How does a person who isn’t black think about Black History Month? With respect? With reverence? With guilt? Curiosity? Indifference?
It depends partly on that person’s own history—on when and how his family arrived in America. Those whose predecessors were present during the wickedness of slavery, and all that followed, will have a livelier sense of the black-and-white binaries of the story than immigrants lately arrived from, say, Kazakhstan. A white New Englander whose ancestors made a fortune in the slave trade, or a Southerner whose forbears exploited black African labor on cotton or rice plantations, will understand the burden of that history. Those whose people came through Ellis Island—potato-famine Irish, Eastern European Jews, Hungarians, Italians—won’t have the same haunted sense of the American past.
I am inclined toward reverence—for black history, for the literature and spiritual rhetoric (the Southern preacherly strain, with its tremendous cadences), and for black music, which is the most powerful and characteristically American music. The black American story is rich, painful, dramatic, triumphant—and shaming to the American conscience.
My great-grandfather Albert P. Morrow, a Pennsylvanian of Scotch-Irish stock, was 18 when he enlisted in the Union Army in spring 1861. He fought as a cavalry officer in every major battle, including Gettysburg, in the eastern theater of the war. He was wounded three times and captured three times (and freed in prisoner exchanges). He served in Virginia under the young George Custer. If my great-grandfather had accepted Custer’s later invitation to join the Seventh Cavalry, he might have died in 1876 at the Little Big Horn, and with him my line of Morrows.