The Unknown History of Slavery in My Family

When white people talk about how slavery wasn’t their family’s fault, I believed I was among them. It wasn’t until a year or two before my mom died that she asked me if I wanted her to send me a booklet about our family. I didn’t know what it was, but since I do genealogy I was happy to get anything about our family. About 5 or 10 years before that I had learned that my ancestors were slave owners, but this booklet…Wooo boy. I wasn’t ready. It was created for a family reunion around the same time that a some of those Confederate monuments were going up. The pamphlet not only contains pictures of my ancestors (as recent as my great-grandmother and great-grandfather), but also contains rose-colored musings on life at the Big House in Kentucky and the little enslaved girl, Mariah, who was sent as gift when one of the children of my 5th great-grandfather, Henry Bruce, was born. She was aged 4 and her first task was to rock the baby to sleep. Just imagine owning another human to do this and not feeling at all bad that she was only a child herself. She later became the Mammy and was responsible for the cooking, childcare, and who knows what all else. People in the 20th century told fond tales of Mariah, but I’m not ever sure what that means given that she couldn’t leave and had to be nice to her masters on pain of whipping, death, or estrangement from her children. In the family photo archive I also have unnamed photos of black people separate from the pamphlet. Few other people in our family would have ever had enough money to have black servants in maids uniforms (and they retained wealth for a few generations after the Civil War ended), but I could be wrong about the prevalence of hired help in my family.  Are these photos of Mariah’s descendants? Were her children the master’s or her husband’s? We don’t have the answers to these questions.

What is shocking to me, someone who grew up not knowing my family’s history of slave ownership, is how grand the pamphlet-writers made it sound to be an enslaved person. To paraphrase Trevor Noah on the subject: if being a slave was so good then white people would have been trying to get hired as slaves themselves. Descriptions given by my ancestors of the plantation are racist, using a slave blaccent to describe so-called simpler times when farm life was remembered as being fun for absolutely everyone.

I was going to write about this years ago, but the poor reception of racially charged material among some people I know, combined with a slew of heavy life events, prevented me. I think now is the time. While I never personally saw any material wealth from my ancestors and we grew up poor enough that I do know what it’s like to feel truly hungry and not have any food to eat, my great-uncle only died less than a decade ago and the inheritance money was distributed to various of his relatives nearer his age. I was not a recipient and never knew him, but there is no question that the wealth earned by stealing the labor of black people ran through my family for generations.  To say that we didn’t benefit from slavery isn’t really true. My ancestors not only owned slaves and engaged in chattel slavery, they fought to later romanticize the past and keep black people in their place at a time when the descendants of enslaved people needed social services, land, good jobs, freedom, voting rights, and any number of things white people took (take?) for granted.

The entire pamphlet, Across America with the Bruce and Morgan Families, is available on my Flickr at the link below. You can also read more about the Bruce-Morgan families and the plantation in the book, The Life of Henry Bruce (also linked below).  Both give insights into how extensive the plantation operations were, with my ancestors creating their own silk, linen, and a thriving pork farm all made possible from slave labor.

P.S. Just wanted to add that even being able to look up your genealogy is white privilege. It's one of the many reasons why I have a lot of respect for Henry Louis Gates, Jr. since he kind of brought this issue to national attention in the show Finding Your Roots, which I am a big fan of. Enslaved people lost all their connections to the Old World when they were sold/stolen and so their family trees only date back to the era of slavery, a time during which they were not allowed to write anything down and didn't have the normal birth and death registries that whites had.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/66584632@N04/albums/72157702811898802/with/33011938378/

https://archive.org/details/lifeofhenrybruce00morg