How to understand your family history (w/ Keith Rushing)

Journalist Keith Rushing has spent years trying to report on his most difficult story - the history of his own family. Who do we come from? What do we inherit from the past? How can understanding our ancestors make us better humans today? To find out the answers, Chris invites Keith to talk about his book Descended: Searching for my Gullah-Geechee Roots. They cover how everything from the history of slavery to the cultural significance of African connections to the Gullah-Geechee people. This is a conversation about how you can spark your own curiosity to start researching your own family history. Featured guest Follow Keith Rushing on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/rushingwrites/ and LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-rushing-04292114/Buy Descended: Searching for my Gullah-Geechee Roots https://uscpress.com/Descended Connect with the team Follow Chris on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/chrisiduffy/?hl=en and at chrisduffycomedy.com https://chrisduffycomedy.com/Buy Chris’ book, Humor Me https://t.ted.com/ZGuYfcL Watch How to Be a Better Human videos on YouTube at TEDPods https://www.youtube.com/@TEDPodsFollow TED on X https://x.com/TEDTalks, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ted, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TED, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/ted-conferences/, and TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@tedtoksVote for our show in the Signal Awards for Best Advice & How To https://vote.signalaward.com/PublicVoting#/2026/shows/genre/advice-how-to podcast! For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts https://go.ted.com/BHTranscripts Fill out our survey at bit.ly/BHSurvey6 https://bit.ly/BHSurvey6 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 2:15Speaker 00

  This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. It's become a joke in my family that my dad has done all this really intense, painstaking genealogical research, tracing our family back generations, and no one else cares about it at all. He'll be telling me this discovery he made about how our great-great-great-grandparents had just moved to Gillespie, Illinois, and I'll say, uh-huh, yeah, wow, fantastic. Um, when is dinner again? What are we having? You know, I've never been that interested in the past, especially the past of my own family. But today's guest, Keith Rushing, has convinced me that I have been wrong. I know my dad will be very glad to hear this introduction. Keith has convinced me that there is a lot of value in understanding where we come from,

• 2:57Speaker 00

  our ancestry, our culture, and our heritage. Maybe I've also just crossed some sort of invisible line of aging where all of a sudden, genealogy becomes much, much more alluring. I don't know. What I do know is that I love Keith's perspective. He views family history as a way of understanding our present and our future. How does understanding where we came from in the past make us better humans right now? Well, Keith's book, Descended: Searching for My Gullah-Geechee Roots, is a beautiful exploration of that question and so many more. To get us started, here's Keith reading an excerpt from his book.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  Soon after ABC first aired the TV series Roots, my seventh-grade teacher asked us to pursue our own mini Roots projects. We had to ask our oldest living relatives about the oldest ancestors they could remember. The story of Alex Haley's family, tracing back to an African ancestor named Kuntukinte, who came to America from the Gambia, had sparked tremendous interest in origin stories among Black people. Although the book later proved fictional, for African-Americans, it ignited conversations about slavery and particularly the origins of ancestors who were captured and bound for the United States aboard ships carrying the enslaved. Aunt Aggie, short for Agnes, seemed like the perfect fit for my assignment. At the time, she was 80 years old. Born in 1897, she was the oldest

• 4:13Speaker 02

  of my grandmother's five siblings, who were all born on the family farm in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. My parents invited Aunt Aggie, who lived not far away in Jamaica, Queens, over to our house in Springfield Gardens to spend the night. As we sat mostly in silence around the kitchen table, she racked her brain, digging up names long buried in her memory. Her mother would add them to the family tree spread out in front of her. Aggie remembered many cousins and the surnames of people who married into the family. Mom remembered names she had heard and people she may have met who lived in the South, not New York City where we lived. Aunt Aggie could go back as far as her grandparents, St. Coe and Margaret Molly Christopher. I later learned they were born into bondage

• 4:55Speaker 02

  on a cotton plantation in Hilton Head in the 1840s. After St. Coe served in the Civil War among the US Corps of Troops, their transition to life as freed people. That knowledge would surface decades later. However, after archival documents revealed details of St. Coe's life during and after the war.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  We are going to talk a lot more about Keith's family and how we can all understand and learn from our ancestors. But first, we are going to take a quick break, and we will be right back after this.

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• 8:41Speaker 00

  On today's episode, we're talking about what we inherit from our ancestors and how the past can inform our future with Keith Rushing.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Hi, my name is Keith Rushing. I'm the author of Descended: Searching for My Gullah Gichi Roots. I began researching on this book about 15 years ago. I'm a former journalist, print journalist, that worked at newspapers in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Virginia. I now work at a nonprofit in Washington DC.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  Keith, I'm so glad to have you on the show. I really loved your book Descended. I think it's such a fascinating and incredibly well-written book. So much of your book Descended and the work that you did, the research to write it, is about filling in these missing pieces, about learning more about the history that you had never been told or that had been lost. Why does it matter to know our family histories?

• 9:31Speaker 02

  I think there's a lot that can just fulfill you in that process. Like, I think I'm still gaining and learning. For me, it's, you know, I think back about, you know, I grew up in New York City. It's my favorite city, probably always will be. But I realized in doing this research and going back to Hilton Head, South Carolina, where my grandmother was born and where my ancestors were, as far back as I know, I feel disconnected spiritually. I feel connected to the place. I go to the Gullah Gichi Cemetery, the ancestral cemetery, where people are buried, and I walk and visit. And I actually feel kind of like just a certain groundedness and a certain feeling that this is home. And it's not something that I can say, like, it's like an intellectual thing. It's kind of an emotional and spiritual thing.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  It's really deep in me. So I think if people do have those questions and they want to know, I would say, research as much as you can. If you can go back to graveyards, if you can go back to a place, you may feel things that you didn't know you were going to feel. It may not just be information. It may be kind of a, an emotional and spiritual connection that you get in that process.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  I also feel like in my personal experience, a lot of times, the people who are most into genealogy, or have the longest history records, and you know, they have the family tree up on the wall, they're often people who their ancestors and their family were always in power. Where they're like, I can trace my ancestry back to the President of the United States, or to a duke in England or something. And often, people who come from a lineage where there was oppression, or violence, or people fled where they were from, or were taken from where they're from, have a lot less information about their lineage and

• 11:19Speaker 00

  what people's stories were, and what brought them to the places they were brought to, or where they fled to.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  And that was, that was something that kind of compounds this for black people. I think if you, if you run into people who are, you know, they may know a great grandfather is from, you know, France, or England, or wherever. Or I've met people who said, I'm descended from the Mayflower. And as you said, like, folks who come from a very elite background and know that lineage. Part of the process of slavery was being torn from ethnicities in West Africa. The oppression was to disconnect you from that culture. And then I think just the pain of something that's extremely difficult to talk about, that, you know, so for, I think for people who lived through enslavement, a lot of times, those stories didn't get

• 12:08Speaker 02

  passed down, with good reason. Like, you know, the most traumatic things that people go through, they don't necessarily want to share. But then, for generations removed, we just have like this, what I describe as a void in the book, and just like, something's missing. There is that, that kind of dichotomy, I think, for folks who have been through a kind of, a level of oppression and systemic kind of rupture that African Americans have.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  Especially with enslavement, one of the many losses was loss of culture and tradition and language, you know, which was violently torn from people, and they were beaten if they were speaking their language, not allowed to practice their religion. But one of the things that I, I found so interesting in the book, and I hadn't really known about, is that people in the Gullah Gichi community had some of these really direct ties to African cultural practices, to language, to food, to religious practices. Some of the most direct ties to the places in West Africa where they were taken from. So I imagine

• 13:19Speaker 00

  a lot of people who are listening to this are not familiar with the terms Gullah Gichi. Can you give us a quick overview of what Gullah Gichi means and what it means to be Gullah Gichi?

• 13:28Speaker 02

  So Gullah Gichi is, just to contextualize it, it's a group of people, and the Gullah Gichi corridor is kind of from the very southern part of North Carolina, like Cape Fear, North Carolina, and it goes along the East Coast to Jacksonville, Florida. So this is the region in which people who are described as Gullah Gichi come from. And it's considered to be the most African of African-American cultures. And I think what are identifiers for people are, you know, there's a Creole language that people speak, that are Gullah Gichi, that really developed in West Africa. So in West Africa, where you had trade with European nations and England, even before the slave trade, you had this Creole language

• 14:10Speaker 02

  develop. But it's intelligible to people who speak Gullah Gichi and people who speak, say, Creole in Sierra Leone, which is where a lot of, a lot of people who are Gullah Gichi originated. You have this kind of connection, and this kind of holding on to African culture. And I think it shows up in foods. And I talk in my book about like, red rice and jollof rice, which have been described as cousins, like very similar dishes, the way foods are cooked. It's something you see on the coast of West Africa, and you see in Gullah Gichi culture. But you may have like meat and fish cooked together in a rice dish, for instance, whether that be jambalaya, you know, gumbo. So you have all these, you see it in the food.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  And then also spirituality. So, again, as you mentioned, Chris, if you could not practice African religions, and it was, you cannot, you were not to speak African languages or suffer punishment, but folks found ways to kind of imbue and infuse African spirituality in ways of, of connecting to the divine in Christianity. Part of your process of becoming a full member of the church, you know, confirmation, was a process that lasted a few weeks, something called seeking, where young people about age 12 would go out into, would fast, and go

• 15:32Speaker 02

  out to the woods at night, and had a spiritual guide that would kind of guide them through this process of like meditation and reflection and dreams. And things are revealed in dreams that are part of their process of becoming a full member of the church. So that's been likened very much to West African rites of passage. You know, so in that sense, it's unique, it's a unique culture among African-American cultures. So.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  I was struck by the incredible ability of families to take care of each other, even in some of the most, you know, dire times possible, but also to preserve these things that mattered, that were about dignity and culture and values, even when, quite literally, an entire system is built to make that as impossible as, as they could possibly make it. And yet, the Gullah Gichi people prove that people find a way to transmit these things, if it's at all possible to do.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, and I think that that's one thing that is, you know, kind of, maybe different for folks who are Gullah Gichi, if you go back in time, where I think for a lot of African-Americans, there was this whole kind of negative, like Tarzan image, you know, this created fictionalized image of Africa. So, black people would not want to be called African. It was something to run from. But in the Gullah Gichi culture, you see people embracing African culture, and also looking, if you go back far enough, people who were, who were actually born in Africa that helped shake the culture, those people were revered, often for their, their abilities to, like, their knowledge of like plants and abilities to heal, which is something I talk about, is, you know, when my grandmother

• 17:21Speaker 02

  grew up in Hilton Head, she was born in 1917, there were no doctors. So you went to root doctors. But there was a whole tradition of passing down, like herbal knowledge and knowledge of, of healing to future generations. So this kind of reverence for Africa, but I think also seeing it as sustenance, like, this is the way, this builds resilience. This is the way we heal. We have this sense of community that we build. And that's something that I think it seems that they're intentional about, you know, through. Praise houses through communal living in the sense that, you know, maybe it's more normative here in American culture for people to get married and move away from parents often. Their folks were living in like kinship family homesteads where you would have multiple

• 18:06Speaker 02

  family members, you know, living in homes on a land where they farm. And that was part of the tradition. It's like kind of land owned not by individuals or willed to individuals, but to anyone who was a descendant of the family. So that's some of the descriptions of this retention.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  You also talked in the book about how many people felt like if you told people you were Gullah Gichi, you would be bullied or ostracized because there was this, this view of people with more direct ties to Africa as, as being not as high status or, or something to be made fun of rather than to be like honored and, and valued.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  If you listen to folks who speak Gullah Gichi and come from the region, you know, it's often like there's like a Caribbean sound to the accent, like a Caribbean sounding accent. The words are pronounced differently in Gullah Gichi Creole. So like folks that I spoke to in Hilton Head, South Carolina, the island where my ancestry is from, didn't self identify as Gullah or Gichi. So it was more like, we were just people living on this island in our own way. And when they would go to Savannah and go to other, other places, people would say, oh, you, you're a Gichi. Listen to how you talk. And then the ridicule would begin. So I think, yeah, part of the, part of that, that ridicule was this kind of more African, backward, weird, strange, funny, you know, and that,

• 19:32Speaker 02

  I mean, has existed well through the 20th century. I think it started to turn around in maybe the last 30 or 40 years. But I mean, you can still hear people who have stereotypes or ridicule people who are Gichi, Gullah Gichi.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  We, we talked a little bit about like what being Gullah or Gichi means in, in the general sense, but what about in the personal sense? What does it mean to you? What do you think when you think of like, my family comes from this tradition? What does it mean to be Gullah Gichi?

• 20:01Speaker 02

  The culture just seemed to be, seemed to be a beautiful culture, like to develop this kind of like a very strong sense of family and values. I think, you know, feeling spiritually connected to my ancestry, which I think if you grow up in a, you know, I grew up Episcopalian in a Christian, American culture, it's not something talked about or experienced. So I mean, I think that that's part of it for me. And I think, and I think also, when I go back, there's kind of an embrace of folks who are Gullah Gichi, who are from the island or who have ancestry there. There's a, you feel kind of a connectedness and an embrace. So I feel like there's a warmth that's still there in the culture. And I'm still discovering, like, I'm still kind of like learning more and, and meeting

• 20:45Speaker 02

  more people. And I feel like it's kind of an evolving process. Like my process of discovery never ended. It's like, I finished the book, but I'm still kind of learning and experiencing more.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  We're going to be right back after this quick break.

• 21:09Speaker 00

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• 24:08Speaker 00

  And we're back. You talk in the book a lot, which I think people would expect if you're trying to trace your ancestry as an African American back to Africa, to understand where your family came from and what their life was like. You, you trace it through the history of, of slavery and that institution, of course. But you also talk a lot about how many years after abolition, families were taken advantage of. Their historical rights to, for example, land that they had lived on and farmed were not respected. This

• 24:49Speaker 00

  island that your family had lived on for many years has become a very wealthy, very white vacation community. And it previously was a very black, very African farming community. And so there, there's this change that has happened that is not in any way the institution of slavery, but is another form of erasure of the past.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  I would say my grandmother was born, you go up through, which I said was 1917, you go up through the 1930s and 40s. Hilton Head and a lot of these islands were seen as kind of remote backwaters by other people. You know, here, for the folks who lived there and own land, they were descended from the enslaved people who were enslaved. These were former plantations, but it was also where their ancestors were, were born, where people, you know, loved one another and lived. So I think there was a, a, a strong attachment to land. But in terms of monetary value, it wasn't thought of something that was, that was worthwhile, right? So, but it was in the 1950s when you started to see two men in

• 25:57Speaker 02

  particular who came and did a whole logging operation, right, to make money timbering on the land. And then it went from that to this idea of vacation homes, like retirement homes, hotels, gated communities. The idea of like the coast as a place for recreation, but also to retire. And if you were to go back to like to the early part of the 20th century, you had this kind of like wealthy white businessman who, who owned.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  A lot of land in the South. So, most black people live in the north of Hilton Head. So, like the upper quarter to a third. And so, you have these like wealthy white businessmen that own land, but they didn't develop it. They'd go down there with, with friends and hunt. And so, black people used the island, all over the island, however they wanted. So, where they live, but they could also go hunt and fish in the South. So, as this development happened and you started to have gated communities, people found themselves like locked out of areas that they, where they had always been, you know? So, that was, I think, the start of a process where you see more kind of exclusion. And in a sense, segregation, where segregation didn't exist. Uh, my cousin Phoebe, who's ninety-seven, never having experienced like segregation on the island,

• 27:13Speaker 02

  like she didn't, you know, you had almost no contact with white people. Um, families would go to Savannah and, and, and sell produce and go to market. And I think when you went to mainland US, you wouldn't encounter segregation, but on the island, they didn't. But through this process of gentrification and locked communities where only residents could be, people who were black and Gullah Gichi found themselves locked out. I mean, not to go in the weeds about it, but aggressive ways of taking land away from folks, like people would buy the rights as an heir. So, their land was heir's property. And I think when you look at Gullah Gichi values, again, it wasn't about, I'm going as a, as a, you know, maybe the, the matriarch or patriarch in the family, going to give this land to the one son who, you know, has his stuff together and is sharp.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  It was the, uh, the idea that the, all the heirs inherited it. Whoever needed to use it to farm, they had ways of allowing that to happen. But when, with heir's property, there's vulnerability, right? Because any heir can force a sale. So, what you would have happen is that people, developers would buy the rights from an heir, maybe for a small amount of money and say, I want to force a sale and force the land to be sold. And so, those are things that, that happened. And I think within families, a lot of times, there's still this, this kind of, of tension between those who may want to sell land and it still goes on today and those who want to hold on to it.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  The personal and the political journey that you went through and that you are describing, it's much more broadly applicable than just the story of one community on one island in South Carolina. I think that this is a, a, a story that happens all over the world in, in slightly different ways, but a lot of similarities of people who are struggling to understand their own history and struggling to maintain control of the property and the land and the place that they have historical ties to, when maybe they don't, and I'm going to put this in big quotes, like have the right paperwork

• 29:17Speaker 00

  or the right, um, you know, legal distinctions, even though those legal distinctions are maybe created just to take it away from them, right? You see this with indigenous communities, you see this with, um, black, uh, families in the United States. You see this all over the world though. And so, I think for a lot of these people, really knowing the history, understanding what was happening and how long it's been happening for can be really empowering. Even when you see how things have been taken advantage of is it's empowering to know what was owed and what would have been the right way to handle things.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  That speaks to their culture and the culture of Gullah Gichi people and land being owned by lineages. And I talk about that and that is true of, it's in West Africa. It's been, it's, it's true of places in the Caribbean where there's a different kind of culture and relationship to land and land ownership than there is in America under, under typical law. People were very intentional about paying their taxes, you know? And if they sold land, they would sell land. You see that all the way into the nineteenth century. And I know, speaking of folks that live there, I mean, it was until very recently, like you, you know, if you didn't pay your taxes for one year, your land can be auctioned for sale, right? So, it's like, so, but so people were very intentional about that.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  And so, the idea of like heir's property, it's not illegal, but the, it's like the system doesn't recognize that as a, I guess it's not, um, kind of validated in the way property is when you confer it into a child or something. And then, and the deed is going to like one or two individuals. It created this vulnerability. But I think the other thing that you're speaking to is, I mean, and I see that here in, in DC, you know, is you see how gentrification, and I would say I, aggressive gentrification, where people are, are having to move, maybe because, you know, taxes are going up, property becomes too expensive. So, the racial demographics of a community changes, but also people, and people who have lived there

• 31:21Speaker 02

  for four generations are having to go. But then the culture changes when people come and say, we know, I don't like the fact that, um, these people are playing this music out on the street or people are congregating and I want to have the police come. A Jamaican restaurant, for instance, right, in DC, in a black community, and they would play reggae music and cook jerk chicken outside, but it was seen as offensive to people in the community, like the music's too loud. Then there's questions like, well, is this sanitary? And a lot of harassment and inspectors coming until the owners just decide to sell and move. So, you see that, that it's not only some gentrification that the race and class may change,

• 32:06Speaker 02

  but then also people trying to control that space in ways that alienate the people who've been there for generations. And so, I mean, and that's, that's what we see in Hilton Head, where people had free rein as to hunt and fish and do it sustainably. But then you have like rules and laws and locked gates coming, you know, in that control people's movement in the space that had always been there. So, yeah, I think that that kind of parallel between gentrification in cities now today and what happened, displacement in Hilton Head and other islands in the, in the corridors are very similar.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  Can we talk about process just for a second? Someone who is interested in doing a, a similar project themselves, how, how does one get started in researching your family history and understanding the stories of where, where your family came from and what they were going through?

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say, I mean, if you can do a, a similar process that I went on is just to, to go and try to find out how far back can you know, just in oral history? If you were to talk to like the oldest folks in the family or someone has kind of kept the family history, to go and talk to them and to start, go back as far as you can. Where were they located? What's the place, you know? Um, there are census records. Once you identify those names, and are there names that correspond to the names in your family? Where did they live? Um, I mean, I went to the, the Heritage Library of Hilton Head was like immensely helpful with this book because they were kind of conducting research around US colored troops. They have said like they will help anyone, you know, who's trying to do that research.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  And there are a lot of libraries around that will help you kind of navigate or figure out, okay, I have this ancestor, how can I go further? And which you'll see, like if you go through census records and you go and let's say you see a great grandparent, you may see an older person living there. And so, who was that person? Most likely, they were a parent or grandparent. There are someone who's a relative. You may see other, other siblings that you didn't know about. So, I think it's, it's just like, there's this process with discovery that kind of unfolds, like one thing leads to another. But I think there are just a lot of resources there. I think, starting with, for me, I think the oral history and then like census data is a great place to start.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  What's the similarity and the difference between doing this research into your own family versus, you know, a, a story that you're reporting on?

• 34:34Speaker 02

  I think just that there was this idea of kind of like, you know, this, this saying, journalists would say of like pulling string, like when you find one fact to keep pulling and going further and further back. And so, if you're doing an investigative piece, like you find out one fact and it leads to something else, there's another question that sparks. So, I mean, that's kind of the process that I had here was, I mean, the first thing was, Sancho Christopher was the US colored troops. He was one of the black troops that enlisted to fight for the Union in the Civil War, to fight for his liberation. And the National Archives has a, if you, for troops that applied for disability pensions, uh, which many of them did. There's all this information that comes available because they have to document who they were.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  There are no birth certificates. So that was the first kind of where I actually was like, okay, he's naming the person who's who was his enslaver. It is a plantation. And that was something that I didn't have like a personal knowledge of slavery in my family until doing this research. It was like, I'm getting this general history. You know, there, there's roots, there's, you know, but that disability pension file, which is like two inches thick and hundreds of documents, it kind of started me on this path of like, okay, he wasn't slave. This is where it happened. And I learned that they're all cotton plantations. Then I was able to kind of see through other documents like land ownership and how people started to buy land and form community.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  I'll be okay. So here's, this is me just being personally honest is that I already know that when this episode comes out, there's going to be a funny moment in my own personal family. Because my dad is very, very into genealogy, has tried really hard to understand our family's history. And I have always been so totally uninterested in everything that he has ever found. I'm like, I can't imagine something more boring than talking to you about our great, great, great, great grandfather. And when I read your book about your family's history, I was like, this is so interesting. So I know that my dad is gonna be like, why are you interested

• 36:43Speaker 00

  in someone else's history and not in our own? Can you convince me to be interested in my own family history too? Or does it not matter? Do you think that it doesn't matter if I am or I'm not?

• 36:53Speaker 02

  Are you curious about anything about your family? What's your relationship to that past that your father has uncovered? Or and maybe not what he's uncovered, but maybe did it spark any questions?

• 37:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, you know, my, my honest opinion normally is that like, if you look into your past, you're likely to find either that horrible things happened to your family, or your family did horrible things. And either way, I'm like, why not focus on like, the future and things being good. And my dad's family is Irish. So there's this history of like, leaving because of the potato famine. There's, you know, trying to make it in a place where there were not many opportunities, but still like the possibility of survival. So I am kind of interested in it, but it does seem to me like uncovering a lot of darkness. And there's so much darkness already in the world, that that's part of why I'm resistant to it for myself.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  You know, the Irish potato famine. So they went through this, this trauma that may have brought them here. You know, I mean, and that's, that's in my book, right? Like the, the trauma of enslavement and the horrors, like, there's a lot that I don't know about, right? But I do know, you know, that there was, you know, torture and there was sexual violence and horrors. But there was all this beauty and resilience of family and culture and community. I mean, to me, it was like amazing for me to go back. I was there once at age like four or five, you know, and saw this cousin who's 97. So when I did this research, she remembered me and she remembered my mom. And there was still enough communication that, you know, we were known to

• 38:32Speaker 02

  her and her siblings. So to me, that's kind of amazing is that, you know, here I'm tracing someone who was born 180 years ago. And my family left Hilton Head and left the South and around 1940. And then I can go back, you know, 70 years after that and be embraced, you know, with love. And it's kind of amazing. For me, it wasn't about the trauma. It was about all this richness that I found.

• 39:01Speaker 00

  It also makes me think, so my dad's family has these ties to Ireland. My mom is Eastern European Jew, so fled pogroms and violence of their own. But something that it made me think on both sides is I can't speak the Irish language. I can't speak Yiddish or the other languages that my mother's family used to speak. And now as a parent, it makes me think about if there are ways in which I can reunite links to the past that have been broken, if there's ways that I can redraw that, right? I don't know if that's possible, but there's

• 39:41Speaker 00

  something interesting to me about that idea of like, how do I reconnect for my kids with this vibrant cultural heritage that was lost along the way somehow?

• 39:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, and I don't know if you've done, if you've gone back to those that, those places in Ireland that your ancestors are from.

• 40:00Speaker 00

  I haven't, no.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  And that's the thing, I think, you know, I didn't know that I would feel differently, you know, in doing this research. I thought, I'm just filling this, I just want to know. And then this is interesting. And I just want to learn more. I didn't know that there would be something kind of spiritual happening that I feel, or that feeling of home would be so, so strong. But I think it could get to you things that you don't anticipate, you know?

• 40:20Speaker 00

  The ancestor who started all of this for you, Sankoh Christopher, as, as best as you can tell, probably came from somewhere in what is now known as Sierra Leone, right?

• 40:33Speaker 02

  So a lot of, of people who ended up in the Gallegucci region, they were brought there for their knowledge of rice agriculture. And so the whole Sierra Leone's part of it. And so when it extends from like Senegal to Sierra Leone, it was called the Rice Coast. And it's kind of this rice growing region of West Africa. So it could be anywhere, you know, in that region. And what I found with his name is that there was an African naming tradition that doesn't necessarily correlate to a person holding on to their identity. I think the same way that we, we grow up and there's names like, you know, Kevin, Paul, John, James, Mary Martha, you don't necessarily know the, the origin of that name. It should be like the sound of it,

• 41:16Speaker 02

  or maybe the name of a, of a grandmother that gets passed down. I think that was what happened in the Gallegucci cultures. You have this African naming tradition and thousands of names from, that were, came from people's ancestors that were, you know, Yoruba and Ibo from, say Nigeria, or the Akon people of Ghana, tree, there's all these different ethnicities that ended up in the naming tradition. So I don't know his specific origins. And probably what I did in the book was to also weave in kind of DNA analysis. Like I found Nigeria being prominent, like 29% of my DNA, and then finding through ancestry, people popping up as like, fifth to eighth cousins that are Yoruba and Ibo from Nigeria. And so I'm like,

• 41:59Speaker 02

  okay, so this is, this is actual real, like this is likely a cousin that I have some ancestors from this place.

• 42:07Speaker 00

  Did the research make you want to spend time in West Africa, traveling and, and seeing life there? Or and, and or have you done that?

• 42:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I went to Ghana in 2016, I believe, 2016, 2017. And yeah, I'd like to travel extensively in West Africa. Cause I find it, for me, it's intriguing to see, experience the culture, how people talk, how people relate, even, you know, and kind of comparing that to African Americans here, Gallegucci people, Caribbean people, like there is kind of this whole diaspora of people who are here and in the Caribbean or South America that happened through the slave trade.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  What would you say to someone who's listening who is black or African American, and they feel like the possibility of understanding their past, especially all the way back to Africa, to before enslavement, they feel like that's impossible, like that is just something that has been lost irretrievably. What would you say to them about the possibility of understanding more about family history and about more than just enslavement?

• 43:21Speaker 02

  Okay, I can't point to, because the thing is, if you are African American, you're probably descended from like, maybe 30 different ethnic groups. Like there's hundreds of ethnic groups that were brought here and people are into marriage. So there's no one, I'm gonna go find my tribe, you know, I'm gonna go find this one group. Like we're kind of an amalgam of different ethnicities. But I also want to kind of like, not think of it as, well, you're African American, and they cut off your, your culture, your religion, your language. So, okay, that's done. It's like, it's a lot more, I think, layered than that. It's, it's not just, just, it's kind of like binary. It's more like, there are, are aspects of our culture as African

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Americans, and you see it in the church, you see it in music, you see it in dance, right? That are African expressions, like the expression, like the, the polyrhythms in music, in black music, are a direct link to Africa. And this is because your ancestors, not only because they were Gallegucci, but if they're African American, were holding on to like, their kind of like sensibility and their, within their way of seeing and being the world in whichever way they could. And so it's in our culture. So I think for black people, like to, to look at it as, what will I learn when I go to the past? And where will it take me? And yes, there's DNA analysis and you can see, you know, where those origins, what they, what shows up for you.

• 44:45Speaker 00

  What about if you are not African American, and you, you're not living in North America at all, but you are part of an indigenous group, or you're part of a group that has been historically not in power, and you're trying to understand more about your history? And it's a history that's not the one that is prominently told in history books. What advice would you have for, for someone who's trying to start that process?

• 45:10Speaker 02

  I mean, I think you, you, you go from what speaks to you and what, what calls to you. And I think as we were talking earlier, there's not, there's a lot of other stuff beside pain. There's a lot of resilience. There's beauty. There's like what I found. And so I think, that's one thing I think, I think to keep in mind. But I also wanted to say, you know, as, as we're talking, it's like, people are, view these things like so differently, just emotionally. So I remember as a reporter covering, there was a replica of an Amistad, which was this ship, you know, the story is, and this, this was a ship that was, that people were enslaved in Sierra Leone. And the enslaved took over the ship. And then they were like, captured and in New England and Boston, and were able to free themselves through a court

• 45:55Speaker 02

  process and go back to Sierra Leone. I remember going in Hampton, Virginia, when I was working at the Daily Press newspaper there to cover this, this, this replica of the ship that was brought down there. And there was a guy standing on the dock, and he said, my wife is on that ship. She's interested. He's like, I can't go any further than this. It's too painful for me. And so it just shows you this, the kind of just.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  Great amount of variance in two people's, you know, way of grappling with the past who are, who are married. So I think, I think a lot of this is like deeply personal, you know, and some folks it like it calls to you and you go for it. And then some folks won't. But I do think there's a lot of richness around the pain and a lot of stories of survival, strength, there's culture, there's so much you can find out.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  Your work and your book is not in any way overtly political. And yet I feel like we live in this time where there's such an active process of trying to rewrite history, trying to avoid talking about narratives that in any way make white people uncomfortable, that in any way acknowledge historical wrongs, that in any way open the door for making things right with things like reparations or land back. Like there's a, there's a real process right now that is pushing back on understanding history in an accurate, full way.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  And so I wonder if this process of just understanding our own family histories, of understanding what actually happened, if it feels somewhat radical or revolutionary or like a political project in a way to just understand the facts of what actually happened when we're told, we're getting some really strong messaging from people in power that we should not be thinking or talking or acknowledging that.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  If I had not done this research, I wouldn't know that not only did my great, great grandfather enlist in the, in the, in the colored troops, but my two great, great uncles, 200 men from Hilton Head. So they like took this active role in their own, fighting for their own liberation. And I, and I grew up in an era where, you know, I used to hear about like welfare dependency. And I had this like negative narrative around black people that was just in the, the atmosphere, you know? And then, and then this book, I'm like, people did everything themselves, you know? Built their homes, built their boats, built their praise, praise houses, didn't have doctors, but healed people through root doctors, you know? Had their midwives that brought babies into the world, like they could make a life for themselves in this island.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  So it was very, it was the opposite of everything that I've been told, you know? So like a lot of the erasure around like race or our history is about kind of asserting kind of white superiority, trying to assuage like white guilt, but we can't sacrifice our history because of these feelings of like white guilt, or I just want to like have power. There's just immense value in like going beyond the kind of general, you know, stories that are out there and historical research, which is a lot of its greatness, important, that's under attack. But then also where do we sit? Where do our families sit within that history? And how are you tied to that history is an important journey.

• 49:19Speaker 00

  Keith, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you so much for the time, for the work that you do.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. It was great. It was great having this conversation with you.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Before I read the credits, we are doing a survey right now. It would be so, so, so helpful to us if you would take a few seconds to answer some questions about the show, what you'd like, what you'd like to see more of, what you think we could do better. We really, really value your feedback and it makes a tremendous difference in the future of the show. You can find the survey at bit.ly/BHsurvey6. That's B I T dot L Y slash B H survey six, or there is a link in the episode description. You should be able to click that link and it'll take you right there. We would love your feedback. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much. Okay. Thank you so much to today's guest, Keith Rushing. His book is called Descended: Searching for My Gullah Geechee Roots. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and my book's called Humor Me.

• 50:16Speaker 00

  You can find more about my book, my live show dates and all of my other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is put together by a team whose family lines all converged on the development of the podcast. On the TED side, our family tree includes Daniella Balarezzo, Banban Chang, Michelle Quint, Chloe, Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, Tansaka Sungmanivong, Antonio Lay and Joseph DeBryan. Ryan Lash is filming and editing the family reunion and Mateo Salas is fact checking whether we are all cousins removed or not removed. On the PRX side, they come from generations of podcast producers and editors, a line stretching back to the very invention of sound itself. It's Morgan Flannery, Norgil, Patrick Grant and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks to you and your family for listening to this show. Please send this episode to someone who you think would enjoy it.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Until then, take care and thanks for listening.

• 51:14Speaker 00

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• 53:20Speaker 06

  Romantic relationships seem to have rules.

• 53:22Speaker 05

  Dating, exclusivity, breakups.

• 53:25Speaker 07

  Friendship, not so much. How often are you supposed to talk? How much should you tell each other? When does an acquaintance become a friend? What happens when someone just drifts away?

• 53:34Speaker 06

  Not to mention full-on friendship breakups.

• 53:38Speaker 05

  The worst.

• 53:39Speaker 06

  And there's no script for any of it.

• 53:41Speaker 07

  In the second episode of Cornerpiece, we ask why friendship is so messy, especially as we get older and what actually helps friendship last. We talk to experts about the big and small risks that true connection requires. Listen to Cornerpiece, a brand new podcast from TED, hosted by me, Melissa, Taha and Sabrina from Answer in Progress. You can find our show on Spotify, Apple and more.