I Named My Mixed-Race Daughter for a Slave-Trading Town
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Version 0 of 1. FOR nearly 20 years, my great-great-great-grandfather’s portrait has watched over me from my red dining room wall. With his high collar, ruffled cravat and black waistcoat, Samuel Fales, 1775-1848, is the very image of the upstanding 19th-century New England gentleman. An eminent merchant and alderman of Boston, he was the founder of the family’s shipping business. I’ve known his face and taken comfort in his smile since I was a child attending Sunday lunch at my grandmother’s in the 1960s. Samuel Fales seemed utterly unperturbed by the changes the 20th century had wrought, among them his great-great-grandson’s unorthodox choice of bride: my mother, a black Haitian-American actress, and my brother and me, his mixed-race descendants. His portrait has stood as an emblem of our family’s pride in its history. “You have relatives on both sides of your family who fought in the American Revolution,” my mother would frequently remind me. To honor my forebears, my husband and I named our only child Bristol, after the town in Rhode Island where some of the Faleses first settled in the 17th century. A year ago, I learned through new historical research that Bristol had in fact served as a main hub of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This gave me great pause. Had I done my daughter a dreadful disservice? Upon reflection, I decided that naming a multicultural African-American after a slave port was in fact redemptive, the ultimate act of reclamation. It never occurred to me that my family might have participated in the port’s inhumane commerce. Knowing of my interest in Bristol, a friend sent me an invitation this past spring to a lecture at Yale by Sean M. Kelley, a historian of the slave trade. Unable to attend, I emailed the professor, asking if a podcast might be available and proudly informing him of my family’s connection to the town. He wrote back, generously sharing his lecture notes. At the email’s end, he stated: “You may be disappointed (or gratified?) to see that I don’t mention any members of the Fales family. I did do a quick check of my notes and found reference to a Fales who was involved in a slave trading prosecution from 1815.” I read on with dawning horror as he described the case of Fales v. Mayberry, a lawsuit waged in 1815 against the captain of a slave ship for recovery of the proceeds from the sale of 150 slaves in the West Indies, and subsequent sale of the ship itself in Saint Bartholomew. The judge in the case, Joseph Story, chastised the plaintiff, Fales, for the horrific nature of the slave trade and its illegality under federal law. The Fales in question was none other than my great-great-great-grandfather, Samuel. He had first established his wealth through trading slaves. That email dealt a death blow to the pride I had always felt in hailing from a family of industrious and, I thought, uniformly upstanding Anglo-Saxons. It was devastating to realize that our “fortune” had begun with America’s original sin. Ashamed of my own naïveté and ignorance, I turned to “The Fales Family of Bristol, Rhode Island,” a “comprehensive” history of the family written by my grandfather in 1919, to see how such essential truths had eluded me for so long. Everyone in the family had a copy of the book; the problem was, like the Bible, few of us had ever bothered to read it cover to cover. In its pages, I found euphemistic references to the “West India trade,” and ships captured by pirates off the “coast of Africa.” Given Rhode Island’s extensive role in the slave trade, it dawned on me that Samuel probably wasn’t the family’s only participant. I journeyed back through the pages and the generations. Timothy Fales, a Harvard-educated teacher for whom my father was named, left his post as Bristol’s schoolmaster to enter in the “West Indies trade.” Read: slave ships. As a result of his ventures, by 1720 he was able to purchase vast tracts of land. Yet another ancestor had decamped to Cuba for 20 years in the early 19th century. Given that the United States’s biggest slave trading family, the DeWolfs of Bristol, held plantations on the island, it is safe to deduce he wasn’t running a cigar factory. My grandfather referenced our forefathers’ shipping ventures, but beyond rum, never discussed the nature of their cargo. As many a prestigious American university does, he had imposed an embargo of silence over that particular detail of our family’s past, to create a noble portrait. The sense of betrayal no doubt felt by some students at Yale who have to live in a residential house named after an arch proponent of slavery, Vice President John C. Calhoun, or by those at Georgetown who walk the grounds financed by the sale of hundreds of slaves, swept over me. In this case though, the crime-stained name was my own. And unlike an administrator at Yale, Georgetown or Harvard trying to make amends for the misdeeds of predecessors to whom they had no connection, I personally owed my debt-free Ivy League education not only to my parents’ hard work, but also to the blood money acquired by my ancestors. I live the paradox that though my brown skin has excluded me from so called white privilege, all my life I have benefited from the plunder of privileged whites. From the time I read Thackeray’s novel “Vanity Fair” as a teenager, I have been fascinated by the character of Rhoda Swartz, the “woolly-haired mulatto from St. Kitts,” a mixed race heiress to a lucrative plantation, and real-life figures like her. Now I know why: Their stories are mine, and like them, I occupy the uneasy limbo between exploiter and exploited. I, an African-American woman, am every bit as much a “debtor” to my “race” as any descendant of John C. Calhoun’s or indeed as Georgetown University itself. Now as I contemplate my ancestor’s portrait, I cannot forget the thousands of lives ruined for my family’s gain. How does one begin to repay such a debt? My pride in my family’s accomplishments has given way to a somber resignation to the fact that I can never make full amends for their crimes. No good deeds, or acts of generosity past or present, will ever restore what my ancestors stole from thousands of families unknown to us and now dispersed across the Caribbean and the United States: two centuries of freedom and dignity. In the meantime, I can neither shun my great-great-great-grandfather nor stand in judgment of him. Some of his contemporaries, like Justice Joseph Story, who presided over the slave ship lawsuit, recognized the evil of slavery. Had I been a white man in the 19th century, would I have been a forward looking humanitarian, like the justice? Was Samuel any more reprehensible than my black Haitian ancestors, who, in an often overlooked facet of colonial and plantation history, belonged to a caste of blacks who owned slaves themselves? The “triangular trade” bound America, South America, Europe, Africa and the Caribbean in a blood knot whose legacy we live to this day but have never thoroughly explored. Our family’s redemption and my own must begin with a full and honest reckoning of our role in this world-altering traffic. Several days after my exchange with Professor Kelley, I shared what I’d learned with Bristol, now 13, over Friday dinner, with Samuel Fales’s portrait peering down at us. Bristol gazed at the portrait as I spoke, and absorbed the revelation with her trademark equanimity, but from the note of sorrow in her eyes, I could tell she was mulling over the ugly facts. A few weeks later, I asked her how she was feeling about what I had told her. “I’m not proud and I’m not ashamed,” she answered evenly. She had accepted our slave trading forebears as yet another facet of the complex legacy she carries, but she did chide me for naming her after a slave port. I reminded her that her father and I had no idea at the time. “Couldn’t you have found out?” she challenged. With that simple question, my child demolished all of my excuses and reminded me that the truth of our family history, like our country’s, had always been hidden in plain sight. It’s our duty to seek it out. |