Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing

One-third of Black Americans descended from slavery are related to the slave masters who bought and sold their ancestors. In other words, one-third of Black Americans descended from slavery are descended also from sexual exploitation. Dionne Ford, whose great-grandmother was the last of six children born to a Louisiana cotton broker called the Colonel and the enslaved woman he received as a wedding gift, is among them.

What shapes does this kind of intergenerational trauma take and how to root it out of the body? In Go Back and Get It, Ford's debut memoir, she tells us: it manifests as alcoholism and depression and post-traumatic stress; it finds echoes in Ford's own experience of rape at the hands of a relative, and in the ways in which, much later, she builds an interracial family and manages the heartache of her daughters' racial confusion; it wracks her insides, stalling both her pregnancies. Meanwhile, Ford's preoccupation with healing is what truly sets this book apart. She tries eye-movement therapy, visits to a medium, twelve-step recovery, capoeira, a sugar- and wheat-free diet. "Anything," she writes, "to keep from going back there." But what she learns is that she needs to go back there, to return to her female ancestors and uncover what about them she can to begin to feel whole.

Thus begins a journey that's anguished and hopeful and strange, one that brings Ford to long-lost cousins both Black and white, to forgotten newspaper articles about her great-uncle's lynching and to abandoned gravesites, to an eBay sword that belonged to the Colonel and that she considers using as a way into the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Go Back and Get It combines the story of her inner life with research and reflections on how racial trauma is generated, repeated, stored, and processed--what the cycle looks like and how it might be broken. It is a memoir about how, in the search for belonging, family can be a source of loneliness and even danger and also a true home.