SIKESTON, MO. — I wasn’t sure if visiting a cotton field was a great idea. Almost everyone in my family was antsy once we pulled as much as the ocean of white.

The cotton was beautiful but soggy. An autumn rain had drenched the dirt before we arrived, our shoes sinking into the bottom with each step. I felt like a stranger to the soil.

My daughter, Lily, then five, happily touched a cotton boll for the primary time. She said it looked like mashed potatoes. My dad posed for a number of photos while I attempted to take all of it in. We were standing there—three generations strong—on the sting of a cotton field 150 miles away from home and many years faraway from our past. I hoped this was a chance for us to grasp our story.

As a journalist, I cover the ways racism—including the violence that may include it—can impact our health. For the past few years, I’ve been working on a documentary film and podcast called “Silence in Sikeston.” 

The project is about two killings that happened many years apart on this Missouri city: a lynching in 1942 of a young Black man named Cleo Wright and a 2020 police shooting of one other young Black man, Denzel Taylor. My reporting explored the trauma that festered within the silence around their killings.

While I interviewed Black families to learn more concerning the effect of those violent acts on this rural community of 16,000, I couldn’t stop interested by my circle of relatives. Yet I didn’t understand how much of our story and the silence surrounding it echoed Sikeston’s trauma. My father revealed our family’s secret only after I delved into this reporting.

My daughter was too young to grasp our family’s past. I used to be still trying to grasp it, too. As an alternative of trying to clarify it instantly, I took everyone to a cotton field.

Cotton is complicated. White people got wealthy off cotton, while my ancestors received nothing for his or her enslaved labor. My grandparents then worked hard in those fields for little money so we wouldn’t need to do the identical. 

But my dad still smiled when he posed for an image that day in the sphere. “I see a variety of memories,” he said.

I’m the primary generation to never survive a farm. Many Black Americans share that have, having fled the South through the Great Migration of the last century. Our family left rural Tennessee for cities within the Midwest, but we rarely talked about it. Most of my cousins had seen cotton fields only in movies, never in real life. Our parents worked hard to maintain things that way.

As a toddler, I overheard adults in my family as they discussed racism and the art of holding their tongues when a white person mistreated them. On my mother’s side of the family, aunts, and uncles discussed cross-burnings within the South and the Midwest once we’d gather for the vacations. 

On my father’s side of the family, I heard stories a few relative who died young, my great-uncle Leemon Anthony. For many of my dad’s life, people had said my great-uncle died in a wagon-and-mule accident.

“There was a touch there was something to do with it concerning the police,” my dad told me recently. “Nevertheless it wasn’t much.” So, years ago, my dad decided to analyze.

He called relations, dug through online newspaper archives, and searched ancestry web sites. Eventually, he found Leemon’s death certificate. But for greater than a decade, he kept what he found to himself—until I began telling him concerning the stories from Sikeston.

“It says ‘shot by police,’ ‘resisting arrest,’” my dad explained to me in his home office as we checked out the death certificate. “I never heard this in my whole life. I assumed he died in an accident.”

Leemon’s death in 1946 was listed as a homicide, and the officers involved weren’t charged with any crime. Every detail mirrored modern-day police shootings and lynchings from the past.

This young Black man — whom my family remembered as fun-loving, outgoing and handsome—was killed with none court trial, as Taylor was when police shot him, and Wright was when a mob lynched him in Sikeston. Even when the lads were guilty of the crimes that prompted the confrontations, those allegations wouldn’t have triggered the death penalty.

At a hearing in 1946, a police officer said that he shot my uncle in self-defense after Leemon took the officer’s gun away from him 3 times during a fight, in accordance with a Jackson Sun newspaper article my dad found. Within the article, my great-grandfather said that Leemon had been “restless,” “absent-minded,” and “all out of form” since he returned home from serving overseas within the Army during World War II.

Before I could ask any questions, my dad’s phone rang. I attempted to collect my thoughts while he looked to see who was calling. I used to be overwhelmed by the small print. My dad later gently jogged my memory that Leemon’s story wasn’t unique. “A lot of us have had these incidents in our families,” he said.

We should always have discussed it as a family. I wondered the way it shaped his view of the world and whether he saw himself in Leemon. I felt a way of grief that was hard to process. So, as a part of my reporting on Sikeston, I spoke to Aiesha Lee, a licensed counselor and Penn State University assistant professor who studies intergenerational trauma.

“This pain has compounded over generations,” Lee said. “We’re going to need to deconstruct it or heal it over generations.”

Lee said that when Black families like mine and people in Sikeston discuss our wounds, it represents step one toward healing. Not doing so, she said, can result in mental and physical health problems.

In my family, breaking our silence feels scary. As a society, we’re still learning learn how to talk concerning the anxiety, stress, shame and fear that comes from the heavy burden of systemic racism. All of us have a responsibility to confront it — not only Black families. I wish we didn’t need to take care of racism, but within the meantime, my family has decided to not suffer in silence.

The “Silence in Sikeston” podcast from KFF Health News and GBH’s WORLD is available on all major streaming platforms. Cara Anthony, Midwest correspondent, writes for KFF Health Network.