Among those who gave the lie to the notion of white unanimity—which notion has served to minimize the culpability of slave owners—we find Angelina and Sarah Grimké, John Fee, Ellsberry Ambrose, John Brown (and his entire family), and literally thousands more whose names are lost to history. Indeed, if we look hard enough we find at least one such person in my own family, Elizabeth Angel, whose opposition to the institution of slavery led her to convince her own family to free their chattel and to oppose enslavement at every turn. Though Elizabeth’s connection to the McLeans—her daughter was the wife of my great-great grandfather, John Lilburn McLean—and her opposition to an institution in which they were implicated might seem worthy of some exploration, in the official family history it is missing altogether. Rather than hold Elizabeth up as a role model for her bravery (which would have had the effect of condemning the rest of the family by comparison), the cousin who compiled the McLean biography passed over such details in favor of some random and meaningless commentary about the loveliness of her haberdashery, or some such thing.
But no excuses, no time-bound rationalizations, and no paeans to our ancestors’ kind and generous natures or how they “loved their slaves as though they were family” can make it right. Our unwillingness to hold our people and ourselves to a higher moral standard—a standard in place at least since the time of Moses, for it was he to whom God supposedly gave those commandments including the two about stealing and killing—brings shame to us today. It compounds the crime by constituting a new one: the crime of innocence claimed, against all visible evidence to the contrary.
In truth, even those family members who didn’t own other human beings had been implicated in the nation’s historic crimes. This was true, indeed, for most any southern family in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. State authorities made sure of that, by passing laws that enlisted the lower-income and middling whites in the service of white supremacy. In 1753, Tennessee passed its Patrol Act, which required whites to search slave quarters four times each year for guns or other contraband. By the turn of the century, and at which time large parts of my own family had made the trek to the state, these searches had been made into monthly affairs. By 1806, most all white men were serving on regular slave patrols for which they were paid a dollar per shift, and five dollars as a bonus for each runaway slave they managed to catch.
Throughout the period of my family’s settling in middle Tennessee, laws required that all whites check the passes of blacks they encountered to make sure they weren’t runaway slaves. Any white refusing to go along faced severe punishment. With no record of such racial apostasy having made it into our family lore—and surely such an example of brazen defiance would have been hard to keep quiet had it occurred—it seems safe to say that the McLeans, the Deanes, the Neelys, and the Carters all went along, regardless of their direct financial stake in the maintenance of the chattel system.
Likewise, although whites were members of nearly thirty antislavery societies in Tennessee by 1827, there is nothing to suggest that any of my family belonged to one. Nor is there anything to indicate that my kin objected to the uprooting of the Cherokee in the 1830s, even though many whites in the eastern part of the state did. And when Tennessee’s free blacks were stripped of the right to vote in 1834, or when the first Jim Crow laws were passed, also in Tennessee, in 1881, there is nothing in our family history that would portend an objection of any kind. In reading over family documents, handed-down stories and tales of all sorts, it is nothing if not jarring to note that race is almost completely absent from their discussions, which is to say that for so many, white supremacy was so taken for granted as to be hardly worth a fleeting moment of consideration, let alone the raising of one’s voice in objection. You can read their accounts of the time, and never know that you were reading about families in the United States, a society of institutionalized racial terror, where there were lynchings of black men taking place weekly, where the bodies of these men would be not merely hanged from trees but also mutilated, burned with blowtorches, the ears and fingers lopped off to be sold as souvenirs.
That was the way this country was when my family (and many of yours) were coming up. And most white folks did nothing to stop it. They knew exactly what was going on—lynchings were advertised openly in newspapers much like the county fair—and yet the white voices raised in opposition to such orgiastic violence were so weak as to be barely audible. We knew, but we remained silent, collaborating until the end.
In marked contrast to this tale, in which European immigrants came to the new country and were immediately welcomed into the emerging club of whiteness, we have the story of the Wises (not our original name), whose patriarchal figure, Jacob, came to the United States from Russia to escape the Czar’s oppression of Jews. Theirs was similar to the immigrant stories of so many other American Jews from Eastern Europe. You’ve heard the drill: they came here with nothing but eighteen cents and a ball of lint in their pockets, they saved and saved, worked and worked, and eventually climbed the ladder of success, achieving the American dream within a generation or two.
Whether or not it had been as bleak as all that, it certainly hadn’t been easy. Jacob’s arrival in 1907 was not actually his first time to make it to the United States. He had entered New York once before, in 1901, but had had the misfortune of cruising into the harbor only ten days or so after an American of Eastern European descent, Leon Czolgosz, had made the fatal decision to assassinate President William McKinley. McKinley had lingered for a week after the shooting, and died just a few days before the arrival of my great-grandfather’s boat. As the saying goes, timing is everything—a lesson Jacob would learn, sitting in steerage and coming to realize that he had been literally just a few days too late. So back he went, along with the rest of his shipmates, turned away in the shadow of Lady Liberty by a wave of jingoistic panic, anti-immigrant nativism, hysteria born of bigotry, and a well nurtured, carefully cultivated skill at scapegoating those who differed from the Anglo-Saxon norm. That Czolgosz claimed to be an anarchist, and thus his shooting of McKinley came to be seen as a political act, and not merely the lashing out of a madman, sealed Jacob’s fate for sure. To the authorities, all Eastern Europeans were to be viewed for a time as anarchists, as criminals, and later as communists. Czolgosz was to be executed, and tens of thousands of Eastern Europeans and other “undesirable” ethnics would be viciously oppressed in the following years.
The mind of a twenty-first-century American is scarcely equipped to contemplate just how long the trip back to Russia must have been, not merely in terms of hours and days, but as measured by the beating of one’s heart, the slow and subtle escape of all optimism from one’s tightened lungs. How painful it must have been, how omnicidal for Jacob, meaning the evisceration of everything he was, of everything that mattered to him—the extermination of hope. Though not of the same depth, nor coupled with the same fear as that which characterized the journey of Africans in the hulls of slave ships (after all, he was still a free man, and his journey, however aborted, had been voluntary), there must have been points where the magnitude of his despair was intense enough to make the distinction feel as though it were one without much meaning.
So he returned to Minsk, in modern-day Belarus, for another six years, it taking that long for him to save up enough money to make the journey again. When he finally came back, family in tow, it would be for keeps. His desire for America was that strong, borne of the belief that in the new world things would be different, that he would be able to make something of himself and give his family a better life. The Wise family continued to grow after his arrival, including, in 1919, the birth of Leon Wise, whose name was later shortened to Leo—my grandfather.
Jacob was the very definition of a hard worker. The stereotype of immigrants putting in eighteen hours a day is one that, although it did not begin with him in mind, surely was to be kept alive by him and others like him. There is little doubt that he toiled and sacrificed, and in the end there was a great payoff indeed: his children did well, with my grandfather graduating from a prestigious university, Vanderbilt, in 1942. What’s more, the family business would grow into something of a fixture in the Nashville community that the Wise family would come to call home.
But lest we get carried