Category Archives: Owning Our Truth

Life, Owning Our Truth

A patio by any other name

In Houston today, an elderly couple sat, seemingly elegantly from my street-level vantage point, at a small table on the second floor open hallway of a run-down apartment building and appeared to be relishing with quiet joy the crisp, sun-dappled afternoon breeze.

In Cabo San Lucas several years ago at one of the world’s most exclusive resorts, a young couple sat, demonstrably well-off, at a small table on a second floor patio perched above a posh spa, and jabbed their dainty forks into fresh ceviche washed down with champagne, and appeared to be bored by the breezes that carried soft stirrings of the Pacific and caressed them as they went through the motions of yet another afternoon in paradise.

At home, my bathtub–where bubbles frolic and lavender scents emerge–is more than eighty years old. When I am submerged in it, the sensation I have is no less embracing than the one I experienced at the exclusive resort in Cabo San Lucas.

There, in the sunken tub three times the size and one fraction the age of the one in my home, the expectations borne of promises of an otherworldly experience that couldn’t possibly live up to the reality of, at the end of the day, just another bath, deprived my immersion in this elegant, watery cocoon of any beyond-the-ordinary appeal.

It’s all a matter of perspective.

Family, Life, Owning Our Truth

Reckoning

Today, on the first day of Black History Month, I am reckoning. No, not exactly reckoning. Rather, I am beginning to reckon with the need to reckon with the tangle of my courageous, industrious Dutch settler ancestors and the blight on mankind that is slavery.

My tenth great grandfather held an esteemed position within New Netherland, and he was employed on behalf of the Dutch West India Company. The Dutch West India Company participated in the cross-Atlantic transport of enslaved people. The records reveal that much to be true.

My tenth great grandfather was also a member of the original Council of Twelve in the brand new colony of New Amsterdam at the southern tip of what today is Manhattan. He was a successful miller, and a successful miller in the 1640s, in order to feed a colony, would have required many hands. I am beginning to reckon with the realization that many of those hands might have belonged to enslaved people.

I am grateful to the New Netherland Institute–among others–for doing the painful, necessary work of bringing to light the role that the Dutch played in slavery in early America.

Pride in the resilience of my Dutch ancestors can absolutely coexist with acknowledgment of their likely violation of the inalienable right of each man, woman, and child to the dignity and agency of his or her own life. For the pride in my ancestry to find its rightful place, I need to reckon with the truth, as bent and crooked as the years may have left that truth. And the truth begins with a search. The first day of Black History Month is a fine time to begin.