We tell our stories slant. And this story is personal.
My grandpa Del was a magical storyteller. A journalist for the Associated Press with only a high school education, Del was a master of words and a whiz on his manual typewriter. In the early 1970s, he typed up for us grandkids family stories passed down from his own mother and grandmother. I fell in love as a child with the romance of Barbara, a red-headed Irish schoolmarm from Philadelphia heading south, and Gabriel, the Kentucky steamboat captain who wooed her when his boat capsized. The newlyweds, according to Grandpa’s lore, freed Gabriel’s portion of the African Americans his family held in bondage and set out for Ohio — and eventually across the continent on a prairie schooner in the late 1840s. The story of their hard luck in Oregon, where their promised parcel of land proved less than promising, and the Native Americans who showed them kindness and struck up a life-long friendship captured my young mind.
I was long an adult, deep in my historical studies, when I awoke to the realization that my beloved grandfather told his stories slant. Like much history told for the past centuries by those of us who claim “whiteness,” Grandpa Del’s stories presented only my ancestors’ views. Our family mythology was replete with forty-niners who gained and lost riches and a pirate-like hotel owner in California. Missing were the stories and perspectives of our sisters and brothers in God whom our family enslaved. Missing was the family tree delineating the twisted branches of my family’s entanglement with slavery. Missing were the voices of the Native Americans who chose, for perhaps multiple conflicted reasons, to welcome my family onto land that had previously been theirs.
There are truths in my family story. But the truths are slant. They run up against the silences imposed on the stories of the women, men and children impacted by my family’s and other white American’s limited definitions of freedom, humanity, land, ownership, citizenship, progress. One perspective, one “slant” elides all others. The African Americans my family enslaved and the generations after told their stories, but my family did not hear them. The Native Americans whose stolen land my family claimed told their stories, but my family did not record them. Our “romantic” viewpoint, relayed through Grandpa Del’s marvelous humor, is only partial truth.
When Emily Dickinson urged her readers to “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant/ Success in Circuit lies,” she used the second meaning of the term “slant.” Dickinson imagined truth revealed slowly, unspooling as multicolored thread from its bobbin. With each turn, the thread reveals a new color, a new resonance, a new way of seeing the truth. To tell our stories slant in this way demands that we take our time to listen to the fullness of each individual’s story. We weave them together carefully to reveal “all the truth” in order to delight in the ultimate Truth.
We historically majority white Presbyterians are opening our eyes and realizing as we listen to our African American, Native American, Hispanic, Asian American sisters and brothers that our stories as a church have been told in the wrong kind of slant for too long. As our seminaries and colleges engage in serious race and slavery audits, as congregations reconsider what community means, as mid councils gather their members together to listen, we begin to hear that circuit of truth that brings us humbly to reconsider the Presbyterian family lore to which some of us have long clung.
Beth Shalom Hessel is the executive director of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia, a historic member library and architectural archive, and a teaching elder in the Presbytery of Philadelphia. She led the Presbyterian Historical Society prior to her current position.
