Ancestry

Branching out

I have been noticing the number of us who lent voices, small as each of ours is, to protest
the senseless violence igniting streets, cities, the whole country and beyond, and the meanness of the abhorrent, often officially condoned, disregard for human life that continues despite the many "laws" that proclaim our freedom from social and political discrimination.

That's a mouthful of words, I know.  Yet words are what seem to be at the base of the problem here:  what we speak is not really what we act on or presume.

We rail against injustice, as we rail against violence, and yet we rear children in the permissive arena of both.  Peace is a word still conjured up in the abstract, and thus undermined by a long history of ignorance...in all its meanings.  We seem to accept that condition without examination.

So after yesterday's controversial blackout, today I happened to turn on, quite by accident, a segment of a PBS show that I like...Henry Louis (Skip) Gates' "Finding Your Roots"...which unwinds the tangled histories of celebrities' families to find answers to the essential question, Where I Come From.  I am not much of a celebrity watcher.  What interests me is the search for roots and its process; the celebrities might as well be the rest of us, everyone (or everyman, in the old lingo), for their fame disintegrates in the face of the personal unveiling they undergo.  Learning it piece by piece, they are amazed, sometimes humbled, sometimes proud, feeling validated or undone, though always they seem to welcome the knowledge.  The puzzle of who they are, or at least part of it, has been solved.

Once a woman in my Journal Workshop nearly went mad when I assigned what I considered a basic cue.  "I can't do it!" she cried.  "Where I come from is too complicated!  It's too crazy!  It's too scary!"  She just about threw her notebook at me.  Okay, I told her.  You don't have to take hold of the huge long picture...just write about one incident in your life, and start from there.

The next week, she came back with a short poem about leaving her house in the morning for first grade.  Her mother would braid her hair carefully, and she, dressed in her favorite outfit--jeans and a cowboy shirt--would run out.  In the alley behind her house, she would undo the braids and shake her hair loose. "And then I am beautiful!" she wrote. When she came home for lunch, her mother would have made her favorite sandwich.  The girl (though she was writing as a woman of 60) then remembered, "Mother would be sad again.  We didn't talk about it.  We never did."

From that seminal version of where she came from, she eventually went on to stories of her family's past.  Growing up in West Texas, she was the granddaughter of a doctor who rode horseback from one patient to another.  Her predecessors had helped settle the west.   So her ancestry as she slowly unveiled it seemed richly entangled with the history of that part of the state, which by the time she wrote was still in many ways a frontier, albeit in a much more cosmopolitan way.

And yet, as everyone who listened to her realized, the most important and most terrifying part of her otherwise sweet poem was that last line..."we didn't talk about it."  The unknown of our histories begins in that very place.  What do we pass along, unrealized, when they don't?  What is it about us that we cannot put into words?

The same issue occurs on a larger scale, too:  the more cosmopolitan we become, the more our ancestries become unspoken.  They get lost in the thickets of entangled social mores, like the rabbit in the children's tale who knows few will dare to venture into such a dark, thorny place after him.  The thorns of discovery hurt, whatever the prize when we find it.

On this show, Gates was interviewing a couple, actors married to each other...famously, he pointed out, for nearly three decades.  Going through their separate histories to find their origins by family history, genealogy, and genetic searches, he and his staff, with the digging of local experts, came up with not only the stories of the generations that bore them, but also shed light...quite a bright light...on the eras those generations lived in and helped shape.  It was easy to do, as interestingly each actor had ties to the progenitors of this country.  Filling out the past beyond family stories, however, meant going into their ties to revolt and to slavery, in which each family had played some part.  (It's a theme that Gates favors, being an historian of some celebrity himself.)

Gates' teams' research led straight into the history of slavery in the North, specifically in New England on one side and in Quaker Pennsylvania on the other.  All the parties agreed that neither family nor learned history, in both actors' cases illustrious, brought that to light.  To make his point about what we learn and don't learn about ourselves as people and as a culture, Gates took his subject to a classroom at Boston Latin, not exactly in the lower echelon of schools and an historic entity in itself.  If you were living in eighteenth century America, he asked them, would you, like your other countrymen and -women, hold slaves?  The students' responses, Gates noted, were more intelligent and open than his own generation's might have been.  He admired that.  (These privileged students, of every race and color, were used to speaking out, of course, in so protected an environment...he didn't add that, but it leapt to the eye.)  Some of them, both black and white, said, yes, they would, because that would have been the norm then.  How they treated their slaves might, they hoped, be better... I leave that sentence hanging, as they did.

I wish Gates had asked them if, that day, that minute, they would fight against the slavery the world still supports.  The thing is, this isn't the latest segment of Gates' show.  I think it aired in 2010.  Have those students, or we, come any farther in self-discovery?

I mention all this because I am thinking back to words spoken and unspoken about where we come from and why we harbor, knowingly and unknowingly, openly and secretly, the prejudices we inherit and pass on, in our families as well as in our social groups, and just as terribly as a country.

I once took my father to task for using a slur at the dinner table, adding that I was glad my two young children weren't in hearing distance.  He looked at me with genuine astonishment.  "But that's just something we say," he said.  "Yes," I said,"but they will hear that that's who they are."

He apologized, of course, as genuinely as his astonishment.  I knew perfectly well by then that my father grew up in a rough, unprivileged time when every culture had its detractors and its slurs, slinging them at one another, hatefully, both in public spaces and in the very corners of private, hands-off places.  They were fighting words which built up barriers whose foundations had begun long ago and continue to be built up, no matter what words we use to counter, to overcome them. He lived through them, fought their consequences, took for himself the shield of toughness to resist their hurt.  We who live in social enclaves (autoclaved, I sometimes think these days) where we pretend they do not exist think we have risen above that.  Have we?  What, I wonder, have I, knowingly or not, inherited from my family's past or my own?

I wish that were not as pessimistic as it sounds.  I'm sorry.  I am pointing out that we still live in a country where hate and prejudice rule in high places as well as on the street, and in a time where resistance still has to be brought out into the streets to try to counter it because in high places it is still entrenched.  I suggest we need to bring that resistance home, too.

But while it is energizing to be against the destructive, how much more hopeful to be for our better selves by inserting acceptance, understanding, the assumption of human dignity in the place of isolation, of xenophobia, of tyranny, hoping against hope.  I would hope we would want to do more than hope; that we would work hard for the better.

Can we do that?  Are we willing?

I'd written this post already when this morning's walk brought me face to face with those very  questions:

The Tri-delta sorority house on Franklin Street...

...and its fraternal neighbor

Good for you!  I said in front of the Tri-deltas.  But I would have liked to see the same allegiance to "We will do better!" on their neighbor's front porch, too.