After days of mourning the latest events in Ferguson, I can’t help thinking about two distant things: my great-aunt Blanche’s manuscript, and something that happened the summer I was six.

This will get a little personal (I hear a collective groan: John’s now apologizing for being PERSONAL?!), but to me no contribution to this wrenching topic can be worth its pixels if it’s not an honest effort to examine one’s own soul.  So here’s my story.

My mother’s family came from northern Virginia.  They owned a large farm, worked by human slaves.  They lost it to foreclosure around the Civil War, and two separate battles were fought near their land.  The night Richmond fell, a boy of sixteen – my great-grandfather — guarded a dry-goods store with a pistol against fire, Union troops and looting locals.  The next day he returned home, the sole surviving white male of three families.   The landscape lay devastated by combat, the white social structure morally ravaged by slavery, and its people facing a terrifying future.  My great-aunt Blanche wrote a memoir depicting her family’s struggle out of that awful shadow, at a time nearer to the Civil War than Vietnam is to us today.  She writes, “As a race we were afraid of negroes.  That is the truth.  The talk of keeping them in their place was merely a way of saying, ‘We’ll make them scared of us, so scared they won’t try anything.’”  At fourteen, Blanche was cornered in a shed by a black boy two years older and was nearly raped, but she screamed herself to safety.  Her mother tried to keep the incident secret and urged Blanche to “forget it ever happened.”  But word in the town got out, and a lynch mob began to form.  My great-grandfather intervened, knocking down the ringleader with his fists, not to save a young man’s life but to protect the reputation of his daughter.  Blanche’s older brother beat up a black man he’d been friends with as a child — at midday in the town square — because the man had refused to call him “mister.”  My great-grandmother again turned her face away (she witnessed the fight) but her husband remarked, “Good for him.  If they don’t know their place, we must show them.”  The family loved each other and worked hard to succeed, but they seethed with anger at the strain of poverty, the breaking of obsolete social codes, and the insistence on denial.  “We will never speak of it,” my great-grandmother would command, while insisting on the pieties of “polite society.”  Her daughter, the unflinching Blanche, witnessed and remembered it all, in a style reminiscent of Jane Austen, even though the bones of the story were pure Faulkner.

My mother inherited her grandparents’ anger.  When I was a kid, she wrestled with emotions  she could neither control nor even name, except that they arose from the conflict and abuse of her own childhood.   Unpredictably explosive towards me and my siblings in moments of privacy, Mom carefully upheld social appearances.  We had an African-American nanny named Essie who did most of the work of raising me.  I loved and trusted her, as I loved and distrusted Mom, with her recurrent triggers of rage.

Then when I was six, a man my parents employed as a gardener lured me into a shed beside our house, threw me onto a table, and raped me.   Afterwards, he demanded I tell no one.  But I had to tell Essie.  No doubt fearful for her job, afraid of my mother, and perhaps afraid of the white perpetrator still on the premises, Essie told me she would keep it secret.  And secret it remained, tearing like buried shrapnel in my psyche, until my late 20s.  In retrospect, I had three choices.  I could have become a perpetrator myself, wrestled myself to exhaustion or suicide, or resolved to heal.  At the time, I only knew that I would lose my fresh marriage to the love of my life — and probably every love after that — if I did not somehow change.  So I spent the next year aiming straight at the nameless thing I dreaded most, determined to beat down the locked door behind which it lay.  The effort at times seemed suicidal, but once I open the door to find only my damaged self, I felt a profound and lasting change.  Because I changed, I am still married, am a father, and have both a career and a creative practice not streaked with shame.

As part of my recovery, I catalogued the concentric emotions I had been carrying for a quarter century.  The pain of the assault lay at the core.  Next, the shame that led Essie — and me — to conceal it, a choice causing greater lasting harm than the rape itself.  Next was fear, mine and Essie’s, of what lay beneath.  Next crusted a thick shell of anger, which I came to understand as healthy and a source of power.  Finally, a topcoat of sanctimonious politics that allowed me to disavow any of the emotions that lay beneath.  It was a classic map of unhealed trauma, sealed and preserved in denial.

Years later I read Blanche’s memoir, and I began to question whether my traumatic geography might resemble my what my family went through, both in the unknown era before the Civil War and in the aftermath Blanche recounted.  I noticed that, in the 225 pages of her manuscript, the word “slavery” never appears.   If slavery was indeed the primary moral trauma, the pain and shame of it remained hidden, and all Blanche could perceive in 1900 was fear, anger, a fierce desire to forget, and a vain hope that obsolete social codes could help them avoid the triggers of what lay unnamed, beneath.

Recently, I saw “12 Years a Slave.”  After the culminating whipping scene, all I could feel was the different layers of pain in that primal moment, for both slaveholder and slave, perpetrator and victim.  In the lobby afterwards, I simply wept.  Ten feet away stood an African-American woman my age, her face opaque.   She had walked out of the film during that scene and was waiting for her husband.  Neither of us spoke.

I cannot speak for others, and the story above is mine alone.  But I believe there is such a thing as a collective psyche that clusters and persist around a collective trauma, which persists across generations, and which does not heal unless active efforts are made to work through the emotions around it.  Part of the difficulty of such work is that we experience this collective trauma from many different angles.  Slavery, the Civil War, and its aftermath remain the deepest traumas of our nation’s history.  As I observe the emotions that events in Ferguson have awakened, it appears to me that many of us are caught in the swirl of that collective trauma.  Some of us cling to the denial of an amnesiac present, while others seem caged in a perpetual past.  I don’t believe the political sanctimony justifying either of these choices will do us any good.  Nor are we likely to progress by focusing solely on each other’s anger, which to some is righteous and to others is simply destructive, but in either case is likely the crust of some deeper core.  I fear that, until we find and feel our respective pieces of that core, we will remain like Michael Brown and Darren Wilson, struggling for our lives to gain control over a trigger that was cocked in the distant past.