Visualizing Our Histories, Our Stories — Part 3

In this series, over the next several months, we will be sharing artwork and brief writeups of the creative process, from our Linked Descendants working group members.

Some of us have begun to explore our thoughts, feelings and the multi-layered experience of finding our ancestors, through collage work. We created collages on our own using a specific framework as a starting point (eg: a river of life, an explosion of awareness, a tree of knowledge or life, a path towards or away, etc.) and then shared with each other in small breakout groups. Most of us found this to be a powerful way to further process our often conflicting emotions. Expressing what we know in visual, rather than written terms, allows for increased awareness, deeper insight, and further integration of the new and/or more difficult truths around our ancestors and overall family histories.

Today’s collage and process description is generously shared by Mariana Chilton.

*CONTENT CAUTION: Violent Imagery

BESTIAL ACCOMPLICE

“If you look like this, if you see that you are the monster, then here’s a place for you.” –Bayo Akomolafe

Bestial Accomplice by Mariana Chilton

Even though I was a beginner to genealogy and Family Search, it did not take me long to find the ancestors of each of my four grandparents. In their full fanned-out array, with some lineages going back to years in the 400s and almost all of them going back to Europe, evidence of their engagement in slavery was on all sides. Over the course of a few months, I started hand counting the people my ancestors enslaved by pulling up the US censuses online. With an eye to my ancestors familiar names (names that I, my siblings, and cousins still bear), I found over 400 people that our family had enslaved. That was without really knowing what I was doing. Trying to get beyond mere counting, I sought out a few wills and googled around, which helped me identify about 30 people by name among this list. Then last fall, a fellow member of CTTT explained how to find names of people enslaved under the name of the enslaver in the 1850 and 1860 Slave Schedules. Though the lists are scattered and incomplete, I found more names among the people my Virginia ancestors enslaved: Joe, Pharoh, Dick, Judy, Suckey, Lucy, Aggey, and Succordy. After presenting my research to my local PA CTTT group, and engaging my Virginia-side cousins with this information in December 2020, the weight of the trauma shattered my spirit and blew it through a crack, down a deep hole. Horrified at the magnitude of brutality that had never been discussed among us, and aghast at the nonchalance of some family members about what I was uncovering, I was in a free fall of heartbreak and atrophy.

When I received the invitation to do a collage with people at CTTT, I knew it might be a way to reach out a hand and find a root in the darkness, or a small stone protruding to catch myself and pull myself upright. I had set aside no time, I had no glue, no magazine cut outs, and had forgotten I had a bunch of PowerPoints with pictures and slave censuses, so I grabbed an old manilla folder and drew without thinking what always comes to mind: my bestial, devil-like ancestors.  They’ve always been there, nestled deep in the mind and darting about invisibly in my everyday conversations. In my work-life I’m always trying to keep them concealed far, far from view. But I let them out here in this drawing. With their pearl necklaces, my ancestors hold spikes, a noose, and ankle clamps, and they have me trapped in chains through which they can yank back my limbs, head, and neck. On one leg, the one I broke a few years ago, I can hardly stay grounded nor keep balanced on the earth. What was most important to me in the drawing was that I gave space to manifest the hundreds of people they tortured, raped, brutalized and enslaved. You see them as individuals and multitudes tumbling forward. They demand attention, expansion, life.

The day after I shared my drawing with other members of my small CTTT group, all with ties to Alabama, and with the drawing right next to my monitor, I caught an email from Bayo Akomolafe, where he introduces his new writings. He was describing the red doors of churches. These doors signaled that anyone—no matter who they were or what they had done—could enter and be given sanctuary. The knockers (called hagodays) on the doors were ghouls, monsters, and beasts; they are a signal of “radical hospitality.” He says, “they remind us of the fallibility and fluid errancy of the flesh and urge us to touch our own seams and sutures, to investigate the ways we are put together, to disturb our claims to coherence, to fall apart.” That felt right to me. These beasts of my Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama ancestors that I recognize in me make me a monster, too. 

That night, I closed my eyes and found myself in an open field with my hands chained behind my back and legs tied together. In front of me was a line of fierce African women, one of whom lunged at me and speared me right the through chest. I landed on my knees, then my back, willing to accept my murder. The others came up and dug stakes into my chest ripping open my ribs. As such a strange vision, I sense it must have been the ancient orishas (deities originally known for being from Nigeria who, having traversed the Middle Passage with their people, are also active in the Caribbean, South America, in Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, and now Pennsylvania) working through me. Through my monster body, they pried open the door to my ancestral line, and set out to murder my ancestors in reverse. In doing so, perhaps they released their people. 

This time, they broke through to Montgomery, Alabama. After making this doodle and after  the spears through my monstrous chest, I got back on track and started to hunt down the papers of my Alabama ancestors that lurk in the basements of my McLemore cousins I never knew.  My Alabama relative responded immediately with an offering of a will and the estate papers of Rev. James McLemore from 1835. The enslaved people listed in the will are Joseph, Biso, Harriet, Mahaly; those in the estate papers listed after his death are Henry, Simon, Joseph, Charles, Northo, Archy, Squire, Will, Ninson, Henry, Vina, Gilsy, Charity and two children, Juney and three children, Nancy and one child, and Girl Easter.

This is just one of many ancestral lines breaking down, while the righteous ancestors named above replace them.

By revealing the demons in me, I manifested a pathway to destruction and retribution. I’m signaling my availability to the ancient energies with their long tendrils. This way, the orishas can do their work with more force.  If we reveal our monsters, we can help to cease our hideous lineages; perhaps we can reset the course of our evolution. I gladly die over and again to help murder my people in reverse, to return this violent lineage to the mud. I’m a willing, bestial accomplice. 

— Mariana Chilton