Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on much, but for a long time, they agreed on this: the more free trade, the better. Now they agree on the opposite: Free trade has gone too far.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced plans to impose steep new tariffs on certain products made in China, including a 100 percent tariff on electric cars. With that, he escalated a policy begun during the Trump administration, and marked the decisive rejection of an economic orthodoxy that had dominated American policy making for nearly half a century. The leaders of both major parties have now turned away from unfettered free trade, a fact that would have been unimaginable less than a decade ago.

Since the 1980s, American economic policy has largely been guided by the belief that allowing money and goods to flow with as little friction as possible would make everyone better off. So overwhelming was the agreement on this point that it became known, along with a few other free-market dogmas, as the “Washington Consensus.” (You may know the Washington Consensus by its other names, including neoliberalism and Reaganomics.) According to this way of thinking, free trade wouldn’t just make countries rich; it would also make the world more peaceful, as nations linked by a shared economic fate wouldn’t dare wage war against one another. The world would become more democratic, too, as economic liberalization would lead to political freedom. That thinking guided the trade deals struck during the 1990s and 2000s, including the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the decision to allow China into the World Trade Organization in 2001.

A few voices on both the left and the right had long criticized these theories, but they were outside the mainstream. The first major rupture took place in 2016, when Donald Trump ascended to the presidency in part by railing against NAFTA and attacking America’s leaders for shipping jobs overseas. The same year, a landmark paper was published showing that free trade with China had cost more than 1 million American manufacturing workers their jobs and plunged factory towns across the country into ruin—a phenomenon known as the “China shock.” The coronavirus pandemic further undermined the Washington Consensus as the United States, after decades of letting manufacturing capacity move overseas, found itself almost entirely dependent on other countries for supplies as basic as face masks and as crucial as semiconductors.

[Michael Schuman: China has gotten the trade war it deserves]

These shifts strengthened the position of critics of globalization and laissez-faire capitalism. The Biden administration, stocked with Elizabeth Warren disciples, entered office eager to challenge the free-market consensus in certain areas, notably antitrust. But on trade, the administration’s soul remained divided. In the early years of the Biden presidency, trade skeptics such as U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai frequently clashed with trade enthusiasts like Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Biden quietly kept in place the tariffs Trump had imposed on China (which Biden himself had denounced on the campaign trail), but he focused his economic agenda primarily on boosting the domestic clean-energy industry.

Then China’s aggressive push into clean energy forced Biden’s hand. As recently as 2019, China barely built electric vehicles, let alone exported them. Today it is the world’s top producer of EVs, churning out millions of high-quality, super-cheap cars every year. An influx of Chinese EVs into the U.S. might seem like welcome news for an administration fighting to lower both inflation and emissions. But it could also devastate the American auto industry, destroying a vital source of well-paying jobs concentrated in key swing states. A glut of discounted solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, meanwhile—China currently produces the majority of the world’s supply of each—would undermine emerging American industries before they could even be built.

To the administration, this presented a nightmare scenario. Already struggling parts of the country would experience a second China shock. The U.S. would become dependent on its biggest rival for some of the most important technologies in the world. Republicans would seize on the issue to win elections and potentially roll back the Biden administration’s progress on climate change. (Trump has made the threat of Chinese EVs central to his 2024 campaign, talking about the “bloodbath” that would ensue if they were allowed into the country.)

Economics, political science, geopolitics, electoral math: Many of the administration’s incentives seemed to point in the same direction. Which brings us to the tariffs imposed this week. In addition to the 100 percent EV duty, the U.S. will apply 25 to 50 percent tariffs to a handful of “strategic sectors,” in the words of a White House fact sheet: solar cells, batteries, semiconductors, medical supplies, cranes, and certain steel and aluminum products.

A president announcing a new policy does not mean that the political consensus has shifted. The proof that we are living in a new era comes instead from the reaction in Washington. Congressional Democrats, many of whom vocally opposed Trump’s tariffs, have been almost universally supportive of the increases, while Republicans have been largely silent about them. Rather than attacking the tariffs, Trump claimed credit for them, telling a crowd in New Jersey that “Biden finally listened to me,” and declaring that he, Trump, would raise tariffs to 200 percent. Most of the criticism from either side of the aisle has come from those arguing that Biden either took too long to raise tariffs or didn’t go far enough. What was recently considered beyond the pale is suddenly conventional wisdom.

The old Washington Consensus was built on the premise that if leaders got the economics right, then politics would follow. Cheap consumer goods would keep voters happy at home, trade ties between nations would destroy the incentive to wage war, and the desire to compete in global markets would encourage authoritarian regimes to liberalize. Reality has not been kind to those predictions. Free trade upended American politics, helping to elect a spiteful kleptocrat initially opposed by his own party. The immense wealth Russia amassed by selling oil and gas to Europe may have actually emboldened it to invade Ukraine. Access to global markets didn’t stop China from doubling down on its authoritarian political model.

The new consensus on trade taps into a much older understanding of economics, sometimes referred to as “political economy.” The basic idea is that economic policy can’t just be a matter of numbers on a spreadsheet; it must take political realities into account. Free trade does bring broadly shared benefits, but it also inflicts extremely concentrated costs in the form of closed factories, lost livelihoods, and destroyed communities. A political-economic approach to free trade recognizes that those two forces aren’t symmetrical: Concentrated economic loss can create the kind of simmering resentment that can be exploited by demagogues, as Trump long ago intuited. “Back in 2000, when cheap steel from China began to flood the market, U.S. steel towns across Pennsylvania and Ohio were hit hard,” Biden said in his speech announcing the new policy, pointing out that nearly 20,000 steelworkers lost their jobs in those two states alone. “I’m not going to let that happen again.”

[Franklin Foer: Biden declares war on the cult of efficiency]

A more cynical way to put this is that Biden’s tariffs are a form of pandering to a bloc of swing-state voters. There’s truth to that, but it isn’t the whole story. The political-economic approach also acknowledges that foreign adversaries behave in ways that bear little resemblance to the rational economic self-interest presupposed by mathematical models. They pursue their own geopolitical agendas, market forces be damned—and so America must do the same. China’s dominance in clean-energy technologies is not a product of free markets at work; it was carefully engineered by Beijing, which for decades has poured trillions of dollars of state money into building up industries that it sees as vital to its national strength. To simply accept cheap Chinese exports under the banner of free trade would solidify that dominance, giving Beijing effective control over the energy system of the future.

The shift on trade is part of a broader realignment that Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has aspirationally called the “new Washington consensus.” What unites Biden’s tariffs with the other core elements of his agenda, including massive investments in manufacturing and increased antitrust enforcement, is the notion that the American government should no longer passively defer to market forces; instead, it should shape markets to achieve politically and socially beneficial goals. This view has taken hold most thoroughly among Democrats, but it is making inroads among Republicans too—especially when it comes to trade.

The details of this new consensus, however, are still being worked out. Trump favors a blunt approach; he has proposed a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods and a 10 percent tariff on foreign goods from any country, including allies. Biden argues that Trump’s plan would sharply raise prices for American consumers without much benefit. His administration instead favors what officials call a “small yard and high fence”: major restrictions on a handful of essential technologies from particular countries.

These are the terms on which the debate is now being waged: not whether to restrict free trade, but where, how, and how much. That is a very big change from the world we were living in not long ago. The precise consequences of that change will take years to reveal themselves. But they’re sure to be just as big.

Photographs by Olivia Joan Galli

Last fall, on an overcast Sunday morning, I took a train from New York to Montclair, New Jersey, to see Auntie, my mother’s older sister. Auntie is our family archivist, the woman we turn to when we want to understand where we came from. She’s taken to genealogy, tending our family tree, keeping up with distant cousins I’ve never met. But she has also spent the past decade unearthing a different sort of history, a kind that many Black families like mine leave buried, or never discover at all. It was this history I’d come to talk with her about.

Auntie picked me up at the train station and drove me to her house. When she unlocked the door, I felt like I was walking into my childhood. Everything in her home seemed exactly as it had been when I spent Christmases there with my grandmother—the burgundy carpets; the piano that Auntie plays masterfully; the dining-room table where we all used to sit, talk, and eat. That day, Auntie had prepared us a lunch to share: tender pieces of beef, sweet potatoes, kale, and the baked rice my grandma Victoria used to make.

When Auntie went to the kitchen to gather the food, I scanned the table. At the center was a map of Mississippi, unfurled, the top weighted down with an apple-shaped trivet. Auntie told me that the map had belonged to Victoria. She had kept it in her bedroom, mounted above the wood paneling that lined her room in Princeton, New Jersey, where she and my grandfather raised my mother, Auntie, and my two uncles. I’d never noticed my grandmother’s map, but a framed outline of Mississippi now hangs from a wall in my own bedroom, the major cities marked with blooming magnolias, the state flower. My grandmother had left markings on her map—X’s over Meridian, Vicksburg, and Jackson, and a shaded dot over a town in Hinds County, between Jackson and Vicksburg, called Edwards.

I wondered whether the X’s indicated havens or sites of tragedy. As for Edwards, I knew the dot represented the start of Auntie’s story. Following an act of brutality in 1888, my ancestors began the process of uprooting themselves from the town, ushering themselves into a defining era of Black life in America: the Great Migration.

I first learned about the lynching of Bob Broome in 2015, when Auntie emailed my mother a PDF of news clippings describing the events leading up to his murder. She’d come across the clippings on Ancestry.com, on the profile page of a distant family member. Bob was Victoria’s great-uncle. “Another piece of family history from Mississippi we never knew about,” Auntie wrote. “I’M SURE there is more to this story.”

I knew that her discovery was important, but I didn’t feel capable then of trying to make sense of what it meant to me. As I embarked on a career telling other people’s stories, however, I eventually realized that the lynching was a hole in my own, something I needed to investigate if I was to understand who I am and where I came from. A few years ago, I began reading every newspaper account of Bob Broome’s life and death that Auntie and I could find. I learned more about him and about the aftermath of his killing. But in the maddeningly threadbare historical record, I also found accounts and sources that contradicted one another.

Bob Broome was 19 or 20 when he was killed. On August 12, 1888, a Sunday, he walked to church with a group of several “colored girls,” according to multiple accounts, as he probably did every week. All versions of the story agree that on this walk, Bob and his company came across a white man escorting a woman to church. Back then in Mississippi, the proper thing for a Black man to do in that situation would have been to yield the sidewalk and walk in the street. But my uncle decided not to.

A report out of nearby Jackson alleges that Bob pushed the white man, E. B. Robertson, who responded with a promise that Bob “would see him again.” According to the Sacramento Daily Union (the story was syndicated across the country), my uncle’s group pushed the woman in a rude manner and told Robertson they would “get him.” After church, Robertson was with three or four friends, explaining the sidewalk interaction, when “six negroes” rushed them.

All of these stories appeared in the white press. According to these accounts, Bob and his companions, including his brother Ike, my great-great-grandfather, approached Robertson’s group outside a store. The papers say my uncle Bob and a man named Curtis Shortney opened fire. One of the white men, Dr. L. W. Holliday, was shot in the head and ultimately died; two other white men were injured. Several newspaper stories claim my uncle shot Holliday, with a couple calling him the “ring leader.” It is unclear exactly whom reporters interviewed for these articles, but if the reporting went as it usually did for lynchings, these were white journalists talking to white sources. Every article claims that the white men were either unarmed or had weapons but never fired them.

Bob, his brother Ike, and a third Black man were arrested that day; their companions, including Shortney, fled the scene. While Bob was being held in a jail in nearby Utica, a mob of hundreds of white men entered and abducted him. Bob, “before being hanged, vehemently protested his innocence,” The New York Times reported. But just a few beats later, the Times all but calls my uncle a liar, insisting that his proclamation was “known to be a contradiction on its face.” Members of the mob threw a rope over an oak-tree branch at the local cemetery and hauled my ancestor upward, hanging him until he choked to death. A lynch mob killed Shortney a month later.

[From the May 2022 issue: Burying a burning]

In the white press, these lynchings are described as ordinary facts of life, the stories sandwiched between reports about Treasury bonds and an upcoming eclipse. The Times article about Bob noted that days after his lynching, all was quiet again in Utica, “as if nothing had occurred.” The headlines from across the country focus on the allegations against my uncle, treating his extralegal murder simply as a matter of course. The Boston Globe’s headline read “Fired on the White Men” and, a few lines later, “A Negro Insults a White Man and His Lady Companion.” The subtitle of The Daily Commercial Herald, a white newspaper in nearby Vicksburg, Mississippi, read: “Murderous and Insolent Negro Hanged by Indignant Citizens of Utica.”

The summary executions of Bob Broome and Curtis Shortney had the convenient effect of leaving these stories in white-owned newspapers largely unexamined and unchallenged in the public record. But the Black press was incredulous. In the pages of The Richmond Planet, a Black newspaper in Virginia’s capital, Auntie had found a column dismissing the widespread characterization of Bob as a menace. This report was skeptical of the white newspapers’ coverage, arguing that it was more likely that the white men had attacked the Black group, who shot back. “Of course it is claimed that the attack was sudden and no resistance was made by the whites,” the article reads.

The author and her aunt at her aunt’s home in New Jersey (Olivia Joan Galli for The Atlantic)

The newspapers we found don’t say much more about the lynching, but Auntie did find one additional account of Bob Broome’s final moments—and about what happened to my great-great-grandfather Ike. A few days after the lynching, a reader wrote to the editor of The Daily Commercial Herald claiming to have been a witness to key events. “Knowing you always want to give your readers the correct views on all subjects,” the letter opens, the witness offers to provide more of “the particulars” of my uncle’s lynching. According to the letter writer, when the lynch mob arrived the morning after the shooting, the white deputy sheriff, John Broome, assisted by two white men, E. H. Broome and D. T. Yates, told the crowd that they could not take the prisoners away until the case was investigated. Bob, Ike, and the third Black man were moved to the mayor’s office in the meantime. But more men from neighboring counties joined the mob and showed up at the mayor’s office, where they “badly hurt” Deputy Sheriff Broome with the butt of a gun. The white men seized Bob and hanged him, while Ike and the other Black man were relocated to another jail. The witness’s account said the white Broomes “did all that was in the power of man to do to save the lives of the prisoners.”

I don’t know whether or how these white Broomes were related to each other or to the Black Broomes, but unspoken kinship between the formerly enslaved and their white enslavers was the rule, rather than the exception, in places like Edwards. I believe that whoever wrote to the paper’s editor wanted to document all those Broome surnames across the color line, maybe to explain Ike’s survival as a magnanimous gesture, even a family favor. If the witness is to be believed, the intervention of these white Broomes is the only reason my branch of the family tree ever grew. As Auntie put it to me, “We almost didn’t make it into the world.”

Each time I pick up my research, the newspaper coverage reads differently to me. Did my uncle really unload a .38-caliber British bulldog pistol in broad daylight, as one paper had it, or do such details merit only greater skepticism? We know too much about Mississippi to trust indiscriminately the accounts in the white press. Perhaps the story offered in The Richmond Planet is the most likely: He was set upon by attackers and fired back in self-defense. But I also think about the possibility that his story unfolded more or less the way it appears in the white newspapers. Maybe my uncle Bob had had enough of being forced into second-class citizenship, and he reacted with all the rage he could muster. From the moment he refused to step off the sidewalk, he must have known that his young life could soon end—Black folk had been lynched for less. He might have sat through the church service planning his revenge for a lifetime of humiliation, calculating how quickly he could retrieve his gun.

In the Black press, Bob’s willingness to defend himself was seen as righteous. The Richmond Planet described him in heroic terms. “It is this kind of dealing with southern Bourbons that will bring about a change,” the unnamed author wrote. “We must have martyrs and we place the name of the fearless Broom [sic] on that list.” Bob’s actions were viewed as necessary self-protection in a regime of targeted violence: “May our people awaken to the necessity of protecting themselves when the law fails to protect them.” My mother has become particularly interested in reclaiming her ancestor as a martyr—someone who, in her words, took a stand. Martyrdom would mean that he put his life on the line for something greater than himself—that his death inspired others to defend themselves.

[From the September 2021 issue: His name was Emmett Till]

In 1892, four years after my uncle’s murder, Ida B. Wells published the pamphlet “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” in which she wrote that “the more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.” In that pamphlet, an oft-repeated quote of hers first appeared in print: “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home.” After the Civil War, southern states had passed laws banning Black gun ownership. For Wells, the gun wasn’t just a means of self-defense against individual acts of violence, but a collective symbol that we were taking our destiny into our own hands.

The gun never lost its place of honor in our family. My great-grandmother DeElla was known in the family as a good shot. “She always had a gun—she had a rifle at the farm,” my mother told me. “And she could use that rifle and kill a squirrel some yards away. We know that must have come from Mississippi time.” My mother’s eldest brother, also named Bob, laughed as he told me about DeElla’s security measures. “I always remember her alarm system, which was all the empty cans that she had, inside the door,” he told me. “I always thought if someone had been foolish enough to break into her house, the last thing he would have remembered in life was a bunch of clanging metal and then a bright flash about three feet in front of his face.”

The lynching more than a decade before her birth shaped DeElla and her vigilance. But as the years passed, and our direct connection to Mississippi dwindled, so did the necessity of the gun. For us, migration was a new kind of self-protection. It required us to leave behind the familiar in order to forge lives as free from the fetter of white supremacy as possible. My northbound family endeavored to protect themselves in new ways, hoping to use education, homeownership, and educational attainment as a shield.

After we studied my grandmother’s map of Mississippi, Auntie brought out another artifact: a collection of typewritten pages titled “Till Death Do Us Join.” It’s a document my grandmother composed to memorialize our family’s Mississippi history sometime after her mother died, in 1978. I imagine that she sat and poured her heart out on the typewriter she kept next to a window just outside her bedroom.

According to “Till Death Do Us Join,” my family remained in Edwards for another generation after Bob Broome’s death. Ike Broome stayed near the place where he’d almost been killed, and where his brother’s murderers walked around freely. Raising a family in a place where their lives were so plainly not worth much must have been terrifying, but this was far from a unique terror. Across the South, many Black people facing racial violence lacked the capital to escape, or faced further retribution for trying to leave the plantations where they labored. Every available option carried the risk of disaster.

[The Experiment Podcast: Ko Bragg on fighting to remember Mississippi burning]

A little more than a decade after his brother was murdered, Ike Broome had a daughter—DeElla. She grew up on a farm in Edwards near that of Charles Toms, a man who’d been born to an enslaved Black woman and a white man. As the story goes, DeElla was promised to Charles’s son Walter, after fetching the Toms family a pail of water. Charles’s white father had provided for his education—though not as generously as he did for Charles’s Harvard-educated white half brothers—and he taught math in and served as principal of a one-room schoolhouse in town.

A newspaper clipping from 1888 that
mentions Bob Broome’s killing (The Boston Globe)

Charles left his teaching job around 1913, as one of his sons later recalled, to go work as a statistician for the federal government in Washington, D.C. He may have made the trek before the rest of the family because he was light enough to pass for white—and white people often assumed he was. He was demoted when his employer found out he was Black.

Still, Charles’s sons, Walter and his namesake, Charles Jr., followed him to Washington. But leaving Mississippi behind was a drawn-out process. “Edwards was still home and D.C. their place of business,” my grandmother wrote. The women of the family remained at home in Edwards. World War I sent the men even farther away, as the Toms brothers both joined segregated units, and had the relatively rare distinction, as Black soldiers, of seeing combat in Europe. When the men finally came back to the States, both wounded in action according to “Till Death Do Us Join,” DeElla made her way from Mississippi to Washington to start a life with Walter, her husband.

Grandma Victoria’s letter says that DeElla and Walter raised her and four other children, the first generation of our family born outside the Deep South, in a growing community of Edwards transplants. Her grandfather Charles Sr. anchored the family in the historic Black community of Shaw, where Duke Ellington learned rag and Charles Jr. would build a life with Florence Letcher Toms, a founding member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.

Occasionally, aunts would come up to visit, sleeping in their car along the route because they had nowhere else to stay. The people mostly flowed in one direction: Victoria’s parents took her to Mississippi only two times. According to my mother, Victoria recalled seeing her own father, whom she regarded as the greatest man in the world, shrink as they drove farther and farther into the Jim Crow South.

Later, after receiving her undergraduate degree from Howard University and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University, Victoria joined the faculty at Tennessee State University, a historically Black institution in Nashville. During her time there, efforts to desegregate city schools began a years-long crisis marked by white-supremacist violence. Between her own experiences and the stories passed down to her from her Mississippi-born parents, Victoria knew enough about the brutality of the South to want to spare her own children from it. As a grown woman, she had a firm mantra: “Don’t ever go below the Mason-Dixon Line.” Her warning applied to the entire “hostile South,” as she called it, though she made exceptions for Maryland and D.C. And it was especially true for Mississippi.

Keeping this distance meant severing the remaining ties between my grandmother and her people, but it was a price she seemed willing to pay. My mother recalls that when she was in college, one of her professors thought that reestablishing a connection to Mississippi might be an interesting assignment for her. She wrote letters to relatives in Edwards whom she’d found while paging through my grandmother’s address book. But Victoria intercepted the responses; she relayed that the relatives were happy to hear from my mom, but that there would be no Mississippi visit. “It was almost like that curtain, that veil, was down,” Mom told me. “It just wasn’t the time.”

Yet, reading “Till Death Do Us Join,” I realized that maintaining that curtain may have hurt my grandmother more than she’d ever let on. She seemed sad that she only saw her road-tripping aunts on special occasions. “Our daily lives did not overlap,” my grandmother wrote. “Sickness or funeral became occasions for contacting the family. Death had its hold upon the living. Why could we not have reached into their daily happiness.”

I sense that she valued this closeness, and longed for more of it, for a Mississippi that would have let us all remain. But once Victoria had decided that the North was her home, she worked hard to make it so. While teaching at Tennessee State, my grandmother had met and married a fellow professor named Robert Ellis. He was a plasma physicist, and they decided to raise their four children in New Jersey, where my grandfather’s career had taken him. My grandparents instilled in their children, who instilled it in my cousins and me, that you go where you need to go for schooling, career opportunities, partnership—even if that means you’re far from home.

My grandfather was one of the preeminent physicists of his generation, joining the top-secret Cold War program to harness the power of nuclear fusion, and then running the experimental projects of its successor program, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, after declassification. His work has become part of our family lore as well. My mother has her own mantra: “Same moon, same stars.” It appears on all of the handwritten cards she sends to family and friends; I have it tattooed on my right arm. It signifies that no matter how far apart we are, we look up at the same night sky, and our lives are governed by the same universal constants. The laws of physics—of gravity, inertia, momentum, action, and reaction—apply to us all.

In 2011, when I was 17, Victoria died. She’d suffered from Alzheimer’s, which meant that many things she knew about Mississippi were forgotten twice: once by the world, and then in her mind. Auntie and I shared our regrets about missing the opportunity to ask our grandmothers about their lives, their stories, their perspective on Mississippi.

But Victoria’s prohibition on traveling south also passed on with her. The year Victoria died, my mother took a job in Philadelphia, Mississippi, as one of two pediatricians in the county. Two summers later, she started dating the man who became my stepfather, Obbie Riley, who’d been born there before a career in the Coast Guard took him all over the country.

Mom and I had moved quite a few times throughout my childhood, but this relocation felt different. I was surprised by how quickly Mississippi felt like home. Yet the longer we stayed, and the more I fell in love with the place, the more resentment I felt. I envied the Mississippians who’d been born and raised there, who had parents and grandparents who’d been raised there. I’d always longed to be from a place in that way.

My stepfather has that. With a rifle in his white pickup truck, he spends his Sundays making the rounds, checking in on friends and relatives. He’ll crisscross the county for hours, slurping a stew in one house, slicing pie in another, sitting porchside with generations of loved ones.

This is what we missed out on, Auntie told me in her dining room. If our family hadn’t scattered, we would better know our elders. To keep all my ancestors straight, I refer to a handwritten family tree that my grandmother left behind; I took a picture of it when I was at Auntie’s house. Every time I zoom in and scan a different branch, I’m embarrassed by how little I know. “The distance pushed people apart,” Auntie said. “I think there is some strength from knowing your people, some security.”

[Read: They called her ‘Black Jet’]

The traditional historical understanding of the Great Migration emphasizes the “pull” of economic opportunity in the North and West for Black people, especially during the industrial mobilizations of the two world wars. Certainly such pulls acted on my family, too: The lure of better jobs elsewhere, as my grandmother put it, gave Ike Broome’s son-in-law the chance to make a life for himself and his family in Washington. But this understanding fails to explain the yearning that we still have for Mississippi, and the ambivalence my grandmother had about shunning the South.

Mississippi had its own pull, even as violence of the kind visited on Bob Broome made life there grim for Black families. A 1992 study by Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck indicated that a main predictor of migration by Black people from southern counties before 1930 was the cumulative number of lynchings in those counties. The collective memory of those lynchings was a force that compounded over time. Hope and despair commingled for my family, as it did for so many others. As the physicists in my family might describe it, these forces worked in tandem to push my ancestors north, and tear them from the South.

Only after I learned the details of Bob’s death did I feel that I truly comprehended my family’s path. In returning to Mississippi, my mother and I were part of a new movement of Black Americans, one in which hundreds of thousands of people are now returning to the states where they’d once been enslaved. I think of this “Reverse Great Migration” as a continuation of the original one, a reaction, a system finally finding equilibrium. I feel like we moved home to Mississippi to even the score for the tragedy of the lynching in 1888, and for all that my family lost in our wanderings after that. We returned to the land where DeElla Broome hurried between farmhouses fetching water, where Charles Toms ran the schoolhouse.

It took well over a century for my family to excavate what happened in Edwards, buried under generations of silence. Now we possess an uncommon consolation. Even our partial, imperfect knowledge of our Mississippi history—gleaned from my grandmother’s writing and from newspaper coverage, however ambiguous it may be—is more documentation than many Black Americans have about their ancestors.

[From the November 2017 issue: The building of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice]

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Alabama, commemorates lynching victims; it is the nation’s only site dedicated specifically to reckoning with lynching as racial terror. Bob Broome is one of more than 4,000 people memorialized there. I’ve visited the memorial, and the steel marker dedicated to those who were lynched in Hinds County, Mississippi—22 reported deaths, standing in for untold others that were not documented. Although those beautiful steel slabs do more for memory than they do for repair, at least we know. With that knowledge, we move forward, with Mississippi as ours again.

This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The History My Family Left Behind.”

In a recent scene from HBO’s The Sympathizer, a communist spy whom we only know as the Captain (played by Hoa Xuande) sits outside a Los Angeles car-repair station, staking out the man he’s planning to kill. His target is a former senior military officer, Major Oanh, who fled with him from Vietnam to the U.S., and who is starting over as a mechanic. When the Captain learns that Oanh is importing expired Vietnamese candy as a side hustle, he confronts him. To his shock, the man embraces him. “It’s a new world here,” Oanh tells the Captain. “If you fully commit to this land, you become fully American. But if you don’t, you’re just a wandering ghost living between two worlds forever.”

Adapted from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Sympathizer follows a protagonist who seems perennially trapped in this between. The Captain is a North Vietnamese secret-police agent embedded high up in the Southern Vietnamese military. As a biracial, half-French man, the Captain is at once strikingly visible in public and yet socially invisible; he’s been, as he says early in the first episode, “cursed to see every issue from both sides.” But what vexes him even more is the realization that he uses his identity as an excuse to avoid taking firm moral stances. By circumstance and by choice, he moves through society as a specter.

Although The Sympathizer isn’t a literal ghost story, this is a compelling prism to view the adaptation through. The series, created by Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar, introduces the Captain after he’s been captured by the North Vietnamese army (which he’s spying for), sent to a reeducation camp, and stuck in a room to write his confession. He begins by writing words we hear in a voice-over: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces,” a nod to the opening of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, Invisible Man, whose similarly unnamed narrator unpacks feeling adrift and anonymous “because people refuse to see me.” In The Sympathizer, the word spook takes on a dual meaning, describing a spy—a job that hinges on being imperceptible—and also a disembodied presence that’s neither dead nor alive.

The Captain narrates his imperfectly detailed memories, which span decades and move between Vietnam and the U.S. He jumps back and forth through time, revealing a man caught as much between physical and psychic worlds as between loyalties. The two people he cares most about in the world—his best friends and “blood brothers” Man and Bon—were on different sides of the war: the former was a higher-up in North Vietnamese leadership, the latter was a South Vietnamese paratrooper and assassin.

[Read: Viet Thanh Nguyen on why writing is a process of “emotional osmosis”]

But unlike in many traditional ghost stories, the Captain isn’t an omniscient figure narrating from the afterlife. He is wrestling with competing political and cultural ideologies and with Vietnam’s legacy of colonialism and war. He is a frequent subject of derision as a mixed-race man: In one scene in Vietnam, the Captain explains that he’s long endured acquaintances and others “spitting on me and calling me bastard,” dryly adding that “sometimes, for variety, they call me bastard before they spit.” Even those who the Captain believes respect him see his humanity as conditional. In the novel, his longtime boss—known only as the General—fires him for flirting with his daughter: “How could you ever believe we would allow [her] to be with someone of your kind?” the General asks.

This sense of alienation is exacerbated in the U.S., where the Captain embeds within the exiled South Vietnamese community. There, he and his fellow countrymen are, as he describes in the novel, “consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation and susceptible to the hypochondria of exile.” At one point in the show, a fellow émigré and journalist named Sonny (Alan Trong) tells him, “Arguably, I’m more Vietnamese than you … biologically”—and yet the Captain is regarded as being too Vietnamese by many of those he meets in the U.S. In an especially atrocious scene after the Captain’s arrival in Los Angeles, a former professor he connects with (Robert Downey Jr.) gives him the dehumanizing assignment of writing down his “Oriental and Occidental qualities” side by side. Afterward, the professor pressures the Captain to read the list aloud to university donors at a cocktail party.

[Read: The Vietnam War, as seen by the victors]

Not even the Captain’s Marxist proclivities can anchor him after he moves to America, a bastion of capitalism that he's been taught to hate but secretly enjoys. Though he technically identifies as a Communist, in the series he doesn’t come off as an active, passionate believer. He also becomes involved in American pop culture, when he's asked to be a cultural consultant on an Apocalypse Now–esque film. Yet the Captain is frustratingly static in these Hollywood scenes. He’s unconvincing when he implores a movie director named Niko Damianos (also played by Downey Jr.) to hire Vietnamese actors in speaking roles. Even the way he pushes back against the inclusion of an unnecessarily violent scene feels tepid; when the director fires him, the Captain walks away in indifferent silence.

In interviews, Nguyen has said that hauntings are inextricable from stories about war and the trauma it leaves behind. He has also noted that Vietnamese culture is full of ghost stories, whose spirits bear both malicious and benevolent intent. The visual language of The Sympathizer takes care to point out that those hovering in the afterlife stay close to the living. Shrines to the deceased, many adorned with fruits, incense, and vases full of flowers, pervade the show’s world, including in the Captain’s home and in the General’s office. Later in the series, literal ghosts also take shape: Major Oanh and another person the Captain murders constantly reappear to taunt him and offer unsolicited opinions.

As the series progresses, the Captain becomes more and more numb, stymied by the realization that neither communism nor capitalism—nor either of the two countries, or racial identities, or best friends he’s torn between—will make him whole. The Sympathizer drives home the salient point that social invisibility has a way of hollowing someone until they’re unrecognizable, even to themselves. It gestures toward a haunting truth: To stand for everything is akin to standing for nothing.