An unexpected family photograph leads Dionne Ford to uncover the stories of her enslaved female ancestors, reclaim their power, and begin to heal Countless Black Americans descended from slavery are related to the enslavers who bought and sold their ancestors. Among them is Dionne Ford, whose great grandmother was the last of six children born to a Louisiana cotton broker and the enslaved woman he received as a wedding gift. What shapes does this kind of intergenerational trauma take? In these pages, which move between her inner life and deep research, Ford tells us. It manifests as alcoholism and post-traumatic stress; it finds echoes in her own experience of sexual abuse at the hands of a relative, and in the ways in which she builds her own interracial family. To heal, Ford tries a wide range of therapies, lifestyle changes, and recovery meetings. “Anything,” she writes, “to keep from going back there.” But what she learns is that she needs to go back there, to return to her female ancestors, and unearth what she can about them to start to feel whole.
Author
Dionne Ford is author of the forthcoming memoir Go Back and Get It (Bold Type Books 2023) and co-editor of the anthology Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (Rutgers University). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, LitHub, New Jersey Monthly, Rumpus and Ebony among other publications and won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists and the Newswomen’s Club of New York. In 2018, she received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and a BA from Fordham University where she is an adjunct professor. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and daughters.
