A pondering on family history

 Laura’s Post. 

Turns out, if you go back far enough, my family came from Alabama. Or came to Northern Alabama to co-found a town named Trinity rather, in ~ 1810 when Alabama was still a territory. Descendants of the earliest colonizers in the 1600’s, someone broke off from the more heavily populated North Carolina as land was being taken from the Cherokee tribes in Alabama and turned into land to cultivate agriculture, namely cotton. This meant bringing enslaved Africans with them, and my ancestors were not except from this practice. 

This is not the version of this narrative I was told growing up. Highlighted have been my Great-Great Grandfather’s involvement with the University of Virginia Law School in Charlottesville, the medical degree obtained by my Great Grandfather, who moved to Seattle to found Virginia Mason Hospital. And honestly it’s a history I don’t quite know how to hold now. In recent years, I am coming into deeper levels of understanding of the one-sided narrative that is my historical point of reference. For the past 2–3 years, I’ve mostly avoided it, maybe bringing it up in hushed tones. When a place of employment or my daughters’ schools encourage us to share a piece of our “cultural history,” I have to pause. Are there history or traditions (or wealth) that have not been passed down in my family built on stollen lives on one side or on the other side of the family (Hawaii), culturally appropriated from a Native tradition? These are hard questions to ask and I do not bring them up to harm, but to sincerely ask, how do we grapple with this? 

Graves of my ancestors

What I feel walking through some of sacred Civil Rights places dedicated to the struggle for freedom is a message I’d like to pass down to my own daughters: the way forward, a way that hopefully will continue to slog towards healing and justice, cannot be built on shame, but must be built on truth. Because in reality, though I’m sure many of my White peers may feel they have more “noble” ancestors than mine, if you have white skin in this country, whether your family arrived 400 or 50 years ago, you have been able to step into a privileged class and benefit from this misappropriation of land, wealth and access to power. And Northerns are not exempt. Just as Boston, the “liberal” Northern city who is credited with banning slavery before it’s Souther neighbors, was built on the backs of enslaved people and continued to economically fuel the transatlantic slave trade with ships, rum, etc., long after it allowed trafficked humans into it’s port. 

I’m understanding in new ways on this trip how badly we need a new narrative. I’m sure there are some among those I love who will find some disagreement or offense with this. I’m sorry. It is not intended to harm. But if I can’t raise these tough questions with those who I know and love, what chance do these conversations have in the world at large? And I do have a deep love and gratitude for the two self-appointed family historians of both the Lile and Morgan lineages: knowing where we come from is so important, and I have learned so much from you both about where I come from. And if the wise man I’m traveling with is correct, perhaps only when we show ourselves love for the whole picture for our messy selves and lineages can we be our authentic selves in the world. 

A pearl of wisdom from Jo Ann Bland of Selma. She was discussing the irony of the Selma Civil Rights March of “Bloody Sunday” struggling to get over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for one of the grand wizards of the modern Klan. Someone in the audience suggested we should change the name. And she said, “No, keep the name. People should know the truth. Keep the name. Change the narrative.” And that is exactly what Jo Ann Bland and other Marchers of Bloody Sunday did on March 7, 1965. Because in our generation, Edmund Pettus is now synonymous with Black liberation rather than the staunch defender of White supremacy it was named for. 

Someone asked Jo Ann, “where do we go from here?” She said, “every mighty river starts with a single raindrop.” 

View from the Edmund Pettus Bridge overlooking Alabama River