The face in the mirror: a writer's search for the Confederates in the family tree leads to some unexpected discoveries.

How much of our history do we really want to know? Thulani Davis had never really planned to look for her "roots" and most especially not the white ones. Thirty years after she inherited two albums of tintype pictures and photographs that once belonged to her grandmother's white father and black mother, closer inspection of images in them of Confederate generals and of an identifiably black child of the 1890s dressed in her family's ancestral Scottish tartan set Davis on a journey. Even she was surprised by many findings and her feelings about her white forebears, especially the unacknowledged female ancestors, their intellectual pursuits and what they might have contributed to who she is today. The point is: Would we as individuals and as a nation be better served if we knew more about history, not less?

FOUR YEARS AGO, IF SOMEONE HAD TOLD ME I WOULD WRITE A BOOK CALLED MY Confederate Kinfolk (Basic Civitas Books, January 2006), I would have seriously doubted the prediction. The title arises from the shock I experienced early on in my research when a search engine popped up with a rebel-flag waving, Dixie-playing site by that name on which a gentleman had documented scads of his Confederate ancestors. I noticed he and I had at least a dozen relatives in common.

In 2001, I started doing research for a novel to be loosely based on the fives of my grandmother and great-grandmother. I intended to create most of the story because I really knew very little about them. My great-grandmother had been a slave in Alabama, and sometime after moving to Mississippi with her husband and children, she had a child, my grandmother, by her white employer. To my surprise, after a few weeks of digging on the Internet, I found a lot of information on this man and his entire family. Not long after, I knew I would probably write about the real people in the story.

Like most people, I suppose I grew up knowing more about one side of the family than the other. But in our case, nothing was ever said about my mother's people, though we all knew there was a Mississippi plantation, and a master-housekeeper-race mixing-inheritance-squabble story. This particular mix is common, so, it was "as if" we knew already the story and its meaning.

My family story as a Davis was so complete, so textured, layered and present, that when I looked in the mirror, I could explain every feature on my face by someone in my father's family. I had a Davis nose, a Davis mouth, and hairline. I had my dad's hands; I might have explained my hair from the un-detailed report of blood from Madagascar, or from the often-heard reports of Indian blood that black folks talked about. Still, I was complete, whole.

As a Davis, growing up in Hampton, Virginia, with no knowledge of how we came to be called Davis, my life was rich with family lore. My Davis great-grandfather was born in the county where Nat Turner lived and was an adolescent at the time of the revolt. Not long after that, my relative was sold to an owner in my hometown who fled when Union troops came, and he was able to rescue his family from the farm where they were kept. I have always been aware of the closeness of slavery, the short time since my grandfather, Andrew Davis, was born in slavery. We weren't missing anything, and what we knew of the white ancestors was none too good.

The Scots-Irish Side

As it turns out, my hairline comes from a Scots-Irish family named Campbell, the Confederates of my title. Seeing pictures of them was at first alienating; all I could think was that I did not look like those people. Soon enough though, I noticed the widow's peak hairlines, the raccoon eyes. I do have my dad's hands and his color. I'm not sure about my nose. The need to take medicine for certain physical problems--I can thank the Campbells for that. Looking in the mirror is quite a different experience at 56 years of age than it was only four years ago.

These are the small results of an extraordinary journey that taught me not only who the whites were, but also a great deal about the lives of my great-grandmother and other African Americans the Campbells either owned or employed after the war. These freedmen and women had several devastating experiences during and after the Civil War that I would never have known from my family.

I started with two 100-year-old photo albums I received when my grandmother died in the 1970s. The books belonged to her parents, one held mostly black images, the other white. It wasn't until 30 years later that I became curious about who the people were in the photos. The people in my great-grandmother Chloe's book were her siblings and many images were of her other children, all except my grandmother. And there were lots of other faces, black and white, with names added in pencil by my grandmother. They were a total mystery.

I had no idea who the people were in my great-grandfather Will's book, except for the dearly marked generals of the Confederacy on a souvenir photo card. He had written in names, usually in ink. The story in this book arises, in all its complexity, simply from looking for the people in those photos and trying to find evidence of some notes my grandmother made for a book she wanted to write.

It was from her notes that I learned Chloe's husband left her in Mississippi and returned to Alabama, and that her relationship with Will was probably a consensual one.

I began my story where she had begun hers, with Chloe's first trip anywhere after slavery, on a train to Mississippi. This was during Reconstruction, and as it happens, around the time she got to Silver Creek in Yazoo County, an African American state representative who lived on the farm was lynched by a posse called by the man for whom she was to work. This plantation owner, who became one of my Campbell great uncles, got himself elected to the black man's seat. Had I not followed the Campbells' lives, I would never have known the kind of terror in which she lived after the end of slavery.

Finding the Campbell women also jarred me, but for different reasons. Two of them turned out to be writers, one of fiction, one of poetry, and a third one built several theaters. In their files were poems, short stories, letters to the editor of the local paper, and at least one novel. As someone who has written some of all those forms, and spent much time in theater, I found this a bit provocative. These are my passions.

Women of Substance

Yes, I once made a quilt with my grandmother's assistance; since it was the early '70s, it was all fabric from old dashikis! I learned to make pottery because my mother did, and pottery is something of a family craving. All the women in the family also sew, but that's where I exhibited hands made only of thumbs. But a bunch of women turning out novels and writing irate letters to the editor of the local paper--that speaks to me. This discovery was also disturbing simply because for so many years it did not even occur to me to look for them. Such is the barrier of imagination in a country reliant on race distinctions.

One cannot be completely explained by anything, thank God, but it would be easier to build less fictional selves and a less mythical community if the truth of American heritage was accepted. If you ask an African American where they got their last name from, and if she's heard tales, she will not mention a onetime slaveholder but a slaveholding ancestor. The line I have heard most often is, "There was a Confederate colonel in there somewhere." Yes, there is a colonel in my book Thulani Davis is a writer in New York City.

My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty-First Century Freedwoman Discovers Her Roots, Basic Civitas Books, January 2006 $25, ISBN 0-465-01555-7