The Truth Beneath the Family Tree: Asale Angel-Ajani on Identity, Secrets, and Belonging

When the stories we inherit begin to unravel, discovering the truth can become the first step toward reclaiming who we are.

What happens when everything you thought you knew about your family begins to unravel? For author Asale Angel-Ajani, a journey to uncover her ancestry became a deeply personal exploration of identity, race, belonging, and the complicated truths hidden within generations of family history.

Growing up as one of only two Black children in a working-class white family, Asale’s search for answers led to startling discoveries involving enslavement, Indigenous ancestry, and connections to the Ku Klux Klan. In her book, Fugitive Archives: My Family and the American Myth of Belonging, she challenges inherited narratives and examines what it means to confront a past that refuses to fit neatly into the stories we’ve been told.

In this compelling conversation with Connected Woman Magazine, Asale discusses the emotional weight of uncovering family secrets, the courage required to question generational truths, and the power of reclaiming your own story—even when the answers change everything.

Growing up as one of only two Black children in a working-class white family presented a unique set of experiences that undoubtedly influenced how you understood race, identity,  family, and belonging. Looking back on your childhood, how did the racial and cultural dynamics within your family shape your earliest understanding of who you were and where you belonged? Were there moments when you felt compelled to minimize, question, or redefine parts of yourself to fit into the family narrative, and how did those experiences influence the woman you eventually became?

 Writing this book helped me realize that no matter who we are- our race, gender, sexuality, and age- we are all fundamentally seeking a belonging. We all minimize who we are at different moments, for love, acceptance, to get a promotion. The short answer, though, for myself, is that I wasn’t raised to question who I was because of white family members— they told me and showed me who I was or thought I should be, as a Black person, much like that of America itself, and this, of course, was countered by loving members of my family, my community, and a strong connection to my history.

The premise of Fugitive Archives is that my family, like many others, has been led to believe that to belong to the nation— the United States in this case— we have to contort ourselves to fit into the national mythology, one that is dripping with patriarchal white supremacy.

 Many of us grow up accepting the stories our families tell us about who we are, where we come from, and what our histories represent, rarely considering what may have been intentionally omitted, misunderstood, or rewritten over generations. What initially inspired you to begin investigating your ancestry, and was there a particular discovery or defining moment when you realized that the history you had inherited was far more complicated than you had been led to believe? How did you navigate the emotional tension between honoring the family that raised you and questioning the narratives that helped define your identity?

 I think whenever we dig deep into our pasts, we run the risk of being surprised at how little we know. Besides finding a brother and connecting a cousin to a father he didn’t know, I think the most interesting part of the research was uncovering my parents’ shared ancestry. This is what is called pedigree collapse. So on my mother’s side, through her native ancestry and my father through his, they are connected to a Scottish trader. This information would have killed my grandmothers, who disliked each other and wanted to keep my parents apart.

  Your research uncovered deeply complicated ancestral connections involving enslavement, Indigenous ancestry, and ties to the Ku Klux Klan, revealing a family history intertwined with some of America’s most painful and contradictory realities. What was the most emotionally challenging discovery you encountered, and how did you process learning that your personal family history contained connections to both oppression and the systems that perpetuated it? Did these revelations fundamentally change how you viewed certain family relationships, inherited values, or even your understanding of what it means to belong to a family whose history you cannot fully reconcile?

When I first started the research, I wasn’t expecting to find that my native ancestors were the ones who were enslavers— this is not something we commonly think about, as many indigenous people were enslaved for a period before the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. I wouldn’t say that this was a history I couldn’t reconcile— it was mostly unanticipated. I expected it from my white ancestors, but the truth was that while they might have aspired to being an enslaver as many white folks did, the white folks in my family were too poor or immigrated to states that had abolished slavery before 1865. What was difficult was finding and confirming the stories of violence and murder that my enslaved African ancestors faced; it was difficult to reconcile the lengths to which greed played a part in the shattering of my family— on my father’s side, our earliest African ancestor was murdered over gold, and likewise on my mother’s side an indigenous distant cousin and her sons were also murdered for gold.

There is a powerful difference between allowing our family histories to determine who we are and consciously deciding which parts of those histories we will carry forward.  Through the process of researching and writing Fugitive Archives: My Family and the  American Myth of Belonging, how did your understanding of yourself evolve beyond the identities, assumptions, and expectations you inherited? What did reclaiming ownership of your personal narrative require you to confront, release, or forgive, and how do you distinguish between acknowledging the truth of your ancestry and refusing to be confined by it?

After the research and writing of this book, I am more convinced than ever that we are mysteries to ourselves. Truly. And I am ok with that. Yes, I am and was raised and still identify as a Black woman, happily and proudly, but I acknowledge that all of our identities are shaped with nuance and experiences that go beyond a single note. Getting the chance to look at my ancestors, to see them in the rich full context of their local and national history to evaluate their actions through the lens of their time, didn’t soften what some of them did, as there have always been people on the “right side” of a morally just history. I learned through Fugitive Archives that we can and should tend to our wounds and not forget the ways our communities have and are still harmed, and likewise, we should remember that some communities still are incentivized to build walls between us or enact violence against us. And these are histories we have to discuss and acknowledge their continued haunting of us. And yet, we have to, as so many have tried and failed, continue to try and build collectively.

Women are often expected to serve as the emotional anchors and keepers of family traditions, sometimes at the expense of their own questions, experiences, and truths. In many families, preserving harmony can become more important than confronting painful realities, leaving generations of women carrying unanswered questions or protecting secrets they did not create. Through your personal journey, what have you come to understand about the relationship between family loyalty, silence, and the courage to seek truth? What would you say to women who suspect there are missing pieces of their family histories but fear that asking questions could damage relationships, challenge cherished memories, or permanently change how they see the people they love?

 I was raised by women and in this way, Black and white and Native and Asian, I have come to see through the stories of the women in my life that our complicity in maintaining the historical record— to keep the archives— is a task men are not given, and yet, we assign them History— with the capital “h”. One thing the women in my family showed me through their secrets and the violence they endured is that the notion of “founding fathers” is a convenient lie. This nation was built out of the wombs of founding mothers— African, Indigenous, and indentured.

Now, personally, uncovering these stories requires the emotional bandwidth to face the consequences of digging too deep, or looking under the bed, as it were. I prepared myself, and yet I wasn’t at all prepared. Yes, I suspected that there were missing stories in the family narrative, and the question I had to ask myself was what is yours to know? Also, what or how was I going to use the information? Fugitive Archives is my third book and I have written and published bits about my family previously, my first book, just a few pages, my next book, a novel was more closely related. My rule for writing about family is always— what relationship am I willing to let go of if the truth becomes too much and also— how can I honor that relationship, that difficult person or their story while being true to my own.

Uncovering the truth about our origins does not necessarily provide the closure we expect. Sometimes it leaves us with more questions, complicated emotions, and the responsibility of deciding what to do with the knowledge we have gained. Having completed this deeply personal exploration and shared it publicly through Fugitive  Archives, how has your definition of family, home, and belonging changed? What truths about yourself have become clearer through this experience, and what do you ultimately hope women, particularly those wrestling with questions of identity, ancestry, adoption,  racial belonging, or generational trauma, will take away from your journey as they begin reclaiming the stories they have the right to tell?

 This was not an easy book to write, and I have to admit— I’m glad it’s done and out into the world. I feel like I have finally been able to close the loop not just on the past but for the future, if that makes sense. For me, what has been clear is that this work is a failure if it is only read through the vein of my singular family story. I wrote this, yes, partially as a family memoir but really as an invitation for all of us to think through how we make and remake national identity. Especially now, when we reflect on ideas of division and politics and power— there is a way we keep going about our lives as if the nation, its history, the power of the elite, the violence, is just something that happens to us. My family, my ancestors, have lived like this since the founding of this nation, and yet, there were small moments when my ancestors looked up and decided to make a change, and these small moments for me shape the book, pointing to the promise that we all contain within ourselves as just ordinary people, to demand a different outcome to our story, one of dignity and love.