Content Warnings: Slavery, Racism, Anti-Blackness, Mentions of Lynching, Rape, and Torture.

Growing up, the topic of Heritage had a strange weight to it. When Tony was younger, he never knew why. In public, his fiercely Italian mother was forced to strip away her heritage and culture to become the perfect all-American wife.

Maria would often tell him of the beauty of Cagliari, the ancient city that sat on the edge of the azure Mediterranean Sea. The way that she spoke Italian reminded him of a song. Now, two decades later, and Maria was deep in her grave, Tony sometimes could close his eyes and almost hear her soft, dulcet tones.

While gently stroking his thick hair, his mother vowed, “Un giorno ti porterò lì. Respirerai l’aria dei tuoi padri e camminerai sulle loro orme”.

His mother once told them that the Carbonells had been merchants and nobles. The Carbonell family history deeply embedded itself into Sardinia’s history. And while his mother had whispered his history in his ears and encouraged him to embrace his Italian heritage with open arms.

Howard was the opposite. His father was cold and tight-lipped. As far as Howard Stark was Tony and the rest of the world were concerned, he just appeared one day in his bespoke Brooks Brothers suits, full of charisma and ruthless intelligence.

Tony dared to ask Howard about his grandparents only once, and he got a crystal decanter thrown at him as his reward.

Howard Stark was an enigmatic man, and he liked it that way.

But when Tony was twelve, Tony was able to get a peek behind his father’s mask. He had been at home on a break, and he had been bored and walking aimlessly through his childhood home when he found Howard passed out on the sofa in his study. On his desk was an open letter with an old sepia-tone photo on top. The creases in the corners showed the photo had been folded and handled many times.

He glanced back at his father, Tony realized he was clutching a photo. Tony had always been curious and reckless, so he carefully crept over to his father and pried the photo out of his father’s hand.

Tony could only stare down at the photo of a beautiful, dark skin woman smiling into the camera.

On the table was a letter:

Dear Mr. Stark,

I am sorry to have to inform you of this matter, but Henrietta Ferguson has recently passed away due to a complication of pneumonia. We have tried to contact you by phone with no response. You were put down as her only emergency contact.

We wish to make arrangements for Henrietta as soon as possible. Please contact us so we can finally put her to rest.

My sincerest condolences,

Carly Ann Gates

Manager of Memorial Rest Home.

Confused, Tony picked up the photo, and he had a thousand questions. Who was this woman?

Just then Howard had muttered something under his breath as he fidgeted in his sleep. Terrified, Tony had quickly dropped the letter and the photo and fled the study. He never got the guts to ask Howard about it.

Time went by, and Tony forgot all about the photo and letter. He was too busy with high school, then he had moved to Boston to live it up as a teenage genius at M.I.T., and then finally he was graduating from college with a double major in Computer Engineering and Computer Programming.

But it wasn’t until his parents’ deaths that he thought about that letter again. He fell into a drunken rage after the funeral because of the pitiful looks and insincere condolences. Tony’s rage was fueled by the random accident that had claimed his parents and Edwin Jarvis.

Tony ripped down the huge painting of Howard on the wall and wasn’t surprised to find the safe behind it. It was the most obvious place to place to hide it.

To this day, decades later, Tony would never know what made him break into the safe. He could’ve just ignored it.

Tony found a pile of letters and photos. He grabbed a photo and noticed it was of the same woman he vaguely recalled from the one his father had held tightly years ago. This photo showed her next to a handsome white man in an old-fashioned white shirt, suspenders, and dark trousers.

Tony found something strangely familiar about the man, but couldn’t quite explain it. He flipped over the back and saw the hastily scribbled words on the back:

Nathanael Stark and Henrietta Ferguson, 1929, written in a messy scrawl.

Tony felt sick as he fit all the pieces together in his mind. His eyes traveled back and forth from Nathanael’s stern face to Henrietta’s and her kind smile. Tony flipped over the painting and tracked the facial features.

Howard had Nathanael’s round eyes, thick eyebrows, and sharp cheekbones, but the shape of Howard’s face, the shape of his mouth, and the slope of his nose were all Henrietta’s.

Tony was a man of science, and it had been the 90s, and DNA technology had been subpar at best. But Tony found other ways to find out the truth. Howard may have done his best to hide his past, but Tony had rage and spite on his side.

It didn’t take him long to find out that Howard Stark had once been Howard Ferguson. His father had been the bastard son of a fruit seller, and his mother Henrietta, had worked in a Shirt factory in lower Manhattan.

Henrietta came from a family of cotton pickers. For generations following the Civil War, her family had remained laborers on the plantation. Henrietta left Mississippi at nineteen, and her history had been spotty after that.

But the birth records had been clear: Henrietta Ferguson gave birth to Howard Ephraim Ferguson on August 15, 1932.

Howard Stark was a Black man.

All of those tiny jagged pieces in his brain clicked together to show an unsettling truth.

He remembered how Howard was so paranoid about catching a tan. Even when he went on vacation (which wasn’t often), he always avoided the sun. His mother used to tease him about it, but Tony would never have guessed the reason for this was that he was terrified of people learning that he was biracial.

This was also why Howard would get irrationally angry every time someone asked about his parent or his heritage.

But it also didn’t explain why Howard had kept Henrietta from him. Tony had been twelve when she died. He could have known her, could have had a connection to his heritage.

All of this time, Tony had a secret family out there. His great-grandparents were probably dead, but he could have aunts, uncles, and cousins out there. Hell, there could be strangers out there who shared half of his DNA. In addition, he was denied access to his father’s culture and heritage.

Tony had these mixed feelings bubbling up inside because what did this all mean? Was Tony a Black man? Would Rhodey welcome him or treat him like an intruder if he told him?

Tony looked white, experienced no oppression, and benefited from white privilege. Didn’t that make him white? Did it matter that 25% of his DNA was Black?

Tony didn’t know what to do, and he couldn’t help but feel a deep well of resentment for the mess that his father had left behind for him to clean up.

But another part of Tony couldn’t help but feel some empathy for his father. As the months faded into years, Tony often thought about his father and the secret he went to his grave to protect. Howard had been terrified of living as a Black man. He had been terrified of facing a society that devalued Black men.

He thought about the all the shit Rhodey had to go through even though the man just as smart and accomplished as Tony. He achieved this without the advantages of Tony’s wealth or white privilege.

And as the years went on, Howard’s history haunted him, and it got increasingly hard to ignore every time he spent time with Rhodey and his family.

Tony would never know all of his reasons, but he could imagine that Howard Stark thought it was the easiest way to success was to become a white man. You didn’t have to worry about segregation and doors being slammed in your face if you were white.

In the end, Tony decided that it was best to leave it be. This was a nearly 100-year-old secret, and it wouldn’t help anyone if he opened that Pandora’s box of trouble any more than he already had.

Through the years and long after his family’s death, Howard’s secret was like a splinter in his mind; occasionally and painfully poking him to put together the jagged pieces of his identity and his family’s past.

A few months after making the Mark II and dealing with Obadiah, Tony finally broke down and made the trip to Mississippi. If one didn’t know the brutal history of the Ferguson Plantation, then one could easily mistake the stately Greek revival framed by oak trees as beautiful and picturesque.

It could have been an awesome vacation spot or wedding venue.

Well, if you ignored that the land was drenched in the blood of hundreds of slaves. Behind the scenic exteriors were untold stories of rapes, murder, and torture.

There had probably been a few of his ancestors lynched on the thick branches of those tall oak trees that waved in the wind. Just standing there staring at it had made him feel ill. Tony didn’t believe in ghosts, but standing there made him feel the weight of the plantation’s filthy history.

His heritage was a stark contrast; his mother’s family included merchants, nobles, and maybe even kings, whereas his father’s was slaves. Henrietta Ferguson’s mother, his great-grandmother, had been a slave.

It was a complete and utter mind fuck.

There was Tony with his pale skin, highly educated with three Ph.Ds. from the most prestigious universities in the world, CEO of a billion-dollar corporation, with so much money he could never spend it all in one lifetime.

Tony Stark’s existence was a fantasy his ancestors couldn’t even dare to dream. Howard had lifted himself out of poverty, but at the cost of himself. He often wondered if Howard could have created his empire being a Black man or would he just end up like the people in Tulsa.

Dead and penniless because he dared to be an uppity Black man. It was these thoughts that kept Tony up at night. He hammered out his fury on scraps of metal in his lab at night, wishing he could tell Rhodey the truth.

He never did.

Tony walked down the lane of the plantation, his back stiff, head straight because “Stark Men Were Made of Iron.” He toured the residence in grim silence, and then he took out his phone and anonymously brought it that same day.

And then, with zero remorse, tore down a 200-year-old historical landmark and built a memorial on top of it instead. Tony could only feel smug satisfaction watching a bulldozer tear down the setting of his ancestor’s suffering.

This didn’t come to a head until he married Kendis. Kendis, who wore their biracial heritage with pride.

“My aunt is English, while my father’s family originates from Nigeria. My grandmother was from an old Ghanaian pureblood family.” Kendis had once told him. “I had little relationship with either side of my family growing up. I was too Black to be white and too white to be Black.”

“I wish I had met them,” Kendis shook her head sadly. “I hate that I grew up without any connection to my heritage. My white family would drop some racist comments from time to time when I was young, and my Blackness was never discussed at Hogwarts. The wizarding world loves to pretend to be color blind.”

Her words rolled over and over in his head because it was so similar,

But still so different than his situation.

And then Kendis and Tony were finally moving in with each other. Not her house in Burbank or his mansion in Malibu. A fresh start in a new home that would be the both of them.

Tony had been packing, and when he found a box in his storage unit. His eyes went wide as he realized that the box held all the contents of Howard’s safe.

When Tony decided to leave everything behind but somehow evidence of Howard’s dirty little secret followed him across the country.

Tony had called for Kendis, and she hurried over with a frown. “You okay?”

“Fine,” Tony coughed, his cheeks heating in embarrassment. “I wanted to show you something.”

Kendis lifted an eyebrow, “Alright.”

Tony opened the box, revealing a stack of letters and some photos of his grandmother. His hands trembled as he gave them to his spouse. Though Kendis frowned as they took them and look through them.

“Who’s this?” Kendis held out the photo that started Tony’s downward spiral.

Tony felt his throat close as he tried to force the words out of his mouth. And then he blurted out, “My grandmother.”

Kendis snapped up to look at him, “What?”

“Turned out Howard was just full of secrets,” Tony laughed bitterly.

Kendis looked back at the photos, and she carefully traced the features of Henrietta’s smiling face. “I think I can see some resemblance.”

Tony turned back to her. “Really?”

Kendis put the photos down and pulled Tony into her arms. “Really! Thank you for sharing this with me.”

“I know this doesn’t make me like you—”

“Black?” Kendis raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, Tony shrugged. “I will never have the same problems as you or Rhodey.”

“That does not make you less Black,” Kendis shook her head. Blackness, to me, is more than just a history of oppression, and it’s certainly not about much African heritage you have in your blood.”

“You are talking about blood quantum.”

“Yeah, that’s the word,” Kendis threw up her hands. “It’s a tool used by white folks to shove us into narrow little boxes. And I’ll support you want to reclaim that part of yourself..”

Tony shook his head. “I—I will think about it.”

Kendis kissed him softly and caressed his cheek, and dropped the subject.

And Tony wasn’t surprised at all when she kept her word. Kendis was there for every bit of the ride. They were there; he got frustrated about the lack of history about his Black family, or when he read some particularly nasty comments about biracial or multiracial people. She was a comforting presence beside him, a place where he could lay his worries about his identity down. And Kendis never judged him for it.

And when the moment came that Tony finally scraped up enough courage to tell Rhodey she was there, holding his hand.

Rhodey’s eyes widened in shock as he stared at him; then he began to laugh. “I knew you danced too good to be white.”

Tony tried to smile, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. It didn’t take Rhodey long to notice, and his smile faded into something more solemn as he reached across the distance between them and pulled him into his arms.

“You are my brother, no matter what,” Rhodey said. “You couldn’t get rid of me even if you tried.”

And years later, after almost dying of palladium poisoning, after he discovered a new element, and long after the dust of the Battle of New York had settled, Kendis and Tony had walked through the cemetery hand in hand. He looked at the large gravestone that had replaced the small placard that had once been there.

His finger traced the words that had been engraved in the stone.