![]() ![]() ![]() (Newton recalls that he smashed the heads off of her dolls because their plastic complexions were a shade too dark.) His decision to marry Newton’s mom was based on a desire “to have smart children together,” she writes. Her father was a lawyer who believed in slavery, for real. Texas-born, a “tiny, waifish, spectral child,” Newton was raised in a troubled Miami household by parents who suffered from an American malady known as crazy. “It’s another thing to face and acknowledge it in the people we love most.” “It’s one thing to acknowledge bigotry and inhumanity where we expect it,” she says. “It’s difficult to heal intergenerational trauma if we don’t understand how it began,” writes Maud Newton in “Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation.” In her unruly memoir and scholarly pursuit, Newton documents her family’s unhappy past - the alcoholism, violence and insanity - and struggles to “make amends” for the ancestral crimes of slavery and Native American removal that she uncovers during the course of her genealogical investigation. ![]()
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