What do we Owe our Ancestors?
On why this question keeps popping up in the world right now
I finally finished reading “Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets” yesterday. I’ve been reading it in spits and spurts in stolen half hour time blocks for three or four months but I wanted to get to the end and set aside an hour plus to do just that.
From the dust jacket: “Fatherland is the story of Burkhard Bilger’s nearly ten-year quest to uncover the truth . . .” It’s a grandson’s reckoning with a grandfather who was a Nazi official, albeit in a small town, tucked out of the way, on the border of Germany and France. Nothing was straightforward about this story—a grandfather who was a Nazi and yet, wasn’t . . . a grandfather who helped save villagers from Nazi wrath and yet upheld the party line. . . .
At the heart of the story are questions I see popping up a lot now: “what do we owe the past? How can we make peace with our history without perpetuating its wrongs” (again from the dust jacket).
These are the same questions I left the movie theater asking after seeing Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, a story about grandsons who who go back to their grandmother’s village in Poland to see where she lived before her family was hauled off by the Nazi’s to concentration camps. I just looked up a synopsis and Wikipedia called the film a “buddy road comedy drama,” which I guess, technically, it is? But the underlying themes are heavy enough I left this comedy having shed tears.
And those themes boil down to—what do we owe our ancestors?
The one I’ve been wrestling with is slavery—not Nazis.
I’ve been tracing my fifth-great grandmother back for a while now, ever since I found out that this widowed, emigrant from Ireland with five children owned two slaves.
Not many in the larger sense of things but still . . . for a widowed woman who managed to acquire a near 100 acre farm on her own with young children? There’s both the wonder of how she did it . . . and also, what happened to those slaves after they were freed by a war? And what do I owe them, if anything, for the moral wrongs committed by my ancestors?
I think these questions are popping up in our culture because of everything that’s happening right now politically. An attempted coup on the government—whitewashed by a third of the country and now pardoned by the new president? Of course, this is the same person who encouraged and wanted the coup.
These are historical times—in the sense that historians will focus in the future and attempt to understand what’s happened the last twelve or so years—and very much so those interpretation will depend on who or what is in power at that moment.
For twenty years or so after the Civil War, historians tried to lay the facts out plainly—the war was fought over slavery. Then things shifted and the interpretations turned to the Lost Cause mythology and suddenly, Confederates were in the right, the war wasn’t about slavery after all. All was forgiven! It wasn’t until the 1950s/1960s and the Civil Rights movement that historians began to push that interpretation out and slavery was placed front and center again.
Normalizing immoral decisions seems to be the way of humans—justifying wrongs because they bolster a certain group of people in power, or allow a group to be in power, or make a group feel okay with what they’ve done. We are seeing this now, today, in action. But that doesn’t make it right or true.
In the words of Peter Tosh:
Everyone is crying out for peace, yes
None is crying out for justice
I don't want no peace
I need equal rights and justice
It may be easy or comfortable to go about your usual stuff today—that may keep the peace—but where is the justice?
I don’t owe anything to that grandmother who owned two slaves. She used their labor for her own ends. Perhaps she was good to them? I don’t know. She died in 1846 in a one-room log cabin, and I doubt her life was easy. She likely suffered from hunger and the usual physical pains associated with having so many children in a time of inadequate medical care (and that’s if all went relatively well for her) and she was widowed in a time when women had few rights. . . .
But however hard her life was, the lives of those slaves and their ancestors were harder. I owe them something—if nothing else but the recognition that my life is easier and better because of the work they did. They are my people, my family, as much as my fifth-great grandmother is.