Mariann S. Regan's Blog, page 4

Tracing Mixed-Race Relatives from Slavery Days

Last week on "Finding Your Roots," Henry Louis Gates, Jr. said it was extremely difficult for African-Americans to trace their slaveholder ancestors, because so many of the usual records are not available.  I know what he means.

My generic assumption is that when a white male slaveholder had a mulatto child with an African-American woman slave, that event would have been seen as an embarrassment to the white family. It would have been "hushed up" by whites. And maybe by blacks also, I don't know.

I well remember all that anxiety about "miscegenation," back in pre-civil-rights days. I'm glad all that fuss is over. Or I hope it is.

So I thought, what if I searched from the other direction, from a white slaveholder ancestor to his mixed-race descendants? My ancestors were white slaveholders.  I feel certain they had some mulatto children. Finding these second and third cousins of mine would be difficult, but difficult doesn't mean impossible.

Last week, I had a "find."

In the 1880 US Census, there was a mulatto man living not far from my great-grandfather (that is, a few lines above him on the census list). This man had one of our common family names, Tom.  He was 26, so I could guess his birth year, 1854.  He had a new wife, Lucy, categorized as black, and a new baby daughter, Annie, a mulatto.

For months, I had been trying to trace this man forward in the census, decade by decade. Nothing. No Lucy, no Annie. No such Tom with the birth year of 1854, anywhere in the state or country.

Finally, I thought of looking at the birth-marriage-death certificate list on ancestry.com. And there was the Tom whom I was searching for. He died in 1921.

Tom's death certificate was extremely helpful. It gave his birth date as December, 1855. That was all right, because birth dates on the US Census during this period are just an estimate, counting back from the given age.

Tom's death certificate also listed his father. It was indeed my (deceased) great-grandfather, judging by name and place of residence.  The first name of my great-grandfather was slightly misspelled, "Erasitus" instead of "Erasmus." But this is such an unusual first name that I do not doubt the identity.

Tom's mother was listed as Annie. He had named his daughter after his mother!

The person who signed the death certificate, Curley, turned out to be a son of Tom's subsequent marriage to a black woman named Anna. (I still don't know what happened to Lucy and Annie, Tom's first family.)  Curley would therefore have been my mother's cousin.

I traced Curley as far as I could. He is in the 1910 and 1920 US Census. Yet in the 1930 Census he is nowhere to be found.

I did find Curley's death certificate, in 1964. I found also a WWI draft registration record for 1917-18, which lists him as a farm laborer for a family in my great-grandfather's town.  Curley got his SSN in 1957.

Between 1921 and 1957, though, I have found no record of Curley. I've looked for his two sons, Josh and Tom, and his brother, Roland, on the US Census. Not there.

And here comes the 1940 Census, tomorrow. I hope it mentions Curley.

I've just begun. There are many, many other places I can search.

Robin Foster @savingstories has shared with me a list of suggestions that I will follow up one at a time. I know there are resources on @LCAfricana that will be helpful. Now that so many records are going online, especially for African-Americans, the search for mixed-race relatives is impossible no longer.

This whole process amazes and humbles me. It is requiring as much patience as I can summon, to work past dead ends for further clues.

And I still have no definite idea what is the right thing to do, or say, if (or when?) I finally do locate my mixed-race relatives. I will then try to proceed slowly and carefully.

On this last point, a great big thank-you to those readers who responded to my last post! Your comments gave me a lot to think about. I'll keep thinking.

 

 

 

 

 

What Is “Doing the Right Thing” in Genealogy?

On the PBS show “Finding Your Roots” last Sunday night, Harry Connick, Jr. was immensely relieved by the information Henry Louis Gates, Jr. told him about his Louisiana ancestors.

Why? For one thing, he learned that his great-grandfather had not owned slaves.

I can understand Harry Connick’s relief completely.

I would share that relief if I could. But my South Carolina maternal and paternal ancestors both owned slaves.

When I discovered that fact, I tried to deal with it through research and writing. My decision felt like an ethical choice—to investigate, or to turn away.

I wanted to formulate ideas about how owning slaves had affected my ancestors’ minds and hearts, and how those effects may have spread to later generations.

Many people in this country today have descended from slaveholders. This fact must have a definite influence on our national consciousness (and unconsciousness) about racial matters.

It took seven years to research my family memoir Into the Briar Patch, through genealogical records, visiting family members, and reading cultural studies. My experience was both painful and exhilarating—like being thrown into a briar patch, if your believe Brer Rabbit.

Right now I’m in the midst of another ethical choice.

I’m deciding to look for my second and third cousins of mixed race. I have reason to believe they exist.

On the one hand, re-establishing this family link feels like an ethical action. By that thinking, I’m assuming my mixed-race relatives would want to be acknowledged as members of the family.  Wouldn’t that be a healing experience for everyone, rather than the current situation of having the facts ignored or hushed up?

On the other hand, who am I to assume my mixed-race relatives want to be contacted? And what about my white relatives, who live in South Carolina, perhaps close to our mixed-race cousins, while I reside hundreds of miles away in Connecticut? What would they want?

Is it my busybody-business to connect people who might find the experience of connection too embarrassing or painful? Like re-opening old wounds?

Once I saw a taped presentation by Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family. He told the audience that when he found his mixed-race relatives, their reaction was halfway between joking and chiding, something like “Well, well, well! And where have you been all these years?” Maybe that was more positive than negative. Certainly those relatives thought it was “high time” that everyone met.

I will ask the family members I know, and the ones I may find, what their wishes are. But how should I ask them? And what if their wishes conflict with one another?

Do any of you readers have similar ethical choices about when and how to reveal the past?  I would welcome hearing your experiences and opinions.

 

 

What Is "Doing the Right Thing" in Genealogy?

On the PBS show "Finding Your Roots" last Sunday night, Harry Connick, Jr. was immensely relieved by the information Henry Louis Gates, Jr. told him about his Louisiana ancestors.

Why? For one thing, he learned that his great-grandfather had not owned slaves.

I can understand Harry Connick's relief completely.

I would share that relief if I could. But my South Carolina maternal and paternal ancestors both owned slaves.

When I discovered that fact, I tried to deal with it through research and writing. My decision felt like an ethical choice—to investigate, or to turn away.

I wanted to formulate ideas about how owning slaves had affected my ancestors' minds and hearts, and how those effects may have spread to later generations.

Many people in this country today have descended from slaveholders. This fact must have a definite influence on our national consciousness (and unconsciousness) about racial matters.

It took seven years to research my family memoir Into the Briar Patch, through genealogical records, visiting family members, and reading cultural studies. My experience was both painful and exhilarating—like being thrown into a briar patch, if your believe Brer Rabbit.

Right now I'm in the midst of another ethical choice.

I'm deciding to look for my second and third cousins of mixed race. I have reason to believe they exist.

On the one hand, re-establishing this family link feels like an ethical action. By that thinking, I'm assuming my mixed-race relatives would want to be acknowledged as members of the family.  Wouldn't that be a healing experience for everyone, rather than the current situation of having the facts ignored or hushed up?

On the other hand, who am I to assume my mixed-race relatives want to be contacted? And what about my white relatives, who live in South Carolina, perhaps close to our mixed-race cousins, while I reside hundreds of miles away in Connecticut? What would they want?

Is it my busybody-business to connect people who might find the experience of connection too embarrassing or painful? Like re-opening old wounds?

Once I saw a taped presentation by Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family. He told the audience that when he found his mixed-race relatives, their reaction was halfway between joking and chiding, something like "Well, well, well! And where have you been all these years?" Maybe that was more positive than negative. Certainly those relatives thought it was "high time" that everyone met.

I will ask the family members I know, and the ones I may find, what their wishes are. But how should I ask them? And what if their wishes conflict with one another?

Do any of you readers have similar ethical choices about when and how to reveal the past?  I would welcome hearing your experiences and opinions.

 

 

In the Light of Memoirs, Part 3: Who Did You Say Was Lazy?

Remember when Newt Gingrich, weeks ago in the Republican debates, informed us that black children raised in poverty needed a "work ethic"?

Their parents and guardians, Newt claimed, lived on government support and therefore couldn't teach their children a "work ethic."

So Newt offered to give black 13-year-olds some part-time jobs as janitors at their schools.

I'm not making this up. The news coverage was wide.

Among the many flaws in Newt's thinking, let's look at his glaring assumption that African-Americans are lazy.

In the light of my family memoir Into the Briar Patch, I can see how this stereotype was born during slavery and Jim Crow. Growing up, I learned that the South's rich vocabulary for laziness was often applied to African-Americans: shiftless, no-account, trifling, good-for-nothing, lackadaisical, half-hearted, slow as molasses.

In the South, slaves labored in the fields from sunup to sundown. Yet somehow the blacks were the ones who got called lazy.

What a devastating irony.

Does this contradictory stereotype make any sense? Not factually. Psychologically, though, it serves the culture of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and today's racism.

Southern planters bought  Africans to do the hardest work, the backbreaking toil of cultivating and harvesting crops. If whites had tried to grow their own crops, our nation would never have built its stupendous wealth—or so goes the common wisdom, and one "justification" for slavery.

In return for hard labor, chattel slaves received sub-standard room and board, along with a disturbing range of indignities and atrocities, including the frequent destruction of families and the sexual coercion of black women.

In researching my memoir I've deduced that during slavery, the families of white planters grew increasingly nervous about being called "lazy." After all, they did not work in the fields. They had to bury their resultant guilt. Among my ancestors, "lazy" was one of the worst words you could call a white person. The harder the blacks slaved away at stoop labor, the more uneasy whites became about that word "lazy."

A guilty workaholism was bequeathed to my mother, born in the 1910's. Her life was a frenzy of work, and she passed on that mandate to her children. She often asked us, "What are you doing right now to justify your existence?"

Thus it seems perversely natural, if unconscious, that whites would shift, or project, that charge of "lazy" onto blacks, to relieve their own anxiety. So African-Americans under slavery bore not only the brunt of the physical toil but also the stigma of being called "lazy."

We still have this term today: slave driver. It suggests the driver is accusing the slave of laziness.

This unjust stigma lasted through sharecropping, Jim Crow, segregation, and right down to the present day, when African-Americans are often still pre-judged as "lazy." A more popular current term, also prejudicial, is "the culture of poverty." To many, this phrase means essentially that blacks just can't help being lazy, because it's in their culture. Seriously?

A few years ago, I asked a second cousin what it had been like for our great-grandfather to own slaves. Here is his answer: "Well, sir, it was hard work, like everything else."

This relative wanted to assure me right off the bat that our white family had worked very, very hard. If anyone was lazy, it was, by silent implication, the blacks.

This stereotype of "lazy" draws African-Americans into one Catch-22 after another today. If they study hard, they can succeed, except that the run-down public schools for those "lazy" blacks cannot really support hard study. If African-Americans work hard, they can succeed, except that jobs for blacks, far inferior to those for whites, pay minimal wages. Beginning with slavery, whites have found all sorts of excuses to deny these stigmatized "lazy" people the true fruits of their labors.

Black people have become deeply discouraged, and no wonder. The stereotype "lazy" becomes vicious in its application. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Newt Gingrich hardly offers young black people a fair return for work. His idea is to distribute one janitorial salary over 30 black teenagers, for mopping school floors and scrubbing school bathrooms. That's insane—and it's an insanity rooted in the history of this country.

Schemes like Newt's are meant to fool all those anxious white people who need to think that they, themselves are naturally the best, hardest, most deserving workers. Even rich hedge fund managers, I hear, truly believe that they exhaust themselves with hard work.  It's never us, but the others—the blacks, the poor—who are lazy.

 

This is "Big Mary" and Lucia Kirven. "Big Mary" was the cook for Hugh Kirven's family in the early 1900s, when Lucia was a child.  This photo shows a tearful reunion in 1964.

 

 

 

 

 

In the Light of Memoirs, Part 2: Terror

Yesterday there were Republican Presidential primaries in Alabama and Mississippi.

Public Policy Polling reported two days ago that 45% of Alabama Republicans think President Obama is a Muslim, and 52% of Mississippi Republicans think so too.

 These days the word "Muslim" can be a fearful insult, suggesting a person who hates U. S. citizens and will strike without warning. To some, the word conjures an image of the Two Towers in flames. It terrifies them.

Some pundits have said that calling President Obama a Muslim is a way to "Other" him—to hint that he is not a real American, that he is an outsider.

Good point. Yet this insight of "Othering" does not cut deeply enough to explain the abysmal depth of people's fears. There is more here to be seen.

This presumed Other can be not only "outside" us but also uncannily close to home. The light of my memoir about my family and its slaveholding ancestors, Into the Briar Patch, reveals a connection between the alarming "Muslim" and the closest-to-home "inside" story that our country has—slavery.

Slavery provoked its own profound terrors, right in this country. They were at least equal to our current fears of militant Islamic terrorists.

During our three centuries of slavery, white Southerners lived in perpetual dread of lethal slave uprisings.  Their anxiety deepened, decade after decade, until the outbreak of the Civil War.  Whites imagined, with good reason, that slaves would organize, procure weapons, and kill their masters to gain freedom. (White Afrikaaners during apartheid also feared being slaughtered in their beds by rebellious kaffirs.)

This profound fear arose structurally, from the knowledge that chattel slavery was a man-made institutional evil. Enslaved persons will naturally come to hate their enslavers, and they will yearn for freedom—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—even if it means violence. This truth is enshrined in our Declaration of Independence. Whites who nervously relied on "good masters" to pacify Southern slaves could still not escape frequent news of slave rebellions, from Stono to John Brown. Such news traveled fast.

Out of these centuries of deeply engrained white panic, a terrible stereotype was invented: The Black Beast, the ultimate enraged and rebellious slave. He is preternaturally strong. He is filled with unquenchable hatred, especially hatred of whites. He strikes without warning. He has no mercy. He is as ruthless as Al Qaeda, but closer to home and more frightening.

[Perhaps this mythical Beast also personifies the savage injustices that whites suspected they had inflicted upon generations of African-Americans. There are centuries of buried and guilty memory to consider here. The enduring savagery of the dominant race would place the Other exactly at home. The Beast would then be a good example of whites' psychological projection upon blacks.]

In my family there are still old stories about this stereotypical and mythical Black Beast. The names vary, but the figure is the same. In a short story written by my mother at college, the Beast vaults across the store counter one night and slits the white salesclerk's throat. "He'd just as soon kill you as look at you," my family would say with a shiver. "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, a Senator from South Carolina in the early 1900s who admitted to disenfranchising negroes, lectured Congress with the image of a hypothetical "black fiend" who raped pure white women.

So when people call President Obama a "Muslim," the implied relation to Al Qaeda may be only superficial. After all, everyone knows that President Obama has had Osama bin Laden killed. The foundational reason for the "Muslim" tag probably lies deeper. People's fears could well tap into a longstanding stereotype, the ultimate horror of slavery and its aftermath, the Black Beast.

Obama is our first black President. In how many ways is that difficult?

It's no wonder that President Obama rarely expresses anger. He would want to avoid resembling the enraged black man of historical myth.

To the adults of my childhood, the worst kind of traitor was a white person bent upon "stirring up the blacks" and reaping the whirlwind of their rage. Southern whites thought that kind of uprising would bring Armageddon.

As I traveled in the South before the 2008 election, whites told me they were afraid that if Obama were elected, the country would have a "race war." A President Obama, they thought, would surely favor blacks over whites and even set them loose upon whites. He would bring about that long-feared uprising of blacks.

So today, white Republicans of Alabama and Mississippi are calling President Obama a "Muslim." But that's only the latest chapter in our long national history of race.

Old injustices, old hatreds, and old terrors keep coming around again. The new threat is the old threat reconstituted. History keeps us in its grip.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the Light of Memoirs

Genealogists find adventure, mystery, nostalgia, and exciting revelations in their pursuits. Researching family history is fascinating detective work.

And it has other surprising benefits. After writing Into the Briar Patch, I'm continuing to discover how much light the past sheds upon the present.

My South Carolina ancestors, who owned slaves, formed perceptions about race from their experiences. Their views drifted down the family tree, sometimes altered and sometimes not.

My research has taught me much about the origins of degrading stereotypes of black people. The causes often lie in the psychological makeup of empowered whites, prevailed upon by history.  When I witness these same negative black stereotypes repeated today, I can neutralize them more easily (for myself and others) by seeing them in the light of my memoir.  This further understanding helps to soften frustration and suspicion that racisms will never be healed.

Current events are often racially charged these days, although we may wish for a post-racial society. The ideas that I forged in my memoir research have become a new lens for me as I watch or read the news.

One harmful long-term stereotype is that "black people lie."

Who can forget GOP Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina yelling "You lie!" to President Obama during his 2009 health care speech to Congress? (Later, fact-checkers verified Obama's statements.) Has anyone ever shouted this to a white President during a formal address?

Yesterday, a new Department of Education study demonstrated that blacks in public schools are three times more likely to be suspended and expelled than whites. It's easy to guess whose protestations of innocence are more likely to be believed.

The "black people lie" stereotype was born in slavery days—from causes that were structural, not racial or moral. African-Americans sold into chattel slavery could not rely on truth. In fact, their emotional truth could be fatal to them. To survive, they had to swear love for their master's family, an unflagging zest for hard labor, and agreement with most white people's words and deeds. Where was the truth in that?

White owners and their families were weighed upon by anxiety and heavy guilt—partly conscious and partly not conscious—because of their unnatural position of  "owning" other people. They were hardly equipped to face the truth. They must have suspected the compliments of slaves were untrue, yet they wanted them to be true. No doubt they wished the slaves could forgive the whites for enslaving them, and allay their guilt. Both blacks and whites could idealize the master-slave relationship, or they could alternate between idealized and disappointed states.

In this labyrinthine situation, the easiest solution for whites was to characterize black people as habitual "liars." The other choice, the unbearable choice, was to publicly call out slavery as an immoral and criminal institution that could not tolerate the light of truth. Individual white Southerners rarely felt they could survive the latter choice.

Of course, the "black people lie" stereotype lingered throughout Jim Crow, known as "slavery without the chains," and the pre-civil-rights era. Many people seeing The Help have shared the black maids' opinion that lying was necessary to survival. Today, black people may still believe that whites cannot withstand the unvarnished truth about relationships between the two races.

In Utopia, Thomas More criticizes his own government for its laws that oppress the poor: "You first make thieves and then punish them for stealing." In a similar way, today's "black people lie" stereotype is a fabricated scapegoat to cover a truth that many whites still cannot bring themselves to admit without evasion or excuses. Plainly stated, it is this:  Chattel slavery, which our nation insisted upon preserving for decades, wrought devastating and ongoing destruction upon African-Americans.

When I was an infant, my mother hired a black nurse to help care for me. In Mother's letters from 1943, she vacillates between idealizing the devotion of Roselle, "a black pearl," and suspecting that Roselle lacks honest enthusiasm. Later I learned that Roselle had left her own five-week-old infant with relatives in another town, in order to live at our house and care for me. The letters do not mention this truth.

Roselle and Mariann in 1943

 

Don’t Mention It

I read out loud two paragraphs from my family memoir, to a group of smart and friendly people.

One paragraph was tough. It was an old family story. One of my grandfather’s tenants ambushed him and shot him in the chest, one day in 1909.  My grandfather survived. The shooter was acquitted for lack of a third-person eyewitness. Soon afterwards, grandfather’s friends and neighbors made certain that this man would never try to assassinate anyone again. It was a violent story, with racial threads. The tenant was a black man, and his boss was white.

The other paragraph was more lighthearted, for relief.  As boys in the 1910s, my South Carolina uncles rode their cows to school and back. The girls at recess were curious about those cows. My young uncles-to-be told them, “Lean close to the cow,” and then squirted milk into the girls’ hair.

I read these paragraphs at a “Book Party” given by a colleague, for me and two other new authors. They read excerpts from their books, as well. The food was scrumptious, the wine flowed, and everyone was in a good mood.

After the readings, several people came up to talk. No one mentioned my story of violence. Nor did they mention sharecropping, segregation, or race. Nor did they refer to the fact mentioned in my reading, that killing a black man was not deemed murder in the South of 1909.

Instead, they wanted to discuss the allure of the South, with its exotic accents. One person said, “No one can tell a story like a Southerner.”

Had I mentioned a topic that no one wanted to acknowledge?

There were no African-Americans in my audience. Why not? I wondered. Chance?A white friend chatted happily with me about having both black and white pals at a Southern college. They were all great friends, he said.

I absorbed the following message from the group:  Racism was bad, but it is now cured. We don’t want to talk about race. Hmm. This was like the message I grew up with, as a Southerner.

In an episode of “Fawlty Towers” with Monty Python’s John Cleese, the high-strung hotel owner Basil Fawlty is serving dinner to German guests. Someone warns him, “Now, Basil, don’t mention the War,” meaning World War II. Of course, Basil freaks out and mentions the War in every sentence. And then the Jews, and the Holocaust. He goes haywire with a Hitler imitation. The German guests begin to weep.

So we don’t mention racism these days. We’re past all that.

Not.

Don't Mention It

I read out loud two paragraphs from my family memoir, to a group of smart and friendly people.

One paragraph was tough. It was an old family story. One of my grandfather's tenants ambushed him and shot him in the chest, one day in 1909.  My grandfather survived. The shooter was acquitted for lack of a third-person eyewitness. Soon afterwards, grandfather's friends and neighbors made certain that this man would never try to assassinate anyone again. It was a violent story, with racial threads. The tenant was a black man, and his boss was white.

The other paragraph was more lighthearted, for relief.  As boys in the 1910s, my South Carolina uncles rode their cows to school and back. The girls at recess were curious about those cows. My young uncles-to-be told them, "Lean close to the cow," and then squirted milk into the girls' hair.

I read these paragraphs at a "Book Party" given by a colleague, for me and two other new authors. They read excerpts from their books, as well. The food was scrumptious, the wine flowed, and everyone was in a good mood.

After the readings, several people came up to talk. No one mentioned my story of violence. Nor did they mention sharecropping, segregation, or race. Nor did they refer to the fact mentioned in my reading, that killing a black man was not deemed murder in the South of 1909.

Instead, they wanted to discuss the allure of the South, with its exotic accents. One person said, "No one can tell a story like a Southerner."

Had I mentioned a topic that no one wanted to acknowledge?

There were no African-Americans in my audience. Why not? I wondered. Chance?A white friend chatted happily with me about having both black and white pals at a Southern college. They were all great friends, he said.

I absorbed the following message from the group:  Racism was bad, but it is now cured. We don't want to talk about race. Hmm. This was like the message I grew up with, as a Southerner.

In an episode of "Fawlty Towers" with Monty Python's John Cleese, the high-strung hotel owner Basil Fawlty is serving dinner to German guests. Someone warns him, "Now, Basil, don't mention the War," meaning World War II. Of course, Basil freaks out and mentions the War in every sentence. And then the Jews, and the Holocaust. He goes haywire with a Hitler imitation. The German guests begin to weep.

So we don't mention racism these days. We're past all that.

Not.

Home Again, With a Difference

UGArdener, Flickr

For seven years I visited the South, with my kind husband at my side.

With each visit, my relatives seemed to relax a little more. Perhaps they became more convinced that I did not want to write an exposé, but simply to understand.

As they trusted me further, they took me aside for more dramatic revelations off the record—some distant brothers shunned because they "took up" with black women, a father expelled from the Church for drunkenness, a man who seduced his brother's sweetheart.

They had funny and heroic stories, too—a misanthropic uncle getting his comeuppance, another great-uncle bearing down on a man who was shooting at him, my great-grandmother riding all night with a single male slave to take back her farm's mules from Sherman's army camp.

I was happy for every bit of information and every anecdote. They added to my expanding sense of my family's minds and hearts. About ancestors past and relatives present, I learned what character traits they honored, what made them feel ashamed, what threatened them, what made them laugh. My bond with my living relatives grew more intimate, and I felt the dead ones come to life in my imagination.

Some of my cousins even wrote passages into the memoir. Some also read my drafts and gave suggestions and corrections. When their accounts of key family events conflicted sharply, my relatives did not argue about which account was "true."  We settled that I would arrange all these different accounts beside each other in the memoir—the full spectrum—and everyone would be satisfied.

I configured ideas to explore how the character of my family has been influenced by their history of owning slaves. My ideas structure the book.

Then I added excerpts from eight recorded interviews of family members. Their voices are there, verbatim. They themselves steered the interviews, expressing how life has tried them and which truths count for them now.

My visits to the South continue. There is always more research to be done, more family members to discover in our growing tree. We're targeting a will in the National Library of Ireland that might belong to the ancestor who first emigrated here from the Old Country.

In the meantime, we stay mostly silent about our political and religious differences. They don't seem to matter so much any more. It may be that even those barriers will eventually crumble, and we can all talk with perfect freedom about Fox News vs. MSNBC. Then again, maybe not.

Don’t Mind Me. I’m Only Listening.

On visits to my Southern relatives, I wanted to be an honest researcher.

What type of honest? After all, they were Christians and conservative Republicans. I was neither.

I decided that if they asked me about my religious beliefs, I would tell them.

If they asked about my politics, I would tell them.

Yet I myself would not bring up politics or religion. My goal wasn’t to make speeches but to listen hard, year after year. I was seeking my family’s views of themselves and our ancestors.

I expected they might be suspicious of me. Who was I, anyway, to swoop down from the North and ask questions, after all these years?

So we had our candid moments, when we jostled each other.

A few cousins asked me what church I attended. My true answer was that I did not go to church. Their reaction was swift:  “Why, Mariann! What do you mean?”

So I opened an honest door, explaining that I believed in the goodness of humanity and admired the life of Jesus.  They nodded. We gave each other space.

Some other relatives, over dinner, asked about my choice for President in 2004. My indispensable husband, a graceful adapter to Southern ways, joked that he had been a “yellow-dog Democrat” his entire life. With that remark, the tension broke. My cousins then ribbed us about John Kerry’s awkwardness.  A kind of “let things be” mood settled over the group.  It was all right. We were Family.

It was harder to admit to my relatives in 2008 that I supported Obama. Some feared his election would bring on a race war. Considering the white South’s longstanding fear of slave uprisings, I listened to their feelings.

Over the years, as I heard multiple versions of family history, I saw that any crusade for pure “facts” might set my family members struggling against each other.

Our grandfather was shot near the heart by a black tenant farmer. Related “facts” diverged like buckshot. When was he shot? Did he die soon? Years later? Regain his health? Was the shooter caught? Jailed? Lynched? What happened?

Our grandmother left the family homestead in her old age. Was she cherished or was she neglected? Who was or was not loyal to her? How did she die? When? Each story varied from the others.

Neither referee nor judge, I honored all their motives.

An honest researcher, I imagined, would assemble their disparate accounts into a mosaic. With great care.