I got a notification from Ancestry that information about my brother had been added to the site. Of course, I followed the trail to the information because that’s what I’ve always done where my brother is concerned, even now that we’re not in contact (see Marie Howe’s poem “The Boy” for an explanation of what I’m talking about).

What I found about my brother wasn’t interesting, but there were dozens of new pieces of information linking numerous relatives on my father’s side of the family to the Civil War, where they fought for the Confederate States of America. One of them was a prisoner of war and died inside the camp where he was held.

My lips are numb. I don’t know how to process all of this. This awful history is in my family, in my epigenetics. It’s been handed down and down and down to me. This is only four generations from me.

It didn’t stop with the war. My grandparents on my father’s side were racist, as was my father. One of my most traumatizing and painful moments occurred when I was very young and witnessed my grandmother and my great aunt treating a Black woman with extreme disrespect before turning away from her and calling her a racial slur. They didn’t know I was in the room where it happened and that I saw everything they said and did to the woman.

I think that experience was more painful than the sexual abuse that occurred later. There’s an exiled part of me who’s still in that room feeling shock and terror and sadness all at once. That’s when the feeling of being part of an evil family started, of being from a family that was more monster than human. It started that day, not the day my father began abusing me. What he did only reified those feelings, setting them like grout in tile that’s already been laid.

Those are the feelings I would eventually turn inward on myself, believing that I was a monster, that I was evil. Or, put a more sanitized way, that I was fundamentally defective. Fundamentally meaning essentially, systemically, absolutely, irreparably flawed.

It wasn’t just my father who made me feel that way. It was his whole side of the family. I was of them. I was of all of them. Who they were and what they did ripped through me like lead bullets, like death, like the only thing worse than death, which is pure hatred.

Family can bite me. That half of my family can bite me.