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A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing
by Dionne Ford
ebook
1 of 1 copy available
Countless Black Americans descended from slavery are related to the enslavers who bought and sold their ancestors. Among them is Dionne Ford, whose great grandmother was the last of six children born to a Louisiana cotton broker and the enslaved woman he received as a wedding gift.
What shapes does this kind of intergenerational trauma take? In these pages, which move between her inner life and deep research, Ford tells us. It manifests as alcoholism and post-traumatic stress; it finds echoes in her own experience of sexual abuse at the hands of a relative, and in the ways in which she builds her own interracial family.
To heal, Ford tries a wide range of therapies, lifestyle changes, and recovery meetings. “Anything,” she writes, “to keep from going back there.” But what she learns is that she needs to go back there, to return to her female ancestors, and unearth what she can about them to start to feel whole.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 4, 2023 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781645030157
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781645030157
- File size: 9763 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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February 15, 2023
A journalist recounts her journey to uncover the stories behind the intertwined lives of her Black and White relatives. The day Ford turned 38, she stumbled across an online photograph of her great-great grandmother Tempy and Col. W.R. Stuart, the married White slaveholder who fathered Tempy's six children. Motivated by a lifelong need to define her racial identity and heal an internal disconnection that had been the result of childhood sexual abuse, the author consulted family members, researched online genealogical records, and "crisscrossed the country" to piece together a forgotten--and, as she would learn, profoundly painful--family past. "This is a study in contrasts," she writes. "Shadow. Light. Black. White. Joy. Pain. Victim. Perpetrator. You will find ephemera--editorials, photographs, wedding announcements--and atrocities--lynched uncles, your people as property in someone's will, deed, or mortgage guarantee." Although Tempy had been enslaved when she had her first two children by Stuart, her last four were born after Emancipation, a fact that hinted at the complex economic and emotional ties that kept her bound to her former master. When Ford learned that Stuart's obituary made no reference to his children by Tempy, she came face to face with yet another layer of racism in her family's erasure from public history. The documents that ultimately confirmed her connection to Stuart came to her via a White art historian whose wife was not only related to the Stuart family, but also the joint owner of valuable Stuart property the author had known nothing about. The parallels Ford draws between her personal traumas and the ongoing struggle among Black Americans to find wholeness and validation--in the form of reparations and other measures--make her narrative especially compelling. That she was able to find connection with lost Black relatives who would become some of her greatest sources of support helps transform a book about multigenerational loss into one about the healing power of community. A cathartic reading experience.COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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