A few months ago a friend of mine who writes for She Loves Magazine (Shelovesmagazine) and I were having a reading/writing day in the sun at Sarphatipark. She was looking for inspiration, and I verbally processing like always. I have recently began reading a Trilogy based during the Civil War and it's been stirring up the Abolitionist in me. As I was sharing with her about my new read I mentioned a story that I had only shared with one other soul before her, and now I feel compelled to share it with the rest of the world.
Last year I became very interested in my family heritage. I know thats a hype nowadays and also wanted to jump on the bandwagon. I knew coming from a white family in America that there was the possibility of finding out an ugly truth regarding my ancestors. Slavery. But naively, I assumed because this area is so dear to my heart that my family would be excluded from this horrendous, inhuman act. I think we all would like to believe that. But as most of us know, the truth can sometimes be a gruesome thing to bear.
My ancestors had owned a plantation in the South and it just seemed inevitable. I remember the moment I read the words. I had come across a will, and it was dividing up which "negroes" would go to who once they passed on. You know that feeling when you're woken up to a foreign noise in the middle of the night and that instant fear runs through your veins? That's exactly what it felt like. My stomach knotted and I just felt so ashamed, so embarrassed. I didn't want anyone to know. How could my family be apart of something that was so evil? I kept it hidden for several days just internalizing it. Then, I just needed to share it with someone and my colleague/roommate walked in the room. What she said in response gave me the first hope since reading the news.
"But the work you're doing now [as an abolitionist] is restoring the wrongs your ancestors had done in the past."
Whoa. Talk about redemption. I instantly remembered one of my favorite passages in scripture: Isaiah 58. If you're passionate about justice, you love this chapter. Verse 12 stood out to me in that moment:
"You shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
the restorer of streets to dwell in."
It's not about what your family has done in the past. Yes, we suffer from their choices even choices made from many generations back. But the beautiful part of this story is that we can be the ones to change it for the generations that come after us. Let us not look to the past wrongs that have been done, but to the here and now, to the future that will affect us, those around us and our children's children. God loves to restore. His entire plan was based around redemption. And He also desires to use us to redeem the shadows of our past; both from the wrongs we've done, and the wrongs done by our ancestors.
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