African-American Histories

[morgan_dhu]

I've been watching a very interesting 4-part series on the American PBS channel for the last couple of weeks, called African-American Lives.

The set-up is that a group of about a dozen high-profile African-Americans, including Tina Turner, Don Cheadle, Chris Rock, Morgan Freeman, Maya Angelou and Jackie Joyner-Kersee (these being the people I was familiar with through the media) agreed to have their family histories searched, making use of every available methodology including genetic testing and comparisons with several different genetic databases.

As a Canadian, I didn't (and still don't) know much about the specific history of black people in the U.S., but watching this has taught me a lot more than I used to know. It'a also brought home to me once again how powerful is the emotional impact on a whole people who must, in order to examine where they came from, face the fact that their mothers and fathers were the property of others, and that for many there is no way to go through the loss of family connection to the past and to a place that has been an almost universal experience of the African diaspora.

Watching it has made me think again about a book I read a couple of years ago, Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (my original review is here).

Even though my ancestors were driven from their homes, forcibly loaded into boats for a voyage across the Atlantic during which many died from the poor conditions and brutal treatment, only to disembark in a country they had never heard of before, at least I can trace my family names back to specific places in the outer islands of Scotland, and my family, when they arrived in Canada, were poor, but they were not property. I can imagine, but I can't understand in my heart and in my gut, and probably no one else who can say what I can say, can understand either, what it means to have those two facts overshadowing anything and everything one knows about one's past, one's family, one's history, one's roots.

Which is part of what makes certain moments of this TV show so powerful: watching the faces of these people as they are shown the records of family members identified in the slave schedules, or listed in wills ot bills of sale, as they visit a piece of land owned by a free ancestor, or find a marked grave, as DNA evidence links them to a particular African people and gives them a past that stretches beyond the darkness of the middle Passage.

Comments

[lavendertook.livejournal.com]

the fact that their mothers and fathers were the property of others

And for many more than not, among those parents are the property owners as well. So there's that to deal with as well.

[morgan-dhu.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes. That is covered in the series as well, in a number of ways, some quite appalling - records of white slave owners selling to other white slave owners their own mixed-race children.

Although this did actually bring about an interesting moment. The host of the series is descended in the direct male line from an Irishman, so one of the DNA tests they were doing traces him, not to an African people, but to the U Niall clan in Ireland - the former high kings of Tara. There's a scene of him visiting Tara and explaining all of this to some other tourists - all white - and one of the women tourists says that she's descended from the same clan and acknowledges the kinship.