Each of us bear our ancestors in our genes and in our heritage. Who we are is built on how we got to be here; the sacrifices of our ancestors, their achievements, even their failures, a part of us. As a genealogist, I have learned secrets kept, recovered forgotten stories, and discovered surprising relationships.

Researching our ancestors has become a national hobby. I watch Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s television program Finding Your Roots. Often, the person whose ancestry is being researched notes that his parents or grandparents did not talk about the past. But, the stories of our ancestors should be remembered. We need their example, and we need to know the truth of history, the errors and sins of the past, and the way people can rise above the most distressing and hateful experiences. How the life we are living was made possible by them.

In How It Happens, Jean Alicia Elster shares the story of her grandmother and successive generations. Strong, beautiful, intelligent, and inspirational women who were harmed by racism and white privilege.

In the Prologue, Elster recalls innocently asking her grandmother if she was white. Over the years, her grandmother told her the stories that this novel is based on. It’s a story of how white men could force a woman of color into relationships that were outside of the law–legal and moral–without repercussion. How a woman of color had no power to say ‘no.’

Elster’s fictionalized family story begins in 1890 when the young bride Addie is working in a boarding house and catches the eye of a man from a powerful family. When he asks her to his room, she knows how things work. She can’t say no. And once he takes her as his own, her husband is supposed to leave her alone. Thomas Mitchell appears to love Addie, but it is a sick love founded on power. Their relationship is against the law. He cannot marry her, but he ‘owns’ her and is possessive about the children she bears him, ‘bright’ skinned girls with straight black hair, even if he cannot publicly acknowledge them. Addie’s husband must live with the situation; powerless and angry, he is cold and distant as father and husband. For Addie and her husband, free people of color, the norms of slavery still control their lives

Addie’s daughter Dorothy May received Mitchell’s special notice; she is the image of his grandmother. He ensures that she gets an education, but it’s all done in secret and Dorothy May was leaving for college before she learns the truth.

Dorothy May married Douglas Ford, a distant cousin. Ford envisioned starting a business in the booming city of Detroit. Ford builds a house and runs a thriving business delivering wood across the city. Then, things change. Wood is out, gas heating is in. TB is rampant, and a daughter spends a year in a sanitarium struggling for her life.

With the closing of the wood lot, Dorothy May decides to find work to pay for Jean’s college education. Although she was ‘one project’ short of her teaching degree, she takes work as a maid–the work her mother had performed. Jean works for the city recreation department; it leads to several threatening encounters with men.

As a YA novel, it tells the truth in scenes that have drama but without unnecessary explicitness. The early section of the novel is the most horrifying and dramatic, but each time period is an important link that builds an understanding of how cultural norms shift and change.

Elster drew from her family stories for her previous novels for children, Who’s Jim Hines? where we learn about the Douglas Ford Wood Company, and The Colored Car, about a child’s train trip to visit relatives, bringing the trauma of experiencing the Jim Crow South.
I received a free copy of the book from Wayne State University Press. My review is fair and unbiased. ( )