American Tapestry by Rachel L. Swarns

Author:Rachel L. Swarns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

TWENTY

The Search for the Truth: Atlanta

JOAN TRIBBLE STILL REMEMBERS THE MOMENT WHEN SHE first laid eyes on the old black-and-white photograph of Dolphus Shields. She was sitting at the kitchen table in her house in the Atlanta suburbs when she saw him staring out of the pages of the New York Times: this stern, bespectacled African American man who happened to share her mother’s last name. Joan is a sixty-nine-year-old descendant of the white Shields clan that traces its roots back to the red-clay farmland near Jonesboro in Clayton County, Georgia. Her great-great-grandfather was Henry Shields, the man who owned Dolphus and Melvinia. Joan grew up in Clayton County, as did her mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandfather before her. She grew up hearing stories about those ancestors and their children, tales of struggling white farmers of Irish ancestry who were dirt poor and had little more than elementary-school educations. Her own mother never got past the seventh grade. Black people never figured into any of the family stories, but then, why would they? Joan never had any doubts about her family’s ethnic background. Her light eyes and fair skin made her genetic inheritance clear to anyone who looked at her. Yet as she stared at that photograph of Dolphus that day, Joan felt something unexpected: a strong stirring of recognition. “I just thought, ‘Well, he looks like somebody who could be in my family,’ ” she says.

Joan prides herself on her openness, on her acceptance of others. She is a silver-haired retiree who gets by on Social Security these days, a woman who exudes a warm, no-nonsense manner from behind her wire-rimmed glasses. Arthritis has gnarled the fingers of one hand, but she is always reaching out, shaking someone’s hand, patting someone’s shoulder. She was inclined to delve into the story about Dolphus, to try to sort out the truth, to openly consider the painful possibility that her family tree might include some black relatives who had been owned and exploited by some of her white relatives. Other members of her extended family wanted to keep it all quiet, concerned about the implications of the possible revelations about the family. Joan saw things differently.

And so, finally, on a steamy summer afternoon, she decides to take the plunge: she decides to find out whether she is actually related to Dolphus and to talk about what she knows about her family. She asks me to bring the historical records that I’ve been collecting on the family and we meet in the snack room in the gleaming, state-of-the-art Georgia Archives Building, sitting at a small table not far from a beeping microwave and a Coca-Cola vending machine.

Even before she saw the photo of Dolphus Shields, Joan had spent many days here over the past few years, digging into her family tree, poring through census records and property records, marriage licenses and faded wills, deciphering spidery, nineteenth-century script as she tracked her ancestors through the decades. That was how she finally discovered that her great-great-grandfather was a slave owner.

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