V.

I came from Silvey.

I am the untallied, unpaid, unrepented damages of one of America’s founding crimes. I come from people who endured the psycho-cultural genocide of slavery, reconstruction, and Jim Crow. Who began to find a place here really only quite recently amid strides toward effecting a more perfect union, of liberty and justice for all.

I am Silvey’s great-great-great-great-granddaughter. She was a slave who worked on a plantation in the late 1700s in Charleston, South Carolina, the harbor town through which close to one in two African slaves entered America over the centuries. Silvey bore three children by her master, Joshua Eden, by which I mean he raped her; there is no consent in slavery. Silvey’s daughter Silvia was born in 1785, and Joshua freed Silvey, Silvia, and their other children some years later. Silvia gave birth to a son named Joshua in 1810. Joshua had a son named Joshua Jr., born in 1845. His daughter, Evelyn, was born in 1896. Evelyn bore my father, George, in 1918. And I was born to him in 1967.

The original Americans are the natives whose land was invaded then stolen by the Europeans. Those descended from the Europeans, the ones who came on ships to the New World, like to think they are the original Americans. But I’m from a third set—from those brought here on different ships over different waters, those whose sweat and muscle were the engine of the American economy for over two hundred years, whose blood and tears watered America’s ground. I come from them.

I come from people who survived what America did to them.

Ain’t I a Real American?