On slavery, 150 years later

Today is December 7th. On December 6th, 1865 the United States ratified the 13th Amendment, officially abolishing slavery. In our short, historical memories, 150 years may feel like a short time, but it really isn’t. By my estimation, I am probably five or six generations removed from my father’s family’s enslavement, which is also about as long as my mother’s (white) family has been attending college.  So that’s awkward.

I find that slavery is more of a conversation killer, than a conversation starter. My family’s history is not on the list of topics I take with me to cocktail parties or social gatherings. Well, at least not my father’s family. It’s perfectly acceptable for me to talk about tracing my mother’s family through Ancestry.com, but the acknowledgment that the same cannot happen for my father’s family is not appropriate for public conversation. Apparently.

I remember when I discovered my first relic of my family’s enslavement. I was 12. In 6th grade, I had to write an autobiography, which necessitated a section about the origin of our names. Names are more than how we address each other; they contain stories. In my mother’s family, Katherine is the name given to the oldest daughter. My mom’s first name is Katherine, and so is her mother’s, and my great grandmother’s, and so forth. I am number seven.  My middle name comes from my grandmother. My last name comes from the family that used to own mine.

It was during that 6th grade project that I actually learned that information about my last name. I knew my father was Black, and that Black people came from Africa and were enslaved in the United States, but it had not really occurred to me that Barnes may not have made that journey. Barnes, it turns out, is a Welsh last name, as I discovered via the nascent internet. It has no origin or tie to anywhere in West Africa.

Slavery, like other manifestations of the deeply embedded racism within the fabric of our nation, is uncomfortable to talk about. Having done all of my schooling at predominately white institutions, I have plenty of stories about the classroom discomfort that comes from talking about racism beyond Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.

For an exercise in one of my college classes, we analyzed property and possession inventories of various Americans living in the 18th and 19th centuries. Over the course of an entire weekend, I poured over these lists of possessions, thinking about what mattered about them, why they were arranged in a specific way, etc. Getting my critical thought on, as it were. During that process, I stumbled upon a collection of people with the last name Barnes located in North Carolina. Listed next to the furniture and just before the pottery were human names, one of which, Patty, has never left me. I stared at this list for twenty minutes, looking at the names of people who could have been my family. Some of them probably were.

In that moment slavery ceased to be a historical artifact, something abstract that I discussed in class. It was real, and a part of me. Being confronted with evidence of my own marginalization was something I wanted, and desperately needed to talk about, but my classmates were having none of it. After sharing my experience reading the inventories, a silence fell over the room. The next time someone spoke, it was about something different.

Talking about slavery is hard. Talking about slavery with a Black person whose family was enslaved is harder. Talking about slavery as a Black person whose family was enslaved is even harder than that.

It’s not that I love talking about slavery. I actually hate it. But I mostly hate it because too often, I’m told it doesn’t matter anymore, as if 150 years erases the impact of dehuminization and restores an equality of opportunity; as if there is not a distinct awkwardness that comes when I meet a white person with my last name; as if the pain and struggle of colorism is not an inherited relic of rape and assault; as if the embrace of a Black stranger who, too, carried my last name was anything less than the acknowledgement of shared owners.

Slavery still matters.

I mentioned tracing my mother’s family history through ancestry.com. It’s as easy as clicking a button. There are always records, remnants of a life once lived, to be explored. Some came from Germany in the 1850s, others from England in 1610. My father’s side of the tree ends with a maybe. Maybe the names I’ve stumbled across in those inventories and in ancestry belong to my relatives. Maybe. Their names, their stories, are lost among the rest of my father’s family, leaving only partial truths and half told stories. That loss will always matter to me.

Header Image Credit: Salon.com