposed to do? Those are the questions we ask.
What are they supposed to do? Melvin makes his living on the water. My Curtis was a brick mason.
Okay. This is air property, so you cannot get a loan to do anything.
Okay. You live in Carter County.
We're not called Jim Crow County.

Okay, it ain't like you can go walk in a bank

and they're going to loan you money

to buy property to go somewhere else.

But what were we to do?

What was they supposed to do?

Where were they going?

Had been here all their life,

know they own their land,

and then you're going to just take them and throw them out of the house.

Not far from his house, Melvin had built a small club,

which he called Fantasy Island.

I really built that to keep the family coming to the water.

Here's Melvin.

And where we can enjoy ourselves on the water. With all the guys got the boats, they'd be bringing in the stuff.
Here's Melvin. When did you start fishing? I'm 77.
I started fishing and shrimping when I was 16. I got my commercial license, and I went to fishing,

then making good money and making good money out on that water.

And I got that boat.

That's where I went on to work.

What do you love about being on the water?

It's so peaceable.

And then I'm catching shrimps and fish and stuff.

That's what I enjoy doing.

And I love to feed people that enjoy seafood.

And then put the word out, y'all, get you some pans

and come down and go on the boat and get all the shrimp you want.

And we had sometimes 3,000 pounds of shrimps. For a while, Melvin kept fishing like normal and kept inviting friends and family over to his club.
He didn't want to leave, and it didn't seem like the developers were going to start any construction. Here's his brother, Ly Curtis.
People coming from everywhere, Elizabeth City, everywhere coming down for the, you know, and joining the salesman, black or white, it didn't matter. We just bought it.
That was it. Every weekend? Yeah, every weekend.
Start on Thursday night. Go all the way up to Sunday night.
We visited Melvin, like Curtis, Mamie, and their family at their mother Gertrude's home on Silver Dollar Road. When we got there, Melvin showed us around the land.
And turning around, so the rest of the property, is it all, the rest of the 65 acres, is it all in here? Yeah, it's from that water back down there to that curve. Everybody on the Silver Dollar Road is just about family.
You know everyone? Yeah, I know everyone. We grow it up together.
Come on in. She say, come on in.
Come on. Whose house is this? This is my mother.
Yeah, we built this. Yeah, we built this house.
We built the house. Toed the old one down and built it and designed it just about like she had.
What year did you build this house? What year did this house were built, mother? This is about my boy. This house was built after Hurricane Floyd.
Mr. Floyd.
Floyd was the one that destroyed her old house. Okay, Floyd.
Hurricane Floyd hit the North Carolina coast in 1999, more than 10 years after Melvin and Lye Curtis' land was sold. They were still living on it.
After the hurricane, Melvin and Light Curtis and their brothers built their mother a new house on her land. That's where we spoke with everyone.
Five years after Floyd, in 2004, Melvin and Light Curtis learned that there was a court order. They had to vacate the land.
They also had to tear down their houses themselves so the land would be ready for the developers.

The developer Shedrick had sold it to

had hired Claude Wheatley III

to finally enforce the eviction,

the same lawyer who'd originally represented

the Reels family as they tried to protect

the family land.

We contacted Claude Wheatley III for this story,

and he declined to comment.

How did it feel when you were told that you were

trespassing on your own land?

Well, I knew it was a lie.

At first, Ly Curtis thought maybe he could try to move his house,

to move it back further into his family's land. But his mother, Gertrude, told him not to.
She said, that's yours. They pretty much said they weren't going down without a fight.
Kim Duhon, Melvin and Ly Curtis' niece. They were not going to give this property up knowing that they lived on this property all

their lives. They knew that the property belonged to them and if it meant them being incarcerated,

that was what they were going to do. We'll be you next time.
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The Reels family tried again to get the courts to reverse the decision that gave the land to Shedrick. But nothing worked.
Kim Duhon told a reporter, that land was never his to sell. We're angry at the courts.
We feel like we own the land. Melvin and Lai Curtis stayed put, ignoring the court order.
And then, one morning, an explosion woke Melvin up. He said he'd never heard anything like it.
His shrimping boat, named Nancy J., was sinking. He reported it to the sheriff, but they didn't ever find out what had happened.
The whole thing made Melvin even more nervous. He said he'd wake up in the middle of the night feeling anxious about someone being outside his house.
Sometimes he'd take a flashlight outside and shine it around. It was hard to eat.
He says he lost a lot of weight. Mamie remembers like Curtis was anxious too, even if he didn't talk about it.
Sometimes she would see him awake early in the morning, walking up and down Silver Dollar Road. In early 2011, a hearing was scheduled.

Here's Mamie.

The attorney we had at that time,

he forewarned us before court.

He said, this judge don't want to hear nothing.

He just want to lock them up.

He said, you thumb your nose at the court.

Their attorney warned them that Melvin and Lye Curtis

could be put in jail for civil contempt for not obeying the court. Their attorney warned them that Melvin and Lai Curtis could be put in jail for civil contempt for not obeying the court.
Kim Doohan remembers Melvin came to visit with her before the hearing. He was my hero growing up because he was the one that kind of, he kind of took care of the entire family.
So it was like he was that person that if you wanted some extra money, you could always do little odd jobs and he'd give you extra money. So, of course, to me, he was the person that you went to if you wanted anything extra.
Now Kim had a chance to help her uncle. My Uncle Melvin literally came to my home in Jacksonville, North Carolina, and said, Kim, I'm going to jail, and I need your help.

And I knew that I was going to jail.

When he bought that eviction saying,

steal off this land, I knew that I wasn't going to steal off the land,

so you got to lock me up.

He asked me to promise him that I would get involved

and help secure the property at any cost.

The hearing took place in Beaufort, North Carolina, in March of 2011. By this time, Melvin was 64.
Mike Curtis was 53. Kim says they thought they'd get an opportunity to present their case in front of the judge.
But instead, the judge said he was sending them to jail. Kim says it felt like a punch in the gut.
She remembers they didn't even really get a chance to say goodbye before Melvin and Ly Curtis were led away. Melvin made eye contact with her and mouthed, Remember what I told you.
The bailiff only had one pair of handcuffs. They didn't usually need them in civil court, so one side of the handcuffs went around Melvin's wrist, and the other went around like Curtis's.
And we was in jail in less than 15 minutes. What did you think when they said you're going to jail? Were you surprised? I was, because I didn't think they could do it.
A judge can hold someone in contempt for their actions in the courtroom, after an outburst, for example, or for actions outside of court, like refusing to obey court orders. In North Carolina, the most common situation is someone has refused to pay child support.
Sometimes journalists have been held in contempt for refusing to reveal their sources. Sometimes the person held in contempt just has to pay a fine.
Sometimes they spend a short amount of time in jail. It isn't like being charged with a crime.
A judge can just announce that they're holding someone in contempt, and the punishment can happen immediately. It can happen without a trial.
So they were put in jail because at the hearing they were trying to say, no, we're not leaving. This is where we live.
We're not leaving land. And because Melvin and, like, Curtis refused to say we're going to be—we're going to leave, they were held in contempt of court and put in jail.

That is absolutely correct.

They expected to be in jail for 90 days.

They were there for eight years.

Next time, the rest of The Reel's family story. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me.
Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.
Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti.
Special thanks to Ruth Robertson. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal.
You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. For more on the Reels family story, you can read Lizzie Presser's article.
Their family bought land one generation after slavery. The Reels brothers spent eight years in jail for refusing to leave it.
We'll have a link in the show notes. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter.
We hope you'll join our new membership program, Criminal Plus.

Once you sign up, you can listen to criminal episodes without any ads.

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I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
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