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    Michelle Obama's All-American Story

    Posted:
    10/9/09
    Filed Under:Woman Up
    It's not that a story in The New York Times about the all-American roots of First Lady Michelle Obama isn't fascinating, even heart-breaking. Viewing the slave trade through the eyes of one of Obama's ancestors, "negro girl Melvinia," a 6-year-old child valued at $475, speaks to the cruel inhumanity of this American institution.

    The trail that leads from slavery has been so neglected and grown so cold, solving just one genealogical mystery is quite an accomplishment. Anything that transforms historical fact into emotional, human drama and reaches all the way into the White House is an essential addition to the tangled, yet ultimately triumphant, American tale. Who would have thought it?

    It's the presentation of the Times story -- all breathless naiveté -- that took me by surprise. In that, I agree with my colleague Helena Andrews. Michelle Obama has white ancestors. Well, yes, so do most black folks in the United States. Look at the variations in skin color and features. Many white folks are hardly one race either. Edward Ball, who is quoted in the story, has written about his black relatives -- descendants of his white slave-owning ancestors -- in his memoir, "Slaves in the Family."

    The wall-to-wall coverage reminds me of the stunned reaction when DNA evidence revealed that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one child with Sally Hemings, his slave. The passed-down stories by those red-haired black folks named Jefferson had to wait for validation from the science. The stalwarts who always insisted our complicated third president – who wrote the Declaration of Independence while owning human beings -- would never have sex with one still are not convinced. Annette Gordon-Reed won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about the other side of the family in "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family."

    Another open secret, the story of Essie Mae Washington-Williams, fathered by Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond with a teenage servant, returned to the news with South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson. He had attacked the character of the elderly woman when she finally claimed Thurmond, Wilson's mentor, as her father.

    For many, it's the idea of rape, coercion and sexual exploitation at the heart of the intermingled history that repels and titillates. The Times story soft-pedals with hedge language more at home in a romance novel: "While she was still a teenager, a white man would father her first-born son under circumstances lost in the passage of time." This isn't David Letterman and a personal assistant we're talking about. It's slave and owner.

    My story isn't so different from Michelle Obama's. My great-great-grandmother was the daughter of the slave master and a slave he raped. When she fell in love with a freed black man doing skilled work, he tried to buy her. But the master (her dad) found out she was pregnant and decided he wasn't going to give up his new "property," his grandchild. He ran the man off. That "property" was my great-grandmother Addie Price, who was a child when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. After the Civil War, by the time they reunited, the man had married. He did take care of Addie. (Addie had a daughter, Mary Cecelia, the grandmother whose name I carry though she died before my birth.)

    They made it work and carried on the best they could; most of the next generations did somehow. That a woman who lives in the White House shares this history is interesting, but not startling. It's all very American.
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    Mary C. Curtis

    Mary C. Curtis, an NPR contributor based in Charlotte, N.C., was previously a writer and editor for The New York Times and the Charlotte Observer... more

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