I just got two new books: Insubordinate Spirit: A True Story of Life and Loss in Earliest America 1610-1665 by Missy Wolfe.
Also Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs.
Both these non-fiction books showcase the life of a woman of the time period. I'm not sure which one to tackle first: the Puritan saga or the memoir of a slave. Given my disreputable slave owning ancestors, I am very much interested in the latter, though I expect it to be fairly gut wrenching.
I think if you take almost any random person on earth today, and you investigate their ancestry, you're going to find both slaves and slave owners, and both colonists and colonized. Humans tend not to be very nice.
I don't have very detailed information on my own ancestry, but the earliest ones I could find arrived at the Cape of Good Hope around 1700, at a time when slavery there was rife, and I have little doubt that at least some of them must have owned slaves. My direct male ancestor at the time was a Dutch ship's officer (in which capacity one can only imagine what brutalities he might have taken part in), and then became a well to do businessman, which makes it highly likely that he owned slaves.
Then my ancestors colonized large swathes of what later become South Africa. But in 1899, they themselves became the victims of British imperialism.
And what would I find if I went back far enough into history? Say, to the time of the Roman Empire? Would not surprise me in the least if some of my ancestors were slaves, or ended up murdered during the Empire's persecution of the early Christians, or enthusiastically participated in the persecution, or if most of them during medieval times were peasants, and as such little more than slaves.
In late medieval/Renaissance times, they became victims of imperialism, when the Spanish dominated the Netherlands. I also have French Huguenot ancestry, i.e. some of my ancestors were victims of religious persecution, and indeed arrived at the Cape as refugees with little more than the shirts on their backs. There, they promptly worked themselves into the upper middle classes and (probably) started owning slaves, almost as if they did not learn a single thing from being victimized.
So it goes with our blighted species. I have long ago given up on both perpetual guilt and perpetual victimhood.
