The Other Madisons

Bettye Kearse wrote The Other Madisons; The Lost History of A President's Black Family as a family history. She is writing her family history because she is the new griotte in her family. A griotte is the person who tells the family story. Her mother gave her a box of old photographs and papers. She is the first in her family to put it into print. Each generation of her family was told they descended from slaves and from a President. Bettye did a considerable amount of research and encountered many obstacles. She tries to envision her fifth great grandmother, Mandy, in Ghana as she is loaded onto a ship and sold into slavery. She tries to reconcile the idea that she is descended from a President who used his position and power to have relations with Mandy's daughter, Coreen. Genetic testing has neither confirmed nor denied her family story of having descended from a President. This was a compelling story about the gnarly history of American policies on owning other human beings.