You Owe Me What Was Always Mine
My mother began the search for our ancestors nearly two decades ago. My maternal family has lived in Maryland for at least 220 years. My father’s ancestors have lived “across the bridge,” on the other side of the state, for at least 150 years. The key term being “at least,” because I’ve reached a point where I can’t find their parents – and those ancestors weren’t birthed out of thin air.
Yet, compared to my white peers, who can build the branches of family trees with relative ease, who can piece together narratives from detailed historical documents, I come up empty-handed.
My family members and I have spent countless hours and years combing through records, sifting through articles and registries. Trying to connect the dots, connect with ancestors, trying to find our origins.
My maternal 4th great grandmother was my age, just 27, when she was captured and sold by Austin Woolfolk – the man notorious for operating a slave pen on the beloved Pratt Street in Baltimore, snatching and selling thousands of otherwise free Black people.
The slave manifest showed her being “sold down the river” from Baltimore to New Orleans on the Lafayette just one year after giving birth to my 3rd great grandmother. On Independence Day 2020, of all days, I sent a message to a Woolfolk descendent, who pointed me to the Magnolia Mound plantation in Baton Rouge.
You better believe I’ll be making a trip.
I want back those things white supremacy has stripped from my family over 400 years. I want back what only advanced DNA testing has been able to provide. Nobody hates the question “Where are you really from?” more than folks with brown skin here in the United States. It always follows the seemingly harmless question of “Where are you from?” But of course, saying your city and state isn’t enough.
I did not choose to be labeled ‘Black,’ nor did my ancestors. The construct of race was created and imposed upon us, as a means of establishing a caste system.
Your white ancestors, who enslaved mine, chose whiteness for themselves. Chose to relinquish their languages and traditions in pursuit of dominion and wealth. Then chose to beat our languages and traditions out of mine.
If you were to tell elementary school-aged me that one day, she would take pride in her complexion, her Blackness, she would not believe you. Yet, after years of experiencing the twin traumas of racism and colorism, and healing from the self-hatred they spawned, I am unapologetic about my existence.
As I move into a new season of adulthood, I feel compelled to connect with that which was taken – my people, my cultures. Somewhere between my first maternal ancestor being stolen from her Tikar kin in Cameroon and Charlotte Elbert being sold on the Lafayette, there was a shift from being Tikar to being Negro. I want to know about the rest.
I want what was taken from them. From me.
Repair means returning the slaveholding records your ancestors have passed down, family to family, generation by generation. It means uncovering and atoning for crimes committed long ago. The gaps in my genealogy are not the fault of my parents nor my elders; they are – in a multitude of ways – the fault of white people past and present.
White people, it’s time for you to repatriate those records you keep. The ones in dusty attics and dark basements, in bankers’ boxes and file cabinets, in mildewed trunks. The ones your grandparents, aunts and uncles don’t want to talk about.
It means making Black families like mine whole. What’s yours, is also ours.
