Thursday, March 19, 2020

A Pandemic of Plantations


Last week I visited the plantation of my great-great-great grandfather. I was so very glad to have my daughter Katie along to share the journey. But before we went to the plantation, we grounded ourselves in our shared racial history at the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, were overwhelmed by the numbers of lynchings documented at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Then we went to Billy the Wagon Maker’s plantation.

I wanted it to be real.

While all that was happening, an invisible menace was expanding across the country and the globe, scarier even than the ghosts that threatened to keep me awake in the echoing plantation house in Alabama.

Now I’m home, and those of us who can are “social distancing,” “self-quarantining,” and “sheltering in place” (I had never heard any of these phrases two weeks ago). For me in the last two days that meant diving into the dark depths of my family on Ancestry. It’s been my own disturbing, self-quarantined episode of “Finding Your Roots.”

Sometimes you don’t want to know.

As we all do, I have sixteen great-great-great grandfathers—the great-grandfathers of my grandparents. Not so very distant from me, if you think about it. Of those sixteen people, all but two of them enslaved other people: one on my mom’s side and one on my dad’s. The total number of people enslaved by my 3x great grandparents in 1850 was 182. In 1860 that number was 313 people. And that’s just one generation of my family—there are many others above and below them on the gnarly family tree.

The curve of today’s virus, whether steep or gradual, will pass. Though it will take years, our economy will recover.

But I can’t unknow what I’ve learned about my own family this week. And I have a better understanding of why my dad thought we should all cast off our earthly belongings and live in the woods. I’m beginning to realize that it wasn’t only mental illness. It may also have been a need for penance. He knew what we came from. 

And now I do, too.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

As your 1st cousin once removed, Cindy, I,too am disturbed by our family history of slave ownership. When I got the results of my genetic test, I learned that I am of 1% African descent. I never knew my Moore history, but my mother found a document in her family papers transferring ownership of a slave.

NelleHill said...

Yesterday, I mistakenly wrote a comment and sent it as "ananymous". Didn't mean to do that. I am your mother's first cousin, Nelle Hill. We have met a few times over the years. I am following your blog avidly, and am extremely proud of you for taking this journey and grateful to you for sharing it with us.