PBS高端访谈:第一夫人米歇尔·奥巴马的美国血统

 　　JEFFREY BROWN: And next: A new book takes a look at the roots of the first lady's family tree.

　　Gwen Ifill has that story.

　　GWEN IFILL: Among the four million slaves living in the United States on the eve of the Civil War, there was a 10-year-old girl who, a century-and-a-half later, would turn out to be the third-great-grandmother of Michelle Obama.

　　Even Mrs. Obama didn't know this family history until New York Times reporter Rachel Swarns unearthed¹ her legacy² in 2009. The first lady's ancestry³, both black and white, are a complicated heritage shared by many Americans.

　　"American Tapestry," the story of the black, white, and multiracial ancestors of Michelle Obama, takes us on that journey. Its author, Rachel Swarns, joins me now.

　　Rachel, thanks for joining us.

　　You started out after having written about the story for The New York Times to find out about the genealogy⁴ of Michelle Obama, and instead you found the story of American history.

　　RACHEL SWARNS, author of "American Tapestry": That's right.

　　It really is the sweep of the country's history through the lens of one family, this first lady's family.

　　GWEN IFILL: A family that turned out to be not necessarily—you traced it backwards⁵ from knowing, of course, who—where it ended, but tracing it backward was kind of the drama.

　　RACHEL SWARNS: Right.

　　Well, the first lady has always known that she had white ancestors, but she didn't know who or when or where. And so I wanted to take the reader back into time to try and solve that mystery.

　　GWEN IFILL: Who was Melvinia?

　　RACHEL SWARNS: Melvinia was a slave girl valued at $475 in 1852, and she was the first lady's great-great-great-grandmother.

　　And she ended up going from a farm in Spartanburg, S.C., to Georgia, where she fathered a child, a biracial child. And the question has been, who was the father of that child?

　　GWEN IFILL: And so you set out to figure that out. But how do you trace that sort of thing?

　　RACHEL SWARNS: It's very challenging.

　　I mean, just telling these stories are challenging, particularly for African-Americans, because Melvinia was unusual. She appeared in a will. But before the Civil War, people simply didn't appear. African-Americans didn't appear in the census⁶, and their marriages and births weren't chronicled in newspapers. So it's not easy.

　　GWEN IFILL: I noticed throughout the book you often had to fall into kind of a "this may have happened" construction. That must have been kind of frustrating⁷ for a reporter.

　　RACHEL SWARNS: It is. And the reality is that there are some things we just won't know.

　　GWEN IFILL: Was the path that you took—the path that they took, that this family took, was it typical? Was it—how widespread was it?

　　RACHEL SWARNS: She—her family story is very, very typical.

　　It is the story of so many Americans. And they basically had front-row seats to major moments in our history, from slavery to the Civil War, Reconstruction⁸, segregation⁹, the migration¹⁰. It is a very, very American story.

　　GWEN IFILL: You—there was a lot written about when this book originally came out about Michelle Obama's white ancestors, even when you first wrote the story for The New York Times.

　　RACHEL SWARNS: That's right.

　　GWEN IFILL: How unusual was that, really? We can look now at the African-American experience and see it's a rainbow, as much as anything else.

　　RACHEL SWARNS: It is a rainbow. And many of us have those stories, and many people are finding that out through DNA¹¹ testing themselves.

　　You know, with genealogy tools available online, with a cheek swab, and off it goes in the mail, a lot of ordinary people are finding these stories out and making these kinds of connections.

　　GWEN IFILL: But it raises lots of uncomfortable questions, too, especially about how the original connection happened.

　　RACHEL SWARNS: It does.

　　And I was able to find the mystery white ancestors in her family tree, and their descendants. And they, as you might imagine, really grappled with this. It's hard to look back and to know that your family may have owned the first lady's family, in fact, indeed did own the first lady's family, and, worse still, that your ancestor may have raped¹² a member of the first lady's family. These are not easy things to think about.

　　GWEN IFILL: And there's really no way to tell, in the kind of research you did, what the nature of the relationship was between Melvinia and the man who fathered her child.

　　RACHEL SWARNS: Right. There's no way to know.

　　GWEN IFILL: And Dolphus Shields, he's a key character in this. Tell me about him.

　　RACHEL SWARNS: So he is the first lady's great-great-grandfather. He was biracial, born a slave.

　　And he really carried the family forward. He became a carpenter. He became a property owner. He became—he ran his own business. He founded churches. When he died, his obituary¹³ ran on the front page of the black newspaper in Birmingham at the time.

　　GWEN IFILL: And we think that he had a relationship, perhaps, with his white father, even if he didn't know it was his father?

　　RACHEL SWARNS: Well, we don't know. There are intriguing¹⁴ questions about that.

　　He left Georgia for Birmingham. And around the time he was living in Birmingham, his—he had a white half-brother who also lived in Birmingham. And there are people who knew Dolphus who said that he talked about having a white brother. Whether that really was this half-brother, whether he knew who his father really was, we don't know.

　　GWEN IFILL: In putting this all together, in knitting this all together, did you talk to current-day members, descendants of this—of this tree?

　　RACHEL SWARNS: Yes, I talked to members black and white. Some of them actually got together quite recently.

　　GWEN IFILL: Tell me about that.

　　RACHEL SWARNS: Yes.

　　They—the town where Melvinia once lived as a slave decided¹⁵ to erect¹⁶ a monument to Melvinia after the story that appeared in the front page of The New York Times. And they had a ceremony. Some of Melvinia's descendants were there.

　　And, at the last minute, I thought maybe some of the white descendants would like to come. And they did. Some drove from Birmingham and parts of Alabama. And some came from Georgia.

　　GWEN IFILL: Wow.

　　RACHEL SWARNS: It was quite something to see.

　　GWEN IFILL: I will bet. I will bet it was.

　　Yet, along the way, there has always been a certain amount of shame and secret-keeping that goes with this kind of connection. And I want you to read a passage from the book that I asked you to take a look at that kind of captures—at least in reading it, it captured it for me.

　　RACHEL SWARNS: "That reluctance¹⁷ to probe the past, to look back over one's shoulder, to examine the half-healed sores that festered in grandparents and great-grandparents reappears over and over again in Mrs. Obama's family tree.

　　"It has made the search for the truth that much harder. But it is also understandable.

　　"People often turn away from what is too painful to witness. They almost always want their children to see the world as a better place, to be free of their pain."

　　GWEN IFILL: In meeting with the descendants, as they met each other for the first time recently, did it seem as if they had transcended¹⁸ that pain?

　　RACHEL SWARNS: I think they were willing to grapple with it.

　　And I—I think, in many ways, they would have wished that this connection might have originated in a different way, but they accepted it and thought that they, as contemporary people, could get to know each other and exchange phone numbers, take a picture, have a dinner.

　　GWEN IFILL: And do you know if other African-Americans and whites who have grown together and grown apart in our society have also found their way back to each other in this way?

　　RACHEL SWARNS: Oh, many, many people are doing this all the time.

　　And when you do these DNA tests, they connect you to your distant cousins. And for many African-Americans, they find they're black, white, and in between.

　　GWEN IFILL: Fascinating.

　　Rachel Swarns, author of "American Tapestry," thank you so much.

　　RACHEL SWARNS: Thank you.

1 unearthed   

出土的（考古）

参考例句：

• Many unearthed cultural relics are set forth in the exhibition hall. 展览馆里陈列着许多出土文物。
• Some utensils were in a state of decay when they were unearthed. 有些器皿在出土时已经残破。

2 legacy   

n.遗产，遗赠；先人(或过去)留下的东西

参考例句：

• They are the most precious cultural legacy our forefathers left.它们是我们祖先留下来的最宝贵的文化遗产。
• He thinks the legacy is a gift from the Gods.他认为这笔遗产是天赐之物。

3 ancestry   

n.祖先，家世

参考例句：

• Their ancestry settled the land in 1856.他们的祖辈1856年在这块土地上定居下来。
• He is an American of French ancestry.他是法国血统的美国人。

4 genealogy   

n.家系，宗谱

参考例句：

• He had sat and repeated his family's genealogy to her,twenty minutes of nonstop names.他坐下又给她细数了一遍他家族的家谱，20分钟内说出了一连串的名字。
• He was proficient in all questions of genealogy.他非常精通所有家谱的问题。

5 backwards   

adv.往回地，向原处，倒，相反，前后倒置地

参考例句：

• He turned on the light and began to pace backwards and forwards.他打开电灯并开始走来走去。
• All the girls fell over backwards to get the party ready.姑娘们迫不及待地为聚会做准备。

6 census   

n.(官方的)人口调查，人口普查

参考例句：

• A census of population is taken every ten years.人口普查每10年进行一次。
• The census is taken one time every four years in our country.我国每四年一次人口普查。

7 frustrating   

adj.产生挫折的，使人沮丧的，令人泄气的v.使不成功( frustrate的现在分词 )；挫败；使受挫折；令人沮丧

参考例句：

• It's frustrating to have to wait so long. 要等这么长时间，真令人懊恼。
• It was a demeaning and ultimately frustrating experience. 那是一次有失颜面并且令人沮丧至极的经历。 来自《简明英汉词典》

8 reconstruction   

n.重建，再现，复原

参考例句：

• The country faces a huge task of national reconstruction following the war.战后，该国面临着重建家园的艰巨任务。
• In the period of reconstruction,technique decides everything.在重建时期，技术决定一切。

9 segregation   

n.隔离，种族隔离

参考例句：

• Many school boards found segregation a hot potato in the early 1960s.在60年代初，许多学校部门都觉得按水平分班是一个棘手的问题。
• They were tired to death of segregation and of being kicked around.他们十分厌恶种族隔离和总是被人踢来踢去。

10 migration   

n.迁移，移居，（鸟类等的）迁徙

参考例句：

• Swallows begin their migration south in autumn.燕子在秋季开始向南方迁移。
• He described the vernal migration of birds in detail.他详细地描述了鸟的春季移居。

11 DNA   

(缩)deoxyribonucleic acid 脱氧核糖核酸

参考例句：

• DNA is stored in the nucleus of a cell.脱氧核糖核酸储存于细胞的细胞核里。
• Gene mutations are alterations in the DNA code.基因突变是指DNA密码的改变。

12 raped   

v.以暴力夺取，强夺( rape的过去式和过去分词 )；强奸

参考例句：

• A young woman was brutally raped in her own home. 一名年轻女子在自己家中惨遭强暴。 来自辞典例句
• We got stick together, or we will be having our women raped. 我们得团结一致，不然我们的妻女就会遭到蹂躏。 来自辞典例句

13 obituary   

n.讣告，死亡公告；adj.死亡的

参考例句：

• The obituary records the whole life of the deceased.讣文记述了这位死者的生平。
• Five days after the letter came,he found Andersen s obituary in the morning paper.收到那封信五天后，他在早报上发现了安德森的讣告。

14 intriguing   

adj.有趣的；迷人的v.搞阴谋诡计(intrigue的现在分词)；激起…的好奇心

参考例句：

• These discoveries raise intriguing questions. 这些发现带来了非常有趣的问题。
• It all sounds very intriguing. 这些听起来都很有趣。 来自《简明英汉词典》

15 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

16 erect   

n./v.树立，建立，使竖立；adj.直立的，垂直的

参考例句：

• She held her head erect and her back straight.她昂着头，把背挺得笔直。
• Soldiers are trained to stand erect.士兵们训练站得笔直。

17 reluctance   

n.厌恶，讨厌，勉强，不情愿

参考例句：

• The police released Andrew with reluctance.警方勉强把安德鲁放走了。
• He showed the greatest reluctance to make a reply.他表示很不愿意答复。

18 transcended   

超出或超越（经验、信念、描写能力等）的范围( transcend的过去式和过去分词 )； 优于或胜过…

参考例句：

• He wanted assurance that he had transcended what was inherently ambiguous. 他要证明，他已经超越了本来就是混淆不清的事情。
• It transcended site to speak to universal human concerns. 它超越了场所的局限，表达了人类共同的心声。