Double Truth Teller
By Sydney Nathans
Rachel Swarns, American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama (New York, 2012)
When Alex Haley published Roots thirty-six years ago, it proved to be a sensation for black and white Americans alike. For African Americans, Roots made the search for ancestors and ancestral stories one which could affirm their strivings and turn up heroes, Kunta Kintes and Chicken Georges who endured and ultimately prevailed through ingenuity, courage, and the faith that “there’s gonna be a better day.” For white Americans, those who read the book or watched its enactment on the most widely viewed television series of its time, larger-than-life characters replaced faceless victims of bondage, and their dramas and resilience became part of the culture. Black family history became a vogue, as did the search for comparable tales of transcendence in the face of oppression,. Some who probed came away chastened. “You know what they say about roots,” reported one woman wryly. “You pay three million dollars to have your roots dug up—and four million dollars to have them buried again.” Many nonetheless followed in Haley’s footsteps, seeking testimony from family members. As it turned out, when Alex Haley encountered gaps, he filled them in with borrowings from the accounts of others, so much so that critical academics labeled his book a hybrid. It was not strictly fact, nor wholly borrowed or made up. It was a mix of fact and invention: “faction.”
Rachel L. Swarns, the author of American Tapestry. The Story of the Black, White, and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama, was nine years old when Roots came out in 1976. She could well have aimed to make her book a latter-day tale of triumph over the course of five generations, culminating with the ascent of our first African American First Lady. In fact, American Tapestry is far more daring and courageous. Through astonishing research into the family tree and forebears of Michelle Robinson Obama, she offers us remarkably realized life-stories of thirty of the First Lady’s ancestors—parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, going all the way back to 1844 and the one clearly identifiable enslaved ancestor, a woman named Melvina. The biracial child that Melvina conceived with a slave-owner in 1858, and the white owner’s identity and relationship to the fourteen-year old mother, constitute the mystery that begins and the revelation that ends the story.
Oral history—interviews with aunts, uncles, and cousins of the First Lady (though not with Michelle Obama herself, or her mother or brother), and conversations with descendants of the white slave-owning family—provided clues that Rachel Swarns, a reporter for the New York Times since 1995, followed up intrepidly. She had to be intrepid, both in seeking added sources and in fearlessly pursuing difficult questions. For the story she found, peopled as it was with persons of dreams and ambitions and remarkable achievements for each generation, was equally an account of dreams deflated, setbacks and separations, profound wounds and protective silences. “The reluctance to probe the past, to look back over one’s shoulder, to examine the half-healed sores that festered in grandparents and great-grandparents, re-appears over and over again in Mrs. Obama’s family tree…. People often turn away from what is too painful to witness.” Part of the pain came from the stigma of slavery; part came from the assumption that coercion lay behind the biracial background of each of Michelle Obama’s grandparents; part flowed from the thwarted hopes that soured lives in each generation.
So the Times reporter became a social historian par excellence. She plunged into census returns, marriage and death certificates, century-old insurance maps of houses and neighborhoods; she pored over fifty-year old photographs; she ultimately persuaded six descendants, black and white, to agree to DNA tests. Her daunting research allowed her to humanize each of her thirty-some characters; her artful use of social history fleshed out the possibilities and constraints, the promise and betrayals, of the places and times they lived in. We come to know the First Lady’s forebears in rich complexity: charismatic Dolphus Shields, minister and man of four wives; his white half-brother, who paid visits to Dolphus’s Birmingham porch and was the single white man at his funeral service; gregarious Purnell Shields, jazz lover who used music to heal his soul; wanderer Phoebe Moten Johnson, an urban pioneer who lived in no less than six different cities. We bear witness to three Fraser Robinsons (Sr., Jr., III), and to the trauma and scarred legacies they passed down one to another. Finally we discover the life of the first forebear of the story, Melvina herself.
American Tapestry is an artful book. In a brilliant decision, it tells the story of Michelle Obama’s forebears by going backward, starting with the Migration Generation that landed in Chicago by the early 20th century, then further back to the Jim Crow generation of the late nineteenth century, and ending with the generation that experienced Slavery and Emancipation. The reverse trajectory allows the exploration of “one generation at a time, peeling back the layers of history to unearth the story” of the family, the nation, and “the slave girl and the white man” with whom it all began. The writing is vivid, made so by a novelist’s gift for detail. Rivers are not full of generic fish but full of “shad, trout, and catfish.” Trees are not laden with generic birds, but “each, quince, and cherry tree” is full of “mockingbirds, whippoorwills, and red-headed woodpeckers.” Whereas Alex Haley's Roots, as critics noted, focused on the personal almost to the exclusion of the political, Rachel Swarns shows how intertwined and often decisive the connection was, whether writing about the exclusion of blacks from voting in the Melvina's early 20th century Georgia, or a 1900 legal lynching in Fraser Robinson's Georgetown, South Carolina that "scarred him" for life, or the 1919 attacks and 1920s housing covenants that drove Phoebe Johnson out of the Hyde Park neighborhood that Michelle and Barack Obama would dwell in at the end of the 20th century.
Rachel Swarns acknowledges that there were family members, white and black, who declined to help her quest for truths or helped but refused to have their names released. They asked the same questions that Michelle Obama’s ancestors asked themselves: what good would it do to delve into the wounds and traumas of the past? The reporter’s own experience—not just as a journalist but as the Times bureau chief in Johannesburg, South Africa—doubtless under-girded her conviction that truth, wherever it led, offered the hope of reconciliation, and that “looking back can sometimes give us clearer vision.” She found two descendants in particular who agreed with her, one black and one white, who gave her indispensable help, and who “marvel at their family’s journey, which in so many ways mirrors the evolution of this country.” The result of their revelations and the intrepid reporter’s research and writing is a classic book. Along with Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, Rachel Swarn’s American Tapestry shows how much we have discovered—and how far we have come—since Alex Haley’s Roots pointed the way almost four decades ago.
From October, 2012
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