Ancestor Trouble by Maud Newton

Newton’s beautiful and complexly nuanced “ Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation” began as an attempt to seek answers to personally troubling questions about her white Southern family’s role in the slave trade. Almost nothing I discovered about him fit the narrative arc I’d plotted.” “I started my research expecting to find - if I could find him at all - an unapologetic swashbuckling hothead. “I can’t recall whether it was my mom or Granny who told me that Charley killed a man with a hay hook in downtown Dallas,” begins one of Maud Newton’s stories. Illo for books sandra dionisi for the boston globe