Family stories are one way our forebears pass down legacies to us; Newton also questions the inheritances of genes and heirlooms. The net effect is like watching a deft magician perform one trick after another and then patiently explain the secret and how you’ve been fooled. Newton will offer scientific research to suggest, for example, that mental health or temperament might be something that could be passed down generations, supplemented with detail from her own life (“Later I learned that Charley had died from manic exhaustion,” she says of her great-grandfather, “and I remembered my own sleepless nights and scrabbling brain”). But then she’ll swiftly move to unpack many of the problems with the same theory. She highlights not only the shaky scientific basis for our beliefs (“Our science is only as good as the questions we ask,” she reminds us) but also, quite often, the racist and ableist ideologies that underpin them. The idea of inherited mental traits, for example, which gained currency around the dawn of the twentieth century and still holds sway in popular imagination (and not just with people like Newton’s father), was itself pushed heavily by eugenicists like Henry H. Goddard and his influential 1912 book, The Kalikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. But Goddard’s central claim that all of the descendants of Martin Kalikak and his wife were “normal,” while those who descended from an affair with a “feeble-minded” barmaid turned out to be equally “feeble-minded,” was later found to be based entirely on altered and invented data.
What Ancestor Trouble makes clear by the book’s end is that there is something fundamentally misguided about the very question of “nature versus nurture” itself. After all, such a binary implies that human culture, parenting, and environmental factors all exist outside of “nature,” and that our behavior and creations are all fundamentally opposed to the natural world. But when we see “trees and birds and flowers and mountains as ‘nature’ and ourselves and the habitations we build as something apart from nature,” we do not understand that “we are also nature. We are all of the land. Our ancestors back through time have already returned to the earth. We have disavowed that kinship, too.” To truly build one’s family tree requires not just blood relatives but a larger, richer, and more open understanding of lineage and heritage.
By the end of Ancestor Trouble, Newton is far less interested in blood kin than she is in these other possible connections—the ways in which our chosen family and friends, the people who occupied this land long before us, our connection to the land itself make us who we are. As for her blood relatives, she strives to keep the memory of them alive, with all their shortcomings and strengths. Ultimately, Newton turns to more spiritual rituals of grief and mourning—even for those she never knew in life. Because, she decides finally, even though many of her ancestors had grievous shortcomings, “Holding ghosts in a state of unforgiveness makes things worse.” The arc of Ancestor Trouble ends up being a subtle move from a process of genealogical spelunking to one of gentle exorcism.