‘This is the Cost of Our History’

TWO OF MY favorite television shows are Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Who Do You Think You Are? Both shows walk celebrities through the process of discovering their ancestors’ stories. I could watch them for hours (and sometimes have).

I love them, but I am also frustrated by them. Because the history of American families is American history, those families’ stories inevitably intersect with major U.S. events: the removal and genocide of Native Americans, slavery, the Salem witch trials, the suffrage movement, prohibition, the great migration, Jim Crow, the list goes on. Usually, these shows give about one minute for celebrities to process their ancestors’ roles in these monumental moments, then move on. Celebrities whose ancestors participated in American westward expansion are often celebrated as “pioneers” whose courage and grit helped forge America. Rarely are they guided to understand that their ancestors participated in the removal and genocide of Indigenous nations who stewarded the same land for tens of thousands of years before Europeans “pioneered” it.

Recently, I dug into the story of my third great-grandmother, Lea Ballard, who is the last adult enslaved person in our family. Her daughter, Martha, died while giving birth to my great-grandmother, Elizabeth.

According to our family oral tradition, Elizabeth’s older sister, Annie, went into the forest one day to collect firewood. She was followed by one of her uncles, who raped her and left her to die in the rain.

I checked weather records for the Camden, S.C. area and found that, indeed, there was a historic storm in 1908, around the time the rape would have occurred. Rivers overflowed across the state as up to 22 inches of rain fell within a one-week period. Could this be the storm that battered Annie as she suffered violence in the woods?

I imagined Annie lying there among the trees. I imagined the fortitude it took for her to drag her mangled 21-year-old body home in the middle of that storm. I imagined Lea’s pain as she realized one of her sons did this and, months later, Elizabeth’s pain as she witnessed her older sister Annie die as she gave birth to a son—just as her own mother had died giving birth to her. The pain is recorded in the 1910 census, in the name Lea gave to her great-grandson: Snake.

I am haunted by these facts. My family story was fundamentally shaped by oppression. Generations of mothers in our family died in childbirth because no hospitals would admit them. Enslaved men were rented to impregnate slave women. What pathologies have state-enforced sexual violence caused within our families? How much healthier would we be if antebellum “breeding” never happened? If family separation and loss never happened? If slavery never happened?

This is the cost of our history—the cost that our families’ stories reveal, if we let them.