Families Uncover Old Secrets, New Roots

Whenever cousins Joe Gardener and Fred Dickey visit their family cemetery, a remote and wooded panorama on top of Hogback Mountain in north Georgia, they send up prayers to their Irish American ancestors who settled the area in the early 1840s.

These days, they also honor more than two dozen black slaves buried alongside their white owners.

“A common response to the issue of slavery is, ‘But my family never owned any slaves,’ ” said Gardener, an Atlanta architect and a direct descendant of George Dickey and Hannah Taylor Dickey, great-great-grandparents of Atlanta-born author and poet James Dickey. “Well, our family did own slaves.”

A generation after “Roots” author Alex Haley popularized genealogy among African Americans by tracing his family’s history from the west coast of Africa to rural Tennessee, the Dickey heirs are among an increasing number of white Americans to uncover family secrets.

To the dismay of some relatives who would rather not know, they are discovering slave ownership--and sometimes even black ancestry--in their own families.

As author Edward Ball details in his best-selling “Slaves in the Family,” such revelations can split apart a once-stable family. Ball’s research led to the discovery of African American family members, the products of forced sexual relations between slave masters and their black property. His work so angered some cousins that they no longer speak to him.

Filmmaker Macky Alston’s search for his family connections led to the discovery of two Alston family reunions--one white and one black, held within miles of each other during the same week--and inspired his quest to consolidate the annual meetings.

And, for Will Hairston, head groundskeeper at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va., his family’s Southern pronunciation of a shared last name was all that separated them from the hundreds of black relatives in the region.

Like converts to a new religion, these white Americans are trumpeting their discoveries, embracing African Americans as kin in a shared legacy. There are no figures documenting the phenomenon, but a wide array of historians and social observers reports growing numbers of white Americans seeking to make amends with known descendants of slaves owned by their relatives.

Jeff Hitchcock, director and co-founder of the Center for the Study of White American Culture, in Rosell, N.J., said some white Americans may be eager to find distant black relatives because so much of the national attention on race has focused on African Americans. Whites often feel left out of the conversation, he added.

“There is a growing trend among white people to be reflective” of their race’s role, Hitchcock said. “And, if they sometimes find [black] relatives, it’s as if they’ve been misled to think whiteness is such a big difference. That’s why they want to tell other white people about their discovery.”

Chip Morgan, a staff archeologist with the Georgia Historic Preservation Office in Atlanta, said white Southerners are among those most eager to heal racial wounds that linger from slavery. “The whole white guilt trip is coming to bear on some of these people and it rubs them the wrong way,” Morgan said. “With the distance and time from slavery, there are more and more young professional whites who want to know the truth that had been kept secret from them down through the years.”

Public Records Back Up Oral Histories

Not everyone thinks that white Americans’ pursuit of public reconciliation with the descendants of slaves represents a critical or positive turn in race relations.

“People who are attempting to come to terms with this may be well-meaning,” said Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, professor of history, literature and women’s study at Emory University in Atlanta. “But there seems to be a move afoot to transform slaveholding into personal guilt instead of membership in a broader social system.

“We, as a society, seem to like confessionals a lot nowadays,” added Fox-Genovese, who has written about slavery’s impact on contemporary society. “It’s almost as interesting to be guilty for slavery as it is to be victimized by it.”

Ball disagrees, arguing in an interview that whites who feel guilt are the “ones who keep secrets hidden.”

As he undertook the research for his book about his family’s slaveholding past, Ball expected to run across black people who might have been descendants of those slaves. “I also thought I might find some African Americans who were cousins,” he added. “But I made no special effort to do so.”

His work, however, led him to thousands of pages of public records concerning his family that coincided with the oral histories of the blacks he interviewed. The circumstantial evidence convinced him there were former slaves in his family.

But the reaction among some others in his family “was like going into an operation without anesthesia.” Frequently one relative or another would ask, why stir up a history that nobody wants to know about? he said.

“My own family felt shame and anger . . . anger at the messenger, who brought the story to the table,” he said. “Several cousins stopped speaking to me and there is still a freeze between me and several cousins. It’s a sad, sad sort of consequence. I did not anticipate it.”

Nevertheless, Ball is convinced the net impact of his book is positive. “In Southern white society, the taboo around black and white sex has been so high, punishable by death to the black man and awkward tolerance of white men who sexually exploited black women,” he said. “It’s good for us all in the long run to have an honest coming to terms.”

Alston, who was unavailable for an interview, posted a Web site to draw attention to his documentary, “Family Name.” He said the film was inspired by a childhood wonder about why so many black classmates at his Durham, N.C., kindergarten shared his last name. For years, his repeated questions to family members about the coincidence went ignored. “Somehow, both the African American kids, and my sister and I, had been taught by our parents or by our teachers or by society at large, at the age of 5, not to get near this issue,” he said.

Research Leads to Joint Family Reunion

Later in life, Alston attended family reunions held by the black Alstons and began to piece together the threads of family histories that led to his great-great-great-great-great-uncle Joseph John Alston, who owned large expanses of property and slaves in Chatham County, N.C. Eventually, he succeeded in participating at the first joint black-white Alston family reunion.

“Over the years, I’ve thought there’s no way to survive this conversation” about black relatives in his family, Alston said in a Web site posting. He discovered that “there are certainly ways of surviving the conversation . . . and life after that conversation is very, very, very interesting.”

Will Hairston grew up in Easton, Md., never meeting anyone black who shared his last name. But at age 18, he moved to rural Virginia, where he met so many African Americans with the same last name that he became convinced that white Hairstons were a minority. “I’m aware now that if you pick a Hairston out of the phone book, 85% to 90% of the time you’d call a black person,” he said.

Of all the black Hairstons, his chance meeting with Darrell Hairston, who was briefly on the staff at Eastern Mennonite University, changed his life forever. “We found that our histories went to the same places,” Will Hairston said. “We became friends and talked about everything with each other. Our talks led to our doing a presentation at a college assembly.”

Writer Henry Wieneck included their story in his book, “The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White.”

Darrell Hairston, now a high school guidance counselor in Martinsville, Va., said it “was no big deal” to learn he was related to white Hairstons. He had assumed as much since his uncle Henry Hairston explained race relations to him as a young boy. “He was the first to tell me that the blacks in slavery took on the slave masters’ names,” he said. “I’ve thought about this since about age 12 or 13. I’ve known that no matter what your last name is, we’re all related somewhere down the line. I figured it would be more likely that a white person named Hairston would be closer to me than one named Smith.”

Of all the issues Will and Darrell Hairston worked through as reclaimed family, none was more curious to them than the way they had been taught to speak their names. “The white people say ‘Har-ston,’ and the blacks say ‘Hair-ston,’ ” Will Hairston said, adding that he changed his pronunciation after accepting Darrell as a distant cousin. “I now say ‘Hair-ston,’ because I consider myself in the same family as the black Hairstons. I want to identify with them. I felt I should take that small step.”

“I think basically every Southern, rural community has black and white members with the same last names that goes back to some mixing of slaves with the whites,” Will Hairston said. “My guess is that people were aware of it, but it just wasn’t talked about. You might know that black man was a cousin of that white man, but you didn’t talk about it in polite company.”

Fear and shame silenced whites from speaking out, he added. “Somebody might say something like, ‘Do you know your great-great-grandfather raped 40 black women?’ ” Hairston said. “Who wants to hear anything like that? I didn’t. But I had to work through it and move beyond such comments to where I can say easily that I have black relatives.”

Both Factions Get Together

For the Dickey heirs, coming to terms with their family history was a public act. Descendants of the original Dickeys and descendants of their slaves participated this month at a “Together on Hogback Mountain” ceremony to rededicate the family cemetery. The observance brought black and white residents of the surrounding Fannin County together for bluegrass and gospel music, food and speeches by politicians and community leaders.

The highlight of the day was the installation of a commemorative plaque that contains a poem fragment by James Dickey and a statement written by the black and white descendants of those buried in the Dickey family cemetery.

“We have no interest in attempting to romanticize or justify slavery,” said Fred Dickey, a former newspaper editor who now produces educational videos in Cardiff By the Sea, Calif. “That would be as wrong as slavery itself. Our actions are guided by the belief that all of those buried on Hogback Mountain are worthy of our respect. We are paying our respects to the past to make today better.”