Linked by Blood or Circumstance

A few days before the spring semester was set to begin, I received a telegram-style email from Clarence White: “I love your writings and I think I fit in with it. Call me.” Without even thinking about it, I dropped my syllabi planning and called him. Clarence had just read an essay I published several years ago that recounts my discovery of slaveholders in my family tree and the questions it raised for me as a White woman who teaches and researches African American literature. Part of me wonders if I published that piece to beckon Clarence before I even knew who he was.

Clarence White’s farm (former site of enslavement), Scotland Neck, N.C.

My story is entangled with Clarence’s in a way that cuts to the heart of the nation’s still unreconciled racial atrocities. I am the great-great-great granddaughter of William Hodges “Buck” Kitchin, a Confederate captain and one-term U.S. congressman. Clarence is the great-great grandson of Henry Arrington, who was enslaved in Scotland Neck, North Carolina, by William and his wife, Maria Figures Arrington, whom he married in 1864. According to the oral history in Clarence’s family, when the Civil War ended a year later, William, now known widely by his nickname “Captain Buck,” was persuaded to grant Henry 1,000 acres of the large parcel of land he now owned through his marriage to Maria—the Scotland Neck land that the enslaved Arringtons had been forced to farm for decades. Yet farming these acres meant living in the shadow of Captain Buck, who remained an avowed White supremacist, a belief system he passed on to his nine children, including my great-great grandfather, Claude Kitchin, who served as a U.S. congressman from 1901 until his death in 1923, his older brother William Walton, who  also served as a U.S. congressman and was governor of North Carolina from 1909-13, and his younger brother Thurman, who was president of Wake Forest University from 1930-50. As Clarence and I uncovered in our research, these ancestors used every weapon at their disposal to ensure that the White-supremacist oligarchy in place before the Civil War remained intact nearly a century after it ended.

When I first spoke with Clarence, I explained that my family’s connection to enslavement and Jim Crow were revelations I had come to rather recently. My early childhood was spent in a liberal bubble nurtured by parents who were bonded by the 1960s counterculture. By the time I turned thirteen, their marriage was over, and my mother (Claude Kitchin’s great-granddaughter) had been diagnosed with a debilitating mental illness caused by her own parents’ abuse, and had given up custody of me and my sisters. The next few years were filled with other losses, including being forbidden to see my maternal grandmother (Claude Kitchin’s granddaughter), who, despite her many flaws, had been an integral part of our early lives. Fumbling for words, I told Clarence trauma had eroded many of my family ties. Clarence affirmed, “Oh, there’s a lot of trauma in this family.” He meant another kind of violence and terror, of course—the kind perpetrated against his own kin. What I’ve come to learn, though, is that my story and Clarence’s are inseparable. We are bound up in each other’s inherited trauma, even if our responsibilities to repair the harm caused by systemic racism and abuse are as different as blood and water.

***

In 2018, Clarence’s mother passed, and he inherited the last 27 acres of Henry Arrington’s original parcel from Captain Buck. He decided to grow cotton—beautiful buds of the flinty flowers that are perhaps the most devastating symbol of enslavement. With the legacy of blood and sweat and unthinkable violence riveting the soil of these troubled acres, Clarence has harvested a new kind of reality—one he urged me to see firsthand. So, in August 2023, I drove to meet Clarence in Scotland Neck, the town where our interwoven histories took root two centuries ago. Clarence and I drove to Hardy Hall Rd.—the place he calls “the hill,” where his people have lived quite literally for centuries. Adjacent to “the hill” stands Gallberry, the columned estate set back from the road where Captain Buck and Maria lived and surveilled their vast acreage of land. Here is where Clarence’s ancestors labored first as enslaved people, then as sharecroppers of one sort or another, and finally as farmers. Clarence is carrying on his ancestors’ legacy by growing cotton that he owns. When we snapped a photograph of us standing before his cotton field on the verge of bloom, I thought of the phrase often emblazoned across t-shirts: I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams. Clarence could have been wearing that shirt, and perhaps mine could have said: I am my ancestors’ wildest nightmare.

***

“I never owned slaves” is a well-worn phrase often used by White people to deflect responsibility from the continued ramifications of chattel slavery, but it is by no means the end of the story. I have never enslaved human beings, but I am heir to the legacy of forced-labor camps and Jim Crow-era campaigns against Black citizenship rights. Whereas Clarence and his kin share a common history of struggle and resistance, my side of the family tree is linked to genocide and racist violence (and, like all people, both of our stories are filled with joys and losses that defy attempts to reduce us to these bare facts of history alone). How we choose to reckon with these ancestral legacies is the enduring question we both must answer—another tie that binds us. When Clarence and I ended our first phone call nearly three years ago, he told me, “We could be cousins too, you know.” Whether by blood or by circumstance, we are indeed.

Emily Ruth Rutter (she/her/hers) is the author of four monographs, most recently White Lies and Allies in Contemporary Black Media (Routledge, 2023). She is co-editor of Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era (Routledge, 2020) and the forthcoming Black Saturation: Selected Works of Stephen E. Henderson (UP of Mississippi, 2025). Her essays have appeared in African American Review, MELUS, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, among other journals and edited collections. 

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