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.