Yesterday morning I posted a bit about the meaning for me of my personal history and the history of the times. Yesterday afternoon, driving and listening to NPR, I heard Gene Demby speak of a dramatic experience in his history. Demby was born in the U.S. to an American mother and a father from Ghana whom he never met. Demby speaks of the distance he felt from his absent father. Then he describes a trip he took to Ghana, not to find his father but to attend the wedding of a close friend. The climax of the trip was a visit to the Elmina slave castle. After sitting in one of the cells and looking out “the door of no return,” he says this:

I felt none of Ghana, the genealogical fact of it, in me in the castle that day. I felt linked to different forebears. Not to my absent father, but to the people who were wrenched from that part of the African coast, crammed into the hulls of ships and sold on another continent like livestock. Those people from far-flung tribes and villages who arrived in their new land and cobbled together families that slavers and slave masters tried to shatter centuries before anyone sounded an alarm about the "weakness of the family structure."

I felt the pull of this shared story, horrifying and beautiful, that shaped the lives of millions of Americans, including a black woman, her daughter and me.

I have copied the most moving sentences from his essay. The essay shows again the personal and societal legacy of past history. You can read it all here.

Finally, Digging in to History

In my most recent post, over a month ago, I touched on the legacy of history in our lives. On a personal history level, all lines of my family tree eventually lead back to Ireland. And still, I was surprised at how moving it was to finally visit Ireland. Not moving in that I found distant relatives and exact spots where my relatives had lived. Maybe it sounds silly, but it felt that the world I existed in had suddenly grown larger. In the United States I was sometimes aware of the many random experiences that had had to happen so that my parents could meet and give birth to me. In Ireland, I sensed that thousands more random events had happened there to create the circumstances that led to my conception and birth.

During high school and college, history often just seemed like a list of events that I needed to memorize. It was later that I began to find that history was full of doors to the present. A few weeks ago I read an article by John Krull where he reflects on some of our country's sins--“slavery, segregation, the extermination of native Americans, the internment of Japanese-Americans, too many other transgressions to list – about which we should feel shame, not pride.” It's a tricky equation. Why should we feel shame about slavery when we had nothing to do with it? On the other hand, why should we feel pride about the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence when we had nothing to to with that either?

Studying my personal history has an emotional and spiritual element to it. On a national level, I think there comes responsibility. How can we live up to the good and noble? How can we repair the harm created by injustice and cruelty? What difficult questions.

(slightly relevant cartoon: http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/store/add.php?iid=136860)