Last week I
visited the plantation of my great-great-great grandfather. I was so very glad to have my daughter Katie along to share the journey. But before we went to the plantation, we grounded ourselves in our shared racial history at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery,
were overwhelmed by the numbers of lynchings documented at the National Memorial
for Peace and Justice, and walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Then we went to Billy the Wagon Maker’s plantation.
I wanted it
to be real.
While all
that was happening, an invisible menace was expanding across the country and
the globe, scarier even than the ghosts that threatened to keep me awake in the
echoing plantation house in Alabama.
Now I’m
home, and those of us who can are “social distancing,” “self-quarantining,” and
“sheltering in place” (I had never heard any of these phrases two weeks ago). For
me in the last two days that meant diving into the dark depths of my family on
Ancestry. It’s been my own disturbing, self-quarantined episode of “Finding
Your Roots.”
Sometimes
you don’t want to know.
As we all
do, I have sixteen great-great-great grandfathers—the great-grandfathers of my
grandparents. Not so very distant from me, if you think about it. Of those sixteen
people, all but two of them enslaved other people: one on my mom’s side and one on my
dad’s. The total number of people enslaved by my 3x great grandparents in 1850
was 182. In 1860 that number was 313 people. And that’s just one generation of
my family—there are many others above and below them on the gnarly family tree.
The curve of
today’s virus, whether steep or gradual, will pass. Though it will take years,
our economy will recover.
But I can’t
unknow what I’ve learned about my own family this week. And I have a better
understanding of why my dad thought we should all cast off our earthly
belongings and live in the woods. I’m beginning to realize that it wasn’t only
mental illness. It may also have been a need for penance. He knew what we came
from.
And now I do, too.
