Ancestor Trouble Read online

  Ancestor Trouble is based on the author’s extensive research and interviews, as well as her best recollections of various events in her life. In some instances, dialogue has been approximated to convey the author’s best recollections of those exchanges. Some names and identifying details of certain people mentioned have been changed. Small portions of this book appeared in different form in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, and The Awl.

  Copyright © 2022 by Maud Newton

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Newton, Maud, author.

  Title: Ancestor trouble : a reckoning and a reconciliation / by Maud Newton.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, [2022] | Includes bibliographic references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021025844 (print) | LCCN 2021025845 (ebook) | ISBN 9780812997927 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780812997934 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Newton, Maud. | Newton, Maud—Family. | Newton family. | Genealogy. | Genetic genealogy—United States. | Racism—United States. | United States—Race relations.

  Classification: LCC CT275.N5225 A3 2022 (print) | LCC CT275.N5225 (ebook) | DDC 929.20973—dc23/eng/20211108

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021025844

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021025845

  Ebook ISBN 9780812997934

  All photographs from the author’s collection except this page, bottom, from the Delta Democrat-Times.

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Rachel Ake

  Cover images: Getty (test tube), Shutterstock (patterns), family photos courtesy of the author

  ep_prh_6.0_139653424_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Maud Newton’s Family Tree

  Introduction

  Part One | Genealogy

  Chapter 1. A Doorway

  Chapter 2. Not Forgotten

  Chapter 3. Like a Lenticular Print

  Part Two | Genetic Genealogy

  Chapter 4. Skeletons and Magnolias

  Chapter 5. Family Secrets

  Chapter 6. Dna Sleuthing

  Chapter 7. A Universal Family Tree

  Chapter 8. Taking a Bite

  Part Three | Nature and Nurture

  Chapter 9. It Skips a Generation

  Chapter 10. An Impulse to Leap

  Chapter 11. The Idea of Heredity

  Chapter 12. Genes Expressing Themselves

  Part Four | Physicality

  Chapter 13. Grandma’s Eyes

  Chapter 14. The Family Face

  Chapter 15. Mugshots from Dna

  Part Five | Temperament

  Chapter 16. Grudging Kinship

  Chapter 17. Chasing the Dream

  Chapter 18. Emotional Recurrences

  Part Six | Inheritance

  Chapter 19. Heirlooms and Disinheritance

  Chapter 20. Monstrous Bequests

  Chapter 21. Not Racist

  Chapter 22. Disconnection

  Chapter 23. Unacknowledged Remains

  Part Seven | Spirituality

  Chapter 24. The Witch

  Chapter 25. Generational Curses

  Chapter 26. Veneration

  Chapter 27. Lineage Repair

  Part Eight | Creativity

  Chapter 28. The Namesake

  Chapter 29. Beneficial and Malignant Creativity

  Chapter 30. Roots

  Photo Insert

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  I look like my father, move like my father, talk like my father. When I was a child and we went places together, we were a full-size and miniature version of the same windup toy, our strides clipped and jolting, brows clenched in concentration, pale legs eerily glowing in the brilliant Miami sunlight. I am unmistakably my father’s daughter, but we’re estranged from each other. The last time I saw him, more than a decade ago at my grandfather’s funeral, he gave me a kiss. I don’t expect he’ll kiss me again.

  Thirteen hundred miles from me, still down in South Florida, my father is going about his day, and I can imagine it. He wakes before dawn, weighs himself, goes for a walk or a jog or rides his stationary bike. He eats breakfast if the scale permits and then he puts on a suit and drives to his law office. If he’s angry about something—and he usually is—upon arriving at work, he’ll pick up the phone and call around until he finds someone with the power to rectify the problem. Let’s hope they fix it right away. Otherwise, maybe tomorrow morning, but probably this afternoon and quite possibly this very hour, he will ring them up again and start shouting. Eventually they will do whatever my father wants, just to be free of him.

  I sympathize. I have loved my father and I have feared him, and I have lain awake in the dark late at night worrying what it means to have half his genome inside me, but I have never understood him. Sometimes I have felt that if I could just reach down far enough into myself, I would find the answers: what he wants, what he fears, what he loves. The older I get, the more I search backward, as though if I could know everyone who led to my father, who made him who he is, I would know him, too.

  He always stressed to me the importance of blood—being worthy of it, showing loyalty to it, protecting what he called the purity of it. He was, by many metrics, an intelligent man. He had a master’s in aerospace engineering on scholarship from an Ivy League university and was valedictorian of his law school class. But he considered slavery a benevolent institution that should never have been disbanded, and he viewed his and my fair skin as a mark of superiority.

  The world being what it was in my post–civil-rights-era youth, while my sister and I were growing up in 1970s Miami, my father didn’t air his prejudices in public but in private mandated separatism. “Birds of a feather flock together,” he was fond of saying. He said it at the breakfast table; he said it on the way to the pool; he said it while covering the faces of brown children in our storybooks with our mom’s nail polish. Sometimes he closed the pages before the paint dried so that they stuck together forever, leaving nursery rhymes unrhyming and stories filled with gaps. Once he led us onto the side porch to watch as he bashed a dark-skinned toy with a hammer until its head came off. Then he threw it in the garbage, where he said it belonged. He often recounted his triumph over being assigned, as an undergrad, to room with an Asian American student: “I marched right over to the housing office and told them that I wasn’t going to live with a Chinese.”

  I remember being eight or nine, traipsing with him around some dismal family parcel in the Mississippi Delta. My younger sister trailed behind and chill February rain drizzled down on us as our father instructed us to pick wet cotton bolls from dead branches to fill a burlap sack he found by the side of a barn. Leading us across the acres, he stopped at some vantage point over a creek or a gully. Our forebears, Confederate soldiers, were killed on or near that very land, I seem to recall his saying. Mostly I remember wanting to go home to my mom in Miami. She had opted out of this trip, as she opted out of all family vacations toward the end of my parents’ marriage, and I consoled myself by imagining her contempt.

  * * *

  —

  I came into being through a kind of homegrown eugenics project. My parents married not for love but because they believed they would have smart children together. This was my father’s idea, and over their brief courtship he persuaded my mom of its merits. Not uncoincidentally, nearly every early memory I have of my father involves letting him down in some way. He spanked me if I failed to finish everything on my plate in the half hour he allotted for each meal; he spanked me for being constipated; he spanked me for watching Sesame Street, because Black and white children played together on it. He didn’t spank me if I made less than an A on a math test but berated me for weeks afterward and made long-division quizzes to occupy my weekends.

  My dread of his wrath was a dull, continuous ache, a mental, physical, and emotional rheumatism that felt endemic to me. My mom tells me she came upon him, when I was eighteen months old, leaving a box in the middle of my room and telling me not to touch it, that I’d get a spanking if I did. She watched as he watched through a crack in the door until I did stick out my finger and make contact, whereupon he rushed in to deliver the discipline he’d promised. So I suppose the fear truly was formative.

  The first time I saw a family tree, a year or two after that Delta trip, my father carried it into my bedroom with tears in his eyes to illustrate why he and my mom should not and could not split up. Flicking through pages of unfamiliar names, he explained that nowhere in our branch of his grandmother’s tree, all the way back to a Revolutionary War lieutenant born in Virgin
ia in 1755, had anyone ever divorced. It would be a terrible scandal and would bring ignominy on his mother’s mother’s line and on our family—on our blood, he probably said—if he and my mom were the first. I’d never seen him cry before. Though I was always begging my mom to leave him, I cried, too.

  * * *

  —

  My mom, Sandy, was a blond-haired, amber-eyed whirlwind of charisma, creativity, and passion. She agreed with reluctance to date my father and then, convinced by the picture he painted, married him with pragmatic resolve six months later: They would have smart children; she would stay home and keep house; he would be a stable husband, parent, and provider, a corrective to her own fatherless childhood. My father didn’t know that she’d only recently kept more than thirty cats in her small two-bedroom house and been featured in the newspaper as president of the Dallas cat club. Membership had really taken off during her term, which isn’t surprising; she’s always been a gifted evangelist. By the time my father started courting her, she’d found homes for all but three cats. She’d also been divorced and followed up her first marriage with a soul-crushing affair. A week before my father introduced himself at her friend’s pool and asked to borrow her copy of Time, she downed a cocktail of iodine, sleeping pills, and lithium and climbed into the bathtub, intending to fall asleep and never wake up.

  Less than a decade later, my mom started a church in our living room, ministering to downtrodden people rather than stray animals. When we went to the grocery store, she wore a blue pin with white lettering that read, i got it!, “it” being Jesus, as she gladly told anyone who asked and many who didn’t. She had not been raised religious, but when her conversion came, it was swift and feverish. During the first few years of my life, before we got Saved, I was the cats, I was the church, I was her all-consuming project. She dedicated herself to grooming me for unspecified yet incontrovertible greatness. Her attention was like the sun, warm and life-giving, a little intoxicating, sorely missed when it went away.

  My parents’ marriage somehow lasted twelve years. My sister’s birth six years in didn’t halt their arguments, which overflowed into lakes of Corningware and casseroles and condiments and juices that my mom threw from the stove and fridge across the floor before roaring away in the car. Toward the end of their time together, my father would wake her in the night with a flashlight lit under his face. “And furthermore,” he would say, continuing an argument they’d been having hours earlier. He took my sister and me to the Presbyterian church down the street, the one he and my mom had agreed on in the short window before salvation became the driving force of her life, rather than allowing us to attend our mom’s services. Sometimes they had a screaming match in our front yard beforehand as we stood there in our Sunday finest. Once, she grabbed my father’s Bible and started tearing pages from it. “Go on to that dead church, with all those hypocrites!” she shouted, flinging the paper in handfuls as the Presbyterians drove past, gaping, in their expensive cars. My father seemed confused by her intractability, and his puzzlement puzzled me. Even as a child I could see that my mom’s enthusiasm rushed like water toward falls. That he could not see the futility of getting in the way made him seem naïve and vulnerable; it was one of few things that humanized him for me.

  While my father idolized his ancestors, my mother saw them (and her own) as figures of fun and fascination, ripe for storytelling, and as her religious fervor gathered steam she also came to see them as harbingers of trouble manifesting in our own lives. She believed in “generational curses,” an idea embraced by some evangelicals that any sinful or ungodly act, such as cheating on your spouse or on your taxes or reading horoscopes, could curse your family—yourself, your children, and your children’s children, on down the line—for generations. Demons literally infiltrated you, she said, and you passed them on. She believed that she and I and everyone else had been possessed the moment we were born. Our forebears had sinned in such a way as to open the door to a generational curse. She described seeing evil spirits everywhere: sitting on shoulders, lurking in eyes, wrapped around necks like boa constrictors—shoulders, eyes, and necks including mine. Exorcisms were ferocious events, held behind locked doors in other people’s houses. Sometimes, unbeknownst to my father, they were even held in ours.

  In the end, luckily for us all, my parents did divorce. Their union lives on, in some sense, in me. As a child, I felt alone in this predicament. Now I tend to see its ubiquity.

  Part One

  GENEALOGY

  Chapter 1

  A DOORWAY

  Over time the simplest facts of human existence have become to me the most unfathomable. We come from our parents, who came from their parents, who descended, as the Bible would put it, from their fathers and their fathers’ fathers. We begin with the sperm of one human being and the egg of another, and then we enter the world and become ourselves. Beyond all that’s encoded in our twenty-three pairs of chromosomes—our hair, eyes, and skin of a certain shade, our frame and stature, our sensitivity to bitter tastes—we are bundles of opinions and ambitions, of shortcomings and talents.

  Every one of our forebears had hopes and fears, good days and bad. All of them took actions, and were forced into situations, that shaped them and that led to us. Each person on earth is a particular individual consisting of parts from other particular individuals. The alchemy between our genes and our individuality is a mystery we keep trying to solve. In the West, many of us look to science and genetics for answers to these existential questions we’ll only ever answer in part. Why are some of us beautiful and some of us plain, some athletic and some clumsy, some depressive and some optimistic? How much can investigating our genes answer these questions, and what do our efforts to decode our destinies in this way say about us? In terms of DNA, we are no more related to most of our ancestors than we are to the people around us on a train or at a baseball game. And yet without each of the people who came before, who contributed to the genes that ultimately contributed to ours, we wouldn’t exist as we do now.

  Even as I focus on the biological family in this book, I don’t idealize it. I have a complicated relationship with some of my family members and no contact with my father. I also have a blended family. My stepdaughter, my only child, is one of the most important people in my life. My sister’s wonderful kids were adopted into my family. My stepfather and stepsister have both had a profound influence on me. And then there are my twin half-siblings, two of my closest biological relatives. They’re my father’s children, born thirty-nine years after me. I may never have the chance to know them. I share more interests and beliefs with my friends and in-laws than with many people whose genetics overlap with mine. I realize that families need not be bound by blood and also that having a blood relationship is no guarantee of affinity.

  Still, the influence of our genes, our ancestors, on the people we are is undeniable. All we have to do is look in the mirror to see that. Wondering what this inheritance means for us doesn’t mean we’re devaluing other important family relationships—or imbuing our ancestors, or their beliefs or practices, with an assumption of supremacy.

  * * *

  —

  Many of us trace our ancestors on genealogy sites that are increasingly entangled with genetic testing. But after booming for a decade, the market for consumer DNA tests seems to be bottoming out. The reduced demand has generated theories. Potential testers may be concerned about privacy; or the tests, which a user takes only once, may already have reached most interested consumers. But there’s been another shift in the culture, especially among young people: a recognition that the pull toward our ancestors is at least as rooted in spiritual yearning as it is in a desire to unearth empirical fact.