Transcriber: Shihwan Go Reviewer: David DeRuwe
I grew up in a leafy suburban town,
the kind of place where dads dressed in pinstripe suits, wingtip shoes,
and carried leather briefcases to their high-powered New York City jobs.
That describes my dad to a T.
He left our home every morning at exactly 6 a.m.
to catch the commuter express train into his Wall Street office,
and he didn't return until well after 7 o'clock every night.
By the time Saturday finally rolled around,
my Mom felt he seriously "owed her one"
for the long hours of childcare and housework
she put in during the week.
What was a traditional father to do?
Well, on many a weekend morning,
mine roused my sister and me from bed,
bundled us into the family station wagon,
and drove us back into New York City where he'd get a little extra work done.
(Laughter)
I still remember the nearly-deserted streets
as we emerged from the gloom of the Holland Tunnel.
My dad's office was deserted as well.
By the time we stepped off that elevator and through that frosted glass door
with its company logo etched in 19th-century type,
we entered a hushed and mysterious world,
filled with row upon row of empty desks, as far as the eye can see.
It was cool and dim and quiet.
A cathedral of money.
I don't know what my dad thought we were actually doing
as he pored over stock reports and client portfolios
in his corner office at the far edge of that huge room.
There was no form of entertainment for two little girls,
and he should have realized something was up
because we never, ever complained!
(Laughter)
And here's the reason why:
Slowly, methodically, and ever so quietly,
we were opening each and every desk drawer.
(Laughter)
Our mission?
Candy! Lots and lots of candy!
(Laughter)
Forget everything you’ve ever heard about those three-martini lunches.
Stockbrokers and their secretaries
fuel themselves on huge quantities of sugar!
(Laughter)
For us, every weekend was like Halloween.
(Laughter)
Sometimes when my sister and I were still high
on Milky Ways and Tootsie Rolls and Butterfingers,
my dad would come and fetch us,
and we would walk around the corner and past historic Trinity Church
where politicians and leaders like Alexander Hamilton are buried.
The most eye-catching monument in that cemetery
is the statue of a man dressed in judicial robes and a wig,
his face fixed in a permanent frown.
Dad jokingly called him "Old Pigeon Head"
(Laughter)
because there was always at least one bird perched atop him when we walked by.
It wasn't until several years later that I realized "Old Pigeon Head"
was my relative.
(Laughter)
The politician, jurist, and member of the 3rd United States Congress,
the Honorable John Watts.
"Old Pigeon Head," it turns out,
was part of New York City's early colonial elite.
His grandfather emigrated from Scotland in 1698,
established a thriving mercantile business,
married into an influential Dutch-English family,
fathered 10 children,
and built a mansion and farm
that encompassed 131 acres of lower Manhattan.
As a teenager, I heard about all the many impressive things
that "Pigeon Head" and my other male ancestors had done.
Founding New York's first library
and the lottery which eventually became the Stock Exchange
and Columbia University, then known as Kings College,
and Anglican Trinity Church
and many, many other important civic and cultural organizations
that still exist today.
But for reasons I couldn't fully articulate at the time,
I found the weight of all this history a burden I simply did not want to bear.
So after college on the East Coast,
I moved as far away as I could get to Southern California
where no one cared or even asked where I was from
or what my family had or had not done in the distant past.
I started a job as a curator, married, and had two kids.
At 20, I would go and visit my folks every now and again,
but 20 years on, I consider myself a proud Californian.
(Laughter)
and that was that.
Then by chance one evening in 2008, I happened to watch a documentary
on public television called "Traces of the Trade: A Story of the Deep North."
In it, a member of an old-line Rhode Island family,
one that bore an uncanny resemblance to my own,
discovers that her ancestor
ran the country's largest slave trading operation,
bringing 10,000 Africans to the Americas bound in chains.
"More than half a million of their ancestors could be alive today,"
she said.
I was confused.
I thought slavery was a "Southern Thing."
Now to many of you, this may sound hopelessly naive,
but at that moment, I was like a child
who'd been handed a piece of information she simply could not understand.
I was like "Wait a minute!"
I thought Northerners were the good guys
in this whole slavery and Civil War chapter, right?
I mean, they may not all have been fire-breathing abolitionists,
but wasn't that what the American Civil War was all about?
The North fighting the slave-owning South?
I kept watching.
And a more deeply troubling and personal question began to emerge.
This family, this Bristol, Rhode Island family helped fuel
a colonial economy built on sugar and rum.
The Watts family had traded along the Atlantic seaboard
and down into what was then the West Indies
in textiles, sugar, and rum.
Was that the whole story?
The next morning, I sought out a book of letters
by my seventh-great-grandfather, another John Watts.
The correspondence, the originals of which are at the New York Historical Society,
primarily recount his business dealings between 1762 and 1765.
It didn't take long before one letter in particular caught my eye.
John Watts's contemporaries praised his pragmatism and good economic sense.
And here he offered it in a letter to Gedney Clarke,
a major slave trader in Barbados,
who'd asked for his advice,
"For this market," he wrote, "the slaves must be young,
the younger the better, if not quite children.
Those advanced in age will never do.
I should think a cargo of them,
none exceeding 30,
should fetch 50 pounds a head.
Gross Sales.
Males are best."
I read that letter.
I closed the book.
And I put it back on the shelf.
(Sighs)
For seven years, I tried to push the terrible fact of that letter away.
I didn't talk about it with anyone.
I tried not to think about it.
And when I did, I was consumed by guilt and shame.
And fear.
An inexplicable fear of being found out.
By whom, I'm not even sure.
Then in 2015,
a man named Bryan Stevenson spoke at my church.
A lawyer, civil rights activist,
and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative,
Stevenson has spent his adult career passionately and courageously
defending the rights of those who Jesus called "the least of these" -
the marginalized, the outcasts,
the mentally ill, the incarcerated,
and those on death row, the majority of whom are African-American men.
"To do justice in this country," Stevenson said,
"we need to change the narrative of race.
I don't believe we are truly free.
I don't believe we have been liberated from our history of racial inequality."
And then he said something that pierced my soul,
"I don't believe the great evil of American slavery
was involuntary servitude," he continued.
"I believe that it was the ideology of white supremacy
that white people made up to legitimate enslavement."
That, that right there was my family he was talking about.
Generations of silence about our success,
success we never, ever openly spoke of,
merely alluded to as a birthright,
came at a profound and still very present racial cost.
I knew at that very moment, I needed to face my family's history,
no matter where it might lead.
I called a second cousin, an avid genealogist,
hoping she'd allay my fears.
"Oh, Jenny," she said, "it's so much worse than you think."
(Laughter)
Thanks, thanks.
So little by little the research began.
It was like throwing a pebble into a lake
and watching an ever-widening arc of concentric circles.
First circle.
The family history of slave-trading and owning in New York,
a city that for much of the 18th century was second only to Charleston
in slave population.
By 1737, one in five New Yorkers were black, the majority enslaved.
Second circle.
Watts's holdings included huge swaths of land
into New Jersey and upstate New York,
thousands of acres that needed tending.
His daughter, Ann, lamenting the loss of property to the Colonists,
seized after the Revolution,
spoke of the "Black Herd" at a New Jersey property.
"I wish you would dispose of the Black Herd," she wrote her brother.
"They are like a moth fretting a very fine garment.
There is neither attachment nor gratitude in them.
If we could sell them at auction for what they would fetch,
it would be better than keeping them."
Another circle.
The tentacles of upper class intermarriage
that melded and solidified fortunes and slave ownership.
Family surnames included
Delanceys,
Livingstons,
Depeysters,
Nicolls,
Izards,
Deas.
Slave owners all.
As I began, tentatively at first,
to talk about this quest with white friends and acquaintances,
some of whom are important American History scholars.
Almost to a person, they said the very same thing to me,
"Jenny, it's not your fault!"
That response really took me aback.
It seems like a largely convenient way to shut down a more difficult conversation
about race in America.
It's accurate to say that my family's history is not my fault.
But making this about present-day guilt or innocence misses the mark.
This is a quest that's rooted in finding truth, seeking justice,
and atoning for generational wrongs.
My journey along this path has taken me to an organization
called "Coming to the Table,"
in which, each month,
descendants of the enslaved and descendants of the enslavers
listen to one another wrestle with those bitter truths.
We come together in a circle of confidence and agree to follow some basic rules,
which we call "Touchstones" that include the following:
Listen deeply.
Try to hear the feelings behind another person’s words.
No fixing.
It's not anybody's job to correct another person's perception of reality
or set another person straight.
Identify your assumptions and suspend judgments.
This has been the hardest realization for me of all:
is that I'm awash in assumptions about other people
that are generally false.
And finally, when someone else's truth challenges your own,
try turning to wonder.
"I wonder what brought her to this place?"
and, "I wonder what my reaction teaches me?"
Over the past couple of years, my truth has been under siege,
and my emotions have run the gamut from frustration to anger
to exhilaration to weariness to hope.
And what have I learned?
Mostly that this is hard and deeply humbling work.
I don't leave those conversations behind when I leave that circle each month.
I can't.
Those stories and emotions, spoken in confidence,
continue to alter the way in which I see the world.
This work has made an impact on every area of my life.
It's changed what I read and what I think about,
how I spend my time,
how I approach my job as a curator and the projects that I choose,
how and where I spend my money,
and my friendships, both the old and the many that are new.
This journey has been deeply painful, yes,
but it's also brought me immense joy.
So I look back at "Old Pigeon Head"
(Laughter)
standing in that cemetery,
and I no longer wonder why he is so sad.
My ancestors helped build a country on a social and economic foundation
that was cracked and fractured and profoundly unstable from the start.
A foundation that enslaved many to benefit a few,
especially me and my kin.
This is the narrative
I want my teenage daughter, Helen,
and my 12-year-old son, the latest in a long line of John Wattses,
(Laughter)
to absorb and truly understand.
And so I turn to wonder.
I wonder what would happen if people of privilege, like me,
committed to finding the truth of our nation's racial past.
Together, we would need to listen deeply;
set aside our assumptions, judgments, and fears;
honor other people's realities;
and work to rectify past wrongs.
I wonder what a country like that would look like?
I'm not sure.
Let's find out.
Thank you.
(Applause)
(Cheers)