RELATIONS: What’s in a Logo?
When I decided to create a podcast based on this blog, I knew I needed a logo. I tried designing one myself using a free design program. The result — a tree to represent the family tree aspect of my research — was symmetrical, innocuous, and unremarkable. I posted the draft on Facebook, and got a mostly positive response.
I could have stopped there. In fact, several people commented that I should. But the image wasn’t quite right. The tree was too healthy, too pleasant to represent the family history the podcast would explore — a family history that involved the enslavement, dehumanization, forced labor, and torture of other human beings. I knew the logo should reflect that dark reality. And because my enslaver ancestors raped the women they enslaved, there would need to be two trees — brutally conjoined and bound together. Finally, there should be something aspirational in the image to represent the budding, tentative relationships forming between myself and the descendants of people my ancestors had enslaved.
I knew I was unequal to the task of creating a logo that could express all of that. Enter Clare, a neighbor and friend whose stunning artwork often includes trees. After a two-months long process during which Clare and I met to discuss the evolving design, she sent the logo below. It was perfect!
When I posted a draft of this new logo on Facebook, the response was overwhelmingly positive (although many of my white friends expressed surprise or even shock with astonished face emojis 😲 and remarks like “Holy cow!”)
But the comment that proved to me that the logo really was perfect came from a descendant — a woman whose ancestors were enslaved by my ancestors and that I have been blessed to meet.
“This speaks to one’s soul,” she wrote. “I can see over six images of my own family stories. Wow!”
You’ll hear these family stories when you listen to my podcast, Relations, available on all your favorite podcast platforms this summer.
Please use the comments below to share your reactions to the logo image and any family stories you see in it. Thank you!
Special thanks to Edward Adams, my newly discovered cousin, for granting me permission to title my blog and podcast 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.
