"This man owned your great-great-great-great grandmother."

[mshcherbatskaya]

I was watching African American Lives 2 on PBS, and it was extraordinary to watch the faces of the participants when then were shown pictures of the slaveowners to whose name they carried as their own. As subtle and visible as wind over a field of grass, as they looked into the stern-faced portraits, and then another gust blowing over them when then found that they carried his genes, or when they found out they didn't. They were searching for their roots, they were people for whom family and origins are important, and they would look at the man in the picture and see so many things that I can't even imagine. Tom Joyner, looking at a photo of a portrait from the 1830s and finally seeing where his gray eyes came from. "I've looked all around my family and this is the first time I have ever seen eyes like mine." The surprise and re-appraisal of Kathleen Henderson, who found that the man "who did not look like a very nice man" was not genetically related to her at all, the way she visibly softened towards him when she realized that he had not raped her many-times great grandmother.

I've been thinking about it off and on all day and it just occurred to me this afternoon, that Barack Obama is not the descendant of slaves. I'm not sure what that means, but it seems important.