Ghosts

of the Masters
Descendants of Slaveholders Reckon with Family History
by Dave Pettee and Susan Hutchison
The heirs of slaveholders are not responsible for the past; but in a better world, they would be accountable for that past. They would make an effort to deal with the slave story, talk about it, and try to come to terms with it. Edward Ball, author of Slaves in the Family

Abstract: Ghosts of the Masters: Descendants of Slaveholders Reckon With Family History is a book-in-progress by Dave Pettee and Susan Hutchison. The authors have interviewed over 100 white descendants of slaveholders to hear their stories and perspectives related to this challenging family history. This paper provides background to the research, and a sample of what the authors learned. Silence about this aspect of family history is suggested to be a prevalent dynamic among descendants of slaveholders.

Copyright 2011 David Pettee and Susan Hutchison

In January 2006, the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, VA hosted a groundbreaking gathering of linked descendants white, black and multiracial people, whose ancestors had once been linked through the institution of slavery. Susan Hutchison, a white descendant of Thomas Jefferson, had collaborated with Will Hairston, a white descendant of the wealthy Hairston family of Virginia and North Carolina, to lay the foundation for this first meeting of Coming to the Table. The name of the group was inspired by a line from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.s speech at the March on Washington in August 1963, when he dared to dream that one day ... the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down at the table of brotherhood. Two and a half years later, the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding received additional funding to offer a weeklong Coming to the Table seminar. Susan came back to EMU for this class, and met Dave Pettee for the first time. Dave had first become aware of Coming to the Table in 2007 when he was preparing to make contact with Pat, a woman whose ancestor had been enslaved by Daves ancestor in Rhode Island. Six of the fifteen participants who came to EMU in June 2008 were descended from people who had been enslaved. Eight were descended from white slaveholders and one white woman was an attorney who specialized in restorative justice and was married to an African American man. Dave was the only participant from the Northeast. The others either came from places throughout the South, or from points west. We ranged in age from our mid-40s to our early 70s. Everyone knew that the legacy of this complex and emotionally charged historical relationship would be squarely on the table. The organizers struggled to figure out how best to bring the participants together, anxious about triggering emotional trip wires and inflaming old hurts, which could hamper our efforts to build a new bridge forward. They developed a structure that first included academic presentations about the history of slavery, historical trauma and restorative justice. Working out of a place of shared understanding helped to set the stage for a facilitated process of revealing why we had come, sharing our personal and family stories, and getting to know one another better. During the first two days, we were all on our best behavior. On the third day, Betty, one of the African American participants, became tearful and angry as she spoke about the terror she had experienced desegregating her Virginia high school in the 1950s. This was the moment when things got real. An awkward and uncomfortable silence enveloped the room. Sensing that the tension was rising, the group decided to meet separately for an hour in two small groups, one black and the other white. The participants in the white group agreed to take turns sharing our emotional reactions to what we had just heard. Dave remembers the exact moment when it was Jacks turn to speak. A thin and sad looking man in his late sixties with Alabama slaveholding ancestors, Jack cleared his throat and took a deep breath before he 2 Ghosts of the Masters

began. With an unhurried and deep Southern drawl, he told us how his family had been profoundly impacted emotionally by enslaving other human beings. Until that moment, Dave hadnt felt any connection with Jack and had wondered privately what common ground he could possibly share with this great-great-grandson of the Confederacy, whose life experience seemed miles apart from his own. (Dave would later learn that as a Yankee, he had been an object of Jacks suspicion, too. Dave came to appreciate Jack, who was a descendant of President John Tyler and many other significant leaders of the Confederacy.) Dave remembers sitting still, his eyes closed, beginning to hear unexpectedly familiar dynamics, first from Jack, and then as the group went around, from all the others. Again and again, themes around child rearing, silence, denial, disconnection, emotional control, ancestor worship, alcohol use and fear of black people emerged. It had never occurred to Dave that descendants of slaveholders might have inherited a living emotional legacy from slavery, in a form parallel to, but profoundly different from, the descendants of enslaved people. It was Daves turn to speak. Something shifted inside. His heart began to race. A deep and unexpected well of old sadness rushed out of his core, and the muscles in his abdomen tightly contorted, fighting against the flood of so much ancient sorrow. For the first time, he knew deep in his gut that something emotionally powerful and painful was entangled with a family history of enslaving other human beings. The pain had somehow mysteriously migrated down his family tree. He began to wonder if it had for others in the group, too. The honest sharing of these taboo stories, joined together, amplified a faint and distorted echo, sounding across the generations. Facing the legacy of slaveholding challenged an emotional and spiritual paralysis of which Dave had only recently become aware. He recognized that he was crossing a threshold, and he knew he could never turn back. Through his tears, Dave looked across the circle and found Susans gaze. She nodded back in recognition, acutely aware that a powerful sense of connection and shared experience was emerging. As we broke through our silence, this circle of white strangers, moments before isolated in our private realms of reckoning, began to build a new and hopeful community with one another. At that moment, although neither Susan nor Dave knew it at the time, the idea for a book was born.

Ghosts of the Masters 3

We Are Everywhere There are perhaps as many as thirty-six million descendants of slaves alive today in the United States. This reality finds its way into the news, books, movies, blogs and genealogy forums on a regular basis. As many as fifteen million people alive today have ancestors who held slaves in the South at the outbreak of the Civil War. This doesnt even take into account the descendants of Northern slaveholders, or of those from elsewhere in the United States, the Caribbean or South America. We are everywhere. But where are we? In contrast to descendants of slaves, descendants of slaveholders are a hidden group, even to ourselves. While there are some who will acknowledge ancestral connections to slaveholding, we are, by far, the exceptions to the rule. We are invisible as a population. The harsh reality that it was our family members who perpetrated slavery is rarely something we want to draw attention to, even within our own hearts and minds. Conversations and articles about the living legacy of slavery are often quickly dismissed by white people. Some whites express frustration, anger or worse at reminders of our countrys history of slavery, unable to appreciate the wisdom of Natasha Tretheway who wrote in her poem, Pilgrimage, In my dream, the ghost of history lies down beside me, rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm. (Tretheway, 2006) Many white people share the opinion that slavery has nothing to do with them, either because their ancestors werent slaveholders, or because slavery happened so long ago. While the election of a black President is to be celebrated as an important national milestone, we are far from a post-racial America. Our nation continues to throb and convulse with problems that are traced back directly to slavery. Racially divided schools, churches and neighborhoods; unequal distribution of economic resources; disparate educational opportunities and outcomes; misguided beliefs in superiority and inferiority based upon skin color; and racially based mistrust and fear are still with us, even though laws have improved, and science has proved that the notion of race is a social construct with no biological basis. Descendants of slaveholders are uniquely positioned to help guide the way forward for other white Americans to directly and honestly face the legacy of slaveryif we can look at and engage this painful history, surely, others can, too. In January 2009, we decided to write a book together, grounded in our experience and willingness to be public as white descendants of slaveholders, Susan coming from the South, and Dave hailing from the North. Reflecting back upon our experiences at the Coming to the Table seminar and elsewhere, we were intrigued by the idea of listening to the stories of others who share this challenging legacy.

4 Ghosts of the Masters

We were uncertain what we would find, but we felt confident that their stories would be powerful. We wanted to explore how the legacy of slaveholding lives on in the psyches and in the lives of our fellow descendants. We also hoped to begin to make visible what has been invisible, to begin to bring this large group into American social consciousness with as much sensitivity as we possibly could. We spent a year interviewing people, exceeding our goal of interviewing 100 white descendants of slaveholders from a wide range of ages, religious traditions, political leanings, socioeconomic backgrounds and ancestral homes. To our knowledge, this is the largest group of descendants of slaveholders that has ever been interviewed in any systematic way. We also felt it was important to include the voices of those whose ancestors had been enslaved, particularly those who had made contact with a linked descendant someone whose ancestor had enslaved theirs, or, as one interviewee put it, someone who was related by slavery (and in some cases related by blood). We met our goal of interviewing 25 people. After developing a series of open-ended interview questions, we began looking in earnest for anyone who would talk with us about their family connections to slaveholding. Since there is no obvious place to go to find this hidden population, we started with our friends and acquaintances from Coming to the Table and elsewhere. In his profession as a minister and staff member at the Unitarian Universalist Association office, Dave had talked openly about his experience of confronting his familys connections with slavery. After he wrote two articles that were posted on the UUA denominations website about his personal story of reckoning and appeared on NPRs On Point, quite a number of people, including several of his ministerial colleagues, revealed to him that their ancestors, too, had been slaveholders. We decided to contact many of these people to seek their agreement in being interviewed, and most were willing to talk with us. Daves willingness to be so public about his family history also led to several invitations to preach about his journey of reckoning. At the end of every service, he began to expect that at least one person (and often more) would wait patiently, then approach him in tears to whisper, This is my story, too. Upon learning that Dave was working on a book about descendants of slaveholders, a number of them volunteered to be interviewed. We sought out members of heritage societies, such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Susan developed a website which proved valuable for receiving responses to queries that we posted various places on the Internet. Soliciting stories over the Internet, however, rarely led to an interview. In hindsight, it seems obvious that most people needed some kind of personal knowledge of us before being willing to reveal this difficult dimension of their family history. A significant number of people would express enthusiastic interest in participating in our project, but then would become unexpectedly elusive in setting up a time to talk. We wondered Ghosts of the Masters 5

if these people, after breaking their silence, encountered deep and restrictive internalized messages that shut them down. One person expressed it this way I have waited for so long to find someone to talk with about this history, but then I heard inside the voice of my father, who urged me to never speak outside our family about what our ancestors did. As the number of interviews grew, we felt confident that we were gathering enough stories to begin discerning some repeating themes, and certainly enough to begin lifting the veil of silence. Over the course of a year, we listened to (or received in writing) reflections from 100 white descendants of slaveholders. We interviewed people who had slaveholding ancestors from every state in the former Confederacy, from eight states in the North, from three Border States and from Cuba, Haiti, Barbados, Brazil and Africa. We heard from two people whose ancestors had enslaved thousands of people. Others found reference in family records to only one or two slaves. We listened as people struggled with wealth inherited from connections to slavery, and heard from those whose slaveholding ancestors were poor, who felt stigmatized by being associated with rich plantation owners with whom they felt no sympathy or connection. We heard from people who were shocked to learn that their family had any connection with slavery, and from those whose family had maintained contact through the generations with descendants of people their ancestors had enslaved. Sixty-six of the people we interviewed were women, and thirty-seven were men. (We are not certain why there was such a gender imbalance in these numbers. Perhaps due to cultural conditioning women are, in general, more willing to directly face uncomfortable family history. Or perhaps the imbalance is simply a reflection of who tends to get involved in genealogy and assume the role of keeper of family history.) They ranged in age from fourteen to eighty-nine. We heard from writers, members of the clergy, business owners, artists, students, professional historians, genealogists, psychotherapists, lawyers, poets, songwriters, speech pathologists and career military. Within the group of linked slave descendants we interviewed, sixteen were women and nine were men, ranging in age from thirty-six to eighty-three. Eight of these African American descendants had a historical connection with a white descendant of a slaveholder whom we also interviewed. Twenty people had ancestors who had been enslaved in seven of the former Confederate states, two from the North, one from a border state, one from the Bahamas and one from West Africa. Our Interview Process Because of the sensitive intersection of slavery and family, we felt it was important to try to carefully shape the interview process so that it would feel safe and nonjudgmental. We 6 Ghosts of the Masters

committed to each person not to publish quotes or their names without first getting permission. We agreed to honor the requests of those who would only speak with us if they could be identified by a pseudonym. There were a number of people who were aware of, or suspected that they had family involved or present at lynchings, or were supportive of or involved with the KKK. For these people, to risk breaking their long silence was an act of courage. For them, the enduring legacy of slavery was clear: it had morphed into Jim Crow and acts of violent racism. We made it a point to be flexible, relaxed and willing to answer any and all questions, including questions about our own stories, as was needed. While we conducted as many of our interviews as we could in person, most took place over the phone, and a few through computer videoconferencing. Most of the interviews took about an hour, but quite a few went considerably longer. The questions that we drew from are listed below, sometimes with a brief explanation of why we included the question. * What is your name? How old are you? Where did you grow up? What do you for a living? * What has made you feel proud about your ancestors? (Given the difficult feelings many people experience when facing their slaveholding heritage, we felt it was important to begin by asking what gave interviewees a sense of pride or appreciation about their ancestors.) * Were you told your ancestors were 'special' in any way? If so, how did this influence you? (We had already heard stories of ancestor worship among some descendants of slaveholders, particularly in relation to wealthy families, and we wanted to see how common this phenomenon was, and what impact the descendant experienced as a result of having this family narrative.) * What did you hear growing up about the Civil War/War Between the States? (We were interested in learning if there were differences depending upon whether the Civil War was a significant part of the family narrative, including whether a persons ancestor(s) had served in Union or Confederate forces.) * As far as you know, what is the extent of your family's connection to slavery? How did you learn about it? Where did your family who enslaved other people live? * Did your parents, grandparents or other relatives ever talk about the family connection to slavery? If so, what did they say? How did they talk about the connection? * If your family didn't talk about slavery, why do you think they chose not to? * How do you feel about your family's connection to slavery? Have your feelings changed over time? If so, how and why? * Have you been in contact with any descendants of people that your ancestor/s enslaved? If you have made contact, how did it come about, what happened and what was the experience like for you? Has making contact had any impact upon you? If so, in what ways? Are there any plans for further contact? What would you like to see happen in this relationship? How did other members of your family react to your contact? (More and more people are having this experience, primarily due to Internet-supported genealogical research. Meeting a linked Ghosts of the Masters 7

descendant is usually a very powerful experience, and significantly impacts the journey of reckoning with this shared history for both people.) * If not, how do you feel about the idea of making contact with descendants of people that your ancestor/s enslaved? What might make such contact appealing to you? What might you want to say to these people, or ask them? * How do you think your family benefited from slavery? * What do you imagine might have been the impact of slavery upon the people your ancestors enslaved? Do you think there could be impact that has been carried forward to generations alive today? * Do you feel that your slaveholding ancestors were impacted psychologically by their participation in slavery? If so, how? Please be as specific as you can. (This question and the next question arose from what we have learned about the impact of oppression on the oppressor, and the ways that unhealed hurts can transfer from one generation to the next.) * Do you feel that enslaving others was traumatic for slaveholders? If so, how? Do you think this trauma has been passed forward from one generation to the next in your family to the people alive today? If so, please be as specific as you can. * As a descendant of a slaveholder, do you feel that you have any responsibility to repair the damage done by your ancestor(s)? If so, how might this involve you? (In contrast to the way conversation can become bogged down or limited around the issue of reparations, we have found the term repair to inspire a much more flexible response.) We did not ask every question in every interview, instead choosing to stay flexible and respond to the person in the particular moment. We would sometimes omit questions, or ask new questions that occurred to us based upon what we were hearing. We used a modified version of this list in our interviews with descendants of enslaved people. We did not design this project to be a scientifically valid study, in part because we are not trained researchers, but more importantly, because we felt the stories and the people who shared them were more important than statistical analysis. Perhaps as a consequence, we were regularly astonished with the stories that people were willing to entrust with us. After hearing from more than one hundred descendants, we felt very satisfied that we had heard from a range of experiences and viewpoints. We felt confident that we had systematically listened to more descendants of slaveholders and linked descendants than anyone before us. The Veil of Silence One of the most striking themes that emerged from our interviews was that of silence. Martijn W. J. Lindt discussed the role of silence in the lives of the children of Dutch citizens who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, in The International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma.

8 Ghosts of the Masters

 Silence has erased much of the memory of slavery in the North, and it is a dynamic in the South that has been utilized for the same purpose. Some scholars of historical trauma describe the phenomenon of encryptment, which refers to a psychic response to trauma in which intolerable experiences become walled in, silenced, and removed from consciousness and the public sphere. Such intolerable experiences can occur with victims who cannot face unbearable loss, humiliation, destruction, torture, or genocide. They can also occur with perpetrators who cannot face their own violence, guilt or shame.2 (Schwab 2010) Many descendants of slaveholders struggle with silence as a key element in their story of reckoning with their family history. Most of the people we talked with heard nothing about slavery from parents, grandparents or other relatives who passed along the familys oral traditions. More frequently, they stumbled upon the information while doing genealogical research. Many used words like surprised, stunned, and shocked to describe how they felt upon discovering that their ancestors held slaves. This tended to be less true for people born and raised in the South, people who had been surrounded by cultural and visible physical reminders of the regions recent dependence on forced labor. Some carried childhood memories about furniture that had been made by slaves, or had heard about seating areas in their childhood churches which had originally been reserved for slaves. One brother and sister recalled their grandmother referring to her hired domestic help as slaves! Still, many people with Southern roots had no idea that their ancestors had been slaveholders. Others had inherited a family narrative that mentioned the familys slaveholding history only in passing, as if it were inconsequential. Barbara Brown Dr. Barbara Brown is the Director of the Outreach Program at the African Studies Center at a local university. Her work is devoted to improving the understanding of Africa in the United States. Growing up, I only knew about my immediate ancestors, maybe back only to my great-grandparents. I thought all we had was this Northern family Ghosts of the Masters 9

Finally, remaining silent has become second nature for children of collaborators themselves. Most children of collaborators hide their backgrounds for fear of rejection. Conforming with the general taboo on the subject seems to be their only way of coping with the danger of stigmatization. Having been silent for such a long time makes it increasingly difficult to speak openly. When bottled- up emotions come to the surface, they scare off potential conversation partners, and this experience reinforces the silence.1 (Danieli et.al. 1998, 169).

 Toni Carrier Toni Carrier lives in Tampa, Florida, but was born and raised in Mississippi. In her retirement, she has been steadfastly working for several years developing three websites that are related to African American heritage, methodically working with volunteers to make information related to slavery available on the Internet. Ironically, even though her work often involves working with descendants of slaveholders who have uncovered names of enslaved people and other important slavery-related information in their genealogical research, she never imagined that she herself had slaveholding ancestry. The way that I learned about my familys slaveholding history was a shock. Not only was I shocked to learn we had slaves, but I was shocked that my mother never mentioned it to me four years into my research. Its a huge part of what I talk about, with family and friends! One night when we were talking on the phone, all of a sudden, she just mentioned it in the most casual way, something about my great-great-grandfathers slaves. I was absolutely shocked. I had no idea. 10 Ghosts of the Masters

winemakers from the Midwest or the North, my grandfather was from Ohio and my grandmothers family were from Germany. My family in Chicago were Ryersons, who were big in the steel industry. I didnt know anything about my family connection with slavery until one day, in the mail, back in 2003, this book arrives Marys World: Love, War and Family Times in Nineteenth Century Charleston. It came from someone who seemed to know me, a distant cousin, who had met my mother in Florida. Im sure my mother said, Oh, my daughter is so interested in family history! No one in my immediate family knew anything about this side of the family. I thought it was just a family history, and then I realize that it is Southern history, so I figured, well, there has to be slavery in here. So, I discover that I am descended from one of the wealthiest families, the Pringle family of Charleston, South Carolina. The Pringles were big rice people and owned several large plantations. This book was written in 2001, off of an old diary. I go through the book looking for slavery, and it seems to be absent, until I get to the chapter titled, The Peculiar Institution. The author tries to leave this impression that slavery is not a very big deal in this family, and that Mary, the important character, doesnt like slavery, except when you read between the lines, of course, she does! They have 32 slaves working in the house alone! We find in the inventory of the house in 1834 two gagging irons, with an illustration. It was quite something to suddenly realize that I had this important South Carolina family history. The story had been lost to history.

 Even though Tonis mother did eventually talk about Daddy Furr having enslaved people, it took four years of frequent conversation about the nature of Tonis research before her mother was able to mention it. During the phone call in which her mother surprised her with the news, Toni remembered, Im sure there was a very long pause, and I said, Daddy Furr held slaves? And shes like, Oh yeah, Daddy Furr held slaves. Like Oh, of course, yes, yes of course Daddy Furr held slaves. Then she said something that was even more alarming. She said, but Daddy Furr treated his slaves well. We talked about the old house, we talked about Daddy Furr, and never once in the entire time we were visiting, or in the entire time I was growing up, or even for the first few years I was doing the research, never once did the fact that Daddy Furr held slaves ever come up in conversation. Its mystifying. Its absolutely mystifying. It was uncommon that we encountered anyone descended from Northern slaveholders who wasnt totally taken by surprise by their discovery. The diluted stories a few inherited were impacted by decades of the institutionalized cultural amnesia that permeates the North, which includes the proud celebration of its abolitionist heritage and Underground Railroad sites, but manages to selectively omit more difficult truths, such as New Englands role as a hub of the slave trade. Few in the North are aware that the Mayor of New York City favored secession from the Union, to make common cause with the cotton producing Southern states upon which Wall Street depended. Colt de Wolf Colt de Wolf grew up hearing that that his fathers wealthy Rhode Island ancestors owned and piloted clipper ships. He didnt know the more complete truth about his family history until a relative dug a little deeper into the story and discovered that their DeWolf forebears were, in fact, the largest slave traders in US history. At first I was in shock. I thought, as someone who had ancestors who were slave traders, that someone is going to shoot me. Initially my thought was Oh my God, I should never talk about this. Rachel Branch Rachel I. Branch is a thirteenth generation, direct descendant of Captain John Gallup who arrived in Massachusetts from England in 1630. The Gallup family (the Gallup Poll, Gallup, NM, etc.) is one of the oldest families in the country. Her voice grew animated when asked how she learned about the enslavement of human beings by her ancestors.

Ghosts of the Masters 11

 Catherine Sasanov Catharine Sasanov published a book of poetry in 2010, titled Had Slaves, about her journey of reckoning since being blindsided in a phone call from her cousin in 2005. My connection to this history started with a will. My cousin called me one day to share some information about the family history. So, here she is, waxing on poetically... Heres some old valentine cards and some tintypes, and heres Grandpa Steeles will from 1857 with the nine slaves in it... And Im like, What slaves? I felt woozy when I first heard it. The only thing that ever struck me harder was when I learned about 9/11. 12 Ghosts of the Masters

In 1992, I stopped in Mystic, CT, to arrange a reunion with school classmates. While gathering brochures, I took the historical walking tour, and, much to my surprise, discovered two Gallup homes along the path. Subsequently, I stayed at the Applewood Bed & Breakfast in Ledyard, a farm that had been owned by Russell Gallup in 1826. The owner told me there was an annual Gallup Family reunion each August. At The Ledyard Historical Society I picked up a copy of "Seven Families. [Volume III of Ledyard Historical Society Publications]. In 2005 I went to my first reunion, and the night before read the section on the Gallup Family. There were wills and descriptions of bequests of ". . . five Negroes" . . . of bequests to wives of the "Negro girl, Cloe," and of the "Negro girl, Phillis. I was stunned and in disbelief. I was shocked. I was disheartened. I was sickened and revolted. My whole life had been about human rights, and I had intentionally worked in multi-racial organizations and lived in multi-racial neighborhoods, as this is what the definition of "American" is to me. Growing up an hour away from where the great W. E. Burghardt Du Bois was born (Great Barrington, MA), we had never been taught about him or about slavery in the North or any relevant American history on the subject . . . these were grievous lies of omission. We did study the Revolutionary War (but not about Crispus Attucks) and only skimmed the Civil War. And, certainly, not one mention was ever made about slaves in the North or in the families of my ancestors. But truth will not be suppressed, and this knowledge only adds to the ongoing meaning and work of my life.

 Bob Ellertson Bob Ellertson discovered his familys connection to slavery while researching on the Internet. When I look through all the family records, there is absolutely nothing about slavery. I never heard anything. I did hear some about the Odells on my mothers side, but not because they had connection with slavery. There was an early 20th century New York State Governor, Benjamin Odell, who was my great-grandmothers first cousin. Odell followed Teddy Roosevelt as Governor of New York. Ive seen genealogies published about him but none ever mention that he was descended from slaveholders. So, I was quite surprised when I went into the census records and I found the verification that my family owned slaves. I was stunned! This wasnt that long ago. I found the information on Ancestry.com. The Internet has really changed everything! My ancestor [and Benjamin Odells], Jonathan Odell, was a Revolutionary War hero and he married a woman named Margaret Dyckman. Census records indicate there were also slaves in the Dyckman family. I found that Jonathan Odell had four slaves in the 1790 Federal Census and six slaves in the 1800 Federal Census. I last found evidence in the 1810 Federal Census that he owned five slaves. The number he owned over that twenty-year period was a lot in comparison to other slave owners who lived in his town of Greenburgh, New York. His son William also owned one slave in 1810 and maybe he still had one slave in 1820, but New York passed legislation effectively ending slavery in 1827. Fred Small Fred Small had also heard quite a bit about his ancestors, but nothing about them as slaveholders. An engaging and articulate man, Fred is minister of a large urban congregation in Massachusetts, and has long worked for social and racial justice. On my fathers side, there is a line that goes back to the Bentons of Missouri Senator Old Bullion Thomas Hart Benton, one of the most powerful men of his time. John F. Kennedy included him in Profiles in Courage because he argued against the extension of slavery to the West, primarily because he was Ghosts of the Masters 13

I felt like I was an elastic band or a piece of silly putty where everything felt stretched out of place. I felt sick to my stomach. I suppose it would be like finding out that you had Nazis in the family. It scared me to realize that I could have gone to my grave without knowing about it. It really bothered me that this kind of evil could have been perpetrated by my nice God-fearing Presbyterian side of my family that I had always been told were fine upstanding people.

 When asked to speculate why slaveholding was not part of the family narrative passed down to them, many people guessed that their parents, or grandparents, or earlier ancestors were so ashamed about this family history that they couldnt bear to face it directly or talk about it with their children or grandchildren. For this reason, often the knowledge went to the grave with those who had known. Marvin Ellison Marvin Ellison is a 61-year-old Presbyterian minister, born in Tennessee, who teaches Christian Ethics at a seminary in Maine. The first time Dave began speaking about this book project in his presence, he could feel Marvin listening unusually intently. He peppered Dave with questions, and then almost matter-of-factly said, I have slaveholders in the family. This is my story, too. When Dave invited him to participate, he seemed to have both appreciation that Dave would think to include him, and at least some trepidation that he would be talking publicly about this topic at all. Dave started by asking him what he knew about the extent of his familys connection to slavery. Wouldnt I like to know the answer to that question! I dont know very much and I suspect there is a lot more. What I discovered was not much longer than three or four years ago. My daughter who is interested in family genealogy is spending a lot of time pulling things together. In gathering up the materials I had to pass on to her, I read through some of it and discovered that I had relatives in Kentucky. There were wills which left property that included slaves. I have documentation of family who were part of Daniel Boones efforts to clear Kentucky of Native Americans, too. And then my great-grandparents and grandparents generation were owners of coalmines in Harland County, Kentucky. No one in the family had ever mentioned this business about owning slaves, and frankly, I had never asked, either Well, I dont think thats true! This is very interesting! I did ask and was told, Oh, no no no no! Ah hah! It really was my own discovery. I have disappointment that I didnt push this earlier. My 14 Ghosts of the Masters

a Union man and he wanted to preserve the Union. Yet, he never freed his own slaves. I am a direct descendant of his brother Nathaniel, who we believe was a slaveholder. I suspect that there were slaveholders in that family going back several generations. My grandmother was the sister of Thomas Hart Benton, the twentieth century painter. The Bentons married into family from Texas that were likely engaged in slaveholding. We heard a lot about the Benton family, oh yes. But I never heard a word about slavery.

 Anne B. We were struck at how some of the people we interviewed had to uncover the truth around slaveholding in the midst of distracting and romantic narratives. Anne B. heard quite a bit about an ancestors plantation in Cuba, without ever hearing a thing about slavery. My grandparents had two portraits. One was of my great-great-grandmother Eliza on her wedding day. She married Joseph Carret, who was from France, and my mother was a Carret. The story I heard growing up was that Joseph came from France to New York first, and then he ended up in Cuba. Eliza went down to Cuba, although Im not sure where they met, and they married in 1832. She wore a veil on her wedding day, which is visible in a painting I have, that has since been worn by more than 150 brides, including me. Joseph owned a sugar plantation in Trinidad, Cuba. The understanding I had from my grandfather was that the sugar plantation was quite successful, pulling in profits of $25,000 per year. That was a lot of money back then. Even though the sugar plantation was spoken about openly, slaveholding was carefully left out. Growing up, I definitely didnt have any idea that my great-great-grandfather owned slaves. My grandfather never talked about the fact that our ancestor owned slaves, even though I am certain that he knew, because I found out that there were letters that reported that Eliza took their nine children and went back to Medford, Massachusetts in 1848. These letters indicate that she just didnt like the fact that her husband owned slaves. My grandfather talked publicly about his grandfather, but never about the fact that he owned slaves. He wouldnt have wanted us to know about it. Annes mother, as a child, had believed her ancestors had not been involved in slaveholding because they were all from New England, but as Anne learned from her sister, Ghosts of the Masters 15

familymy parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, great-aunts and great- uncles all of whom were available growing upare no longer present for me to say, Come on now! You gotta tell me more! Whats so stunning to me is how the silencing around this has been so strong. The reason there was no talk, I would say, is shame, and I would imagine both social and personal confusion and disruption. There has been such monumental social change, such as the civil rights movement, and I think for my parents that they probably didnt have the language to talk about this.

 Pat Keoughan Pat Keoughan is a 63-year-old therapist from Fairhope, Alabama, whose ancestors owned coffee plantations in what was once Saint-Dominigue, now Haiti. Family lore has it that they escaped the 1791 slave insurrection with the help of two slaves. I heard nothing from my family about slavery other than the story of the slave couple who helped our family members escape from Port-au-Prince during the insurrection. It was such a romanticized story! While further researching her family history, Pat learned more about what happened once her ancestors relocated in the black belt of Alabama, so named for its rich soil. I learned that one ancestor owned a cotton gin and others were in the lumber business. In 1850, two of my great-great-great-grandfathers owned six slaves each. There is another document from 1819 with my ancestor selling a slave in New Orleans. Slavery in our family went on for decades, obviously. Im certain my family knew the wrong that had been done, and surely they would have understood that in their own way. It was shameful to talk about the history and not part of who they thought there were years later. The other reason they didnt talk about it was that it might have been so commonplace there would have been no need to talk about it. Maybe it was just the pain and the tremendous loss experienced by Southerners around the Civil War. It may have been too painful to think about the history, and because slavery was entangled in it it may have been just too much. Whats There to Talk About? There were several others, mostly Southerners, who suspected that slavery was so commonplace that their forebears felt it was irrelevant and not worth mentioning. Hillary Goodridge put it this way, It was never talked about when I was growing up. I just think that my older relatives just assumed that the family had slaves, because everybody did, so whats there to talk about? Prinny Anderson is a descendant of Thomas Jefferson. She grew up closely connected to this heritage. I dont think they thought there was anything that needed to be talked about. Slavery was not perceived as having much relevancewhy would it be discussed? Yet there was apparently more to it than that. She added, I do remember that knowing about slavery 16 Ghosts of the Masters

then she found out... but she never said it to me. I started putting the connections together about the family ties to slavery when my grandmother gave me these books that were collections of all these letters, about 30 years ago. I would read these letters, looking for the more romantic kinds of things, when I came across these references to slavery.

was something I wasnt supposed to know, and talking about this with my mother or grandmother was a bad idea. Eunice Bentons ancestor was Floridas Civil War governor. She told us, I grew up pre-Brown vs. Board of Education. No one talked about slavery when I was growing up, because it was just so known, accepted, a part of the fabric of everything, of history, of life. She then added a more sophisticated analysis. Slavery didnt get talked about within my family because of white privilege. We didnt have to talk about it. As with Prinny, Eunice was aware of another dimension to the silence an unspoken but clear prohibition against talking with the black sharecroppers on her familys farm. If I had ever broached this topic with the black people I loved and felt close to, folks who lived in the shanties on the farm, folks who were essentially sharecroppers, they would have stopped me. They would not have wanted to get into trouble for talking to Mr. Johns white daughter. It wouldnt have occurred to me to talk with them about this history. Part of it was that I was a girl. In that time and place, that made a big difference. Kim Wilson had a similar reflection why her familys slaveholding past in Mississippi was not spoken about with her. My mother never talked about it because she was significantly shaped by her mothers reality, meaning if her mother didnt talk about it, then it was irrelevant. My grandmother never talked about it. Yet again, it seems that there was more at play than a sense of irrelevance. Its a touchy area for me to even do this kind of research at all. My mother is protective of her family of origin as if it is not my family, too. Shes uncomfortable that I am nosing around and finding all this information, particularly finding stuff that she didnt even know. Our Stories The dynamic of silence in our own families is worth mentioning here as well. Dave had been an avid genealogist for 40 years, after inheriting family trees and records from his grandfather at age 12. He was steeped in proud New England family history, including Pilgrims, Puritans, Patriots, and abolitionists. Yet it wasnt until 2006 that Dave stumbled upon a census from 1774 revealing that there were four slaves listed in the household of one of his Newport, Rhode Island ancestors. His disbelief and shock gave way to a determination to uncover, as much as he was able, the full extent of his familys involvement with slavery. Since then, Dave has recovered a stunning 44 ancestors from New England between 1638 and 1858 who held African and/or Native slaves, including one who sailed in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Susan descends from many Southern slaveholders, including Thomas Jefferson and George Washingtons first cousin, Catherine, but slavery was never mentioned by family elders. It wasnt until 2008 that Susan recovered the fact that her great-great-grandfather, a slaveholder in Mississippi, had authored a 200-page book defending slavery, published in 1861. Ghosts of the Masters 17

 A Call for a New Movement The stories we heard, along with our own family stories, illustrate again and again how silence has limited the ability of descendants of slaveholders, as well as the descendants of slaves, to begin to reckon with our families histories. Not only are we descendants ourselves directly affected, but also the absence of our families stories in the national dialogue hinders efforts to engage in a deeper and more honest public conversation. This aspect of our history need not, in fact should not, displace the many other truths about our ancestors. But it must be fully faced, incorporated and reckoned with, however painfully, if we are to find our way to a more perfect union. With Ghosts of the Masters, we hope to lift the veil of silence, and draw more members of this hidden group out of the shadows to talk about their family histories, and to support one another along a journey of honest and compassionate reckoning. We hope to foster enough sense of community, safety, hope and encouragement among us that a new movement will emerge, a movement of white descendants of slaveholders willing to face the past together, with courage and integrity, willing to play a role only we can play in the healing of our society from the still-crippling wound of our nations crime against the daughters and sons of Africa, and against every human heart. We dare to imagine that a critical mass of descendants of slaveholders could turn the tide in reversing our societys lack of accountability in all areas of our national life to the full truth of this history and its persisting cruel echoes. Our government will not lead the way here. Its up to us. And we can do it. The growing community of Coming to the Table is living proof that focusing on the priorities of nurturing our relationships, facing history together, and listening respectfully to one anothers stories can secure the foundation that we need to weather the conflicts and challenges along the way. Keeping these priorities uppermost has allowed us to experience the incredible joy and transforming power of coming together at the table of brotherhood in the spirit of truth, healing, reconciliation and love. And more than anything, this project is an offering of love.

18 Ghosts of the Masters

About the authors Dave Pettee and Susan Hutchison met through their involvement in Coming to the Table, a project based out of Eastern Mennonite Universitys Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. They love listening to peoples stories, and are particularly moved by the healing and connecting power of sharing and listening to stories. They have found their involvement with other descendants of slaveholders, and with descendants of slaves, to be transformative and liberating. Susan is a descendant of Thomas and Martha Jefferson, and many other Southern slaveholders. She was born and raised in southwest Louisiana and has ancestral roots in Mississippi, Virginia, Missouri, and several other southern states. In 2005 she helped start Coming to the Table along with Will Hairston, and Amy Potter Czajkowski of EMU/CJP. She has warm relationships with several descendants of people who were enslaved by her ancestors. In addition to working on this book project, she works for the Coming to the Table program, and leads classes in shared listening and emotional healing. She lives in Washington state. Daves family has long connections to slavery in New England, beginning in 1638 through 1858. Beginning in 2006 with an accidental discovery, he has recovered 44 slaveholding ancestors from Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut. Daves journey of reckoning took him to Cape Coast Castle in Ghana to follow in the footsteps of an ancestor who sailed in the transatlantic slave trade. Upon his return, he used genealogical research to find and get to know a family in Queens, NY whose ancestor was enslaved by Daves ancestor in Newport, RI. More recently, DNA testing revealed that he has Native American and African ancestors within (roughly) 15 generations, a finding that reflects the complexity of his family history. Dave is a minister and works for the Unitarian Universalist Association. He lives in Massachusetts. References * Ball, Edward. 1998. Slaves in the Family. New York: Ballantine. * Danieli, Yael, (Ed.). 1998. The International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma. New York: Springer. * Schwab, Gabriele. 2010. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Columbia University Press. * Tretheway, Natasha. 2006. Native Guard. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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