RELATIONS: Why focus on this dark chapter of my family history?
Somebody recently asked me why I am researching and writing about my enslaver ancestors and the lives of the people they enslaved. Why focus on this dark chapter of my family history? It’s a good question.
The most obvious answer is that these are fascinating stories! I mean! — power, sex, death, love, money, resilience, intrigue, what it means to be family, even what it means to be American. It’s all there. But beyond the fact that I love a good story, the research and writing process is helping me understand the complex history of race relations not only in my family but also in the United States — and how that history informs current events.
My roots in Mississippi reach back as far as is possible for someone who is not indigenous. My 3rd great grandfather, William Adams, migrated to what was then a Spanish territory in 1792 — twenty five years before Mississippi became a state. His name is listed as “Guillermo Adams” in the territorial census and his tract of land as “Cerro Gordo.” Originally employed on river boats, he began to accumulate acreage in the new territory, eventually owning half a dozen plantations consisting of thousands of acres where he forced hundreds of enslaved people to work in cotton fields that sprawled on either side of the Mississippi River in the fertile soil of the Delta.
William Adams married Orpha Gertrude Leonard on January 4, 1795, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and the couple had 12 children over 22 years. Adams likely also fathered many more children with the girls and women he enslaved. As my newly discovered cousin Edward Adams says, “You can’t throw a rock in Mississippi without hitting an Adams.”
William Adams died on March 21, 1857, at the age of 102, and was buried in the Solitary Valley Plantation cemetery in Adams County, Mississippi. The labor of enslaved people had made him, an uneducated man who could neither read nor write, among the richest people on the planet.
By the time I was born in New Orleans, a city that had been the capitol of human trafficking in the 1800s, only one working “plantation” remained in the family. Nonetheless, I grew up hearing my mother’s stories of riding ponies and hunting ducks at Locust Ridge, where my cousin Magruder raised soy beans and cattle. Ancestors who owned plantations and fought for the Confederacy were a source of pride mixed with a sense that there was some unpleasantness involved (Better not to speak of that!). I must have watched Gone with the Wind a dozen times as a child.
As I learned more about slavery and race relations, however, I realized this part of my family history was nothing to be proud of. So I chose to reject and ignore it — as if it had nothing to do with me. And ignoring it wasn’t hard. Most of what I knew about slavery came from watching the televisions show Roots, rather than from my family or from school.
Today there is an organized and concerted effort to suppress teaching and learning about slavery and the decades of racial terror that followed Reconstruction. These attempts to suppress and/or rewrite history, have created in me an urgency to learn and share about my ancestors’ participation in the slave society of the deep south — to piece together, using primary source documents, what ancestors only a few generations back believed and did and how that legacy has been passed down to me. What have I inherited besides blood money?
“While history is what happened, it is also, just as important, how we think about what happened and what we unearth and choose to remember about what happened.”
― Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New American Origin Story
Even more compelling are the stories of the people my ancestors enslaved and dehumanized. Who were they and how did they survive? Where are their descendants now? And how can we understand our relationship?
While I know that I can never make amends for what my ancestors did, I can at least choose to tell the truth about it. This is not altruism; it is self-interest. I am convinced that if we as a nation don’t reckon with white supremacy, the American attempt at democracy is doomed to fail. And that is a legacy I don’t want to pass on to my son.
Special thanks to Edward Adams, my newly discovered cousin, for granting me permission to title my blog RELATIONS. which is also the title of his book on his Adams and Stewart family history.
About the Author
I began researching my family’s involvement in the slave society of the South in the spring of 2021. Until that time, I knew very little about American history and nothing about genealogy. I am slowly learning about both. In addition to the essays and interviews published on Medium, I have published essays and op-eds in Salon, the Austin American Statesman, and Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine, among others. I have an MFA in Creative Writing from Texas State University.
