Fantasmagoric Ancestors

Remember that scene in Bull Durham in which Annie tells Crash that she thinks, because of her love of animals, she was probably Francis of Assisi or Catherine the Great in a previous life? Then, Crash asks why people always think they were someone famous in a prior life. No one ever thinks that they were Joe Blow. Of course, she laughs and says, "no, no! It doesn't work that way."

I noticed the same thing among some people doing genealogy. Not all genealogist, but some. For instance, when I was in grade school, one girl bragged that her ancestry took her all the way back to Catherine of Aragon. One of her classmates said that his took them straight to Henry VIII. ("My how their family has fallen," I thought -- but in the language of a 12-year-old.) There's currently a guy running around Baltimore perpetrating the fraud that he is the direct descendant of Frederick Douglass -- although how he is keeps changing. Even my mother used to tell me that my father's family descended from Valcour Aime. "It just doesn't count unless you can connect yourself to someone famous," I thought.

Of course, if you can't connect yourself to someone famous directly, you can include your ancestors in ostensibly noble categories of people. Hence, all of the southerners who, in the words of my grandmother, "don't have to feel guilty because your ancestors didn't own slaves." Yes, really, my parents and grandparents and their various kinfolk all said the same thing. How this squares with also being a descendant of Valcour Aime mystified me. Even a census record showing differently doesn't stop that line of argument. The response was either, "well, they treated their slaves well" or "well, it was the times" or "well, the women didn't own slaves." In fact, I had a friend whose grandmother owned up to their slaveholding past, but, as he said, "to hear her tell it, Africans were diving into the ocean and swimming for South Carolina just to be slaves on their plantation, that's how well they treated them."

This categorical association, however, is usually a bottom-up sort of interpretation. "Our people were union men from the beginning," one friend bragged. He, incidentally, was That Professor, the one with the red Che Guevara banner in his office. "I'm a descendant of the X family and the Y family on both sides, and so is my husband," one woman told me. "They were the original, hard scrabble settlers of this old New England town." (Yeah, isn't that usually a joke about working class southerners? That our family trees have no branches and it made us all idiots?) This working class immigrant and pioneer narrative is much more common than the Great Ancestor narrative, given the history of this nation and the size of the population. All of it seems to stake a claim to both earned citizenship and an inheritance of citizenship in the U.S.

In the past 20 or 30 years, other people claim Native American ancestry, which seems to claim a stake beyond an immigrant lineage. I knew one guy who, nearly in his fifties, discovered that one of his great- or great-great grandparents was Cherokee. He then grew his hair into braids and decked himself out in turquoise and beads. Two other women, upon the release of Dances with Wolves, embraced their Cherokee and Chickasaw ancestry and did the same, except they skipped the braids. They must have worn 10 lbs of silver and turquoise to work every day. That turquoise and silver were Navajo was beside the point. The jewelry was a tribute to their grandmother, who was born Cherokee and told to deny her 100% Native American ancestry.

The Native American connection sometimes has a mercenary quality. I had a friend who used a genealogical library to research prisoners of war. She said that, at 5 pm, the place filled up with people either searching for Confederate ancestors so that they could join the Sons of Confederate Veterans, or Cherokee ancestors, so that they could get on the tribal rolls -- or something of the sort. I've even heard of people trying to prove some sort of minority-status ancestry in order to apply for benefits, scholarships, and minority-owned business status.

Everyone wants some sort of proof of genetic nobility, genetic citizenship, a birth right. They want some sense that in there very person survives all of the ideals of America, even if those ideals are ahistorical and constantly changing. They want a claim to place in the old world and the new. They want sense of self that transcends the here and now. Yet, the claim says more about the person staking the claim in the here and now than any of the ancestry does.

I'm not immune to this. Yet, I realize that, given my actual ancestry, I am the descendant of villains. We were the bad guys, the slaveowners, the overseers, the imperialists, the Indian killers, the Confederates, the drab, boring perpetrators of the benign evil of the status quo. This, of course, squares with my own self-loathing and cynicism.

See? My claim says more about me in the here and now than my ancestry does.

Being the descendants of the villians is a hard lineage to claim in fact or in fantasy; and, while I do, I want to counter it. Thus, I have invented another, fantastical lineage.

While I do have French Canadian, Cajun and Louisiana French Creole ancestors -- hence, the Valcour Aime story -- I imagine some of them not in Louisiana, but as Nova Scotian metis.

I have a picture of a young girl, French Canadian. I think she might be my great-grandmother or her cousin. She has dark, curly hair and a nose that bespeaks a Mediterranean ancestry. "A Jew," I decided. "Or perhaps a Gypsy. They had to flee Europe to escape the pogroms. Or maybe they were descended from marranos."

My great-grandfather's father (or perhaps his father -- my grandmother's stories underwent constant revision) was an Irish immigrant. I decided that he was the remnants of leprechauns or Celtic druids or, at the very least, Black Irish. His mother died on the voyage to America (again, my grandmother is the source, so probably not), but I imagine that she was not buried at sea but returned to it when she found her selkie skin in her husband's pack.

Because my grandfather's last name was Kemp, the same as the actor who originated some of Shakespeare's early comic roles and then became a wandering Morris dancer, I have claimed him as my own.

My grandmother's father's name was Loupe, which is French for female wolf, so I invented a story about La Loupe-Garoues, female werewolves wandering the swamps and riverbanks of the Mississippi, a sinister, land-bound version of selkies, incorporated into folklore about the Deslondes rebellion (top that, Anne Rice!).

Yes, all of these are ridiculous. I intend them to be. What does it matter who my actual ancestors were or what they did? I can search for their documentation and then place them in narratives that make them better than they were. Their actual stories only inform my privilege, and my privilege in the here and now is what I have to address. If I am going to invent stories about ancestors, stories that say more about who I wish I were and who I want to be, I might as well make them good stories. Mythical creatures, actors, and outcasts are much more interesting than the truth.

-------------------
ETA, 2/26: My SiteMeter reveals that someone along the River Road found this blog by looking for the subject of a post from three (or four?) years ago. I have ancestors buried -- or once buried, since their tombs have long since been busted open and filled with moss rather than bones -- in the town where this person's isp address is located.