When Lisa Sharon Harper em\u00adbarked on a pilgrimage to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where her enslaved ancestors arrived from West Africa in the 1680s, she had been researching her family tree for decades. This was no easy task when so many earlier generations had tried to forget the past.<\/p>\n
Her quest to understand where and who she came from was made difficult by the reality of trauma, family separation, and the deprivation of basic human rights for enslaved people and their descendants. \u201cPrevious generations did not have the luxury of memory,\u201d Harper says. Only White births, marriages, and deaths were reliably recorded by historians and census takers. Scant information gleaned from living relatives\u2014a few names and places and hints of Cherokee or Chickasaw ancestry, including a beautiful beaded necklace she inherited from her grandfather\u2014were the bread crumbs she followed.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t until Harper joined Ancestry.com in 2010 that she was able to confirm the existence of those who had seemed as myths to her, \u201clike the Greeks spoke of Hermes and Dionysus,\u201d traceable to a slave schedule listing the human property of a White man named Jonathan Lawrence. Black life and death were not worth recording, she emphasizes, except as property gained or lost.<\/p>\n
Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n Lisa Sharon Harper\u2019s new book \u201cFortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World and How to Repair it All\u201d uncovers America\u2019s racial roots by tracing Harper's own family history. — Kathryn Post (@kathrynmaepost) February 4, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n
I spoke with @lisasharper<\/a> about the book, set to release next week: https:\/\/t.co\/oV5YR5fxrk<\/a><\/p>\n