Yet another ancestor had decamped to Cuba for 20 years in the early 19th century. Given that the United States’s biggest slave trading family, the DeWolfs of Bristol, held plantations on the island, it is safe to deduce he wasn’t running a cigar factory.

My grandfather referenced our forefathers’ shipping ventures, but beyond rum, never discussed the nature of their cargo. As many a prestigious American university does, he had imposed an embargo of silence over that particular detail of our family’s past, to create a noble portrait.

The sense of betrayal no doubt felt by some students at Yale who have to live in a residential house named after an arch proponent of slavery, Vice President John C. Calhoun, or by those at Georgetown who walk the grounds financed by the sale of hundreds of slaves, swept over me. In this case though, the crime-stained name was my own. And unlike an administrator at Yale, Georgetown or Harvard trying to make amends for the misdeeds of predecessors to whom they had no connection, I personally owed my debt-free Ivy League education not only to my parents’ hard work, but also to the blood money acquired by my ancestors.

I live the paradox that though my brown skin has excluded me from so called white privilege, all my life I have benefited from the plunder of privileged whites. From the time I read Thackeray’s novel “Vanity Fair” as a teenager, I have been fascinated by the character of Rhoda Swartz, the “woolly-haired mulatto from St. Kitts,” a mixed race heiress to a lucrative plantation, and real-life figures like her. Now I know why: Their stories are mine, and like them, I occupy the uneasy limbo between exploiter and exploited. I, an African-American woman, am every bit as much a “debtor” to my “race” as any descendant of John C. Calhoun’s or indeed as Georgetown University itself.

Now as I contemplate my ancestor’s portrait, I cannot forget the thousands of lives ruined for my family’s gain. How does one begin to repay such a debt? My pride in my family’s accomplishments has given way to a somber resignation to the fact that I can never make full amends for their crimes. No good deeds, or acts of generosity past or present, will ever restore what my ancestors stole from thousands of families unknown to us and now dispersed across the Caribbean and the United States: two centuries of freedom and dignity.

In the meantime, I can neither shun my great-great-great-grandfather nor stand in judgment of him. Some of his contemporaries, like Justice Joseph Story, who presided over the slave ship lawsuit, recognized the evil of slavery. Had I been a white man in the 19th century, would I have been a forward looking humanitarian, like the justice? Was Samuel any more reprehensible than my black Haitian ancestors, who, in an often overlooked facet of colonial and plantation history, belonged to a caste of blacks who owned slaves themselves?