Blood and Bones

The chorus to this song had been floating around in my head, given life by my voice and banjo, but it didn’t really have a home in a song. I wrote it not long after reading reports and watching videos of white nationalists feeling more confident about asserting their views after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. There’s “not enough steel to reconcile” our humanity and our sense of selves. The verses were inspired by both a photo I saw of a black slave child holding a white baby and slave narratives. In them, Alli and I were describ- ing the way the binding of black slave and white master created a sickness that was terrifying for both parties, but especially exacted a price from the slave. My chorus, written in response to today’s issues, ended up bridging the past. — AK

The institution of slavery twisted and distorted and dehumanized the slaver as well as the enslaved. Rampant rape meant that many slave owners were in fact keeping their own biological children in slavery—they were selling their own flesh and blood, selling and abusing their white children’s half-siblings. Only recently has Sally Hemings—Thomas Jefferson’s slave “mistress” (if one can be called a mistress where there is no possibility of consent) for four decades and mother of six of his children (whom Jefferson eventually emancipated) —been acknowledged as a deeply significant figure in American history. It is impossible to understand the full story behind the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the founding of the land of the “free”; impossible to decipher the character, contradictions, dichotomies, and challenges of this brave, young, imperfect Republic without reclaiming these glaring omissions in the narrative. The tangled, toxic webs of broken family dysfunction and abuse reverberate still and have repercussions that impact our society and culture today. — AR
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