Histories and heritage have always been complicated at best. Like everything else that’s human, there’s a constant teetering balance between the ugly and the beautiful [a lengthy but well-intentioned thread]…

On my father’s paternal side alone there are ten relatives who fought for the Confederacy. One, Nathaniel Rankin, a member of North Carolina’s “Gaston Blues,” was wounded in the head on June 27, 1862 in Virginia.

He was sent back home to Charlotte, North Carolina where I grew up and where doctors removed a Minié ball that was lodged in the roof of his mouth. He died three weeks later of infection.

On my mother’s side a man named Jim Barnes wrote An Autobiography Of An Ex-Confederate Soldier in which he talks about the surrender at Appomattox, being taken prisoner, and shipped to Point Lookout.

“When I was in prison I was allowed to fish in the Chesapeake Bay,” he wrote. “My tackled wasn’t very good, but I caught some nice fish.” Hard for a man like me to deny he’s kin.

I remember the first time I realized, unlike what I’d been told and taught, that some of my family were slave owners. I remember the first time I read each and every sentence:

“Alexander Roseman owned nine slaves.”

“Adoniram Patterson had several hundred acres of land and nine slaves in 1860.”

“Benjamin Fisher owned one slave in 1850 – a black female, age 70.”

I remember the look on my father’s face when he made an off-hand comment while we were traveling that none of his family owned slaves, how they were too poor, and I informed him that wasn’t the case.

I recognized the look of pain and disgust and confusion on his face because I’d felt the same. Those three simple sentences had ripped apart every single thing I ever thought I knew about where I came from.

But honestly I don’t need to travel that far into my family’s past to dig up examples of white supremacy.

To this day my father will say that the most racist thing he ever witnessed first hand was ushering Granny Akridge,

my great grandmother and an in-law to my father, through Atlanta to a bridal shower where she swung her purse to clear the sidewalk screaming, "Get out of my way, ni**ers!"

She told him not to worry that if anything should happen she would shoot them, and he wholeheartedly believed that she would, knowing that she had a pistol with her.

Meanwhile, in this same family history, I can tell you about John Patterson, a blacksmith who took root near Rocky Face Mountain in North Carolina before the Revolutionary War.

In 1780 at age 21, John joined General Gate's army as a private and fought in the Battle of Camden, South Carolina, where he was wounded and taken prisoner.

His pension records say that after he was released he couldn’t find a way home and that his mother tore out on horseback to rescue him. Mother and son rode the 150 miles back to family land one grasping the other.

I could tell you about grandfathers on both sides who fought in World War II, one taking the iron crosses off of each and every Nazi he killed, me carrying those medals in a box in my closet to this day.

I could tell you about grandmothers who worked cotton and tobacco as children, textile mills as adults, worked until their hands bled and never once let it strip the smiles from their faces because they were far too strong for that.

I could tell you about my Papa who was a Golden Gloves champion boxer in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the man my mother says she only ever saw cry once in her entire life: the day that Nat King Cole passed away.

I could tell you about sitting on the pew as a child and having my Granny slip me hard candy while she listened to the message being given by our Black female minister.

The point of all this is to say, you don’t get to cherry-pick the best parts of your heritage and completely ignore the blood on your hands. You can own all of it or none of it but you don’t get to just have the one.

No one has to be proud of everything their past entails. You can recognize the ugly, embrace that it’s your history and where you come from, try to understand the implications of that, and in the same breath be absolutely appalled by what that history entails.

For too long white people have bought into the lie that there are no stains on our carpets. We have refused to clean our own houses.

So again, you don’t have to air your dirty laundry but you should at least recognize that’s why your house stinks. You can pinch your nose, turn away and go sit out on the porch for awhile to forget, but until you unpack all that shit it’s just going to be waiting for you inside.