Restored cabins, Cross Keys, South Carolina

The last stop on our just-ended southern drive was a personal one for me. A few days ago, we moved inland in search of the town of Cross Keys, in western South Carolina - not much more than a crossroads now, a wilderness when my ancestors settled there in the 1760’s… four families on either side of the Tyger River near the Padgett’s Creek Quaker Meeting and the Padgett’s Creek Baptist Church: the Jacksons, the Murphys, the Pearsons, and the Burns. I have their genes. A cluster of log buildings dating from those early days stand on the side of the road, preserved by the town. It was hard to imagine any one of the families I come from living in these small, dark buildings, even harder to imagine the land they cleared, and the lives they led at the lazy river’s edge.

My sister Lauren has spent a lifetime collecting bits and pieces of the family history and shared this when she sent me to this place: By the early 1800’s, some of the Burns had moved from Cross Keys to Ohio, along with many local Quaker friends and relatives, allegedly due to their objection to slavery, while some from those families who stayed behind became slave owners as early as 1810. Though their wills indicate that they didn’t own many, and that they at least had the decency to request that enslaved families not be separated “if possible to avoid it,” there is no getting around the truth of it: this is one of several branches of my family that once owned enslaved human beings. I thought about that, too, as I stood at the crossroads looking back in time.

Ironically, on the very morning we set out for Cross Keys, President Trump issued an executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” and directing the removal of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology.” He’s pretty clear about what he meant. Having just visited the Gulluh Museum in Georgetown, and the Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston, as well as several historic plantation museums on our route, I had, for the past week, been immersed more fully than before in the reality and weight of what slavery meant to my fellow Americans, what travesty it wrought. And though it made me feel uncomfortable, those experiences and those truths helped me better understand the privileges of my own family and the responsibility I have going forward to make my country heal and, above all, to tell and live with the truth. I do not want these human stories buried. I do not want to “white wash” American history. It is flawed. We all - one way or another - are flawed. We must do better. But it is the truth unburied and unvarnished that gets us to that better place. Not lies. Not platitudes. The truth.

Old Slave Mart Museum, Charleston, South Carolina

I knew when I headed for Cross Keys, that it would take more than a log cabin along the road to connect me with my ancestors and our shared history, yet it felt good to breathe the air and kick the grass in a field the Jacksons/Murphys/Pearsons/Burns may have cleared to make for themselves an American life - sometimes, truth be told, at the expense of others. I don’t want anyone to varnish their truth or tell me how I’m supposed to feel about their choices - and my own - 200-odd years down the road. This is our America, however flawed, painful, and glorious it may be. For heavens sakes, we owe it to ourselves and to those who lived and suffered before us: let the story be told.

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