Rooted Book Club: GO BACK AND GET IT by Dionne Ford
Our May 2024 Book Club Selection
These days, it’s easier than ever to find distant and not so distant relatives with the swab of a cheek or a simple Facebook search. Genealogical webs unravel, time collapses, and a rush of painful and joyous stories fill the once unspoken gaps in family history. At the same time, it’s impossible to separate a family’s history from the bitter history of our nation. These unspooled mysteries of the past and the ways in which they illuminate and complicate the present are the subject of our May Book Club pick, Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing by Dionne Ford.
“If you are going to look for your enslaved ancestors,” Ford writes in the book’s prologue, “you will have to look for the people who enslaved them. […] This is a study in contrasts. Shadow. Light. Black. White. Joy. Pain. Victim. Perpetrator. You will find ephemera—editorials, photographs, wedding announcements—and atrocities—lynched uncles, your people as property in someone’s will, deed, or mortgage guarantee. You will also find the living— third cousins once removed, fifth cousins straight up, and descendants of the family that forced your family into slavery.”
Dionne Ford will be joining us to talk about her luminous memoir, Go Back and Get It on Thursday May 23 at 7 p.m. CDT / 8 p.m. EDT. You can order a copy of the book from our partners—Lemuria Books and Friendly City Books—or purchase one through our affiliate Bookshop link. [Note: This month we will be migrating the book club discussions to Streamyard from Zoom for a more streamlined recording experience.]
Here is the official description of the book:
An unexpected family photograph leads Dionne Ford to uncover the stories of her enslaved female ancestors, reclaim their power, and begin to heal.
Countless Black Americans descended from slavery are related to the enslavers who bought and sold their ancestors. Among them is Dionne Ford, whose great grandmother was the last of six children born to a Louisiana cotton broker and the enslaved woman he received as a wedding gift.
What shapes does this kind of intergenerational trauma take? In these pages, which move between her inner life and deep research, Ford tells us. It manifests as alcoholism and post-traumatic stress; it finds echoes in her own experience of sexual abuse at the hands of a relative, and in the ways in which she builds her own interracial family.
To heal, Ford tries a wide range of therapies, lifestyle changes, and recovery meetings. “Anything,” she writes, “to keep from going back there.” But what she learns is that she needs to go back there, to return to her female ancestors, and unearth what she can about them to start to feel whole.
Dionne Ford is an NEA creative writing fellow and the co-editor of the anthology Slavery's Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation (Rutgers University Press). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Literary Hub, New Jersey Monthly, the Rumpus, and Ebony and won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists and the Newswomen's Club of New York. She holds a BA from Fordham University and an MFA from New York University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and daughters.
The Rooted Book Club is in partnership with the Mississippi Book Festival, Lemuria Books, and Friendly City Books. Red Squared records and produces our book club conversations at their podcast studio in The Hangar in Midtown, Jackson. Let me know if you have any questions, suggestions, or comments. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts on this book!