Connecting to the Ancestors

I remember many years ago reading Michener’s book Chesapeake about Chesapeake Bay.  It starts with “the settling” of the Bay and the impact on a Native American Family, a wealthy family from England and a poor indentured family, a faith based family, etc.  As the book moves on from generation to intergeneration we see these families intermarry and their fortunes rise and fall. It effectively makes the point that we all have scoundrels and heroes in all our family lines.  I have held with shame since the third grade the knowledge that my father’s family were Virginia plantation owners and owned many slaves.  I was surprised when about 5 years ago a friend without my permission traced my family line and told me that one of my family line actually served in the Union Army (I had always assumed it would have been the confederate army and was captured and helped in a prison camp.  This did not erase the wrongs of previous generations but again prove the truism that we all have both scoundrels and heroes in our family line.

Native people traditionally introduce themselves by saying who they are descendent from on both sides of their family – back to grandparents.  This allowed for an oral tradition that kept them connected to and honoring of ancestors.  But the genociding, the re-locations and the boarding school kidnappings all began to bring down a wall of silence where histories were lost.  For African-American’s it has been nearly impossible to trace back any further than the end of the civil war – usually the first census after the war.  That may sometimes reveal clearly that they were born into slavery – and sometimes with some real sleuthing and due to the common practice of enslaved people being given the last name of the plantation owner – it has been sometimes possible to find information directly linking them to a plantation.  But it is near impossible to find out which generation was brought over in chains or from what African country.  Despite that possibility most African Americans know only back to their grandparents and sometimes do not know one set of those or sometimes even don’t know a parent.

A few years ago, I watched a webinar that brought me to tears.  It featured a white woman and an African American man about 10 years her junior.  Both were part of the philanthropy world and had met there and formed a casual friendship.  In a conversation it came up that they both had grown up in the same SC small town.  With dawning horror, it occurred to the woman who knew her family history involved slave owning that her family could have enslaved his.   She did the research and discovered this to be true.   She sat with it for two years working on a clean apology.  By clean she meant no defensiveness, no excuses, no minimizing – just a genuine apology.  Then she asked to meet up with him and she gave it to him.  He tells, crying a new in the filming, that he had never thought he needed anything from anyone about his enslaved past generations.  He thought he just accepted this as a grim fact.  But he tells that when she read to him the apology, he began to uncontrollably sob.   He later had the letter laminated and counts in one of his most precious possessions.

In the last six months I have begun to watch Henry Gates, Jr’s Finding your Roots.   He has many people of color on the show but also white people.   I was struck at first by how many of the African American people cry at finding out who was the enslaved generation of their family, at discovering their names, or sometimes at the cruel facts that are revealed.  But universally they express the feeling that they are whole in a way they had not previously imagined.   That they feel “real” – that it is a relief to have their roots.  I am very struck by how this was another level of the destruction of slavery – to separate descendants from ancestors and to leave them rootless.   Universally they also say none of this was ever talked about in their families.

I had thought that of course the trauma of slavery or Native genocide would make people talk about it – but as he also covers white people – I see that the trauma of poverty, or of doing shameful things like owning slaves – also makes people silent and not speak to their children about their past. I am struck by how people of all races when they hear the stories of suffering of great great grandparents long dead – of children left orphaned, of widows left with many mouths to feed, of people who kept their family together against great odds – they cry.   These are stories that if just watched as a stuffy PBS history special would not make them cry – but it is that feeling of connection – that I believe held knowledge in their very cells that makes them cry.   And many also express gratitude to both the heroes and the scoundrels of their family that they persevered so that they can be sitting there today.

Joanna Macy and many indigenous leaders have been saying that we must connect with our ancestors and our unborn descendants in order to save this planet.   Certainly our ancestors have stories of resilience and determination to share with us, and we must then in turn be these good ancestors for our unborn descendents.