I Can’t Hide Mine, Please Don’t Hide Yours: An Open Letter to Ben Affleck

In the 1980s, the descendants of the Collins family of Somerset Plantation in North Carolina and the descendants of the slaves of Somerset Plantation met for a family reunion. It was a very important, healing experience, and one that came about as a result of years of genealogical studies done by Dorothy Spruill Redford, who tells the story in her book Somerset Homecoming.

Imagine if any of the participants had been reticent in any way…..but they weren’t. It was a joyful experience, from all accounts.

Alex Haley even attended. Pretty cool. I’ve loved this story for years.

LikeLike

WE HAVE TO TALK ABOUT THE PAST!!! I’m so on board with this, Keith. One aspect you didn’t mention though, that I think is important is our shared blood lineage. So many whites have black blood, and vice versa, that it’s clear we all hold a little of the other within ourselves. I’m reading a book right now called Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball, which addresses this topic. So many slaveowners had children with their slaves that our history is indeed a shared one, physically as well as emotionally and culturally. Peace to you.

LikeLike

trying my best not to sob uncontrollably right now…this post is really bringing up some emotions. Mr. Twitty, THANK YOU SO MUCH for writing this.

i’m currently trying to piece together the family of my 6th great-grandmother, Saline Davidson. during Saline’s lifetime, over the course of many moves with the William & Jane (Fleming) Davidson family (from South Carolina to Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, to Pontotoc County, Mississippi, to Brazos County, Texas, and finally to Eureka, Navarro, Texas), two female members of her family — first, i suspect, a sister of Saline, then later one of Saline’s daughters — were given away as “wedding presents” to two of William & Jane’s daughters upon their marriages (Caroline Rachel Davidson Allen and Elizabeth Ann Davidson Jones). i’m trying to find evidence of these gifts/transactions so i can bring these two relatives home. it’s been as many as 200 years since the first separation, and they deserve to be reunited with their families. it would be helpful if i could make contact with white Davidson descendants in these areas; however, because of the “blind spot” that exists in regards to acknowledging & discussing slave-owning ancestors, i don’t have much faith that such contacts will happen. but i will keep trying, because tracing African-American ancestors is courageous-as-hell work.

LikeLike

I want to sincerely thank Michael Twitty for this beautiful and empathetic piece. I am the descendant of people who held other people in slavery. I refuse to refer to “slaves” and “slave owners;” “slave” is not who those peolpe were – it was a circumstance forced upon them. “Slave owner” is equally offensive as the perpetrators simply stole what they had no right to no matter how much they paid.
Being descended from people who enslaved other people is like being descended from Nazis – while you yourself didn’t do it, you live with the shame, anger and disgust you feel for your ancestors actions, and the long-term consequences, and I deeply appreciate Mr. Twitty understanding that.
My personal reaction has been to attempt to remain mindful in my attitudes, assumptions and dealings with people and live my life in such a way to try to heal the evil my ancestors perpetrated by standing against the racism that still poisons our national psyche.
And I made the decision that though I would not deny my ancestors’ actions and own up to my familial connection, I would let them as individuals be forgotten. I figure they had brought dishonor to themselves, and since one of the main fears we have as humans is having our personal existence forgotten, letting that be their fate would serve them right.
Yes I’m familiar with the ancestor worship Mr. Twitty refers to. My mother has traced our family to the earliest days of the founding of this nation and back several hundred years before that in Europe. These generations of people were not all involved in bringing shame upon their family by enslaving other people. That was a very small number of individuals in a long lineage. Mr. Twitty has caused me to rethink my approach; perhaps those individuals who participated in our country’s shameful slavery past should be remembered, everything that can be found out about them should be found out and shared so that others may find links to their own ancestry. I will do that Mr. Twitty – I will look at those southern ancestors I slammed the book on, the ones about whom I’ve said “let them be forgotten and rot.” I’ll ask my mother to point me towards the ones who held slaves, I’ll look for census records, see if I can learn the names of the people they enslaved. For it never occurred to me until just now that by slamming the book on those ancestors, I might also be slamming the book on the ancestors of many other people – the descendants of the people my ancestors enslaved. If I really want to heal my ancestral karma, that is probably a far more useful strategy. Thank you Mr. Twitty

LikeLike

About six years ago, 2009, an African American Muslim imam, Mikal Sahir, visited my United Church of Christ to lead us in a discussion about the Abrahamic religions. After his presentation, I went to meet him and his wife. At my church, we wore name tags, for hospitality toward guests. He saw my surname and we began to talk about our ancestors. In fact, my surname was the surname also of several families in the town in which my father was born.

Mikal shared that his great grandfather was a slave in the cotton plantation of a man named Fate McWilliams. His great grandfather was freed from slavery by the Emancipation Proclamation, when he was nine years old.

I recalled a conversation many years ago about Jim Fate McWilliams. Fate was the colloquial pronoun citation of LaFayette. James LaFayette McWilliams was my great great grandfather.

As Mikal and I pulled at all the loose strands of our ancestors and our current families, I became overwhelmed by a sense of shame. I felt I had been punched in my gut, blindsided with the unfolding story. This stranger told me stories about my family I had never heard.

I grew up not 20 miles from my Dad’s hometown, but I never knew I was descended from a slaveowner. I realized that in summers of most of my childhood life, a young person near my age had gone to movies in the same theater as I, but he would have sat in the upper balcony, away from white kids. That is about as close as we would have come to each other, I’m sure, because my father was estranged from his McWilliams family, due to tragic circumstances in his childhood.

Trying as hard as I could to get information from my father about his father’s ancestors, I could pull only a few vignettes of Dad’s contact with the descendants of the enslaved McWilliams. But, Mikal had many years of research into his ancestors’ stories, and their ties to my ancestors. Mikal knew more about my white slaveowner forebears than I did. He interviewed my father’s aunt, whom I met only once, when my estranged grandfather died, and my family visited her (source of familiarity with her grandfather’s name, Fate). Mikal’s recordings I heard some forty years later called to mind more stories I did not know.

I was invited to the African American McWilliams family reunion that year. Many of the elders remembered my father’s birth. They remembered my grandfather’s abandonment of or banishment from my grandmother and my father. They told me I bore resemblance to my father’s aunt. They had so many stories!

Mikal and I gave presentations of the story of our meeting to some groups. The most memorable one, besides the family reunion, was the Indianapolis African American Genealogy Society. I learned from that group that many individuals had grown up alongside their slaveowner descendants. Eventually, when schools were integrated, great great grand children of the slaveowner and the enslaved played together and learned together. I went to school with and was in Girl Scouts with kids from Mikal’s family, but married names changed, and Mikal Saahir was a Muslim name given to him in his twenties. I came away from the genealogy society realizing that African Americans are acutely aware of being descended from slaves. Only white descendants of slave owners can choose to hide their history. Like Ben Affleck, a white person can avoid discussion of “How did you come to be here?” White people, like me, like Mr. Affleck, need to acknowledge the past, and admit that we benefitted from the horrific institution of slavery. “We” like to say, “Well, my ancestors were Irish, and they were enslaved and terrorized by the English.” Fine, that might be true, but the truth is, hundreds of years of killing, beating, and withholding opportunity are a story white Americans descended from slaveowners must claim as our story. If the Old South aristocrats want to live in that glorious history, they must also embrace the whole story. I almost want to say, “Repent!” That’s what I felt on that Sunday morning in the First Congregational United Church of Christ of Indianapolis.

What continues to amaze me about this story is that Mikal’s parents moved north to Indianapolis for better opportunity. I had moved to Indianapolis only three or four years before this meeting. I almost slept in that Sunday morning, having returned from a vacation in the wee hours that morning. I cannot imagine other circumstances that would have brought us together to have what was to me a life-changing encounter.

I learned of two men, Edward Ball, author, and Macky Alston, filmmaker, who had similar awakenings to their descending from slaveowners. I recommend their works for more about their experiences: Edward Ball, “Slaves in the Family” http://www.amazon.com/Slaves-Family-Edward-Ball/dp/0374534454 and Macky Alston, “Family Name” http://www.pbs.org/pov/familyname/video_interview.php#.VTmJ_lI8KJI

LikeLike

Sir because of you and ppl like you as a young girl taken to Mississippi during summer months to live with my grand and great grand parents to receiving rich history of the past was amazing ,whether maternal or paternal I received information that has awake the passion to incite a calm that no person can erase ,at first anger stood in the way of understanding who I was as and individual ,because of the inhumane treatment of my ppl as a whole , my history was not taught in the city of my birth but as a child with a inquisitive mind I know something was not in place , my grandma would take my hand and lead me with the pain of the past in her beautiful grey eyes to the grove of pine trees on ancestral grounds to show me a glimpse of her past in our grave yard of my ancestors,oh the stories that amassed on those little journeys,so yes we need knowledge from past slave and slaveholders alike to complete these passages of history to help heal the deep atrocities of an institution that has left ppl of color without knowledge of themseleves or their root, and we all know without root nothing truly grows….

LikeLike

I wanted to add another comment. When I was about 12 or so in the ’60’s I was with my father when he was doing family research in the Alabama State Capitol building in Montgomery. As my father and I were meeting up I noticed he was talking to an African American janitor. I had seen the man had approached my father and they were finishing a conversation. I saw my father smile, I saw them both smile. They both looked like they were tickled by something. After the man left I asked my father what they had been talking about. Dad said that the man had come up to him and said “I hear that you and I are related.” I didn’t understand. I asked my Dad what he told the man. He smiled broadly and said “I told him that I had heard the same thing!” I asked my Dad how that could be possible, being that I was a pretty young 12 year old. He named yet another white male relative, one I didn’t know, but who wasn’t one of my father’s uncles.

If I look back at the census from 1790 in Maryland I see that right next to where my great great great grandfather lived was a household that was comprised of a free African American woman with several children. There is only one explanation for that which seems at all likely to me: those were mixed children and they too were my relatives. Why else would the woman be a free woman, right next door, living in a separate household with a bunch of kids? In any case, I do not think it is possible to discuss slavery without also discussing the probability that at some point in time, slaves were to some degree enslaved extended family members, however distant that connection had become over time. And like with my father and his relative in the capitol building, everyone involved had heard something or other specific like that from somewhere.

LikeLike

Michael-Thank you for posting this. Well said.

LikeLike

Thank you, Mr. Twitty for approaching this issue with understanding and knowledge sprinkled with humor and kindness.

LikeLike

Mr. Walters wrote in his personal blog, linked to in his post here on April 24, 2015 at 3:34 pm

“In a parallel to Dr. Watkins comments in this video about Ben Affleck, it is the continuation of lies through cover-ups that hinders people and their relationships with others from being the most fulfilling and truthful they can be.”

Mr. Walters’ comment strikes a chord with me. I have a cousin my age living in the community in Alabama where my father was born in 1919 and raised in until 1940. (I was not born or raised in that community.) My cousin several years ago was approached by some older African Americans doing family research. They wanted information from him that would confirm what must have been the rumors that they had heard about their own ancestry.

My cousin told them that it was “too bad that they hadn’t come asking sooner because all the old folks who would have known that information were now dead.” My cousin who had quite early in his life seemed to get some satisfaction from whispering family secrets instead had now lied when asked to talk about such matters with those ‘outside’ the family. Excuse me? Outside the family??!!!

Why had he lied to those truth seekers? In trying to decide why, I consider that my cousin had also told me that his own father had on his death bed told him everything about those old folks, his dying father had unburdened himself to my cousin on his deathbed and sworn his son, my cousin, to secrecy. So my cousin claims to have much information, but assets that he himself has taken some sort of death bed oath to not reveal that information, even with me that topic now closed by my cousin’s ‘maturity’. Could there be a more ridiculous rationalization?

My father’s white brother, my aged uncle, had help, some living on his property in what can only be called shacks. Were they ‘help’? The most visible shack was across the road from the beginning of my uncles driveway. I remember it clearly. Sometime during the long times between my visits, that shack had disappeared. Once I realized it was no longer there I asked my uncle what happened to it. He replied that there had never been a structure there, that my memories weren’t factual, were from too long ago when I was but a child. LIAR! His African American half brother lived there up to when I was about 15, I gather that because why else would my uncle outright lie to me except to further conceal from my mind that family fact. The African American man’s name was John, my half uncle John. John was also the given name of my slave owning great great grandfather.

As Mr. Walters puts it, lies and cover ups. All helped by certain peripheral activities such as untoward ancestor worship where my cousin writes poems as odes to our great great grandfather who owned 160 slaves in both Autauga and Lowndes county. There is a disconnect comes from false narratives, a disconnect for everyone. Truth will set you free, and what you lose in the telling is more than compensated for by the blessing that however hard the telling, truth contains.

So thank you Mr. Walters for your blogged remarks. Ben Affleck looks to me to be just as big a damn liar as some are in my family.

LikeLike

“Many formerly slaveholding families have papers and details vital to the process of climbing African American family trees. We need formerly slaveholding families to come to the fore, not hide.”

http://www.autauga.net/mysql/process_search_1860.php

There’s John! Eliza was a Bishop. John’s mother was a Morton. John’s father was Henry, born in Maryland and died in Georgia. Henry’s will: top of the list of property was a still, followed by what seemed to be implements connected to that activity. John’s occupation is listed as Planter, but he also had an MD from Penn. John used his medical knowledge to buy seemly sick slaves at a discount in auctions. Nice. I put what I had up on Ancestry.com that links Henry to a man that came to the Maryland in 1677. Given that Henry’s principal property was a still, my guess is that his son John MD had benefitted greatly from his connection to the Mortons.

So I don’t see justification for ancestor mythology, view ancestor mythology as hiding. The arrowheads I have from my father, collected from behind a mule and a plow, are from a way of life whose destruction is our history. False narratives are fools in a house of mirth. Our ancestors are among us, are us and for them and for ourselves, we best be in mourning.

LikeLike

thank you

LikeLike

As to the legacy of slavery. My mother told me of a bus ride she took from Alabama to Florida in the late ’40’s or early ’50s. There was a whites only toilet on the bus that she could use freely. The African American women were not allowed to use that toilet. When African American women had to go to the bathroom the driver stopped the bus and the women had to go visibly squat in a field near the road. Everyone could see them. That was one of my mother’s introduction to the legacy of slavery, having grown up in Chicago and out west. That was about 100 years after the civil war. That was the kind of segregation that some of my relatives felt at the time that they just couldn’t live without. Some didn’t see anything wrong with it. Some instead were almost mortally offended by it. Mortified, shocked, troubled and saddened. That is in my lifetime.

Another legacy of slavery is that in my family there were secrets about the legacy of slavery. Secrets are damaging. I’m not over that. Who on earth would rightly ask that a descendant of a slave just be over it when psychologically, the descendants of slave owners clearly aren’t?

LikeLike