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As she approached the age of 40, Dionne Ford, co-editor of the 2019 anthology Slavery’s Descendants, wondered how she had become “an invisible woman.” Who was she behind the mask she’d created to survive white supremacy and evade her struggles with mental illness? In Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing, Ford, a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellow, skillfully blends illuminating research and moving prose to describe her path to self-liberation.
Ford’s quest began when she discovered an early 1890s photo of her great-great-grandmother Temple “Tempy” Burton; Tempy’s enslaver, Colonel W.R. Stuart; and the colonel’s wife, Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s family were North Carolina plantation owners who bequeathed Tempy to the couple as a wedding gift. Tempy’s six children with Stuart included Ford’s great-grandmother Josephine, who was born a decade after emancipation. Although an internet search had uncovered this ancestral information, there were still considerable gaps in Ford’s family history.
Driven by the need to understand and contextualize Tempy’s life, Ford mined genealogy records, newspaper articles, county archives, ancestry message boards and the murky memories of relatives. Ultimately, Ford didn’t unearth clean-cut answers. The reasons Tempy stayed with her enslavers well after slavery had been abolished remained opaque, as did the interpersonal dynamics of Tempy’s relationships with the couple. But the intergenerational project cracked open the darkness of Ford’s trauma, which manifested as PTSD and alcoholism. Through efforts that often challenged her comfort, Ford restored the silenced voices of her ancestors, connected with distant cousins who were propelled by the same mission, and learned how to heal from childhood sexual abuse inflicted by a male relative.
Go Back and Get It is as deeply empathetic as it is introspective. With this striking work, Ford magnifies the interconnectedness of pain and forgiveness, cruelty and reconciliation. In order to regain autonomy—to feel at home in her body and to fully own her Blackness—she had to confront the dead rather than erase them. “Remember and recover,” Ford writes. “Re-member. Put yourself back together again and again.”