This is a much belated post — I’m embarrassed by how belated, really — but I really wanted to get it up here. (And I want to start posting more in general. But don’t hold me to that!)
A few months ago, a colleague of mine, who is black, was telling me how excited she was to get the results back from one those DNA tests that tells you where your ancestors are from, based on your genetic makeup. She and her family were thrilled to discover that they had roots in, among other places, Nigeria and Ghana. I understood, on an intellectual level, how meaningful this must be to a family whose relatives just a few generations back were enslaved, their countries, cultures of origin and even their names erased, rendered irrelevant. But there’s understanding something, and then there’s really understanding something.
We spent Memorial Day weekend (see! belated!) in Pennington, New Jersey (near Princeton) and environs, where my father in law is from. One of his closest friends from elementary school, whom he’s reconnected with in the past few years, is part of a close-knit group of families that are active in supporting, preserving, and researching two historic black cemeteries in the area, the Stoutsburg Cemetery and the Pennington African Cemetery. We met and hung out and sang (Alastair and Clio did, that is, at a house concert benefit) and danced (Elsa taught everyone how to floss) and ate and prayed and learned all weekend with this group of families and friends and supporters.
We also saw Civil War reenactors from the 6th US Colored Infantry Regiment (and as they stood there in 85-degree heat in their wool uniforms, we gained a new sympathy for how miserable it must have been on the battlefields and in the camps in the summer). I learned that this regiment fought in one of the same battles that my ancestors on my father’s father’s side — from the south — fought in. Which was sort of strange to contemplate. Like, I would have been rooting for the north, but I’m also happy to exist. If that makes sense.
One of the most moving moments of the weekend was hearing the women who co-chair the Stoutsberg Cemetary Association talk about their passion in tracing the ancestry and lineage of the people buried in the cemetery, who include a number of Civil War veterans, and even a Revolutionary War vet. And then an actor performed a monologue as one of the women’s ancestors, Aaron Truhardt, a Civil War veteran. You could see how proud this woman was, seeing someone from her family’s past portrayed.
Sometimes life gives you moments where something you understood on an intellectual level you’re suddenly able to understand on a visceral, emotional level. I knew, of course, that for many African Americans descended from slaves, their ancestry before the mid- (or even late) nineteenth century is a blank space: Full names, dates and places of births and weddings and deaths, regions of origin unknown, with the only records of their existence to be found (and usually not found) in bills of sale and trade.
Whereas me, on the other hand? The vital data of my ancestors’ lives has been recorded and carried down over generations, inscribed in everything from family bibles to church registries to immigration papers to municipal records. Ancestry enthusiasts in my family have traced threads of my family as far back as 15th century England.
It’s not like I wake up every day thinking about these things. But that sense of continuity — a tree branching out and out and out, ever wider, through Connecticut and Pennsylvania and Ohio and Virginia and North Carolina, back to England and Ireland and Germany and France, with hundreds of first and last names, a good portion of which I could probably fill in fairly accurately if I put in the time — is part of the construction of my sense of self and reality. Even if I’m not actively thinking about it much, it’s still there.
It’s something that many African Americans don’t have. (And people of other races and ethnicities, to be sure, but that’s not what this post is about.) I already knew that. But I feel like now I understand it in a way I didn’t before. It’s a privilege to know, on a detailed and specific level, where and who you come from. It’s something that those of us who have it should be thankful for, while acknowledging that it’s something many of our fellow citizens don’t have.
So, many thanks to the wonderful supporters of the Stoutsberg and Pennington African Cemetaries and their friends and family, who welcomed our family with open arms (and good food and hijinks on the dance floor at Hillbilly Hall) and who helped me deepen my understanding (and, I hope, my children’s understanding) of something very important about what it means to be American.
