I’m not sure what, exactly, excites people about exploring their roots. Perhaps it’s an inherent urge to identify tribal connections. Perhaps it reflects an underlying need to establish one’s “worth” and to validate one’s existence. For some people, I’m sure, the excitement is in exploring rather than in identifying the branches of the genealogical tree, the “sussing out” of secrets and hitherto unknown connections. Others, such as I, just love a story; we’re caught up in the drama of individual lives almost submerged by the sands of time. Every person’s genealogical search is different, and nowhere is that difference so stark as the difference between the search conducted by a white person in the United States and that of an African-American. And nowhere is that search so fraught with tension as a search in one’s Southern background. If you’re African-American, you run up against slavery and the unpalatable truth that at one point, you’re going to be searching not through birth and death certificates but through bills of sale and property records. If you’re white, you’re likely to discover that no matter how humble your roots might be, there’s probably a slave-owning ancestor somewhere in your family history. (And if you have a conscience, that discovery is going to make you queasy rather than pleased.)
A recent New York Times article discusses the roots of our First Lady, Michelle Obama, whose family history so tellingly reveals the tangled history of the South. Michelle’s great-great-great-grandparents were a slave girl, Melvinia, and an unknown white man. Melvinia took the surname of her slave owners, Shields. After the death of her original owner in South Carolina, Melvinia found herself in Georgia, one of three slaves owned by her former owner’s daughter and son-in law, Christianne and Henry Shields. This couple had four sons, still at home and ranging in age from 19-24, at about the time Melvinia became pregnant with her first of four children. Whether or not one of those young men or some other young white man visiting the 200-acre farm is the father is unknown. After the Civil War, Melvinia worked as a farm laborer on a farm next to that of one of the sons, Charles Shields, until she eventually moved further west near the Alabama state line.
Melvinia’s child, Dolphus Shields, from whom Michelle Obama is descended, was light-skinned enough almost to pass as white. What some white folks encounter when they search their family roots is a similar ancestor who decided to pass as white and thus was integrated into the white community in the South, the family’s losing in time the knowledge of their slave past.
I was struck, as I read the article in the Times that Melvinia Shields, the eventually emancipated slave, is a sort of African-American opposite to my husband’s great-great-great-grandfather, Paul Cook: black, enslaved, illiterate and great-great-great-grandmother to Michelle Obama; white, wealthy, well-educated, and great-great-great-grandfather to my husband. Born in Rhode Island, Paul Cook was not an original child of the South, but as a participant in the sugar refining industry in Louisiana in the 1800s, he certainly profited from African-American labor. According to his obituary, he settled in New Orleans in 1846, and went into the western produce business until, in 1866, he got involved in the sugar refining business. The history of African-American labor in the cane fields from which that sugar came is not a pretty story. And yet, four generations later, the great-great-great-granddaughter of the slave is First Lady of the United States, and the great-great-great-grandson of the Southern merchant works for a non-profit organization.
As I delve more deeply in the background of the Armstrongs, Nugents, Cooks, Whites, Robbs, Greenes and all the ancillary branches of my husband’s family, as well as my own, I know I will run up against this Southern dilemma: how to discuss—or, rather, WHETHER to discuss the relations between the white ancestors and their black slaves and servants and whether to reveal what we would now identify as bigoted attitudes. If one is honest and true to history, one will confront what one finds and reveal that information in all its tangled glory and infamy.
- Tamie Dehler, “Searching for Slave Ancestors Requires a Strategy, Terre Haute Tribune-Star, 12 January, 2008.
- Tony Burroughs, “Commentary: Tracing Michelle Obama’s Roots—and Yours, special to CNN.
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