Walking the Berkshires

"We Apologize Because This Is Not Who We Are"; What Southern Africa Really Owes Zimbabwe

The African National Congress, South Africa's ruling party, has issued a strongly worded statement condemning repression of democratic rights in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe.  Meanwhile, the President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeke, who lost control of his own party last December, has remained silent.  In neighboring Namibia, the Prime Minister Nahas Angula voiced concern last week about the upcoming runoff elections in Zimbabwe and called for increasing the number of observers. 

Since then, of course, the opposition leader has pulled out of the elections and fled to the Embassy of the Netherlands in the wake of surging violence and police action against members of his party.  Namibia has not condemned Mugabe's regime either, and its Defense Force Chief has just returned from a 4 day trip to Zimbabwe where he assured the Zimbabwean media:

"The relationship between Namibia and Zimbabwe is growing from strength to strength. We share so many things. We have so many things in common. We would want to build on that relationship,"

What southern Africa nations share with Zimbabwe, in addition to a common history of liberation struggle and instability during the Cold War / Apartheid years, are complex economic dependencies, most significantly with regard to access to electrical power.  This month Namibia doubled its power imports from Zimbabwe. 

"[In March],Nampower advanced US$40 million to Zimbabwe to assist with the refurbishment of four electricity generating units at its coal-fired Hwange Power Station in return for a guaranteed supply of 150 megawatts for the next five years.

NamPower's managing director Paulinus Shilamba said the rehabilitation of the first unit has been completed, allowing for the increased power production.

Shilamba said the utility was not concerned that the deteriorating situation would affect Zimbabwe's ability to honor the agreement despite the power station being plagued with breakdowns and a shortage of parts in the country.

"They (Zimbabwe) have been very good in fulfilling their commitment and we have a lot of confidence in these guys," Shilamba said."

Even as many world powers call for the isolation of Zimbabwe, including a unanimous vote of the UN Security Council which said that "a free and fair election was impossible if violence and intimidation continued",  Russia, China and South Africa blocked stronger language in the UN measure that would have recognized opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai as "the legitimate president, until another fair election can be held."  China and South Africa are Zimbabwe's biggest trading partners, and both are heavily invested in the regional economy. 

There is also a strong sensitivity in southern Africa to interference in the affairs of sovereign nations.  Namibia, Angola and Zimbabwe overcame these qualms as participants in the The Second Congo War, which was as much a scramble for resources as an expression of solidarity and regional alliances.  Some of this reticence is cultural; with the exception of leaders like Nelson Mandela and Julius Nyerere, there is not a strong tradition of former African leaders making a successful transition to senior statesmen.  Some of it comes from looking over their shoulders.  And some of it is ideological - resistance movements that become ruling parties after achieving Independence are used to identifying external threats and avoiding turning the lens on internal shortcomings.

Alan Little of the BBC cautions his readers today; "Do not underestimate the psychology of Africa's liberation tradition." This tradition is also what makes this e-mail letter from a South African to Zimbabwean refugees who have suffered a murderous backlash in his own country so telling:

"...I have been pondering whether to write this email or not, but mainly because I was ashamed of what this beautiful countries (sic) of ours has become.

In your country:  My democracy was conceived when the MK soldiers fought alongside the ZIPRA forces in what was known as the Wankie Campaign in 1967.  My brothers and sisters were looked after in Lusaka and they were given shelter.  The blood of my brothers and sisters were spilled in Maputo in what was known as Matola raid on January 31, 1981 and your government gave them a state burial.  The blood of my people was spilled in Maseru in what was known as the Maseru Massacre and your government gave them a state burial.  The foundation of my democracy was laid in Mongoro Tanzania in 1969 in what was known as the Morogoro resolution.  Your country gave my people land for them to be educated at Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College (SOMAFCO) in Mazimbu Tanzania.  My soldiers were trained in Uganda, Lusaka, Angola, Mozambique, Algeria, Libya, Cuba, Russia.  They fought in Cuinto Canhavallo alongside their Angolan, Namibian as well as the Cuban comrades in Angola.  My democracy was delivered in Harare when the Harare Declaration was signed with the support of the Frontline States.  my Movement's Congress was held in your country in 1985 in Kitwe, Zambia.

Your people protected, clothed and loved my movement.  My people's struggle became your own struggle.  Not once did you call them with derogatory names.  Not once did you burn my brothers and sisters and not once did you say they are taking your jobs and women.

But most importnatly, I have a home in Harare at pastor Murefu's house, Zimbabwe.  I have a home in Lilongwe at Cyprian's house, Malawi.  I have a home in Kenya at Levi Nyambati's house.  I have a home in Lusaka, Chipata, Mapanza as well as Livingstone with the BBalo and the Mutare family respectively, Zambia.  My brother is lying in Mapanza, Zambia.  I have a home in Mozambique at Pastor Nhantumbo's family (May his soul rest in peace).  I have a home in Ivory Coast as well as DRC Kinshasa with Vincent Tohbi.  I am married to the grand daughter of the Sena people in Malawi, Mozambique as well as Zimbabwe.  My wife's maternal grandparents are in Swaziland.

My brothers, I apologize to you, your friends and your families for the barbaric action that you see in our country.  I apologize to Kenyatta, Nkrumah, Machel, Tongoara, Mwalimu Nyerere, Aostinho Nehto, Mondlane, etc.  I apologize on behalf of my leaders as well as my people that this is not who we are and this is not what makes us.  I apologize and I would like to tell you that this is not the view of my country, but the thuggery elements in our society who will use and drag our name in mud to achieve their evil deeds.  I would also like to assure you that our government as well as the members of our society at large, are working hard to root out these elements in our society.

We apologize because this is not who we are.

I hope you will find it in your hearts to open your doors and not to let these barbaric actions come between our friendship and all the wonderful things we have shared.  My home is your home and I trust and believe that your home will remain my home.  This I write from my heavy heart and i truly apologize on behalf of my firends, my family as well as all South Africans.

Freddy Tshikala, South African"

The return to the bad old days of regional instability and the specter of burning necklace victims once more in the townships have shaken people like Mr. Tshikala and those like him who were raised in a culture of pan-African resistance where "an injury to one is an injury to all."  They grieve for what Zimbabwe has become under Mugabe, their former comrade and supporter.  But they also grieve for what they have become, as nations and people who by their actions and inactions are now complicit in the repression of those who stood by them when the oppressor was always external and not one of their own.  Finding their courage and helping their leaders find theirs is the best hope for Democracy in the region. 

May it come in time for Zimbabwe.

Invisible Men

Here is an image with much to tell about matters of race and memory in contemporary America.  I am confident that just a few years ago, its subject matter - a black American soldier menacing a fallen white enemy with a bayonet - would have been deemed too provocative and risky for a venerable manufacturer of high end toy soldiers to bring to an American market.  Yet last year, the 115-year-old W. Britains company did just that.

True confessions time, here.  I am a collector of matte finished toy soldiers in this scale and from this company, though I concentrate on the American Civil War period and not, as it is known in the international collector trade, the American War of Independence.  This is a reflection of the expense of this hobby and lack of display space rather than lack of interest in other periods.  Sometimes I think the ideal job for me would be dioramist in residence at some well endowed and indulgent museum.  I've had this interest since I was in kindergarten.

I was prompted to think about this two-figure set from Britains AWI range while engaged in this thread at  Civil War Memory.  Kevin Levin's special area of interest is Petersburg's Battle of the Crater.  He and some of his readers drew attention to the utter absence of the many black soldiers who fought there from depictions of this battle marketed by Conte Collectibles, another high end toy soldier company and one I have patronized in the past.  Conte also has an extensive plastic play set business and its Civil War range represents the Crater.  Although Conte has produced four excellent African American figures from the colored 54th Massachusetts infantry regiment, none of these are reproduced in plastic and are not included part of the 192 figures in its Crater play set, or Conte's other two plastic play sets compatible with this item.

Another true confession.  I own hundreds of these matte finished ACW toy soldiers after a decade of collecting, and yet I have yet to purchase either Conte's 54th MA figures or the few (inferior) sculpts of this unit produced a number of years ago by W. Britains when it was under different ownership.  It is not that I do not like them - Ken Osen, who now is head sculptor for W. Britians, did the Conte figures and they are excellent - but there was always another group of toy soldiers that I wanted more, and I rationalize waiting on these because there were fewer situations when I could deploy them in a diorama, as colored troops came into active service at the midpoint in the war.  Since this collection is a substantial drain on my discretionary income, I've had to make hard choices about what investments to make.

These justifications don't really cut it.  I don't have the space to set up the dioramas of my dreams and the figures are many ranks deep in an upstairs bookcase in my home.  At the very heart of the matter, this collection is an expensive adult hobby playing out a boyhood fantasy, and none of my toy Civil War soldiers (or playmates) back then were black, either.  Except for a brief period when I was a teen-aged Civil War Reenacter in a Confederate cavalry troop based in upstate New York, my orientation has always been toward the Union perspective. But I am still left with a quandary and second guessing my excuses.

I cannot speak for others who collect these kinds of figures.  I do know that the ACW period tends to do well in markets East of the Mississippi and has less of a draw elsewhere.  I can only assume that the vast majority of collectors are male and with sufficient disposable income to lay out the considerable sums required every year to feed this rather addictive habit.   The only colored regiment from the American Civil War that the general public is aware of is the 54th Massachusetts, made famous by the movie "Glory", and that is why it alone is represented in the small number of figures available that depict black soldiers.  And though I am an exception, as a rule there is far more interest both the reenacting and the toy soldier collecting communities in confederate subject matter.

The American War of Independence, on the other hand, has a stronger international market for toy soldier collectors, particularly in the British Commonwealth.  I do not know the sales generated for W. Britians by the three figures of the 1st Rhode Island Light Infantry, a unit brigaded with the New Jersey troops commanded by my ancestor Elias Dayton at Yorktown, but they clearly were seen as appropriate subject matter.   The light company of this regiment, which these figures actually depict, was part of Lafayette's command and fought in the assault of Redoubt #10 along with my ancestor Aaron Ogden.   The regiment had several segregated companies of black, mulatto and Indian soldiers, thought African American soldiers were integrated in some regiments and militia companies during the war. Others fought for their freedom in British and Hessian units.

Collectors of British military figures, particularly those depicting the Victorian era, are accustomed to  depictions of Tommy Atkins facing racially diverse adversaries.  W. Britains has a new Zulu War line in both traditional glossy and matte finish that looks to be extremely popular with collectors.  The Zulu line in particular takes great pains to accurately depict the various regiments in Cetshwayo's' impis without round-eyed caricature.  I would love to collect these figures, but I do not.  I stick with the American Civil War.  It is not worth risking a divorce by expanding my habit to other periods and the size of my collection thereby.

So we come back to the question of why the Civil War regiments on my shelves are still monochrome when there are several appropriate figures available to represent those African Americans who fought in blue?  And would spending the $90 bucks or so it would take to rectify that omission really buy me indulgence?  I am sure it is not so simple, though I am left uneasy about its implications.  What we learn from our innocent play as children creates assumptions and blind spots that even as reflective adults we may not readily recognize. When I played "Civil War" as a boy, I did so in my own image.  Perhaps it is that simple. All I know for sure is that this stuff is hard.

The Way From Here...

My adviser in graduate school gave me some very good advice when she told me that you may never feel finished with what you write, but the time comes when it is done with you.  I may have reached that place for now in this series on matters of race and memory.  I certainly do not have a way of wrapping it all up in a satisfying conclusion, and it would have been hubris indeed to think that this could be done in a few blog posts, however thoughtful. 

This same adviser taught me to be wary of conclusions based on partial understandings.  There are too many examples of polices, programs, and strategies that fail to address the root causes of a problem by only treating a symptom, or fail to appreciate the synergy among a multitude of causal factors. Ethnicity in America is far more complex than the dynamics of black and white that I chose to write about here.  The same is true at the very least for class, creed, politics and gender. 

Yet it is also important to act, to make a decision and adapt in a timely fashion to new information and changing circumstances.  If you do this without a framework for understanding these changes you can only muddle through.  There may be significant implications for making the wrong decision, but worse still is to fail to decide at all.

There is a difference between being able to discriminate and discrimination.  One may question the basis for our judgments, but not the fact that we value one thing more highly than another.  Cultural sensitivity does not require that we accept human rights abuses that are the norm elsewhere.  Self awareness requires facing up the legacy of such abuses at home.

I believe that people act, even if unintentionally, within an arena of choice that is unique to their experience and circumstances.  The same applies to institutions, which are essentially repetitive patterns of behavior.  We are not always rational actors, dispassionately weighing costs and benefits, incentives and threats: otherwise Wall Street would be a very boring place and no one would remember Shakespeare.  You cannot blame externalities alone for the circumstances you face.  But nor can you blame the victim while being silent about the crime and its legacy.

They tried something different in South Africa after apartheid, an experiment that has yet to run its course.  The idea that truth and reconciliation was not only possible but to be actively sought and sustained is a revolutionary one.  I have seen a small part of its impact and I still am left with more questions than answers.  Still I believe that talking about the past and accepting our individual and collective responsibility for what we make of it in the present is a prerequisite, if we are ever to reconcile memory and denial, guilt and accountability, what we came from and what we can hope to be.

For now, that is what I can do.

"Memory and Denial are Kissing Cousins"; Talking with My Dad about God and Race

Writing this series of posts on race and responsibility came on me quite unexpectedly, and I am not at all sure where it may lead.  I wanted to talk through some of what it prompts me to think and feel, and so I called my father. I wanted to ask him about one of his experiences during the Civil Rights era, when he was an Episcopal seminarian in Massachusetts and one of his activist classmates was murdered in Alabama.

Religion is not a regular topic of conversation in our family.  Both of my parents came from families of faith, and yet neither my sister nor I was raised in a particular denomination, or even went to a formal church.  I attended an Episcopal boarding school and a Quaker college, but in neither case were these decisions based on their religious character.  Today Dad composes and orchestrates choral music that reflects a deeply individual and organic faith.  I have vivid childhood memories of the Martin Luther King service he would hold in the school chapel, back in the days when he was a headmaster and before there was a National Holiday, that featured Stevie Wonder's Happy Birthday and my father's clear tenor singing Abraham, Martin and John:

Anybody here seen my old friend Martin?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He freed lotta people but it seems the good they die young
I just looked around and he's gone.

Dad holds a B.D. from what is now Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, but chose not to be ordained at graduation.  I asked him if his choice was influenced by the death of his fellow seminarian and what he drew from that experience.

My father replied that the decision not to get ordained was made practically before he went to Seminary.  While a Yale undergraduate, he studied religion and was a deacon with chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr.  Bill Coffin was Dad's lifelong mentor, and the one who encouraged him to apply for the seminary fellowship because it offered the space to engage with the very questions of spirituality and social justice that made my father question whether he should become a minister.  Dad went on to say that the murder of his classmate in 1965 "confirmed in my mind that the church had to get out of its sanctuary and that as a layman I could do more...and people should speak from the position of faith to do so." 

Dad describes his own growing activism and the late night conversations with his fellow seminarians in which "we were honing our positions and our hearts on what had to be done."  He remembers his classmate Jonathan Daniels as a complex man, and totally non-violent. "I was in a very different place than he was, in terms of active activism and spirituality" he told me.  "In his liturgical way he could sing the Magnificat and feel as if that was his calling, a true Epiphany, and I wasn't there yet.  I was studying religion rather than living it the way he was.  I was much closer to the activism, on the verge, but there were too many easy rationalizations for not going down to Selma.  They weren't about self-protecting - I was not as concerned about personal harm, though perhaps I should have been - but felt I had obligations at school...When he went to Selma with the 1st wave, a couple of seminarians went with him..."

Jonathan Daniels responded to Martin Luther King's March 7th, 1965 call for clergy of all faiths to come down and support their efforts of voting rights marchers in Alabama.  Realizing that a brief visit by outsiders was not a sufficient expression of solidarity, he and fellow seminarian Judith Upham returned to Cambridge only long enough to request permission to return to Alabama for the rest of the semester.  After taking his exams in May, Daniels went back a third time to continue his work integrating a local Episcopal church, living with a black family while he tutored school children and helped register black people to vote.

He and a group of nearly 30 protesters were arrested on August 13th, 1965 while picketing white-owned   stores in Fort Deposit, Alabama.  All but five juvenile members of the group were held in the Hayneville jail for a week in incredibly cramped, fetid conditions until they were released but without transport back to Fort Deposit.  Daniels, along with a Catholic priest and two young black women, walked down the street to Varner's Grocery Store to get soft drinks, and were met on the steps by Tom L. Coleman, a state highway department engineer and unpaid special deputy who confronted them with a shotgun.  According to one of the young women with them, Ruby Sales, Coleman shouted at them;  "Get off my goddam property before I blow your goddam brains out, you black bastards!"  He then leveled his shotgun at her, and Daniels pulled her aside as Coleman fired, killing him instantly. Priest Richard F. Morrisroe grabbed the other two young people and ran, taking a second blast to his lower back which critically injured him.

The killing shocked the Episcopal Church.  It came two weeks after President Johnson signed the National Voting Rights Act into law, and just days after the Watts Riots in Los Angeles that officially left 34 people killed (28 African Americans), 1,072 people injured, and 4,000 people arrested.   Lyndon Johnson's White House tapes record a conversation he had with his chief civil rights aide Lee White about a request for assistance to help the Daniels family bring their son's body back home to Keene, NH.  My father was a pallbearer at the funeral on August 24th, and recalls linking arms along with Stokeley Carmichael. 

Dad told me that he remembers preaching at chapel that fall - by then the killer had been acquitted of manslaughter - and that his sermon grew out of Matthew 10:34 "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword."  Dad called it "the hard realistic message that change would not come not without sacrifice."  Peace and social justice work continues to be a central part of my father's life and a formative example for my own.

This conversation was a great gift to both of us.  We got into some of the racial themes I've been exploring these last few days, and particularly how we remember and internalize the past.  "Memory and denial are kissing cousins", said my father.  He said the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel are embedded in his heart:

"In regard to cruelties committed in the name of a free society, some are guilty, while all are responsible." The difference between guilt and responsibility is a key distinction for me.  I believe that is where we will pick up the thread tomorrow.

Take a Giant Step Outside Your Mind

One evening around our cooking fire in southern Africa, the Environmental Shepherds of ≠Khoadi ||Hôas Conservancy got to talking about animals, and in particular the ones that we thought we most resembled.  I remember that Harry chose the tiny pearl spotted owl as his personal totem, but what stands out from the rest was what the one African woman in our number had to say.  Landine !Guim said she was a baboon.  Had we been in America, I would have been appalled, given the horrible slur that this analogy signifies in our society.  Landine surprised me with her explanation.  "I am like that one" she said in her halting English, "because I am always looking under rocks to see what is there."

There are some very heavy rocks out there. 

For the last couple of days, I've been looking under stones, thinking hard about how our racial values and attitudes get internalized and overcome.  Does what we come from predetermine who we are or can hope to be, or are we truly masters of our own destinies?  The problem with this kind of polemical choice lies in its assumptions about the nature of the problem, grounded in the old nature v. nurture dichotomy.   I'm afraid a deeper understanding and any conclusion is going to require a far more complex hypothesis.

I recently heard conservative intellectual and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Shelby Steele speaking on the radio about African American racial masking", and particularly the bargain it makes with liberal white guilt.  Take a few minutes to listen.

It has been a long while since I've had my self perception on matters of race challenged so directly, and I confess there is part of me that wants to reject the message by discrediting the messenger.  Shelby Steele is that most uncomfortable of liberalism's critics, a conservative African American, someone who challenges the multicultural narrative of mainstream progressives and whose motives we naturally suspect.  Challenges to our deeply held beliefs and assumptions do not come from those who agree with us.  They frequently come from those who once held the same beliefs, and somewhere along the way broke ranks with the dominant view.

One reviewer of Steele's work on black masking and white guilt states:

Steele asserts that the primary focus of the civil-rights era was a legitimate quest to remove racial barriers. In the shift to the black-power era, Steele sees a paradigm shift, away from racial uplift and agency, where blacks assume responsibility for themselves, to a "race is destiny" mode. As the counterculture merged with the civil-rights movement, America was exposed for its racial hypocrisy and, consequently, lost its moral authority. Here, "white guilt" became the moral framework for America. Steele argues that liberal whites embraced guilt for two reasons: to avoid being seen as racists and to embrace a vantage point where they could mete out benefits to disadvantaged blacks through programs such as affirmative action. Steele believes blacks made a deal with the devil by exchanging responsibility and control over their destiny for handouts. He sees a deficiency in black middle-class educational achievement, further raising questions about claims of lack of equal opportunity. Despite these omissions, the cultural analysis of America's loss of moral authority for its exposed racism has resonance today.

I do not know whether I can accept Steele's premise, but I also know I cannot afford to reject it out of hand.  I am going to have to engage more deeply with what he has said and written, as well as with his critics, and I am going to have to take a giant step outside my mind, gain a bit of altitude, so I can test Steele's hypothesis againsts at my own understanding and experience.

I grew up at a progessive boarding school headed by my father in the Hudson Valley of New York.  The academic community that nurtured me was very non racial and yet only minimally diverse in terms of race.  There was a rich life of the mind in our family, and strong examples demonstrated by both of my parents that each of us has intrinsic worth, and that one person is inherently no better or worse than another.  Particularly in our formative years, my younger sister and I were treated with great equanimity, and I believe as a result developed a mutual appreciation for the talents and abilities of the other without having to compete for our parents' attention or validation. 

There is no denying that ours was a priviledged upbringing.  In the prep school environment, the headmaster occupies a unique social position that influences not only the economic lives but also the home lives of every member of the community.  My playmates might have been the children of the maintenance staff or of senior faculty members, but though I was initially unaware of it, the fact that I was the headmaster's son was not lost on their parents.  Dad and I had a heart to heart when I was nearing High School age about the challenges of being the son of the headmaster as well as a student, and it must have been a relief to him when I said the idea of boarding school sounded good to me and I was looking forward to going somewhere else.

I attended the local public school until 7th grade, when the positive benefits of being connected to people of different socio-econmic backgrounds and with deeper community roots were outweighed by a precipitous decline in the quality of the education provided.  Issues of class, rather than race, were most apparent in the schools I attended, but then, there were only a couple of African American families in the towns where I grew up, and fewer than 11 black students at the boarding school I attended.  This did not cause me to doubt my own values and attitudes about race until college, when one day I found myself filling out a survey that arrived in my student mailbox from a campus alliance of persons of color inquiring into my experience of racial diversity.  The more questions I answered, the more uncomfortable I became, for there was little in my upbringing, in the near absense of persons of color, to suggest that my own beliefs about racial equality were anything other than empty intellectualism.

When I was an undergraduate English Major, I wrote my senior thesis on William Faulkner and an idea I had that those stories he set in the Native American past were a means of getting a fresh perspective on the all consuming issue of race in which he as a white southern male was deeply implicated.  My subsequent years in Africa had that effect for me.

I made myself a promise when I decided to go to Africa after college to teach English in newly-independant Namibia.  I made myself promise not to try and become a "good white man" in Africa to compensate for the painful legacy of racial injustice in my own country and my own position of priviledge within it.  I also accepted responsibility not to take a tour through the lives of others, not to expect absolution or take advantage of the very flattering role that the situation offered me as a priviledged English-speaking white male to be catered to as a patron who held the keys to economic and social advantage.

It is well that I was deliberate in my approach to this new experience and the lives of people who would be impacted by that choice.  For the first and only time in my life I was a minority, though one with special status and priviledge that in some ways parallels my childhood as the son of the headmaster.   I was the subject of great interest but also held at a distance, with people initially wearing the mask of what they wanted to appear to me.  It took months and years of shared experience living together for those masks to start to lift. 

During our last years in Namibia, my wife remarked to me after a visit from officials from a development NGO to the community where we lived and worked that our African friends treated these visitors far more gently and with more open expressions of friendship than they now did with us.  I replied that that was because our relationship with the community had changed, and they could risk challenging, offending and being more open with us than they could with these others.

People have many layers, of course, and wear multiple masks.  Matters of race and class and gender identity coexist and play off each other.   We show different sides in different situations.  We are not color-blind, but can we hope to be more self-aware about what we project on others, and what we expect of ourselves?  More on that in a future post. 

The Tally Sheet of Shame

Unlike many people, I know the names of every one of my 32 Gr-Great grandparents.  Nearly all of them were in this country by the time of the American Civil War, and those who served in that conflict fought for the North - though here the exception proves the rule, as there was one Gracie ancestor with a brother who became a Confederate Brigadier, though the family was from New Jersey. 

Many lines in the pedigree can be traced far deeper into the past.  A significant number have been in North America for 12 generations.  I know about only a fraction of the 2,048 individuals in that generation of my family tree, but what I do know presents a particular challenge when looking to the ancestral past to understand something so volatile and deeply rooted as matters of race.  Proud as I am of their many accomplishments, it isn't stretching the point to say there is hardly a frontier atrocity or witch hunt in 17th or 18th century New England where I cannot place at least one of my forebears.  As for race relations, there wasn't one of them in that period who existed outside of the transatlantic mercantile system that sustained our colonial economy on the lives and labor of slaves.

I take pains to confront these ancestors on their own terms, to try to understand them in the context of the times in which they lived.  Even a family archive with as rich a trove of primary source material as ours only preserves what was deemed worthy of passing down.  A Society of Colonial Wars claim in our files tells me much about the service record of an ancestor from Connecticut:a chaplain with two different regiments during the French and Indian War.  It does not mention that he owned slaves, yet there are records for that as well.  To understand that part of his past means coming to grips with slavery in the northern states, but he is not the only northern slaveholder in this family tree, and we have southern kin as well. 

Reverend Jonathan Ingersoll (abt. 1713-1778), the French and Indian War veteran, was my 6th-Great Grandfather and a congregationalist minister in Ridgefield, Connecticut.  The Ridgefield Historical Society reveals:

Several prominent Ridgefield families of the period were slave owners, including Congregational Church Minister Jonathan Ingersoll. Inhuman as it seems, slave transactions such as Ingersoll's 1777 freeing of twenty-year old "Cyphax" were considered property transfers and duly recorded in town land records.

In this, Reverend Ingersoll was not unique, for half the ministers in Connecticut owned slaves on the eve of the Revolution.  Furthermore, Cyphax was freed the year before Ingersoll died and it is quite possible that the minister was settling his affairs.   Even as a free man, Cyphax faced Connecticut's "Black Code" that made for a very precarious existence:

Discrimination against free blacks was more severe in Connecticut than in other New England colonies. Their lives were strongly proscribed even before they became numerous. In 1690, the colony forbade blacks and Indians to be on the streets after 9 p.m. It also forbid black "servants" to wander beyond the limits of the towns or places where they belonged without a ticket or pass from their masters or the authorities. A law of 1708, citing frequent fights between slaves and whites, imposed a minimum penalty of 30 lashes on any black who disturbed the peace or who attempted to strike a white person. Even speech was subject to control. By a 1730 law, any black, Indian, or mulatto slave "who uttered or published, about any white person, words which would be actionable if uttered by a free white was, upon conviction before any one assistant or justice of the peace, to be whipped with forty lashes."

The Hartford Courant maintains an on-line collection of superb resources and articles called: Complicity. How Connecticut Chained Itself To Slavery.  There were more than 6,000 slaves in Connecticut by the time that my ancestor Jonathan Ingersoll manumitted Cyphax.  Slavery in Connecticut lasted for over 200 years.  It died a long death after the Revolution and was not fully abolished until 1848.

The Ogden branch of our family is justly proud of its prominent members who were considered among the "first families" of New Jersey at a time when that got you into the Social Register.  Signers and Senators, friends of Lafayette and companions of Arnold and Burr, they lead fascinating and active lives.  They also owned slaves, as did most of the principle families in Elizabethtown.  In the previous generation, my ancestor Robert Ogden was presiding Justice in 1741 when 2 or 3 blacks fleeing the panic in New York which followed the Great Negro Plot were apprehended in Elizabethtown.  His court formally sanctioned their execution by burning at the stake before the courthouse and local citizens were reimbursed for the cost of firewood and iron manacles they provided for the victims.

Hannah (Dayton) Ogden, widow of my collateral relation General Matthias Ogden of Revolutionary fame, and daughter of my direct ancestor General Elias Dayton, freed her mulatto slave, Michael Hardman, in 1797.  He was 26 years old. I discovered this bit of family history in Theodore Thayer's As We Were -The Story of Old Elizabethtown, published in 1964 by the New Jersey Historical Society.  Thayer also records that my ancestor Aaron Ogden, Governor of the State in 1812 and former US Senator and Presidential Elector, maintained a couple of slaves until he went bankrupt in the 1820s.  Like Connecticut, Slavery in New Jersey was practically as old as the first English settlement and persisted until 1846.

"New Jersey's slave population, unlike that of other colonies, actually increased during the Revolution, mainly through migration from other states. But the white population increased at a much faster rate, and wages for laborers became affordable to employers, while the cost of feeding and maintaining and guarding slaves remained high. By 1786, when a ban on slave importation into New Jersey took effect, the institution was dying an economic death. The 1800 census counted 12,422 New Jersey slaves, but the white population had boomed from 1786 to 1800, increasing at a rate six times that of blacks. This is not surprising, in part because in the same year New Jersey banned importing of slaves it also forbid free blacks from entering the state with intent to settle there."

My Gr-great Grandfather Dayton Ogden (1833-1914) married Esther Gracie, the sister of the aforementioned Confederate Brigadier, Archibald Gracie (1832-1864).  The Gracies were a New York mercantile family of great renown who resided in Elizabeth.  Her Grandfather, the first Archibald Gracie (1755-1829), was truly a merchant prince in the late 18th and early 19th centuries:

"As cotton was becoming a staple in the transatlantic trade, Scotsman Archibald Gracie immigrated to New York after training in Liverpool, Great Britain’s great cotton port. Gracie became an international shipping magnate, a merchant prince, building a summer home on the East River before losing much of his wealth. His son and grandson left the city to become cotton brokers in Mobile, Alabama, but their family’s summer home, today called Gracie Mansion, is the official residence of the mayor of New York."

All the same, in 1819 this same shipping magnate served on a committee of prominent New York Merchants to "devise some plan for checking the spread of African slavery." 

His son Archibald Gracie Jr. (1795 - 1865) married Elizabeth Davidson Bethune of Charleston, South Carolina, shown in a teenage portrait at left.  Her mother Margaret Willeman (b. 1782) was a second generation German immigrant.  The Willeman family came to South Carolina from Baden-Württemberg in the 1760s.  Her father, Christoph Willemann (b. 1748), appears in the 1790 Census as the head of a household with 2 free white males, 3 free white females, and 57 slaves.  Her Uncle, Jacob Willemann, allowed his slave Leander to buy his freedom for 900 pounds current money, or about 130 pounds sterling:

"I...do hereby declare that the said sum...was delivered to me by...Leander from time to time as Monies which he had by his great care, diligence and industry in his business Trade or occupation of a Butcher for several years passed got together and earned."

According to Against the Odds: Free Blacks in the Slave Societies of the Americas, a manumission deed from Jacob Willemann also shows that several years latter, he sold a slave Diana her freedom and that of her daughter for "the earnings and gains arising from her Labour and Industry [which she was] from time to time allowed to carry on and transact  during the term of her servitude."

Elizabeth, New Jersey was also a popular summer retreat for southerners in the age before air conditioning  and a number of them, including General Winfield Scott of Virginia, made their residence there. General Archibald Gracie (1832-1864) married Josephine Mayo, whose Virginia grandfather John Mayo married Abigail deHart of Elizabethtown.  Another southerner who arrived in New Jersey and married more directly into the family was Frederick Beasely D.D. (1777-1845) of Chowan County, North Carolina.  He was my 4th-Great Grandfather and wed the daughter of Constitution Signer Jonathan Dayton.  Beasely's mother, Elizabeth (Blount) Beasely, is listed in the 1790 census as the female head of a household that possessed 20 slaves.

I am not satisfied with simply outing my slave-owning ancestors.  It is too convenient to simply discredit and dismiss them as a way of distancing myself from the values and attitudes that allowed them to participate in and to profit by a racist system that countenanced slavery.  It is too simple to project the expectations of the present on the past.  Social change is neither quick nor self-evident...

...I remember a ride I got once from an Afrikaner farmer in Namibia.  I confess I expected him to be what I had come to think of as a typical Boer, and he certainly fit the profile in his rolled knee socks and his black farm workers riding in the dust in the back of his open truck.  I climbed inside and we began the customary exchange of pleasantries, but when he learned that I was living with and teaching black people his response completely put my prejudice to shame.  He told me that it was very hard for an Afrikaner to go against his parents and his church, but that was what was required in a post-apartheid country with majority rule. 

"Some day" he told me, "I will come home to my wife and I won't say I've invited my coloured friend and my black friend over for dinner.  I'll just say it is Johannes and Erasmus.  I don't want to always think about the colour.  I am not there yet, but I want to be."  I looked at him, there on the cusp of a strange new world, and told him I thought he was well ahead of the rest of us.

"Emancipate Yourself from Mental Slavery"

My seven-year-old daughter is learning about slavery.  It is Black History Month, and her second grade curriculum focuses on the Underground Railroad.  Emily is a very bright, empathetic child, and I am watching her process this information in her imaginative play at home.  She talks about helping slaves escape and creates plays with her dolls that feature slaves being led to freedom.  Her impulses are sweet and her sense of fairness is strong.  She aligns herself with those that helped slaves win their freedom.  And I wonder what else she has internalized.

Does she now think, as would never have occurred to her before, that when she sees a black person someone in their family must once have been a slave?  Is she starting to see blacks as needing white assistance to win their freedom and unable to win it for themselves?  Can she imagine herself as the oppressed slave, or does she default to the benign but paternal role of agent of the slave's redemption?  The obvious part for her in this particular version of history is that of the good Northern white person.  What will she make of the far more complex history of race relations in America that does not spare the Yankee any more than it absolves the defenders of Dixie?

I do not fault the school for its simplified, even sanitized 2nd grade curriculum. Seven-year-olds are not ready to look at burned, lynched corpses and smiling white vigilantes.  But my obligation as a parent, as an historian, and as one who knows deep in his private soul that I am not free of the taint of prejudice, prompts me to listen to my daughter and offer additional information, sensitively and straightforwardly, and respect her intelligence as well as her tender years to work through what we share.

There is a Namibian proverb that goes; "You cannot smell yourself; let another smell you."  We become accustomed to our stench.  How do we respond when we are told that we stink? Is soap and water sufficient to cleanse the body, or is it now a reeking corpse? Or is it more the offended person's issue, a pendulum swung too hard the other way? We are on perilous ground, bad enough for adult angst, let alone a growing child. 

Over the next few days, Walking the Berkshires will take a hard look at the narrative of race in our family tree and our minds today.  I am not yet sure where all this may lead, but I do know that it is not enough to deconstruct the myths that we tell each other about our pasts and prejudices, but to build up a new paradigm - more honest, less damning  - if we have any hope of doing better. I do not believe in original sin, though some patterns run very deep and are very hard to overcome. It does not begin or end with the sins of our fathers, nor with personal responsibility though that has its part as well.  It begins by looking hard at ourselves and in some very awkward places, but it cannot end there.  Most of us crave redemption, and tend to project that desire on those we have wronged, but like the song goes; "None but ourselves can free our minds."

Scrapheap of History

My great grandmother Margaret (Olmsted) Ogden was an inveterate scrap-booker.  She clipped and pasted newspaper articles, playbills, poems and prose that caught her fancy for more than 60 years, and these books are a rich but fragile trove of family history.  The yellow paper and newsprint often crumble at the touch and I treat these (often unattributed) primary sources with the greatest of care.  This means that I have not read them all cover to cover, and once in a great while I don the white gloves and gently turn the precious pages to see what they contain.

Some of the scraps she saved pertain to the events of the day - she did half a book on the death of President McKinley - and others to friends and acquaintances.  I do not know what, if any connection the family had to one Monroe Anderson of Point Pleasant, New Jersey where the family had a vacation residence, but his obituary of December 24, 1926 is dutifully glued alongside another for Civil War General J.R. Brooke who married a cousin from New Hampshire.  The Monroe obituary is striking not only for the gruesome details it provides of the accident that lead to his demise but also for the details of the funeral and a particularly notorious "benevolent" organization's evidently respectable association with it.  See what you make of this:

MONROE ANDERSON DIES FROM INJURIES

Succumbs Two Days After Accident at Stillwell's Mill In Which He Lost Legs

"Monroe Anderson of Point Pleasant Borough died late last Friday afternoon at the Point Pleasant Hospital from injuries sustained in an accident while at work in Joseph Stillwell's mill at Bay Head two days before.  His clothing caught onto a steel shafting and he was whirled around in midair, mashing both of his legs so badly that it was necessary to amputate them below the knees that day.  He also sustained severe internal injuries

The funeral, held from his late home on Arnold avenue Tuesday afternoon, was largely attended.  He was a member of the Junior O.U.A.M. Metedeconk Tribe of Improved order of Red Men and of the First M.E. Church, where for several years he sang in the choir.  Interment was at White Lawn Cemetery, where about one hundred members of the men's, women's and children's branches of the Ku Klux Klan assembled at the grave and conducted ceremonies from their rituals.  Reverend Earl Hann, pastor of the First M.E. Church, officiated at the services in the home.

The funeral procession to the cemetery was led by the band of the Ku Klux Klan.  Services there were in charge of Dr. W.H. Morgan, Grand Titan of the order in New Jersey.

Mr. Anderson was 45 years of age..."

One often forgets that the Klan had a huge following in the north during the early 20th century.  It is estimated that in the 1920s, just a decade after its second incarnation as a national membership organization, 15% of the eligible population of the entire country (2,000,000 people) was a member of the Klan, more than 60,000 in New Jersey.  John Blackwell of The Trentonian reports:

"'It was a reaction against modernism in all its forms in the 1920s,' said Bernard Bush, an East Windsor historian who is researching the sordid story of the Jersey Klan.

"If you were a white Protestant in New Jersey at that time, you might feel disoriented and want to join an organization like the Klan,' Bush continued. 'There's a tremendous influx of Catholic and Jewish immigrants.  Blacks are moving north and starting to gain a measure of civil rights.  There's the influence of movies, modern standards of morality.  There are flappers and a lot of drinking.'

'The Klan was really a movement to just tell the 20th century: stop.'"

So I have to ask myself, as perhaps you have already done; "Why did my great grandmother include this article in her scrapbook?"  Was it more than merely the sort of sensational story that clearly appealed to her?  Was there, in fact, a closer connection?  My great grandparents were neither of Monroe's social set (they were old money blue bloods descended from one of New Jersey's First Families) nor his church (they were Episcopalians).   My great grandfather was in the Society of the Cincinnati and the Elizabeth Country Club, not the Metedeconk Tribe of Improved order of Red Men. Nonetheless they were products of their era, and their attitudes about class (patrician) and race (no mixing) were quite discernible in my grandmother's generation.  My great grandmother clearly delighted in stories with a whiff of scandal - there is an article in one of her scrapbooks about a shootout on Elizabeth New Jersey's Broad Street - and it could well be that this is nothing more than that, a lurid incident in the town where the family spent its summers.  But I do not know for sure that that is all there is to this story.