Rachel Swarns is one of the smartest reporters to ever work in Miami... or as a foreign correspondent anywhere. About two decades ago, she arrived here to write at the Miami Herald, where she covered Hurricane Andrew and the LA Riots.
In 1995, she headed off to the New York Times, where she has written about national politic and reported on immigration and presidential campaigns. She has also been a foreign correspondent for the Times, reporting from Russia, Cuba and Southern Africa, where she served as the Johannesburg bureau chief.
This Sunday, Swarns reads from her recently published book, "American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama" at the Miami Book Fair International. She'll appear at 3 p.m. at Miami Dade College (Building 2, 1st Floor, Room 2106, NE 300 NE Second Avenue). What follows is an excerpt from the book.
Freedom came to Jonesboro, Georgia, in that spring of 1865, during those hardest of hard times. The town was in ruins, its buildings shattered by cannon fire. The fledgling green fields had been decimated by drought and hunger rippled through the land. Everywhere Southerners turned, people were moving. Many newly freed slaves were dropping their hoes and packing their sparse belongings. They were walking away from the parched earth and the white people who had owned them, overseen them, or marginalized them.
Melvinia, a dark-eyed young woman with thick wavy hair and cocoa-colored skin, watched them go. Like all of them, she knew the miseries of slavery. She had toiled in bondage for most of her existence. She had been torn away from her family and friends when she was a little girl. She had been impregnated by a white man when she was as young as fourteen. Yet when the Civil War ended, when she could finally savor her own liberty, she decided to stay. She decided to build a new life right where she was, on the outskirts of that devastated town, on a farm near the white man who had fathered her firstborn son.
She was barely in her twenties and silenced by the forced illiteracy of slavery. Even if she had wanted to, she could not have put pen to paper to reveal the name of the father of her child, to spell it out in the permanence of black ink. This was a different kind of affirmation. Her choice was her clue. A census taker would record her address after the war, memorializing her decision in his curly script. His notes would serve as something of a handwritten message that would survive, untouched, for more than one hundred years. It would be the only message Melvinia would ever leave.
Nearly a decade would pass before she gathered up her children and headed north on her own. Black people walked then, sometimes for miles and miles on those dusty, country roads, or squeezed onto the crowded, rattling railroad cars that chugged between small towns in rural, up-country Georgia. Sometime in the 1870s, Melvinia put some sixty miles between herself and her past. And somewhere along the way, she decided to keep the truth about her son's heritage to herself.
People who knew her say she never talked about her time in slavery or about the white man who so profoundly shaped her formative years as a teenager and a young mother. She never discussed who he was or what happened between them, whether she was a victim of his brutality or a mistress he treated affectionately or whether she loved and was loved in return.
She went her way and he went his, and, just like that, their family split right down the middle. Their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren--some black, some white, and some in between--scattered across the country as the decades passed, separated by the color line and the family's fierce determina- tion to step beyond its painful roots in slavery.
Contemporary America emerged from that multiracial stew, a nation peopled by the heirs of that agonizing time who struggled and strived with precious little knowledge of their own origins. Melvinia's descendants would soar to unprecedented heights, climbing from slavery to the pinnacle of American power in five generations.
Her great-great-great-granddaughter, Michelle Obama, would become the nation's first African American First Lady. Yet Mrs. Obama would take that momentous step without knowing Melvinia's name or the identity of the white man who was her great-great-great-grandfather. For more than a century, Melvinia's secret held.
On November 4, 2008, some 143 years after Melvinia experienced her first days of freedom in that postwar wasteland, Mrs. Obama stood before a crowd of thousands of roaring, singing, and weeping support- ers in Chicago's Grant Park. It was Election Night and her husband had just become the first African American president of the United States. Mrs. Obama was all warm smiles and gracious thank-yous that evening, the poised picture of a sophisticated, self-assured woman prepared to take her place in history. The truth was, though, that she knew very little about her own.
Adapted from "American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama" by Rachel L. Swarns. Published in June 2012 by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
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