As she approached the age of 40, Dionne Ford, co-editor of the 2019 anthology Slavery’s Descendants, questioned how she had turn out to be “an invisible woman.” Who was she behind the masks she’d created to outlive white supremacy and evade her struggles with psychological sickness? In Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing, Ford, a National Endowment for the Arts inventive writing fellow, skillfully blends illuminating analysis and transferring prose to explain her path to self-liberation.
Ford’s quest started when she found an early Eighteen Nineties photograph of her great-great-grandmother Temple “Tempy” Burton; Tempy’s enslaver, Colonel W.R. Stuart; and the colonel’s spouse, Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s household have been North Carolina plantation homeowners who bequeathed Tempy to the couple as a marriage reward. Tempy’s six kids with Stuart included Ford’s great-grandmother Josephine, who was born a decade after emancipation. Although an web search had uncovered this ancestral data, there have been nonetheless appreciable gaps in Ford’s household historical past.
Driven by the necessity to perceive and contextualize Tempy’s life, Ford mined family tree information, newspaper articles, county archives, ancestry message boards and the murky reminiscences of kin. Ultimately, Ford didn’t unearth clean-cut solutions. The causes Tempy stayed together with her enslavers effectively after slavery had been abolished remained opaque, as did the interpersonal dynamics of Tempy’s relationships with the couple. But the intergenerational undertaking cracked open the darkness of Ford’s trauma, which manifested as PTSD and alcoholism. Through efforts that usually challenged her consolation, Ford restored the silenced voices of her ancestors, linked with distant cousins who have been propelled by the identical mission, and discovered find out how to heal from childhood sexual abuse inflicted by a male family member.
Go Back and Get It is as deeply empathetic as it’s introspective. With this putting work, Ford magnifies the interconnectedness of ache and forgiveness, cruelty and reconciliation. In order to regain autonomy—to really feel at house in her physique and to totally personal her Blackness—she needed to confront the useless fairly than erase them. “Remember and recover,” Ford writes. “Re-member. Put yourself back together again and again.”
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