I am just a really inherently curious person. SHAPIRO: And yet I could imagine some people upon reaching adulthood saying, well, thank goodness I'm done with that, and running as far away from it as they could instead of, what other skeletons might be in this closet? So it wasn't an environment like the place where he grew up in the Mississippi Delta in the middle of the last century, where these kinds of ideas were probably more prevalent. And luckily, my mother was not on the same page. So when you grow up with someone like that, you have to have a relationship to it. He literally defended slavery and felt that it was a benevolent institution that was working for everyone until northern bleeding hearts got involved. I mean, he was a very explicit white supremacist. He thought slavery should not have ended. SHAPIRO: When you say explicitly racist, he thought you shouldn't watch 'Sesame Street' because it showed Black and white kids playing together. NEWTON: You know, because I grew up with a father who was very explicitly a racist, I didn't really have the option that a lot of people had to sort of ignore those histories in my family. SHAPIRO: Where do you think your impulse to confront the darkness in your family's past, rather than push it out of sight, comes from? MAUD NEWTON: Thank you so much for having me. Maud Newton, welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Rather than shove that inheritance under the bed in a locked box, she excavates it in her new memoir, 'Ancestor Trouble.' In the author Maud Newton's past, there are ancestors who committed violence, extremism, racism and worse. Everyone's family tree has some gnarled branches.

Ancestor trouble by maud newton