I think I've always thought with Faulkner that the past is never dead; it's not even past. I had a version of this conversation recently at a Catholic blog site with one of many Catholics who now seem to feel it's absolutely okay to vent open and really toxic racism at these sites. Who seem to feel it's okay to put their racism out there in black and white because, I suppose, hey imagine that their opposition to the first African-American president the country has had is self-evidently moral.
And so the racism that underlies that opposition has in some way to be moral, too.
I suspect not a few Catholics in the U.S. have long been comfortable with various forms of racism, and regard discussions of racism as outside the pale of moral discussions. Catholic leaders have, after all, hardly talked about racism as a serious moral issue--ever. Certainly not in recent years. Not as a burning moral issue akin to, say, contraceptive use.
The bishops underscore the idea that racism is far down the list of issues to be considered in any moral calculus as an election approaches, too, by their willingness to make obtrusive use of the considerable racism that lingers among many cultural enclaves of American Catholics as the bishops press their war against the president. And against gay and lesbian people, where they have long colluded with the National Organization of Marriage, which has explicitly stated (we now learn) in internal memos that it wants to exploit racially driven animosities and to shove the wedges of those animosities deeper in American culture.
And so my "discussion" with a fellow Catholic at a Catholic blog site recently: this man wants to argue that African Americans are responsible for their economic and social struggles because they do not have a strong sense of culture and family, and, above all, of morality. "They" have too many children out of wedlock. "They" expect handouts from the welfare state.
They're not like us. They haven't worked hard, lived moral lives, played by the rules. And so it's no accident that they have ended up where they are now--at the bottom.
In response to his trumpetings about these issues, I pointed out that white Americans--my own ancestors and perhaps his--quite ruthlessly and quite deliberately destroyed any vestiges of traditional African culture enslaved Africans brought to this continent when they were seized, stolen from their homelands, and shipped against their will to America. And so it seems astonishingly cruel to blame "them" for lacking strong cultural cohesiveness, when we did everything in our power to assure that the cultural roots of African Americans would be eradicated when they were brought in bonds to this continent.
What perplexes--and, yes, angers--me about this trend of argument that many Catholics now defiantly trot out as the nation assesses the performance of its first African-American president is that the same Catholics who dismiss out of hand historical analysis of the experience of people of color in North America demand ultra-respectful understanding of their own ethnic groups' cultural and historical experiences. Point to the lamentable effects of the experience of slavery (followed by decades of savage Jim Crow laws, lynchings, disenfranchisement, withholding of education, etc.) on African Americans, and these fellow Catholics want to tell me that history is all over and done with.
"They" need to get over it. It tells you how culturally weak and culturally deprived "they" are, doesn't it, that "they" still want to talk about slavery, when it ended more than a century ago.
But, as I say, the very same people pushing these memes don't hesitate for a moment to ask me and others to understand that their outlook on life, their views and attitudes, have been radically shaped by centuries of history. On a trip to Ireland some years back, as I stopped in a village in the southern part of Co. Kilkenny not far from where some of my ancestors lived before they emigrated to America, and as I admired the Church of Ireland parish church in the village, a woman seeing me look at the church said to me, casually, "Beautiful, isn't it? And it was ours until Cromwell did his dirty work. It used to be our Catholic parish."
She was talking about events of the 17th century as if they were contemporary events, because the Cromwellian conquest of the country and the suppression of Catholicism were contemporary events to her. She still lived with their effects. The effects were carved into stones she passed daily on her village street.
The past is never dead; it's not even past.
All of this has been on my mind recently for two other unexpected reasons--two out-of-the-blue events that have reminded me all over again of how alive history remains for us, how the rippling effect of history continues in our lives for decades after a particular occurrence in the past begins the ripples moving into the future.
The first unexpected event: someone contacts me by email to ask if I have any information that might connect my grandmother's family, a family whose name was Snead, to her ancestors in Georgia and Louisiana. And who happen to be African-American.
She's managed, she tells me, to track her family back from a specific place in Louisiana to which they came in the late 1840s from Georgia. And she wonders about a connection to my Snead family because her family has been buried for a number of generations in a cemetery called Snead, on land given to them by a Mr. Snead in that place in Louisiana.
Which happens to be the place to which my Snead ancestors came in Louisiana when they moved there from Georgia in 1848 . . . . And when she tells me the names of other families related to hers who are buried in their family cemetery, Snead, those names leap off the page for me, since they're all names of other families from Georgia who accompanied my Snead ancestors to Louisiana and had kinship ties to them in Louisiana. When she points me to her ancestor on the 1870 census, when he first appears in census records as a freedman, what immediately strikes me is that I can identify every other family on the page. And they're all either Sneads of part of the kinship network of my Snead family.
This correspondent and I are reaching the conclusion that it's very likely that her ancestor came to Louisiana from Georgia along with my family--because he was held in bondage by my family. The pieces of the historical puzzle she has fit together perfectly with pieces I have, and the picture they appear to be forming is a picture of a white family that brought a black family in bondage from one part of the country to another in the 1840s, and then, when emancipation occurred, gave land to the formerly enslaved family for that family to use as a family cemetery.
The past is never dead; it's not even past.
And, just in case I still need to consider that lesson, in case I haven't learned it well enough, there's this, another totally unexpected recent occurrence involving the history of my other grandmother, my maternal grandmother: throughout my childhood, I heard my grandmother and the three brothers of hers I knew when I was a child tell stories about their uncle Pat Ryan, a man who had been much admired in their community because of his hospitality and generosity to those in need. Some of these stories centered on a number of orphans Pat and his wife Delilah adopted, since the couple were themselves childless.
The stories recounted the specific names of the orphans Pat and Lilah took in and raised as their own children. In my adult life, as I've researched this family's history, I've found those names confirmed in Pat and Lilah's estate records, which speak of their legal adoption of various orphans, giving the names of the children. Not too many years before her death, an elderly cousin of mine rehearsed these stories all over again for me: same stories, same names of the children Pat and Lilah raised, still vivid in her mind as she approached the age of 90.
And now this happens: a few days ago, out of the blue, a descendant of one of those orphans has emailed me to ask what I can tell her about the connection between her ancestor and Patrick Ryan. She has family stories that have bits and pieces of information about her ancestor, who named his first son Patrick. How does her family connect to my Ryan family, to which she understands there was some connection of her ancestor?
Her pieces of information match, and, in some cases, fill in gaps of, my pieces of information. And from my side, I can fill in gaps for her both from the family stories handed to me and research I've done as an adult. As with the other person who has recently contacted me, her family stories flow together with my family stories, forming a cohesive whole--a cohesive whole that explains the connections between disparate families with disparate histories and lineages, who are nonetheless connected by quite specific historical events.
Quite specific historical events, which continue to affect their lives and my life, in that we have and acknowledge a connection to each other that would not be there without history, without the events in the past that initially linked us to one another. And which are not events lost in the past, but living events still exerting influence in the present, or how otherwise would we have connected, we three people living in different places, who grew up in different families with different traditions, who had no idea we were connected by specific historical occurrences . . . .
The past is never dead; it's not even past.
And when white Catholics who don't intend to confront their racism and whose animus against this nation's first black president is fed by that unacknowledged racism inform me that African Americans need to get over their history, because it's over and done with, I think I'm going to inform them that I'll adopt the same approach to their cultural background and their history: it's all past. Don't talk to me of your family's experiences in the old country and their struggles when they arrived in America, of all they've accomplished over the generations due to hard work and family cohesiveness.
Since the past is dead, after all. It's just history.
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