In her debut memoir, Dionne Ford takes readers along for an emotional ride as she crisscrosses the country to find her enslaved ancestors—and herself.

The day Dionne Ford turned 38 years old, she came across an old “family” photo on the internet, a picture she’d never seen before. It shows her great-great-grandfather Colonel W. R. Stuart, a wealthy Louisiana cotton broker; his wife, Elizabeth; Ford’s great-great-grandmother Tempy Burton, who was given to the Stuarts by Elizabeth’s parents as a wedding present; and two biracial-looking young women, assumed to be Tempy and the Colonel’s children.

The discovery prompted Ford to embark on a yearslong journey from New Jersey to Louisiana to Virginia and back again, searching for clues into the life of Tempy and her six children, plus whoever else she could find to uncover (and understand) her roots. Last April, she published Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing, a compact yet expansive look at her trek back in time to search for her family history. And a trek it was.

“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.”

The book’s title refers to a kind of pilgrimage, called sankofa by the Akan people of Western Africa. “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten,” writes Ford, who earned a B.A. in communications and media studies from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 1991 and an M.F.A. in creative writing from New York University in 2016. As she digs deep into the 19th century, she also contends with personal trauma: the childhood sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of a close relative and the alcoholism that helped her cope. And she evokes a riot of emotion for readers, perhaps particularly Black readers, as she grapples with the history of slavery and the ways in which its aftermath affects generation after generation.

At the beginning of the book, you talk a bit about wanting your older daughter, Desiree, to embrace her roots. Did she? How did your research affect her, your other daughter, Devany, and your husband, Dennis?
This definitely affected my family. I took my girls with me on research trips, so they were a part of this journey. I do think that they both had a certain pride in just knowing about this side of their family’s history, and particularly about the enslaved women.

My cousin made this game for the kids to play that had all the ancestors on cards, and everybody always wanted to be Tempy. I felt like they already were positively internalizing their female ancestors’ lives. I think it’s always grounding for people to know as full a story as possible.

Throughout the book, you write about how language can fall short when you’re doing this kind of research—and writing about it. What advice would you give to other Black people who want to investigate their own family history? How should they get started?
Talk to your elders. Find a respectful way to let them know that you’re interested in your shared history, and you’d like to set aside time to just ask them some questions about it. They’re gone before we know it, so it’s so important.

Then get yourself some kind of group because it’s painful and hard if you’re dealing with people who were enslaved or oppressed, so working with other people who are also in earnest, who can be a support to you and you can support them, is great. The group AfriGeneas is for people who are of African descent. And if you also can find a research partner in your family, that’s really wonderful. Don’t be in a hurry, and be open-minded because you’re probably going to find a lot of things that you didn’t expect—and maybe that you didn’t want to, either.

Beyond personal reasons, why did you write this book?
James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” In my experience, not only can nothing be changed until it’s faced, but somehow the more I try to avoid a thing, the more power it has over me. Something fundamentally shifted in me through this process of confronting my family’s history and my own. So, by organizing my experience into a narrative, I hoped to offer that to readers: the possibility for some fundamental shift by facing whatever it is in their life they would rather avoid.

Is there a particular ancestor that you now feel most connected with as a result of your research?

How did you choose what research to cite and discuss?
I chose to include things, in the end, that were specific to my story—if they were specific to Louisiana slavery, women in slavery, or my own story—but it was hard.

For example, I kept From Slavery to Freedom, [John Hope Franklin’s classic history of African Americans], because it dealt with the Sterling family, who had enslaved some of my family. There were so many wonderful texts that did help me get a better understanding.

What would you say has been the most unexpected response to your memoir?
I have had a couple of strangers—and friends, too— say that they really appreciated me talking about the sexual abuse. One woman, in particular, said that had happened to her and that after she read my book, she actually sought out a survivors group and went for the first time in her life. That was very humbling and moving, and I felt so grateful that anything that I could write might actually help somebody find a bit more peace or serenity.

What’s next for you?
I’m working on adapting my book into a limited series. There are things you can do visually that you can’t do on the page—things that I didn’t feel comfortable doing because it was a memoir, and I really wanted to stick to as much of the truth that I was able to back up as possible. Now I’m having a little bit more fun and envisioning what it would’ve been like for them living at that time. I’m also going back to the novel that I was supposed to write as my MFA thesis at NYU but had ditched so I could work on my memoir.

I’m a member of the New Jersey Reparations Council, too. The state has been dragging its feet on passing a bill to just study reparations, so the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice just said, “You know what? We’re not waiting for you. You guys take too long. We’re convening our own council.” And they invited me to participate. I’m really excited.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Sierra McCleary-Harris is an associate editor of this magazine.

For Keefe, a 2008 Fordham College at Lincoln Center graduate, her brother’s death was both a painful personal loss and a wake-up call to the systemic failures—criminalization, pharmaceutical profit-chasing, lack of patient-centered addiction treatment—that had contributed to so many tragic endings like Matt’s. In the year following Matt’s death, Keefe moved to Brooklyn and began spending a lot of her time researching addiction issues, leading her to a job at the nonprofit Shatterproof. She also began training for the Brooklyn Half-Marathon. She had been a casual runner before that, but had never run a race that long, and the training offered her an opportunity to find both physical release and a healthy form of repetitive structure—“a connection to both the grief experience and the addiction experience,” she says.

In her memoir, Thirty-Thousand Steps (Prometheus Books, 2022)—a reference both to the approximate number of steps in a half-marathon and to the 12-step addiction treatment model—Keefe pays tribute to her brother Matt’s life, takes a deep dive into the medical and political changes needed to address the addiction crisis, and recounts her half-marathon training as a form of catharsis. She hopes that it will reach others who have lost siblings or peers to addiction.

Keefe recently spoke with Fordham Magazine about her first book, her running practice, and the space for optimism about the future of addiction treatment.

Your parents are in the book a lot and come off as very kind, loving, supportive people. How supportive were they, and how much did you involve them in the process of writing the book?
They’ve been very supportive. It’s difficult for them. Neither one of them read it completely through, but they’ve had friends tell them about it and they’ve been excited and supportive and happy to hear that people like it. I wanted to be clear in the book: This is my story about me and my brother. This is our story. But I didn’t want to pretend my parents weren’t there when they were. They were in the hospital, they were helping him in every way that they could. There is so often that idea that it’s the parents’ fault or whatever, and that was never something I wanted to play into or give any air to—that they were absentee or didn’t love him or weren’t present for him.

But I didn’t want to get too into what their perspective was, because that just wasn’t the story I was equipped to tell. Part of what made me want to write this book so badly is I felt like there’s not a lot of writing for peers, siblings, friends, spouses who have lost people to addiction. We’re losing people at a really alarming rate. I felt like there was a big hole for people like us who are watching someone our own age go through this and thinking, “Why is it them and not me?”

Following Matt’s death, you got a job at the nonprofit Shatterproof, which focuses on addiction issues, and you still do consulting for them. How did your work with the organization overlap with the things you wrote about?
It was a huge opportunity for me to learn from people who are familiar with the policy space, people who are familiar with the treatment landscape, people who are familiar with government institutions that create regulations. That was a hugely eye-opening experience and really helped me synthesize one of the most straightforward messages of the book: that it can’t be overstated how much is known and understood about addiction right now and how little of it is utilized in medicine.

We do know what works, but also, one size doesn’t fit all. There’s no one treatment that’s appropriate for everybody. Addiction is such a specific condition that comes from such a specific psychosocial background of each person. And I think that’s what I tried to show in the book, too, with my brother and I being three years apart, right next to each other all the time, with a very safe, comfortable life, and one of us going this way and the other one going that way.

You can torture yourself trying to ask, “How could this have been prevented?” I think it’s more about if and when this does happen—because it does happen to people—here’s how you can react and here’s how people can get better. When he was sick, I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop the whole time, which is horrible. I wish I had had a better understanding of this being a treatable condition. The nonprofit work that I did gave me such an incredible view into the way that both medicine and government handle this—what they think the approach has been and what the approach should be.

Were there moments when it felt too emotionally difficult for you to push through with the practical elements of research and writing?
I think the way that the trauma manifested for me was not like, “Oh, I can’t look at this.” It was almost like, “I’m looking at this too closely. I’m spending too much time on this.” I think there are a lot of ways that you can react to an event like this in your life. Not wanting to engage with it very much makes a ton of sense to me. And I almost wish that had been my reaction, but I had the opposite reaction, which was like, “I’m so obsessed with this, I must do something.”

It was more a question of, “How do I synthesize all of this raw information into a coherent story? How can I make this intense degree of emotion something that a reader would choose to engage with?” You have to ask some hard questions, like, “Would I choose to read this if this is going to be non-stop suffering? Is this something that appeals to someone for 200-plus pages?”

One way you do make people want to engage with it, I think, is through humor. Along with all the really serious issues you write about, you also tell some really funny stories about growing up with Matt and are able to use self-deprecation when talking about how you grieved. How did you think about the ways you wanted to include humor?
It’s the way that everybody uses humor in their normal life—when you feel like the pressure’s building too much and you need just a little release. That would be when I would try to reach for the humor. And also to let people know that I’m okay—they don’t have to worry about me. I’m describing something that’s very horrible, but I’ve had enough time to zoom out that I can even make a joke. So you can laugh too, it’s okay. We’re all kind of going through this together. But you definitely need the people around you to tell you when something’s working and when something’s not.

How far do you think we have come in terms of treating addiction since you started the project? Have you seen progress in terms of things like safe consumption sites and people knowing more about the issues?
I feel like there’s so much stuff going on that would’ve shocked me five years ago. Fentanyl test strips, Naloxone being in music clubs underneath the bar, being a tool that people are prepared to use or at least theoretically know they should be prepared to use—that’s huge. I didn’t even know what Naloxone was in 2015, when I was living with someone with an active heroin addiction. I think at the very least, now people understand that this is out there.

There’s just a comical amount of unnecessary restrictions on addiction treatment. When you look into what the root of that is, it really is just nothing more than stigma and misunderstanding. There’s an impression that people with addiction have a certain moral character and that might make them riskier to treat. And that’s obviously just not true. And so now, after it was part of the omnibus bill, it’s easier for doctors to prescribe buprenorphine, which is the gold standard medication for people who have an opioid use disorder. So I think that aspect is definitely improving.

The thing that continues to be frustrating is having these little pieces of hope within a larger system that is cursed. As long as we have a for-profit medical model, and as long as addiction is criminalized in the way that it is, these issues will persist. So I think that we’re chipping away at it, and I think that that’s nothing to be diminished, but the overdose rates now are even higher than they were when I started writing the book.

You recently did a reading at the bookstore Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C. How was that event?
It was really great—a full house, a very engaged audience. It was similar to the experiences I would have when I would be representing Shatterproof and going to public places, and you get people that kind of come up to you and put their arm on you and just really need to blab. They need to talk to somebody. And I think when people see somebody who is willing to talk about addiction in a public way, they see that as a way to engage with this thing that maybe they haven’t felt comfortable engaging with before.

Are you still an avid runner? Is that something that you still use to keep yourself centered as difficulties and challenges and tragedies occur in life?
I’m still a very avid runner. I completed my 10th half-marathon in the fall and I did my first full marathon in Los Angeles in the spring. It’s hard to overstate how very important running was to me. And I didn’t even really realize it at the time. It is very much a first line of defense coping mechanism for me. The physical element—I’m a very high-energy, anxious person, so if I don’t have an outlet for that, it’ll be a problem. So that has persisted and definitely continues to be important. Before I ran, I feel like I would roll my eyes at fitness content. So I hope people, even if they’re not into running, they’ll check it out, because the purpose of me including that was to show, “Here’s the power of finding something that works for you.”

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Adam Kaufman, FCLC ’08.

The Unquiet Daughter: A Memoir of Betrayal and Love

Danielle Flood, TMC ’73, was born in Saigon and raised in the United States, the product of a wartime love triangle that inspired The Quiet American, Graham Greene’s 1956 novel about the early days of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

“I am a sequel he never wrote,” she claims in this powerful memoir of her emotionally turbulent upbringing and her decades-long quest to learn the truth about her parents.

Flood’s beautiful but troubled French and Vietnamese mother raised her fitfully, lying to her about their past. “I lived for decades in mystery,” writes Flood, who attended convent schools on Long Island and in Dublin before graduating from Fordham in the early 1970s. She ultimately found her way as a journalist and, over the years, uncovered “pieces of truth” about her family’s history in Southeast Asia, France, and the United Kingdom.

For years, she avoided writing this memoir. But as her own children grew up, she realized it was time to tell her life’s story. “It has taken me more than half a century to get here, tapping at the keys of my life,” she writes. The result is a compelling, poetic account of self-doubt, self-discovery, and the power of love.

In December 2009, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s already-frail mother took a bad fall and broke her hip. Forty-eight days later, she was gone. Mortal Blessings is the story of how the author and her siblings cared for their mother in that short, sacred time span, when mundane acts of caregiving took on divine grace. O’Donnell, associate director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, divides this memoir into chapters named for newfound sacraments. There’s “The Sacrament of the Cell Phone and the Wheelchair,” for example, an account of regular calls to family members and daily strolls around the hospital that “served as a kind of communion for us,” writes O’Donnell. “We moved up and down those hallways as one, two parts of a single whole.” Even their ritual of enjoying pie together had become “Eucharist by another name.” And like the Eucharist, O’Donnell writes, her sacramental witness to her mother’s final days “was one more way of affirming life in the face of apparent death.”