Annals Of Genealogy - Bob Hoped For Black Blood But Got A Slaveowner's Instead

Bob Muzelle was a liberal's liberal - a man who had cut his teeth on Freedom Rides, had marched with Abernathy across the Pettis bridge, had stood on the stage when Dr. King had given his famous 'I have a dream' speech, and had gone on to fight tirelessly for the black man in the rattiest of places.

Liberalism for Bob was not only a political philosophy but an ethos, a raison d'etre, the essential defining quality which made him who he was. 

He had spent his whole life burnishing that image, and in each decade he added to its luster.  He was first to denounce nuclear militarism, first to warn of the earth's fragility and coming climate disaster, first to stand with women, and later in his life to stand tall and proud with transgender Americans.  There were no cracks in his doctrinal purity, not even the suggestion of straying from received wisdom.  He was first at the barricades and the last to leave. 

Bob was from a storied family of both patrician New England and cavalier Southern roots.  His Boston ancestors had been among the first to arrive and had gone on to make a fortune in shipbuilding, transatlantic trade, and lumber.  They had become esteemed members of the British colonial administration, and then after Independence, renowned American judges, governors, and civic leaders. 

It was the Southern wing of the family which gave Bob pause.  King Carter, like all big tobacco planters in Virginia, had owned slaves; and if so, his legacy was a tarnished one.  Bob’s mother, however,  proudly displayed her certificate of registry as one of the First Families of Virginia (FFV), and never looked beyond the fact that the Lancasters had played an important, instrumental role in the building of America.   She was uninterested in any slave-owning members of her family, dismissed the allegation as revisionist history (“Everyone owned slaves in those days”), and believed that once you began to airbrush history, there was no stopping the erasure.

For years Bob let the matter rest, and was satisfied that Lancaster County was the seat of his mother’s family’s power and influence; and that the Lancasters and their descendants had been exemplary models of noblesse oblige.  They had become political and religious leaders, philanthropists, and industrialists; and all gave back to their state, their region, and their country.

Yet the more Bob became involved in the civil rights movement, the more he wondered about his Southern past.  What if his ancestors had been slaveholders?  What if they, like Thomas Jefferson, had taken advantage of their slaves and had illegitimate children with them?  The names Carter and Lancaster were common throughout the Tidewater.   

Most importantly, what would this mean to Bob?  Would he have to make a public disclosure concerning his disreputable past or make amends and restitution?  As much as he supported reparations, the thought of spending his own money was troubling.  Certainly if he made a public disclosure, every black Tom, Dick, and Harry on the Northern Neck with the name of Lancaster would come running, hands out.

“Leave well enough alone”, said his mother when she told him that he was about to begin a thorough genealogical search of her family. “You already know what you are going to find.”

That of course was not the point.  Finding a slave-owning past was a double-edged sword. On the one hand if he found out that he had a slave-owning past, he could, thanks to his vigorous rejection of his family, gain street creds with The Movement.  He was reminded of Ibsen’s play Rosmersholm and how Rebekka West recruited Rosmer – the latest in a long line of patrician, aristocratic families -  to be a spokesman for her radical progressivism.  If such a man could espouse causes that condemned the rich, the privileged, and concentrations of power and money, then the cause would be strengthened.



If Bob discovered proof of his plantation past, he could use it as the penitential offering that  was long overdue.  He, as a religious man, could beg God to forgive his ancestors for what they did, thereby relieving his own sense of shame and guilt.

On the other hand such a tainted bloodline, such a disgraced and disgraceful family heritage would be ineradicable.  At no time on the podium as he railed against the South's amorality and persistent racial indignities, would he be able to forget that he was one of the defiled.  Nature always trumps nurture despite the progressive cancel canon. 

Even more importantly, if he could prove that he had black blood flowing in his veins, his political resume would be complete.  Not only would he fight racism and Jim Crow as an outsider, but as one of the oppressed, a latter day Nat Turner, a black hero.  'I want to be black', he was overheard to have said as he stood before a portrait of Stephen Douglass, bowing his head and touching it lightly like a Russian icon in an Orthodox church. 'Please God, let it be'. 

Bob got more than he had bargained for.  His exhaustive archival and DNA search discovered that not only were there slaveholders in his family, but they were among the most prominent in Virginia.  Worse, when the lands of the Northern Neck became infertile (because of the increasing worldwide demand for rich, smooth, fragrant Virginia tobacco, planters never gave the land a rest), Bob’s relatives sold their slaves down the river.  

Jefferson and others had raised the issue of freed slaves and were worried about an un-assimilated, un-Westernized flood of Africans into the Commonwealth, made manumission difficult, and indirectly facilitated the slave trade.  The Lower South’s demand for slaves to work the cotton plantations on the Mississippi Delta was insatiable and money was to be made.  Bob’s relatives shared in the wealth.

Many slaveholders in the antebellum South kept careful journals of the operations of their plantations – how much was spent on each slave and what was the return on his labor.  A review of this primary source material has enabled scholars like Fogel and Engerman (Time on the Cross) to study the economics of slavery and determine whether or not it was a going concern thus justifying the Civil War; or whether it would collapse on itself.

Bob’s research, however, pointed to the worst kind of white tyranny, abuse, and terror that had ever been reported.  His ancestors were so unconcerned about their slaves and so absolutely decisive in their views of Africans as savages, that they did not even try to sugarcoat their records.   Compared to other plantation owners of the era and the locale, Bob’s relatives had been the worst  Simon Legrees of  the Upper South.  Not only was he descended from the worst sort of whites, he had not a trace of black blood in his veins, not a scintilla, not even a suggestion that somewhere in holocaust of slavery a Yoruba or Mandinka woman had given birth to a mixed race child which would go on to propagate his noble ancestry. 

These revelations made it difficult for Bob to do anything but cower in shame and humiliation. The sins of his fathers were too heinous to be forgiven, and no matter how he might wish that the past could be airbrushed, these sins had been visited on him.  All at once he fell from the grace of a true believer to a defiled, corrupted, and hated nonperson. There could be no refuge for him, no rehabilitation possible, no reentry into the progressive holy of holies.  He would forever be an outcast, a wanderer. 

The discovery of slaveholders in the Muzelle cupboard was so disastrous, it couldn't be dismissed or put aside.  It was as though he were the slaveholder, the punisher, the miscegenist, the brutal oppressor of black men; which is why he could not show his face again in the National Black Caucus, the boardroom of Black Lives Matter, or even at the National Museum Of African American History And Culture. 

It is hard to understand for an objective observer to understand, empathize let alone sympathize which Bob's existential angst.  America is a hodge-podge, a stew of savory, tasteless, and downright nasty bits. Every plantation owner took liberties with the most beautiful of his slaves - le droit du seigneur was alive and well in Mississippi - and with wave after wave of European immigration, God only knew what he was tossing up on American soil.  There might be surprises in the DNA results - some Mesopotamian or Laplandic blood, but nothing to upset the applecart, nothing existential or life-altering. 

So it was no surprise that he disappeared from sight. His Yale Class Secretary after a thorough canvassing of Bob's classmates came up with nothing.  Bob had simply dropped out, disappeared, became one of Yale's few ciphers. 

 

One random sighting had him behind the plastics counter at an Ace Hardware store in Edmonds, Washington; another on a pig farm in Chillicothe, Ohio, but neither could be confirmed.  He like Conrad's Lord Jim, had become a wanderer in search of penance, rehabilitation, and forgiveness. 

'An insufferable bore', said a less charitable classmate, probably the majority view of a horrendously self-important man.