That May, my brother Stephen died at age forty-three after a short but intense bout with pneumonia. He’d spent his entire career as a public interest lawyer in Chicago, and when he died was the Vice President of the ACLU of Illinois.
He was the brother I knew best of all my big siblings because he was the last to leave Nigeria for college, and had gone to law school in Wisconsin when Daddy, Mom, and I lived there. He’d been the one to take me to the Jack and Jill cotillion at the end of high school. He was the brother who’d cautioned me against writing my law school application personal statement about my dawning racial consciousness because it might be interpreted the wrong way. He was a confidant of things I wasn’t even intending to share. And he loved me anyway.
At Christmas five months before his death, Stephen had given all of us Lythcotts a strange and weighty gift—a printout of the genealogical research he’d done on our family. This was before the Internet could tell you these things with the press of a few buttons. Stephen had walked and talked his way through courthouses and graveyards toward this understanding of our slave ancestor Silvey and her descendants, and had begun to fashion a narrative out of it. A story.
Through Stephen’s work I now knew I was a seventh-generation American, descended from folks long buried in unheralded plots in and around Charleston, South Carolina. Thanks to the painstaking work of my beautiful dead brother, I would one day come to know I was Silvey’s child. But at the time he gave me this gift I was not interested in the relic of ancestry.