Prometheus 6   

Slaves in the Family: One Generation's Shame Is Another's Revelation
By BRENT STAPLES

Those of us who write about our families inevitably dig up secrets having to do with petty crime, infidelity or children born out of wedlock. I encountered similar domestic dramas while writing the history of my family a decade ago. The most dramatic discovery was that my great-grandfather was conceived in the fading days of the Confederacy, had several ex-slaves among his siblings and narrowly missed being born a slave himself. He died just 11 years before I was born.

I had always known � at least in the abstract � that slavery was somewhere in the past. But it startled me to realize that it was so recent and that my life had overlapped with the lives of people who had been bought and sold. I learned this not from my uncles � who talked ceaselessly about the family � but from a mimeographed family bulletin I came across when I was nearly 40.

… Black families have commonly dealt with slavery by leaving it behind when they moved north in the Great Migration, sometimes bringing relatives who had once stood upon the auction block. The memory of enslavement was too fresh to be anything but stigmatizing and shameful. Families elected to bury this harrowing past and sometimes forbade their elders to speak of it.

Concealment of slavery at home was matched by dishonesty about it at school, where slavery was addressed superficially � and incorrectly � if it was addressed at all. Most Americans, both black and white, grew up believing that the North was always made up of "free" states � dominated by fire-breathing abolitionists � and that the evils of slavery were confined to the downy white cotton fields of the South.

Many present-day New Yorkers, for example, were made aware of their state's slave history only in the years since 1991, when a construction crew uncovered a colonial-era African burial ground while digging the foundation of a federal office tower in Lower Manhattan. The surprise was palpable in New York and beyond, even though Gotham in the 18th century was a capital of human bondage, with more enslaved people than any other American city, with the possible exception of Charleston, S.C.