GO BACK AND GET IT

A journalist recounts her journey to uncover the stories behind the intertwined lives of her Black and White relatives.

The day Ford turned 38, she stumbled across an online photograph of her great-great grandmother Tempy and Col. W.R. Stuart, the married White slaveholder who fathered Tempy’s six children. Motivated by a lifelong need to define her racial identity and heal an internal disconnection that had been the result of childhood sexual abuse, the author consulted family members, researched online genealogical records, and “crisscrossed the country” to piece together a forgotten—and, as she would learn, profoundly painful—family past. “This is a study in contrasts,” she writes. “Shadow. Light. Black. White. Joy. Pain. Victim. Perpetrator. You will find ephemera—editorials, photographs, wedding announcements—and atrocities—lynched uncles, your people as property in someone’s will, deed, or mortgage guarantee.” Although Tempy had been enslaved when she had her first two children by Stuart, her last four were born after Emancipation, a fact that hinted at the complex economic and emotional ties that kept her bound to her former master. When Ford learned that Stuart’s obituary made no reference to his children by Tempy, she came face to face with yet another layer of racism in her family’s erasure from public history. The documents that ultimately confirmed her connection to Stuart came to her via a White art historian whose wife was not only related to the Stuart family, but also the joint owner of valuable Stuart property the author had known nothing about. The parallels Ford draws between her personal traumas and the ongoing struggle among Black Americans to find wholeness and validation—in the form of reparations and other measures—make her narrative especially compelling. That she was able to find connection with lost Black relatives who would become some of her greatest sources of support helps transform a book about multigenerational loss into one about the healing power of community.

A cathartic reading experience.