Today is Lee-Jackson Day in Virginia. I find this whole ‘war in my backyard’ thing fascinating, but also kind of disturbing. I don’t know how to reconcile the fact that today is a day to honor Confederate generals, while Monday is to honor a civil rights leader.
So, I did what any normal person would do when faced with such cognitive dissonance; I loaded up the kids and drove off to read road signs.
A significant pre-war event happened 30 miles away from me; Nat Turner’s Rebellion. The same area is also the birthplace of Dred Scott who grew up, only to have the Supreme Court of the United States tell him he wasn’t a person.
How we choose to remember the past colors the way we see the present. What do we choose to memorialize, and why?
Faithful slaves and fugitive whites. It sounds so dramatically kind, doesn’t it? Yet down the road was the hanging tree, and the place where they put the black head on the sign post. Faithful slaves, I’m sure.
It was phrased this way in 1930, and it still stands. And a wide swath of the country won’t bat an eye at the thought that blacks in the South in the 50’s were happy and singing. Because hanging trees were so 19th century, obviously.
A monument is erected in 1902, when the memories are still fresh and the wounds still visible. But it’s rededicated in 1992.
When I’m 11, they are still remembering those who defended against people like me. Still remembering without acknowledging. And yet, where I’m from, we don’t acknowledge their own scars.
“The immense force of empire continues its lethal enterprise, refusing to notice the failed fabric of social reality all around.” – Brueggemann, Journey to the Common Good
What does it mean to see, to recognize the humanity in others? Are we indifferent to the histories of our neighbors? How are the wounds healed when the weapon used was erasing the humanity?
A literal anti-christ act was committed by a ‘christian nation’ which is an empire, and fights to keep the empire together, and people still aren’t equal and generational poverty sets in and – yes, there’s enough resentment to go around.
Only now, decades upon decades later, the history has sunk into the pervasive swampy ground.
“Solomon is the model in the Bible for a global perspective of the common good, a perspective that smacks of privilege, entitlement, and exploitation, all in the name of the God of the three-chambered temple, the three chambers that partition social life and social resources into the qualified, the partially qualified, and the disqualified.” – JttCG
What does legacy and honor and remembering look like in the midst of division?
“God’s holiness embraced pain…God’s holiness forms an alliance with pain that cuts underneath every explanation we may offer.” -JttCG
What is it to absorb the pain of the South? To empathize and groan with them in all the ways statistics measure pain? What is it to form an alliance with the pain of racism and structural injustice?
Time passes and history scars over. New subdivisions are built and the hanging tree is chopped down. And people talk about the good old days and how we can get back to them and how many laws will it take.
But a nostalgic look at the past only serves to blind us to our own capacity for hate and fear. When we act like it was all ‘back then’, things are different now, the rebellion is over, the war is over, racism is dead, and we don’t even care about the words we tell ourselves in our monuments, we aren’t facing the fact that it isn’t over.
It isn’t over because it isn’t only about the specific events. It’s about our humanity and how we see it in other people.
To enter the racial and socio-economic issues that affect people now, we sometimes have to untangle the roots of the past. What, and how, we choose to collectively remember matters.
“Love of God comes as love of neighbor, with an immediate, concrete, economic dimension.” -JttCG
What kind of society do we want to work towards? Is the common good really our goal? Or is it just about entrenching the powerful?
The lessons to be learned from history include what happens when the oppressed have no voice and are not considered, and the law of the land is not necessarily moral. Do we not see the potential in us all towards violence or peace? Oppressed and oppressor?
What does redemption look like in all of this? When a plantation with slaves and rebellion and murder is still growing cotton – what does healing look like?
I honestly don’t know. But I think it at least starts with some empathy.
Civilized society can skin and quarter a man, place his head on a post, name it so that his descendants 180 years later still see that reminder, and then put up a memorial describing faithful slaves and fugitive whites?
If we cannot be honest about the past, we can’t be honest about the present. If we can’t own up to our failures of humanity, we won’t see our weaknesses now. And if we can’t work towards a fair and just present, then what kind of future will we have?
It’s nice and tidy to reduce life to an issue or an event that happened. But it always comes back to people. It comes back to people wanting to be free from whatever haunts them, whatever oppresses them, whatever inherited systemic issues plague them.
It’s more than a slave rebellion or a road sign or a day off work.
All these events and memorials are only indicative of what we value, who we love.
Will we be like Solomon, creating levels of acceptance, guarding what is ours so fiercely that we will be driven to kill for it?
Will we work to build a society that was so heavily indicted by the prophets?
What will it take for us to “redecide about our common life in the world”?
What will it take for us to forge an alliance with the pain that cuts across historical and racial lines?
Because there’ve been rebellions, court cases and war, sit-ins, boycotts, and speeches, riots, highways, and suburbs, and what will it take for us to enter the pain of our neighbor?
Good words, Caris. Hard words, but good ones. Thank you. (What are you quoting from? Somehow I missed the title . . .)
“What will it take for us to enter the pain of our neighbor?” I am art-journaling that, because it is a question worth dwelling on. Thanks for wrestling with these topics, Caris.
I really appreciate your post. It speaks to the reason as a society we haven’t moved beyond our blemished history – because we rarely, in the broad sense, acknowledge it honestly. As if by applying gentler, easier narratives and descriptors, we can somehow blur the vile nature of slavery and purge those (oft times our ancestors) of the role they played in its proliferation.
On Tuesday I received copies of 1864 slave catcher’s receipts for my CODY Ancestors owned by Jeptha CODY in Warrenton, GA. They’d escaped his plantation and were running for freedom. When captured they were beaten and jailed. I cannot imagine their punishment when returned to the CODY plantation.
Yesterday I reread the CODY family journal sent to me by a descendant describing Jeptha as morally upright, generous and of impeccable character. A HUGE contrast between the man allowing my Ancestors to be captured, beaten and jailed vs. the likable family man described in the CODY journal.
How do we remember the past? Depends on the narrator. How do we heal the past? Acknowledge it in all its ugliness and disparity, so we can all begin to heal.
We tend to cover things up with the good words on memorials, post, street signs, etc., and the fact that it covers the truth of what our histories actually were just leaves a scab that is covering a very deep wound. I thank you for writing this post with these very pressing issues that we see as we try to better our communities and the world around us.
I hope one day that all is not forgotten and there is some healing.
This was a good read!!! I think the confederate flag along with any remnants of slavery should be destroyed. Here in Danville, Virginia where I live, we have the distinct honor of being called “The Last Capitol of the Confederacy”. That is so sad to me, because of what it represents and that’s your claim to fame. This city has always been proud of that and it is memorialized in the museum here. I am a lover of history and I support preservation efforts to make sure that our history is never forgotten. Recently speaking out against the plans here to build over top of the Fearn plantation site, I was accused of trying to keep people in slavery. Slavery happened whether people want to acknowledge it or not and until we come to grips with our past, history will repeat itself in some way or another. Healing can not begin until we acknowledge OUR history, and stop trying to hide it. The effects of slavery can still be felt today and people forget that it wasn’t that long ago….just 50 years out of Jim Crow. Once the healing begin we can have dialogue and be able to talk freely about it, it will simply be apart of American history. The constant reminders don’t help either, the flags, the special days commemorating the confederacy….they keep us in the same place. Prayerfully one day we can move beyond race relations. In the meantime I will continue to celebrate my ancestors and my heritage. We survived and to come this far as a people after being enslaved for over 400 years, that is something to be admired!!!
Brueggemann’s Journey to the Common Good. So glad Kelley introduced me to him!
oooooh. I like that idea.
I’m struck every time I go out and see an elderly person and realize they have seen and endured so much. Seeing it up close and realizing that Jim Crow really wasn’t that long ago and that history is so real and is really about people, I just…..I don’t even know. It makes me angry when people want to dismiss it. And your plantation story? Oh my gosh!!! I would much rather see them preserved and turned into a museum or something, then just covered up and forgotten, or turned into a resort!!! It was good and sad for my kids to see the plantation and see the cotton fields and know that when they read about slaves, this ground is literally where it happened. We can’t just build over all of that.
gah!! So horrible. That also makes me think about all the nice, ‘morally upright’ people today who support all sorts of things that are harmful to people, and don’t think anything of it. And aren’t self-aware enough to realize that if decent people back then could do awful things, then how am I doing the same thing now?
One day, hopefully…….
I remember the hanging tree on Old Lexington Road in my hometown of Winston Salem N C, that we passed by every day on the way to and back from school. and the stories that we were told as kids by our elders. when I was there in September I drove pass and it was no longer there. was I pleased, mixed emotions because even though the tree is gone the memories are still there to those that are still around that remember the sad part is that so many pass by every day not knowing that they are walking pass Holy Ground, we don’t know if a Jesus was crucified in that same spot, not in our history..
I really appreciate this. Having grown up in the south, married a Yankee (I hate using that term though), now living in Chicago it has been a long process of engaging and growing. Understanding both sides and trying to find truth masked in all the emotional confusion. I never felt comfortable with the “war is still being fought” mentality, the anger towards a north or nation that spurned those who fought. So I have actually gained more empthy (not agreement with) my southern family because I see there is truth and lie on both sides. Now, if only we could learn to live according to Peace and Unity.
“Morally upright” is a subjective character analysis, contingent on the lens of the observer Caris & I do believe people of the past & present are self-aware enough to realize wrongdoing. I think it gets down to acceptance of truth, without the need to justify or lessen its ugliness. In respect to slavery & the broader culture, there’s guilt, shame, ignorance, & self-interest feeding the denial. And we also must accept whether connected to me or not, humans are capable of inhumane acts and not every Ancestor (or relative) is a spiritually enlightened being. Our shared history is an open wound, because we’ve refused to take the courageous step to heal it — applying the salve of TRUTH.
Mmmm. Yes Caris.
Thank you for this. I will be pondering. So glad that your new surroundings are shaking you up.
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