My mother used to say that we were from broken-down aristocracy, but I had no idea what that assertion was based on, and I basically did not believe her. I had zero knowledge of my family ancestry – my mother fled an abusive home at 16 years of age, and as a result, her side of the family was basically a black hole. Certainly, wherever we had come from was long ago and, to me, of no relevance. Nevertheless, I was deeply affected by growing up in Virginia, Williamsburg to be exact, and the shadow of American history from the Revolution to the Civil War haunted me – and still does. Though I made my escape to New York, I could not, ultimately, ignore the past.
During extended pandemic downtime, I began poking around various genealogy websites, and I discovered to my astonishment, that both sides of my family go all the way back to Jamestown, the first colonial outpost in the so-called new world. And they were not common laborers. They had plantations, grew tobacco, and enslaved hundreds of captive Africans. Because my ancestors were prominent individuals who left paper trails – wills and deeds – I have been able to retrace their steps, and I can see where fortunes were made and, in the end, where fortunes were lost.
I will write in detail about these ancestors in due time, but for the moment, I want to focus on a recent discovery that is both amazing and disconcerting. Wikitree, one of the genealogy websites I use, sends out regular emails with lists of cousins and direct ancestors, usually connected to a theme. In this case, the theme was prominent African Americans. African Americans? Cousins? It turns out, surprisingly, that I am a 7th cousin once removed from Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay) and an 8th cousin once removed from Martin Luther King, Jr.
How can that be? The answer is distressingly clear in both cases. There was a multi-racial child born as the result of a relationship (call it rape) between slave owner and enslaved. In the case of Ali, it appears to be a child born of an unknown slave and Henry Clay, 7th Speaker of the House and Secretary of State under President John Quincy Adams. The common ancestor I share with Muhammad Ali is Elizabeth Hudson, a descendant of Henry Hudson, the famous explorer. Yes, I am related to him.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and I share a common ancestor in Thomas Jones, a prominent 17th-century Virginia landowner. The black/white relationship, apparently, came several generations later in Georgia, where King was born. This is the cold hard reality of slavery. It was a system and a culture of exploitation, rape, and violence. It was human trafficking for profit.
From Encyclopedia Virginia:
The historical record speaks to the ubiquity of mixed-race sexual relationships in the era of slavery: Virginia had the largest number of mixed-race enslaved people of all the southern states, totaling approximately 44,000 in 1850. While some of these sexual relationships were long-term and some enslaved men and women navigated sexually intimate relations with their enslavers and other white people in an effort to survive and secure better treatment, historians question whether any relationships under such an unequal power dynamic can be considered consensual.
So, sometimes when you start digging, you find out things – painful things. And while I am not responsible for the actions of ancestors many generations ago, I do feel it necessary to acknowledge my connection to them and to the shared history we have yet to come to grips with fully.