Clouds

I woke up feeling heavy and sad. My morning walk lifted the clouds for a bit, but they wrapped around me again soon after I descended back to the valley.

Today Ahmaud Arbery would have celebrated his 26^th birthday. My white son is 23--he runs in our neighborhood. I can’t stop thinking about Ahmaud’s beautiful mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones. I speak her name aloud.

With news events like this, my tendency is to either consume it and let it consume me or avoid it completely. There’s no middle ground for me. This story is swallowing me up. Running 2.23 miles and taking a picture are not enough—I can’t outrun the injustice and grief.

I’m reading My Grandmother's Hands, and I’ve been thinking a lot about racialized trauma, reptilian brains, and acts of violence that bypass reason. The murderers who stole Wanda Cooper-Jones’ light don’t deserve the benefit of a reptile-brain defense, and yet they are part of this generational cycle of lynching that infuses our bodies and systems. It’s so much bigger than these men, this southern town, this story.

These clouds will lift. Blackberry winter will turn back into spring. But in a time when we complain about wearing masks, I will wrap my arms around my son, knowing that we do not deserve the sense of safety we take for granted.

Just One of 'Em

Richard Furman was my 5x great-grandfather on my daddy’s side. If you’re from the south, and especially if you have any Baptist in you, his name may ring a bell. Furman University in Greenville, SC was named for him. My mama’s sister graduated from there in the 1950’s.

As far as I can tell, Richard Furman was the Billy Graham of his day. The Baptists were just getting started as a denomination then: they had their first national gathering to organize in 1814 in Philadelphia. Reverend Furman, who was by then the pastor of the already rich and powerful first Baptist Church of Charleston, was elected president at that first meeting.

But Richard Furman was rich and powerful in his own right as well. He owned at least four plantations, with many enslaved people on each and every one. In fact, he regularly preached from the pulpit that slavery was “ordained by God.” That worked out well for him, I guess.

And one more thing: Furman’s first wife, Elizabeth, died shortly before he accepted the position at First Baptist of Charleston in 1787. In 1789, at the age of 35, he married again. His second wife was Dorothea, who was 15 years old when they wed. She bore thirteen children before she died at the age of 45. He called her “Dolly;” she called him Mr. Furman until the very end.

I don’t yet know what all this long-ago history means to me. I somehow carry it at a cellular level, despite the ministers closer to me on the family tree, who tried to do the right thing. The first step is for me to learn this history and to face it head-on.

I wonder when Furman University will be ready to do the same.

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.