I thought my work was done
Nearly three decades after I forcibly rejected all things Southern (including my accent, unless I get angry), I find myself face to face with them again, and it’s all Ben Affleck’s fault.
I know, it sounds nuts to frame it that way. But think of it like this: I am white. No matter how inclusive I work to be in life, the lens through which I view the world is by default that of a short, white, (naturally) blonde Southern girl. I may have grown up in turmoil, but I grew up in turmoil with enough. Enough of everything. Enough freedom to decide I didn’t like how folks were being treated where I was from and to head off to make a new life somewhere else. If that isn’t privilege, I don’t know what is.
Growing up, I questioned my life. I caused friction, I didn’t fit in (by refusing to try, and not wanting to become what I saw*). I thought it was weird that we had a maid, and weirder still the way my step-grandmother and parents spoke of her — as some odd combination of friend, downtrodden family member, servant, and object. What did it mean when my step-grandmother said “I sent Penny** to my son’s — she’s theirs now,” as if Penny had no choice in who she worked for? I adored her. She was kind to me, a difficult child, and I vowed I’d never treat someone like my people treated Penny. I was 8.
All these years later, looking back, I still can’t remember if Penny was happy — only that she made me and my sisters happy. It’s probably just the passage of time, a natural amnesia, but it feels like I failed at not erasing a person.
I was lucky in life to have a grandfather and grandmother I adored, who loved me unconditionally. Yet I thought it was weird that my grandfather would hang out in the black part of town, drink with black people he [said he] adored, pick fights with these same people as the night went on, then come back to his house drunk and angry. He’d even occasionally end the night shooting trees in his yard with his two pocket derringers and shouting racial slurs. How could this person be so kind to me, so friendly to people in our town, and then act like that? Worse, what did it mean about me that I adored him?
It felt for a long time like I was born with a knot of anger in my belly — a full-body clenched resistance to a certain brand of conformity. That much anger seemed excessive, even as I experienced it. It often felt like I was being smothered by this feeling of “other,” and so I began to drift — to travel without leaving my little place on the planet.
It started with books. Books I read anywhere I could, as often as I could. In the back of a walk-in closet with a flashlight while arguments raged in the “real” world, I read. In bed, under the heinous Laura Ashley coverlet (one of my mother’s many futile attempts to remake me into a docile, compliant daughter). In the bath. At the table, — my leg bumping up and down in time with the story. In the car, my headphones in and blaring, building my world a page and a beat at a time. I couldn’t get enough of the tales of other lands, other people, braver girls. I wanted to become Lucy, Anne, Ivy, Dicey, Kit, Scout, or a dozen others.
Then came movies, and I wanted to be Leia and Han all at once.
I didn’t know it yet, but I was running. And it’s difficult to outrun something nameless.
No matter where I ran — summers at three-month long sleepaway camps, nights at friend’s houses, afternoons stealing away with friends and causing trouble, walk after walk alone in the woods…
No matter how I ran — attending a high school across the country, hiding in books and music…
It never felt far enough. You can’t run from what you are.
What I was (and what I am) is Southern. The kind of Southern that grew up with “the South shall rise again” rhetoric all around her, Confederate flag shirts and stickers everywhere. The kind of Southern raised on Gone with the Wind, Uncle Remus, and terrible, racist humor. The kind that went through the first years of History and Social Studies classes using textbooks that barely devoted any pages to Civil Rights, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Rosa Parks, only learning about the extent of America’s true history after leaving the state. The kind of Southern that ‘had money’ once, that owned farm land (leased out to actual farmers), that sold off family land by the parcel to keep pretending they were still ‘gentleman farmer’ types, that ‘paraded their “eccentricities” on the front porch and handed them a sweet tea’ as they say, that hunted (and still hunts) for sport, that votes how their family votes, worships how their family worships, has parents in societies like the Junior League and Gardening Club and aunts and great aunts in the DAR. That’s right — we’re one of those families: Daughters of the American Revolution, pearls and jumpers, appropriated cornrows for all of the sisters during the summer of Bo Derek — the whole pretentious, tone-deaf kit and caboodle. (Or at least part of the family is. The other part? Well, my genealogy-obsessed aunts certainly didn’t like to talk about that).
So I ran, because I couldn’t believe people could still be that way and function as adults in America*.
I refused to apply for the DAR, even though it may have helped pay for college. I left an all-girls Southern college after Freshman year and moved to California to embark on a more diverse and inclusive life plan (although I use the word “plan” very loosely here). I remade myself — not without some casualties along the way, and certainly not without the help of so many people and their amazing families — into a person I could stand to be around.
At first I thought leaving was enough. Back then, I thought the damaged relationship with my family would be enough for my ‘work’ to be done. But now, as I sit here watching black man after black woman, black adult after black child get shot, lynchings happening in this decade — this year — I think, “wasn’t that just so cute of me to think that?”
Each new act of domestic terrorism makes me sad, makes me angry, makes me vocal on social media, makes me check myself, but my reaction is still so very white. It is “How can we work within the system to solve this?” But this belies the problem — that the system is broken, and that until we stand up and are accountable, as white people, for how we treat our fellow humans, that won’t change.
What does that have to do with Ben Affleck?
He and I have something in common: slavery in our family history.
When I read that he had canned a television show so people wouldn’t discover this, and that a respected professor was complicit in this deception, I thought “What cowards.” I don’t know how we would go about reaching the parity that we could achieve with more complex solutions like reparations, but I think reparations are way past due in some form. I know that will make a lot of [white] people freak out, potentially asking where that money will come from when people are struggling to make their way in a post-recession, tech-altered job market. Perhaps we can take a cue from the reparations that were approved for survivors of the Japanese internment camps in WWII. However we make it happen, I do believe reparations are due for past mistakes, even if you weren’t the one who made them.
So here are mine.
I think it’s important that we stand up and acknowledge a piece of history. My family goes all the way back to Nathaniel Rochester, and while that is a cool fact for a history buff, a history that long (and longer, even, to England and Ireland) comes with a price, and other people paid it for us long ago.
Part of the admission process to the DAR is tracing, with provable documentation or copies thereof, that your lineage is true, as far back as you can. Acceptable documents include wills, marriage records, family bibles, census records, birth records, letters and the like. Looking at these documents when I was a teenager made me queasy in a way I couldn’t articulate yet, reading that slaves who were barely given names were passed along in list after list, like furniture. “I bequeath Big Jim, Sally, Little Dot and the family feather bed to my son…” was the first line I read in a will that made me pale. In some cases an entire family was split between siblings to keep things “fair”. Fair for whom?
As I write, I’m not sure what saying all of this out loud will do, other than to say loudly, “I see you. I see what happened. I am not OK with what happened to your families. We need to acknowledge this happened to you, and in many ways still happens to you. It matters. My ancestors were part of the problem. I am sorry.”
Even then, it’s not enough.
Think of it this way — I’m certainly not the first person to confront slavery in their family history, and neither was Ben Affleck. On the same show, Finding Your Roots, Anderson Cooper was confronted with a slave owning ancestor so horrible that one of his slaves murdered him, and Cooper didn’t try to censor anything. His reaction was entirely honest and empathetic (my personal favorite line from Cooper: “He had twelve slaves. I don’t feel bad for him.”), but it also ended there. Ken Burns and Derek Jeter were on the same episode — and while they also didn’t try to hide the ancestry that was uncovered, they also didn’t do anything beyond the confines of the show. If people with a platform stop at the absorption of a fact, a basic reaction, we’ve lost leverage in a battle to give weight to the recent history of our fellow Americans.
Here’s the rub: I don’t think simply acknowledging our past for what it is will be enough. I think we need to apply some of the better Southern traditions to how we approach this. I have huge problems with my roots, but there is also much to love. When someone in your family dies or you are in any kind of pain, the community rallies around the family and person in pain and lifts them up. They are inundated with support, with casseroles, with warmth, affection and acceptance. We are all one community, and we need to spend more time supporting and amplifying instead of dividing and arguing about tone or trying to tell people how to talk about their lived experiences.
So what can we do, as a nation of divisions, to become a community that lifts each other up? Acknowledge that we are a product of a painful past. Educate yourself on the present. Listen — without opinion or comment. Amplify stories of injustice so they can be held to the light and fixed. Bear witness to the ongoing pain of our fellow man. Take a stand — in the voting booth, on juries, as a citizen who observes wrong doing and calls it out, and more. Change the system from our place of privilege within it to hold accountable those who operate from a place of keeping their fellow man downtrodden and hopeless. Raise your voice, and do your part to help the voiceless and marginalized be heard.
* It is safe to assume that my reason for leaving South Carolina was about more than one huge social justice issue, but those stories are for another time, another essay, another layer peeled back.
** Names changed, yadda yadda
