Executive producer, Nicholas Gottlieb. Directed by Macky Alston Screenpaly, Alston, Kay Gayner. N.C. The reason, of course. was the practice of slaves being given the last names of the masters who owned them. Returning to North Carolina from his current home in New York, the filmmaker discovers that slavery has produced a curious division evident in the fact that two Alston family reunions occur almost simultaneously, yet the black and white versions seem entirely unaware of each other. But the reality is much more complex and engrossing.
Race has been an issue in filmmaker's own family line in every generation, it seems.
His father, a Presbyterian minister, received death threats for his pro-civil rights stands in Alabama during the '60s. Alston likens the pattern of keeping secrets over shared bloodlines, the result of masters having children by slave women, to his own secrecy regarding his homosexuality before coming out as a young man. His efforts to trace the family legacy brings resonant encounters with numerous black Alstons both past and present. One, Charles Alston, was a highly regarded artist of the Harlem Renaissance who died in 1977 leaving a trove of pictures and audio-taped interviews that testify to this century's black cultural achievements. In Charles' surviving sisters, Macky meets two extraordinary elderly women whose memories encompass the experiences of black Alstons in the South as well as the North, where their light skin allowed them to pass as white if they chose to.