[...] when I trawled for their names on the 1860 census I came up empty. No enslaved African American was named on an antebellum federal census; they were counted, eighty to a page, and the count was made, by 1860 at least, by supplying the rough age, sex, and color of the individual, either black or mulatto. Prior to the search, it had made sense to me that three generations back I might face a wall of silence. But when I discovered the simple facts, witnessed the script on the census ledger, and interpreted the hash marks in a column, the historical record took on another kind of life altogether. It seemed—well, the word I would use is close: uncomfortably present, not in the past, not safely tucked away at all.

When black Americans who barely knew the legal names of their own grandparents—people whose ancestry dates back to American shores for ten or eleven generations—look back to the era of bondage, we do this from the perspective of the families that we know today. The now-grandfatherly male cousins we have who have never, in all of their lives, had regular employment. The people known by “street” names, who never grew into adult names. The sisters, aunts, and female cousins raising children in poverty, sometimes with genteel flair, sometimes not. We are seeing immigrants of every hue offer lip service to our historic plight, take advantage of the legislation that we pioneered for two centuries, and then pass us by. We are thinking about the mental illness that seems as much a style as a neurological disorder. We are thinking about black people using illegal drugs and frowned-upon remedies for a hundred years for the same reason that tens of millions of Americans have sought prescriptions from physicians for relief. We are thinking about people who, for as long as they can recall, have experienced a simmering anger that was sometimes addressed with alcohol and narcotics, an anger that became a kind of manufactured commodity that fed an industry of incarceration, security, and hospitalization. We are thinking about neglected communities and decaying houses and public services that operate under multiple standards. We are thinking that in every new place we have ever traveled in the United States, we found a community with posh homes, quaint comfortable businesses that catered to desires we had yet to fully form, and regular traditions that we found enchanting and seductive—and yet just on the other side of the tracks were the crumbling huts for us. Even when these wore fresh coats of lavender or lime or canary or fuchsia paint, it didn’t ease our sight of blemish on the country that willed it.

ineluctable conjunctions of the present and the past