The Soft Burden, Part 3

This is the final part of an essay I wrote about my family's history of racism and how I try to deal with it. I hope that those of you who've read it have gotten something out of it -- maybe a stark picture of white privilege as it's played out over the centuries, maybe an understanding that not all Southerners are racist, even if we've come from racist backgrounds, maybe a vague sense of hope that we, as a society, can move into a more unified and less traumatic future. For those of you just tuning in, here are links to Part 1 and Part 2.

The Soft Burden

(Part 3)

This is where Mom's beliefs and mine come into sharp contrast. Mom has her pride and her Klan stories, and like so many other people born into Southern families she dismisses the KKK as some inconsequential thing from the past. But I am acutely aware that it still exists. A former Grand Wizard held public office and still makes political endorsements (because people still listen to him). In Georgia, a branch of the Klan wants to adopt a stretch of highway for litter cleanup. I see Klansmen as domestic terrorists who are somehow clinging to outdated beliefs and perpetrating acts of violence based on a war that, despite the rhetoric of extremists, has been over for a very long time. But the invalidity of their philosophy does not mean they are extinct, or even endangered. For me, the Klan is part of a very real white supremacist movement and an organization that wants to violently tear down one of the principles I grew up with: equality for all.

(From Wikimedia Commons)

I am fortunate to be surrounded by people who oppose hatred, ignorance and violence, and they do it without resorting to hatred, ignorance and violence themselves. They know their “enemies.” When they protest Klan or other rallies, they dress up as clowns, relying on distraction and irony rather than anger. When I was in college in Austin, a few women I knew went to a KKK rally and asked Klansmen about membership possibilities -- “So can anyone join? Is there a form to fill out? Can I take some of your literature home to share with my family?” – which really impressed me, because the women were Black. I've known other people who oppose the social and political groups that use patriotism and religion as excuses for hatred – and rather than protest angrily, my friends pray for these people to find peace and enlightenment. They have inspired me to do the same.

These are the kinds of people I stand with, but they are not the kind of people I came from. In a way, counting myself among those who oppose the Klan and its ilk deepens my shame about my family history, because I came from a large family full of the kind of people my friends stand against. By action, I am part of a force against injustice; by blood, I'm the very thing I oppose. But believing and acting in opposition to the Klan and any other group that promotes hatred is a possible path to salvation– a way to try to transcend the past.

I had a conversation about the KKK Quilt with a friend of mine who's a missionary. I told her how even though I was not a slave owner or a KKK member I felt a kind of residue from the actions of my ancestors. I told her the quilt seems like a giant symbol of institutional racism that will eventually come to me, like some family curse. She agreed that it's a heavy subject and said she could understand how I might feel like the quilt, and everything it means, is a burden I have to bear. But then she reminded me of the story of Nehemiah in the Old Testament and how he prayed for forgiveness for himself, for his family and for his entire country.

“That kind of thing happened a lot in the Old Testament – one person seeking salvation for a whole group,” she said.

Then we talked about my great-grandmother, Granny, and what she might have been thinking when she grabbed the KKK robe and cut it up into squares to use it for an entirely different purpose.

“She redeemed it,” my friend said. “She turned it into something new.”

And I suppose she did. Granny took something almost universally reviled and turned it into something useful -- something with a connotation of coziness, gentleness, home.

The quilt and I are alike in that no one would ever guess, just from looking at it, where it came from and what secrets it might hold. And if the remnants of that hated robe can be redeemed, perhaps I can, too. What I end up doing with my strange inheritance can help me change how I view myself and my past. Holding on to it seems somehow unhealthy, but giving it away seems like a form of denial, and although I feel shame and disgust about my family's ties to the Klan, I can't deny that they exist.

In the county where Granny lived, there is a small museum dedicated to the area's history. I think the healthiest thing for me to do is loan the KKK Quilt to the museum indefinitely, for display or just for safe keeping. I will tell the curators where it came from – made by the daughter of one of the county's prominent families – and what it is made of – a symbol of hatred given a new and gentle purpose.

The museum houses a collection of the pottery made by the former slaves who ran their own free enterprise after the war. Many of the clay jugs and bottles on display are still whole, survivors of the nearly 150 years since their creation. My ancestors' KKK robe, however, is no longer recognizable. Perhaps putting all these artifacts in the same building can show that freedom endures, but hatred can be rendered powerless and even be turned into something comforting. Perhaps, a century and a half after the Civil War, some of the “general hard feelings” – including my own – can be put to rest.

The Soft Burden, Part 2

This is the second part of an essay I wrote a few years back about my family's history as slave owners and KKK members and how I try to cope with that. Here's a link to Part 1 and a better explanation of where this essay came from.

The Soft Burden

(Part 2)

I remember looking back through the newspaper archives in the county where my great-grandmother lived and seeing a very brief story about a young Black boy who had been found “accidentally lynched” in a barn sometime around the turn of the century. There wasn't much question in my mind about who might have “accidentally” lynched him, especially after I found out my ancestors who had lived in that county were part of a thriving population of Klan members in the area.

The same county was home to the first Black free enterprise in Texas after the Civil War – a pottery shop operated by the freed slaves of a Presbyterian minister. This could be taken as a sign of enlightenment, and the site of the pottery business has earned national landmark designation. But there are reports of “general hard feelings,” as The Handbook of Texas put it, and violence against the business owners. I can't help but wonder if my ancestors ever acted against the pottery owners  – if the robe that's now part of the KKK Quilt was there during any of the post-war attacks on these men who were trying to become truly independent.

This part of our shared heritage has created quite a few “general hard feelings” between Mom and me. Mom is unflinchingly proud of our family's past, but not because of any lingering racism on her part. She is from the last generation of my family to go to high school before desegregation, and she used the words “colored” and “Negro” for decades, but when social mores changed, she changed with them. And, after all, she raised me to accept everyone as equals and embrace other cultures.

(From Wikimedia Commons)

But Mom's genealogical research revealed so many details of our Southern ancestors' lives and their hardships and accomplishments during and after the Civil War that she became enthralled with the men and women who came before us. She saw, looking back at a century of slow migration and hard fighting, the miraculous sequence of events that had to occur for her to come into this world. Some of those events involved owning slaves. Sometimes I wonder if her pride is a kind of coping mechanism – she might not be at peace with the vein of racism and cruelty in our heritage, but since there's nothing she can do to change it, she's just decided to accept it and wave her Confederate flag high.

If you ask her about why she holds our Southern ancestors in such high esteem, she'll simply say, “You have to remember, these men were fighting for what they believed was right. They weren't right, but it's what they believed in.”

The last time we had that conversation, I wanted to respond that the same could be said for the Nazis, but that would have started a conflagration of a magnitude I was not prepared to deal with. I just shook my head, letting Mom know that even though I knew I could not change her mind, she had not changed mine, either.

A couple of years ago, Mom presented me with a special gift. She had just had one of her prouder moments: attending a rededication ceremony for a monument to Hood's Texas Brigade, the outfit in which one of our more prominent ancestors served during the Civil War. She bought me a limited edition medal struck to commemorate the rededication. The medal came in a plastic box with a certificate of authenticity that included the words, “May You Wear This Medal With Pride.” She also gave me a copy of the program from the ceremony, sure that I would want this souvenir related to one of our accomplished ancestors. According to the program, the crowd said the Pledge of Allegiance and also the Salute to the Confederate Flag: “I salute the Confederate Flag with affection, reverence and undying devotion to the cause for which it stands.”

What was that cause, exactly?

But Mom didn't care – the important thing to her was the recognition of our forefathers and their tenacity in fighting for what they thought was a noble cause. The important thing to me is that I can't wear the medal she bought me with pride, nor can I salute the Confederate flag with affection. But filial devotion, and a little joy at seeing Mom become momentarily giddy, kept me from mentioning either of those points as I accepted these mementos with a tired sigh.

Mom has even been able to justify our ancestors' membership in the Klan. She's not the only person who's ever done this, of course – a friend of mine who has the same sort of background I do said her grandmother told her that Klan members just put on their costumes and rode their horses together, as if it were some kind of social club to keep the menfolk busy while the women were at their knitting circles. Whenever I bring up the Klan's place in our family history, Mom always stops me in mid-complaint and says that whatever else it did, the Klan stepped in to see that justice was carried out whenever a Black man raped a white woman. Somehow I think it would matter less to them if a white man raped a woman of any color, but regardless, Mom focuses on the perceived chivalry of the Klansmen, as if they were actually white knights and not just calling themselves that.

One of Mom's favorite family stories (and her favorite Klan story) has to do with one of our foremothers: a woman with the improbably adorable name of Tiny Bell. Tiny Bell's husband died in the flu epidemic in the early part of the 20th century. At the funeral, in the middle of the ceremony, the church doors swung open and several Klansmen, in hoods and robes, walked into the church, found Tiny Bell, and handed her a bag of money. Her husband had been one of their own, and they had collected money to help support his widow.

I was surprised to learn that the Klansmen were capable of such an act of kindness, but I don't think the Klan could assist enough poor widows or avenge the honor of enough compromised women to save its reputation.

I know the Klan began as a response to Reconstruction. It was started by men who found themselves suddenly desperate – their fields and homes in ruin, cities burned, social order destroyed, friends dead or starving, and a crowd of politicians who seemed indifferent to (if  not pleased with) their suffering. But I can't accept the idea that man's inhumanity to man is reason to carry out more acts of inhumanity. Hunger is no reason to drag a family out of their home in the dead of night and whip them. Cognitive dissonance does not give a man the right to shoot a Black man for not tipping his hat as they passed each other on the street. And there is no excuse for allowing hatred to expand to include other minority groups. I can't say I fault Tiny Bell for taking the money the Klansmen gave her – perhaps it was their way of trying to help her avoid the destitution that had turned them into what they were, and I have no doubt she needed the money. But one act of charity – even one that benefited my relatives – is not enough to get me to ignore more than a century of violence. Instead, in a sense, it makes it worse.

Just a little something about racism and genealogy

So a few years ago, I wrote what I guess would be classified as a personal essay about this peculiar family heirloom that I will be inheriting when Mom passes away -- a quilt incorporating pieces of one of my ancestors' KKK robes -- and everything that entails. I had wanted to post this a few weeks back but I hesitated because of the protests and riots and, thank God, the national dialog that began emerging about institutionalized racism and white privilege. I decided not to post it then because I felt like I would be intruding on a conversation far more important than where I, as a white person, am coming from and how I got here. I still don't want to interrupt that conversation, but I feel like this might be at least a sidebar.

Growing up Southern and white, with the knowledge that my ancestors were slave owners, gave me a pretty disgusting feeling at a pretty early age. I wasn't even sure what to call it, other than "white Southern guilt," until I heard the phrase "white privilege" maybe just a year ago. That's the unsettling knowledge that you inherently benefit from the current system because of the color of your skin. That's the realization that store security personnel or police officers will probably never automatically consider you a suspicious person because of the human-suit your soul is encased in. That's the feeling I have had since I was about 13 years old when I found out that my family's fortunes -- lost as they were during Reconstruction -- were built on the bones of slaves, and their losses avenged by hooded men on horseback wielding guns and torches.

(From Wikimedia Commons)

This was the hardest thing I have ever written, and it is probably the hardest thing I will ever share. But it might go some way in explaining why racial injustices, particularly those involving authority figures, prompt an anger in me that makes it hard for me to even have a rational discussion about it. I can't do a thing about my ancestors' behavior without a time machine, but I can fight the same hatred when I see it today. It is not meant to be my personal diatribe about Ferguson, or Staten Island, or any of the other countless police shootings of unarmed Black men, nor is it meant to drown out the voices of people of color who obviously have more experience and more to say than I do -- this is just the road map of my own experience of white privilege and how I try to cope with a past I can't change. Read it if you want to, don't if you don't.

I'm posting it in three parts because it's a long damn thing and it might be easier to digest in pieces anyway.

The Soft Burden

(Part 1)

I sat in my parents' dining room, waiting for Mom to show me the quilt she was digging for in the bottom of her cedar closet. She came down the hall with it, cradling it in her arms as if it were swathed around an infant.

“Here it is,” she said, approaching me. “Here.”

I looked at it – an unassuming patchwork quilt. A top of purple and white squares, tacked onto a white backing. I could tell that my great-grandmother had taken some care in making it, but as Mom stretched out her arms to hand me the quilt I shrank back in my chair.

“I don't want to hold it,” I said.

“But you said you wanted to see it.”

“Yeah, because I kinda can't believe it's real.”

I stretched out a hand, hesitated, then traced the tip of my index finger over one of the white squares.

“That … this. This that I'm touching. That came from …”

“That's a piece of one of your ancestors' KKK robes,” Mom said, without a trace of pride or shame in her voice. “I'm not sure if it was Granny's father's robe, or her brother's, or her husband's. Could've belonged to any of them.”

I withdrew my hand as if I'd just touched fire. In a way, I had, though it was one that had been lit generations before.

Someday, “The KKK Quilt” – a most unsettling heirloom – will be mine. I'm my mother's only child, so there is no one else for her to pass it on to. But, like the culture of hatred attached to the garment used to make the quilt, it is not an inheritance I want.

Because of an intersection of geography, curiosity and open-mindedness, other cultures have bled over into my life for as long as I can remember. I grew up on an Air Force base among people from all over the world, and Mom and Dad raised me to believe that no race or nationality was any better than another. I began learning to count in Japanese shortly after I learned to read and started learning Spanish before I was 5. The friends I made when I was very little came from such far-flung places as Germany, Alaska and Barrio Pescado in San Marcos, Texas. I fell in love with old-school blues and jazz when I was in college and was nearly 20 before I learned that the fried chicken, watermelon, chitlins and grape soda I had grown up with were “a Black thing.” As far as I knew, it was all just food, much like my childhood friends were just friends.

I was not raised to look down on others – I was raised to learn from them. And as an adult, I believe in equality, human dignity and freedom and fighting ignorance with reason. Yet I don't feel as though I have found the kind of grace that washes me completely clean of the history of racism and hatred in my family -- the Southern version of original sin. Like the Judeo-Christian concept, this sin is something I was born into, though I didn't ask for it and would certainly prefer not to have it. But I don't know where to look for salvation, so I walk through this world feeling irredeemable. I might not want this inheritance, but it's not something I can just throw away, because it seems to cling to me.

So many of my friends' relatives were drawn to America because of the Potato Famine, the anti-Semitism in Europe and Russia ahead of World War II, or the crushing poverty and despotic governments in Asia and Latin America. These families were fleeing some kind of oppression and looking for freedom. Their immigration stories are beautiful and heroic.

My “coming to America” story is less noble. My privileged ancestors, all of whom came to this country before 1865, loved freedom -- but mostly their own. The story I usually tell is that my people came over from England, Scotland and France, where most of them had been aristocrats. They settled largely in the South, then made their way to Texas, where we've been for five generations. I don't mention that they owned plantations and people in several states. I don't say that we were impoverished after the Civil War because some of my ancestors abandoned their homesteads and fled to Mexico to avoid surrendering to Union authorities. I will announce with pride that my ancestors have fought in every war in U.S. history; I just don't mention that my family still talks about what our forefathers were doing during The War of Northern Aggression. I certainly don't mention the quilt.

Mom has done genealogical research for decades; books on the various branches of our family and notebooks full of pedigrees and photocopied letters and pictures fill shelves in her library. She was the one who found incontrovertible proof that our ancestors owned slaves. Court records and estate inventories she discovered in her research list people among my ancestors' property: “Sixty acres of land. Two mules. House servant, George, age 31. Four cattle.” Some of the court records give a person's name, age and value in dollars.

Over the years, I've heard dozens of people inside and outside the family give a litany of justifications for slave ownership: It's how the French and Dutch were building their wealth. It wouldn't have happened if Africans weren't selling other Africans to European traders. It's what the economy in the South was built on at the time. People didn't know any better. People have owned slaves since before the days of the pharaohs, so Southern plantation owners weren't doing anything new.

Although the idea of slavery fills me with revulsion, I could almost see how some people could find comfort in these attempts at rationalization. But there is no acceptable justification for the Ku Klux Klan. It was founded with a specific and malicious purpose, and the men who joined it did so with every intention of carrying out that purpose: using an arsenal of violence including lynching, burning and assassination to terrorize Black Southerners and white sympathizers and reclaim supremacy in the South.