Reckoning with Ancestral Sins: Uncovering My Family’s Slaveholding Past, with Debra Bruno

Debra Bruno will talk about her personal journey of uncovering her Dutch American family’s history of slaveholding in the Hudson Valley, and how that history has been hidden and diminished. She will explore how that reckoning led her to a friendship with a woman who is descended from the very people her family enslaved, and what that means for us in today’s America. Her talk at Fenimore will include the story of how she realized that she and Eleanor are both likely descendants of the Van Bergens, black and white, who are depicted in the Van Bergen Overmantel. The Overmantel, one of the earliest images of slavery in New York, helped them see history face to face.

Registration required.
$15 Members, $17.50 Non Members

 

About Debra Bruno
Debra Bruno is a longtime Washington, D.C., journalist and author with who has written extensively on the law, politics, the arts, music, dance, theater, books, culture, health, sports, and international issues for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and many other publications. She has also worked at Moment Magazine, Legal Times, and Roll Call. As an editor at Legal Times from 2004 to 2008, she wrote a column, “Balancing Act,” on women in the law, including an interview with Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That column won a “best feature” award from the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association.

From 2011-2014, she was a freelance writer in Beijing, covering subjects as diverse as expat divorce and a baijiu-themed bar for the Wall Street Journal, rowing in a dragon boat for the Washington Post, and Chinese hutongs for The Atlantic’s CityLab. A book she co-authored with her husband, former Wall Street Journal senior editor Bob Davis, Beijing from A to Z: An Expat Couple’s Adventures in China, was published in 2015 as an e-book by the Wall Street Journal.

When she got interested in learning more about her Dutch ancestry, she found the story of a lifetime. A historian friend told her that if she had Dutch ancestors in New York’s Hudson Valley, they were likely enslavers. She was right. She hadn’t known about New York’s 200 years of enslavement and was stunned to realize that her very rural area of the state held so many hidden stories. When she connected with Eleanor Mire, whose ancestors had been enslaved by her ancestors, their shared history became that much more nuanced and powerful. Those revelations first appeared as a 2020 article in the Washington Post Magazine, one that drew a wave of attention. Debra and Eleanor were featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Here and Now.”

Her book, an expansion of that article, is A Hudson Valley Reckoning: Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in My Dutch American Family (via Cornell’s Three Hills imprint in October 2024). In connection with that work, she serves on the Ulster County (NY) Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is creating a website and a walking tour focusing on enslavement in the mid-Hudson Valley region.

She formerly taught freshman composition at the George Washington University, where she also served as editor of its literary magazine, the GW Forum. Today she is also a member (second soprano) of the Georgetown Chorale, a lifelong Francophile (if only to have the fluency to chat up Parisian cab drivers), and Nana to two perfect grandchildren, Lane and Casey. Learn more at www.debrabruno.com.