Cue the wingnuts impugning the morality of Michelle Obama's ancestors

This story gave ME chills and made me go all weepy, I can't even imagine what it must be like to piece together your own history like this:

In 1850, the elderly master of a South Carolina estate took pen in hand and painstakingly divided up his possessions. Among the spinning wheels, scythes, tablecloths and cattle that he bequeathed to his far-flung heirs was a 6-year-old slave girl valued soon afterward at $475.

In his will, she is described simply as the “negro girl Melvinia.” After his death, she was torn away from the people and places she knew and shipped to Georgia. While she was still a teenager, a white man would father her first-born son under circumstances lost in the passage of time.

In the annals of American slavery, this painful story would be utterly unremarkable, save for one reason: This union, consummated some two years before the Civil War, represents the origins of a family line that would extend from rural Georgia, to Birmingham, Ala., to Chicago and, finally, to the White House.

Melvinia Shields, the enslaved and illiterate young girl, and the unknown white man who impregnated her are the great-great-great-grandparents of Michelle Obama, the first lady.

Yesterday I wrote about how Germany doesn't flinch from the less-savory aspects of its past, while we insist on sweeping ours under the rug. Here we have a situation in which the First Lady of the United States is a reminder and descendant of the part of American history in which human beings thought they OWNED other human beings, and in which rape was a common occurrence, and the American discomfort with this reality seeps into the research:

It is difficult to say who might have impregnated Melvinia, who gave birth to Dolphus around 1859, when she was perhaps as young as 15. At the time, Henry Shields was in his late 40s and had four sons ages 19 to 24, but other men may have spent time on the farm.

“No one should be surprised anymore to hear about the number of rapes and the amount of sexual exploitation that took place under slavery; it was an everyday experience, “ said Jason A. Gillmer, a law professor at Texas Wesleyan University, who has researched liaisons between slave owners and slaves. “But we do find that some of these relationships can be very complex.”

In 1870, three of Melvinia’s four children, including Dolphus, were listed on the census as mulatto. One was born four years after emancipation, suggesting that the liaison that produced those children endured after slavery. She gave her children the Shields name, which may have hinted at their paternity or simply been the custom of former slaves taking their master’s surnames.

The relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson is the highest-profile indication that what began as rape, or at the very least, exploitation based on the idea of humans-as-chattel may evolve into something resembling genuine affection. But that doesn't change the fact that there is no such thing as consent when one person OWNS another under the prevailing law of the land. And the possibility of an "enduring relationship" doesn't mitigate one bit that the slave Melvinia was for all intents and purposes raped by a white man.

There's something profoundly moving, though, and "uniquely American" about the elegant, cool, self-possessed, smart, educated woman currently in residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue tracing her ancestry, now with faces and names, back to the single biggest blot on American history. It's too bad that in the environment of fear and loathing in which we now live, we've already lost sight of what the First Couple represents.