I drafted this on Nov 6, right before driving back to West Lafayette after two quiet, unexpected weeks in St. Louis. The first-floor apartment passed inspection early, the keys are with my new tenant, the tools are put away, the birds are calm — and when my hands stop moving, my brain goes digging.
So I went back into the archives. My family tree.
I’ve been on a genealogy kick again — deep in census records, newspaper clippings, and those glitchy scans you have to squint at sideways to make out a name. The weather snapped cold, I went to Spirits in the Garden with my friend Mary, talked too long on her porch the next night, and then… I fell down the rabbit hole. It happens like that: a little loneliness, a little stillness, our nation divided and in turmoil… and suddenly I’m time-traveling with dead relatives.
This time, I found him. I’d forgotten his name but remembered the story.
My 3rd great-grandfather, Joseph J. Johnson, was killed by Confederate soldiers in Miller County, Missouri, around 1864. He’d been one of the only men in his township who voted for Abraham Lincoln in 1860 — and apparently that didn’t go over well. I can hear my grandmother now, her voice gravelly and proud: “Our folks on my mom’s side, YOUR great-great-great grandpa, was chased out of the county for voting for Lincoln.”
When I was little, she left out the violent part — of course she did — but she never let me miss the point. Her family stood on the right side of history. Morally, not militarily. She even forbade me from joining the DAR while she was alive because she thought they were racist (I don’t think she ever forgave them for excluding Marian Anderson from performing in 1939). That tells you everything about who she was: born 1913 or 1917 (depending on the record), feisty, allergic to hypocrisy.
As I pulled more threads, the shape of it sharpened. Both of my grandmother’s parents came from Union-supporting families: her father Lewis A. Caldwell (youngest son of Joseph Langdon Caldwell) and her mother Martha Emmaline Johnson (second-oldest child of John M. Johnson, Joseph’s second-oldest). Some Caldwells — not my direct line, as far as I can tell — were infamous on the Confederate side, which is its own kind of family whiplash. But her father’s father and his siblings fought for the Union. And her grandfather, Joseph L. Caldwell, served as a Corporal, Company B, 10th Missouri Cavalry (Union) — enlisted and mustered out as a corporal, Missouri born and Missouri loyal. On my dad’s side, the German farmers and merchants who arrived before the war also joined the Union.
And yes: the Civil War was as polarizing as anything we’re living now. Maybe that’s why it resonates with me lately — the way convictions crystallize under pressure, the way choices turn into records.
Here’s the thing that keeps thudding in my chest:
Privilege isn’t just comfort; it’s visibility.
Who had land. Who could read and write. Who left signatures and deeds and letters so that their great-great-great-granddaughter could find them 160 years later and know: they chose decency when it cost them. I can’t find meeting minutes where they called themselves abolitionists (besides one 2x-great on my grandmother’s mother’s line). But not enslaving people when your peers do, voting Lincoln in a hostile county, joining the Union — and leaving receipts — that is a stand. Not flashy. Often costly. Still the right side of history.
And that choice — not inevitable, not genetic, not geographic — is the drum beneath this pause. A decision, made on an ordinary day: cast the vote. refuse the profit. walk away from the club with rotten values. Small hinges. Big doors.
In April I wrote about systole — the push that got me out of the wrong room. October felt like diastole — the rest that rebuilds the muscle. In the quiet I started washing rocks gathered from Hawk’s Bluff, discovering beauty in the backroads and rediscovering my family history, which brings me back to my grandmother’s voice — proud, bossy, right. Back to myself..
And here’s where I get a little biting, because the pause has given me fewer fucks to give about saying things plainly:
Privilege is a responsibility, not a pillow.
If you’re lucky enough to be visible — to have your name inked into the record, to have a platform, to be heard — then use it. Stand up for people with less. Write down what happened. Correct the myths. Leave receipts. Make it stupidly easy for someone 150 or 200 years from now to look you up and say, “They chose right.”
I don’t think my grandmother told me her ancestor was shot because I was small and she wanted to give me courage, not trauma. But the courage is in the documents too, hiding in the margins: a vote, a move, a refusal, a signature. The story doesn’t have to be perfect to be proud. None of my people were saints. But enough of them used what they had to stand where it mattered.
So that’s where I am in this odd, beautiful in-between — resting, rooted, washing rocks, filing permits, hanging out with Boo and Misha, and stitching a lineage I can live inside. The work is quieter right now: Shopify automations, theme upgrades, birds and tea, the kind of nerdy focus that feels like meditation. And under it, the steady beat of responsibility: tell the truth, write it down, choose right.
Because someone will go looking.
Because I did.
Because we owe each other a record.
PS: Read the original account on the Miller County Historical Society site: biography of Joseph J. Johnson
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