I watched the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. special on PBS where he traced 3 African-American celebrities’ lineage back before the civil war. To my surprise it didn’t upset me all that much. More than upset, I was intrigued with the people uncovered in Gates’ search, particularly the unnamed people in the photos used during his narration (not the ones identified as part of the family trees). These were human beings, the descendants of various African people forcibly transplanted from their continent to a place where they were treated like property, though they were much more. What did they do with their anger? Their unfulfilled dreams? How did they survive day after day?
Some of them were MY people. REAL people. They had personalities and intelligence and talents that were derailed into slave labor, a disgusting, disrespectful phrase that doesn’t even begin to describe them. Who were they, really?
I have been trying to distance myself from that part of my family history, but I’m rethinking that decision. The people who made up that aspect of my history are not beneath me; the station they were forced into is what is beneath me. But that station didn’t define them, and that is the mistake I made in dismissing them: acting as though their station defined them. It never did. It couldn’t. We are who we are even underneath the circumstances and lives we find ourselves born or kidnapped or raped or freed or lovingly propelled into.
I will never know all of them and who they were. That frustrates me, but it isn’t unique to my experience as an African American; no one will ever know all of their ancestors and who they were. Some people are blessed with better documented historical records than most African Americans are, but that’s just a record and not the same as truly, deeply knowing them. I…will come to accept that.
I also embrace the phrase African American to describe me now. I have alternated between using that phrase and “black”, but as I looked at those photos I was reminded “black” is nothing more than a color. “Black” does not say a single meaningful thing about who I am. African American, however, does. It wasn’t a big deal to me before I saw tonight’s show, but it is now. Those were real, live African people brought to America, and they were my ancestors. Referring to myself as African American is the most accurate descriptor I can come up with right now. I am not just African of any one stripe; I am, most likely, a mix of various African nations. I am American, but I certainly am not just American, even though my African experience was diluted (to put it nicely) and Americanized by the slave trade. To call myself “just an American” spits in the face of my dark-skinned foremothers, particularly the ones who were raped by the white men who masqueraded as owners of human beings. (There are mulattos on both sides of my family tree not many generations back from me.) I am African American. There is no way around that fact and no respectful way to shorten it.
For years my history has felt like a burdensome, painful vacuum. Between last weekend’s realization about jazz being my very own musical heritage as an African American and tonight’s realizations, I feel a little more whole, more rooted.