On Inheritance
/My grandmother passed away this spring, aged 93. Yesterday my father brought the last of the furniture I have inherited from her and my grandfather. She was a cheerful, outgoing woman who had a habit of treating friends like family, and distant relatives like immediate relations. She was a keeper of family history. Even in the last days of her life, she could tell you which items in her home came from which family member and how they were related, or how else the object came to be in the family.
The stories my grandparents handed down were heroic. But I am no longer a child, and I am old enough now to know that no family is made entirely of heroes. I am descended from a colonial governor, whose grandson was an early president of Harvard College, and whose name was handed down for a dozen generations to my grandfather, father, and brother. I learned his title, his status, and his heraldry. We didn't talk about his role in genocide.
A few years ago I read Stamped from the Beginning, and there, in between the lines of Chapters 4-6, were whispers of my ancestors. Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised, knowing they were well-to-do Boston contemporaries of Increase and Cotton Mather, but it still startled me to notice threads of my own family's myths in the pages of a best seller on the history of racism.
The family story I grew up with was one of former greatness. A coat of arms and service to the King. Towns named for a forefather. A silver cup engraved with generations of names. A massive oil portrait in a gilded frame of a several-greats aunt in a black dress and a white lace cap, whose stern eyes followed me through my grandparents' modest home. I was the eldest child of the eldest child of the eldest child going back two hundred years, but my father was a dairy farmer, my mother a schoolteacher. We had rats in the basement (and under the sink once), and countless mice in the kitchen. We hung curls of flypaper in the summer, and the sticky yellow paper would soon be black with wings and bodies. I fed calves, stacked hay bales, milked cows, and, on more than one slushy gray March night, I leant my weight to pull a newborn calf free from its mother's womb. I know the pickled smell of silage and the taste of cow shit. It didn't feel like wealth.
Someone clever on Twitter (perhaps it was Jorts) observed that monarchs inheriting titles from their ancestors also inherit the sins of the ancestors wielding those titles. The new King of England has chosen to use his birth name for his regnal name, and is now Charles III. My many-greats grandfather, the colonial governor, served at the pleasure of the previous Charles. I inherited no title, but I did receive his family name, the myth of his greatness, and later the uncomfortable knowledge that he, personally, stole land and life from Indigenous Peoples.
I am here because my ancestors had the fortune to survive and prosper. Their possessions and privileges became my wealth. My great grandmother's cabinet has a crack running through the glass door. Grandpa's dresser has a nick in one drawer. The silver spoons have tarnished. They are witnesses to wealth and hard times and making do. They have seen family heroes and their flaws. I have inherited it all: the glory and the sins, the hero myths and the oppressive history, the riches my ancestors accumulated and the inequality they perpetuated. My grandmother's home was filled with such things: treasures, keepsakes, burdens, and obligations. And now they are mine.