The interstate looked as familiar as any old American interstate would be. Driving along winding roads, we passed cars and they passed us. My eyes were glued to my window in the backseat.
The rental car was complete with a car charger and a sunroof which I thought were so cool. The former provided access to the rest of my life and the latter served as natural A/C. When we left the nation’s capital, it was raining, but by the time we ventured out of the state, the sun had returned.
Placing my head on the edge of the car window, I was content. As an unassuming high schooler on a college tour, things were just peachy. But I didn’t quite realize that in a few minutes, I would be left to reckon with an image that I had only ever seen in history books.
It wasn’t long before my window had become filled with pickup truck after pickup truck, the moment we passed a sign welcoming us into Virginia. I spoke up, expressing my observation. My mom turned her head to me in acknowledgement from the passenger seat and my dad glanced through the rear-view mirror.
Suddenly feeling uneasy, I started up a conversation that spanned the projects I had coming up in school, the rest of the college tour, and anything else I could think of. I discussed my tally of various state license plates and soon, my mind had easily wandered away from the odd feeling that had overcome my body.
I kept the music going through Bluetooth connection, switching the genre to one that would cure the intermittent shaking of my body. We were only a few hours away from the city where we would stay before heading to the next college and I knew that.
But my brain hadn’t quite gotten that message through to my heart or body that were starting to cave in fear.
I focused on the color-changing sky. Orange and yellow, mixed with blue and purple-pink, it was something I’d normally remark on. But the only direction my brain was headed was toward the hope that the sun wouldn’t set just yet.
My palms were warmer than a minute ago despite the temperature of the car still comfortable. The blue in the sky kept getting darker and darker, the music getting closer and closer to songs I believed to be the equivalent of lullabies.
The last thing I wanted was to drive toward the dark, thin, towering trees reminding me of uncertain times during slavery and reconstruction reminding me of ancestors, complete with a confederate flag.
The confederate flag?
Waving just as high and wide as the American flag should have been was the red with blue cross stripes, star littered thing. My tongue, desert-dry, stuck to the top of my mouth. I swallowed and my vocal chords came back.
I pointed it out to my parents. They saw, I saw, I stared until I could no longer. Even as we were miles away from it, I expected to see it again. Above my head came one of the road signs. It read the direction of cities like Richmond and Charlottesville.
My brain registered images of white supremacists, lit tikis, and that flag. Working in overdrive was the same song that I had started playing on repeat.
Late evening arrived and the sky still had remnants of blue, but the mild weather had soured. Wrapping myself in my small sweater, not expecting it to have been so chilly, the image wouldn’t shake from my head.
Monticello was near Charlottesville, my ancestors could have been enslaved there for all I knew. They were from Virginia. My lineage could have roots exactly where the tires of the rental car spun.
At that time, all I knew was the vague Ancestry DNA detail that the migration story of one part of my family traced back to Virginia in the 1700s. I didn’t know that my 5x great-grandfather was indeed born in Virginia as a slave and at one point was in Jamaica.
I didn’t know that there was a separate lineage in my family tree that traces back to slaveowners in New Kent, Virginia and going even further, Scottish and English colonizers.
We didn’t make any stops until a rest area. A few women and men, dressed conservatively with bonnets and hats, entered the building with us. Other families stopped to view the information boards in the rest stop, but I just wanted to get to the restroom and get out.
Trailing the interstate were more trees. The road wasn’t well lit, our surroundings and the car itself dim.
My playlist was still on repeat. The same Gospel songs were in the same order, just as my same thoughts were in the same order.
Confederate flag, neo-nazis, towering trees, plantations.
Confederate flag, neo-nazis, towering trees, plantations.
Confederate flag, neo-nazis, towering trees, plantations.
I had been to the South before. Domestic trips were not foreign to me. I’d been through empty corn fields and past dense woods. I had been to the deep south. I had been through rural Pennsylvania, through hills and valleys and side roads. I had been among racist yard signs and starch-white steepled churches.
But something was different this time. I had never seen that flag in-person. Maybe I wasn’t as culturally aware as I thought. Maybe I was stuck in the confines of my blue city. My longtime interest in history felt nervously too close to home.
As I covered in Episode 2: Tribe, I am descended from a lineage of those who were enslaved in the United States. However, after evaluating the relationships within my family tree, a brief wave of confusion emerged.
The common story of Black Americans discovering distant European ancestry materialized within my family tree. One of my great-grandfathers going six times back was a slaveowner. As I went back further, his ancestors were also slaveowners from Virginia. And if I go far enough back, they’re from Scotland and England.
As I looked at the well-kept, neat records of these people – or I guess my distant ancestors – I didn’t know what to feel. One part of me is appalled at the circumstances that obviously occurred for there to be both enslaved people and slaveowners in my lineage.
Another part of me is kind of sour at the fact that none of my Black ancestors had such detailed records as this, that some portions of my family tree abruptly end at the beginning of the 20th century.
Another part of me is a bit stunned at the fact that so many things I learned about as a child have this new salience. There is an increasingly long and material history of my ancestry in the United States of America. History just keeps getting a little more personal.
As far back as second grade, I had a strong interest in history. I remember when my classmates would look at me when slavery came up during the Civil War unit. I remember putting Christianity-themed stickers on my Revolutionary War timeline booklet and being told to take them off because they were supposedly irrelevant to Early America.
However, it is known that European settlers misrepresented the Bible in order to validate their slaveholding and colonizing proclivities. Just like those today who adhere to Christian Nationalism and advance agendas that are in conflict with the Bible.
The longer these things are left in the dark, the likelihood of historical inclinations and patterns continuing to weave themselves into our futures. There is power in recognizing the impact of the messy, difficult, troubling past that makes up not only one’s family tree, but American history and therefore world history at large.
The power comes from rejecting the burdens, the things feel encoded into our DNA from our ancestors and our own doing. That power is freeing. It’s healing.
As you can imagine, I ended up attending a different college. But the experience left me intrigued to tinker around with genealogy, which led me to understanding generational trauma, epigenetics and how our bodies store or remember information — particularly the things that burden us. This is such a large interdisciplinary concept to cover ranging from history to psychology to sociology, even theology.
I feel almost childlike looking up and around at all these concepts, trying to make sense of a world much larger than myself that I will never have all the answers to. Although I am quite small in this big, wide world, the Ultimate Storyteller holds my story, all of the stories of my family tree, and so much more in His Hands.
Well, I now ask you:
Who are you? Who is your tribe? What leaves you feeling anemoia or desiderium? What are some of your fleeting things? What is your story?
I hope that something within these eight pieces inspired a new understanding for you in some way or inspired you to start telling your story.
