2. Southerner in Denial

Twenty years ago white filmmaker Macky Alston set out to find his Black cousins.  Macky’s great great great great uncle was “Chatham Jack” Alston, the largest slaveholder in North Carolina and the brother of my own great great great great grandfather, also a slaveholder, Philip Alston.  In his documentary Family Name, Macky wanted to face this legacy and understand its meaning for the present.

When I first saw Family Name, I was motivated to delve ever so briefly into my own family’s Alston connection – a subject I’d grown up hearing about: After seeing the film, I borrowed a copy of the family genealogy, The Alstons and Allstons of North and South Carolina, and followed a trail that led from Philip Alston down generations directly to my father’s name.  This was a lot to expunge from my autobiography, I came to see.  Inspired by watching Family Name, I wrote an essay that USA Today published under the title “A Southerner in Denial Reconnects to her Roots.”  Then I put the book away and didn’t think about it again for 20 years.  

That changed after I joined Coming to the Table, an organization co-founded by descendants of slaveholders and descendants of the enslaved to research and share family histories across racial lines.  At the first meeting I attended, at Friends Meeting House in Manhattan, I was seated between a woman who was descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings,  and another whose ancestor was Nathan Bedford Forrest, a major slave trader in Memphis, a Confederate general and the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.  

I thought of Martin Luther King’s optimistic dream that “one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.”  Daughters in this case, but at that meeting I dared hope it was a start.