The Weight of Family History – The New Republic

Ancestor Trouble does what all truly great memoirs do: It takes an intensely personal and at times idiosyncratic story and uses it to frame larger, more complex questions about how identity is formed. Using her own family tree, with its mix of colorful characters, closet-lurking skeletons, and truly vile monsters, Newton recounts the tall tales about these folks she grew up with before revealing what dogged and thorough research has turned up about their actual lives. Sometimes, these ancestors reveal themselves to be of surprising character. A great-grandfather, Charley Bruce, existed in her mother and grandmothers stories primarily as a man whod once killed another man with a hay hook. But through scraps of news accounts and trial records, Newton discovers a fuller picture: Charley was attacked by a former friend whod been convicted of sexual assault of a young girl; Charley had testified against him at trial, and the subsequent attack was revenge, the fatal blow struck by Charley an act of self-defense.

Others are far less redeemable. Newton turns up far more slave-owners in her lineage than she was expecting, not just on her racist fathers side but on her mothers, as well. And even some potential heroessuch as Mary Bliss Parsons, a distant ancestor in New England once accused of witchcraftturn out to be far from any kind of role model. Maude Newton, the ancestor after whom Maud (ne Rebecca) chose her pen name, was described to her by her mother and grandmother as an idiosyncratic and irascible iconoclast, a woman who chose to live an independent life in Texas. An autodidact who designed and built her own house, and a writer to boot, Maude seemed to have been a kindred spirit, or at least so Newton had hoped. But Maudes published writings (which took the form of a newspaper column from Drew, Mississippi) reveal a figure enamored with George Wallace and Barry Goldwater, who exhorted her readers to defy the Civil Rights Act to save their little white girl[s] from little Negro boys. Summing up this disappointing revelation, Newton writes, Im sorry that Maudes writing turned out to be what it was, but Im not sorry I found it, remembering, as she does throughout, that we do not dispel the ugliness of the past by ignoring it but by recognizing it and, ultimately, seeking restitution for the sins of the fatherand of the great-aunts, as well.

Family stories are one way our forebears pass down legacies to us; Newton also questions the inheritances of genes and heirlooms. The net effect is like watching a deft magician perform one trick after another and then patiently explain the secret and how youve been fooled. Newton will offer scientific research to suggest, for example, that mental health or temperament might be something that could be passed down generations, supplemented with detail from her own life (Later I learned that Charley had died from manic exhaustion, she says of her great-grandfather, and I remembered my own sleepless nights and scrabbling brain). But then shell swiftly move to unpack many of the problems with the same theory. She highlights not only the shaky scientific basis for our beliefs (Our science is only as good as the questions we ask, she reminds us) but also, quite often, the racist and ableist ideologies that underpin them. The idea of inherited mental traits, for example, which gained currency around the dawn of the twentieth century and still holds sway in popular imagination (and not just with people like Newtons father), was itself pushed heavily by eugenicists like Henry H. Goddard and his influential 1912 book, The Kalikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. But Goddards central claim that all of the descendants of Martin Kalikak and his wife were normal, while those who descended from an affair with a feeble-minded barmaid turned out to be equally feeble-minded, was later found to be based entirely on altered and invented data.

View original post here:
The Weight of Family History - The New Republic