Stitt of Liverpool

Slavery. It is easy to be an old cynic. When I saw pictures of the demonstrators looking glum with T-Shirts reading "so sorry," I felt a mixture of annoyance and toe-curling embarrassment on their behalf. Empty gesture, I thought. It was horrible but a long time ago, I thought. Why not do some real campaigning where slavery still exists, I thought. And if you have time - lose that beard and those sandals.

With the annoyance and embarrassment, though, guilt also crept in. So what if people wanted to say sorry for slavery? Why didn't I think it was that important? Did I think it had nothing to do with me?

Lying in my bed, thinking randomly about this (and other things, like what happens next in Grey's Anatomy) I remembered an 19th century portrait that used to hang in our house when I was a kid. It was of a serious, dark-haired, wealthy looking-man. "Stitt of Liverpool" was his name, and it was my name too until I got married.

(I will pause for a moment to let you get over the high comedy value of the name 'Stitt." Think of what it rhymes with; observe what it reads backwards; fall about laughing. When you have recovered your composure, please continue.)

I didn't know anything about Stitt of Liverpool, other than he surely had to be an ancestor. The only other pair of Stitts in the phone book were relatives, and the fact he had made it as far as our house had to be significant as we lived in London, which is a long way from Liverpool. His portrait hung in the stairwell on a salmon pink wall: it was the seventies. I used to slide down the bannister while he looked on, pursing his lips disapprovingly. (They would purse even more when he saw me drinking Thunderbird with my teenage friends while my parents slept)

The other night it wasn't his lips or the pink wall that bothered me: it was reading earlier how Liverpool had been a port with well-established and flourishing commercial connections to the slave trade. Was Stitt of Liverpool a slave trader? He was obviously wealthy. Did he profit from the slave trade? Had I benefitted from that profit? I felt queasy at the thought, and slightly panic-stricken. And annoyed: I wanted to be asleep, not thinking about all this.

There is no easy end to this story. I looked up SoL on the internet; he was definitely a relative and an iron merchant and a devout Presbyterian. It doesn't mention anything about slavery connections, but that doesn't mean they're not there. And I feel a bit more humble and more disposed towards the demonstrators than I did.

And it's Good Friday today. With the enormity of sin, how much more enormous is the cross of Jesus.