New Statesman review
18 AUGUST 2021
By Michael Prodger
Blood Legacy: Reckoning With a Family’s Story of Slavery by Alex Renton
“I am an heir of Britain’s slavery past,” begins the journalist Alex Renton in his highly personal book about his family and the enslaved people his ancestors once owned. For Renton, the legacy of slavery is an active thing; it has shaped him and given him privilege. This book is his way of grappling not just with the complexities of slavery itself and the issues of acknowledgement and compensation, but the personal difficulties that come with being a descendant of the Fergussons, plantation owners in Tobago and Jamaica who held 950 black lives in their hands.
Where the book goes deeper than mere discussion or polemic is in Renton’s use of the family archive. It is in the testaments of the people involved – both slaves and slave owners – that the real force of Blood Legacy lies. The papers reveal the everyday business of overseers, runaway slaves and mortality (of “obstructed viscera”, “water in the head”, drowning “in the muck pitt”), as well as moral qualms. A degree of personal guilt for these quotidian horrors drives Renton’s conviction that reparations, personal and governmental, are both feasible and necessary.