Category Archives: Slavery

Family Graphics

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Last year while writing about my slaveholding Scarlett ancestors, I tried my hand at rendering three of them visually. The process surprised me—not because I saw that I had mixed feelings about these people (duh)—but because, as I hacked and slashed with my paintbrush, I saw that I wanted to eradicate them.

I later shared the images during a session of Coming to the Table’s Linked Descendants group, where we were asked to make collages addressing our ancestral pasts vis a vis American slavery (you can read more about that session here.)

            I continue to wrestle with this stuff. To cast blame on my enslaving ancestors is to suggest I would have been any different. But that’s a lie. I’m pretty sure I’d have done exactly what they did—especially as a woman, dependent on fathers and husbands and brothers for financial security, raised to defer to power. I’d have been as complicit as Fanny McDonald Scarlett (pictured here), who raged when one of her most trusted “servants,” an enslaved woman named Matilda, seized trunkloads of Scarlett belongings and fled for freedom in 1862. (“I wonder if it is possible that she can be so depraved as to be happy,” Fanny said.) Little wonder I’m eager to silence her.

Robert Leslie Pettigrew (December 9, 1923 – March 25, 2021)

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He was invariably there, my Uncle Bob, as I worked to unpeel the family history we both knew lay stuck inside those boxes of my grandmother’s—the ones she’d collected for half a century, then surrendered to him, who held onto them for another decade or so before he packed them up and shipped them to me. “Perishable Fresh Fruit,” read the lid of one box. I put it in my closet and left it there, unopened, for another half-dozen years.

My beloved Uncle Bob: inheritor of his mother’s (my grandmother’s) overflowing archive and her strict devotion to family, the only religion I ever knew her to preach.

Early on, she picked Bob, her only son, as the one to take over the family history business when she got too old and addled to handle it herself. Loyal to the core (or possibly lacking the will it would have taken to stand up to her withering frown) he dutifully took on the task.

One of the things she gave him was a key: an old, bent, quasi-rusted tool of the sort a child might draw to illustrate the concept of “key.” I’ve got it now on my desk. Uncle Bob sent it to me years ago, in a cardboard container he’d carefully carved out to hold the treasure. He attached a note, in which he sketched the outline of the key and speculated about its origins—“something to do with the family, I never knew exactly what”—and then went on, in his engineer’s way, to ruminate on the “shape of the matching combination part inside the lock.”

In much the same way, he handed me the key to the book I’ve just finished writing about our slaveholding Scarlett ancestors. He did it five summers ago, when I was visiting him in Wyoming. He happened to mention a memory my grandmother had harbored lifelong. I’d never heard the story before—not from my mother, and certainly not from my grandmother—and it quickly became the driving engine for my book.

Specifically, my uncle told me that his mother had told him, when he was just a kid—this would have been in the early 1930s—that she was haunted by memories of the men in her family going out into the night in Brunswick, Georgia, in the first years of the 20th century, and doing something wrong.

When I asked my uncle to write down the details of the story, he did. “Your Grandmother did tell me of ‘men riding off in the night, mysteriously, and returning without explanation,’ of that I’m quite sure. She didn’t mention any names nor did she directly suggest any reasons. … It was I who mentally related her comments to night raids on Negroes, not your Grandmother (at least not vocally), but I still believe that relationship was true.”

A chance conversation in 2016—one of those spider threads that have the power to utterly change what we know about the past. My uncle’s passing revelation pushed me to places I would never have gone on my own and led me to uncover a plausible source for my grandmother’s nightmare—a killing of a young Black man in Brunswick in 1901 that involved one of her uncles.

That my own Uncle Bob—prudent engineer, cautious family historian, a man whose political instincts erred toward the conservative—was willing to break my grandmother’s code of silence says worlds about the man. He knew the information he gave me was likely to expose uncomfortable truths about our family, and he did it anyway. I wish more people would heed his example.

Lee’s Traveller (after Charlottesville)

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They bred such horses in Virginia then, horses that were remembered after death.

Head lowered, flanks stilled, the animal fixes his eyes on the red brick city where the boys are massing. The invincible boys, the gallant men behind their shades and shields. The ones who at long last, after all these years, have been fed and fueled.

No more waiting for rations or trains. No more shoeless troops, spent cartridges, empty trough. No gaunt faces and skeletal limbs. No retreat. (Remember how they peered up at you as you cantered past on the way to Appomattox. Remember how he paused in the midst of the dreadful ride to let you sip from a cool stream.)

All these years after the ivory flag, the inglorious exchange of letters and conditions, he sits astride you still, as if still posing for Brady, stalwart in his colonel’s stars and gold buttons not two days after surrender, unable to resist celebrity’s consolation prize. Never utter the word defeat. Speak instead of God’s hands, as he does. As they do. Mom, dad, the lanky brood with their buckteeth grins. All those schoolkids arranged in happy groups at your feet, gazing up in awe (or was it boredom) at the Roman face and gloved hands: the image inscribed in a thousand holy books.

All those quiet decades when the sword hung idle by his side. And now they’re back, flames in their eyes.

Feel the shift of his weight in the saddle, the familiar tug of the reins. You’d forgotten the fear, the urge to bolt. How he used to soothe you. How he ran his strong fingers along your hide, sponged the sweat, fastened the dove-gray coat and whispered sweet encouragements. Tightened the blinders and turned you toward the guns.

What is peace, after all, but a lost cause. Yoked to him like this, you know only fieldworks, picket lines, the swift and sudden flank attack, the fury of the uniformed brigades. The ones marching this way, tikis aloft.

Across the valley the enemy campfires flicker. Now they’re chanting the soft songs of brotherhood, the tender ballads. A child, weeping, begs to hear more. Her strange grace, floating skyward, reminds you of home, whatever that is. Reminds you of clover and bluegrass, the bobwhite’s call. Pillared house. Stabled lawn. The daughters with their fragrant skirts. The sons he sends, like you, into battle. Can’t we simply be, they cry. But he’s got fresh recruits.

All those years when you trusted. Raised your head and carried him forward. Watched him muster the infantry, mourn the dead, discipline the shirkers and stragglers. Watched him strip the ones who ran to their waists and order the whip. All those times you closed your ears, prayed for an end. But God, for whom two-thousand years (as you well know) are but as a single day, works slowly, and the master is nothing if not patient.

Once they loved you so much they built you a grave. Chiselled it with your name. Planted hyacinths and moss, as he did for his beloved. Who would believe you once threw him to the ground? Yanked the reins and leapt backward and flung him from the saddle, both wrists sprained. For weeks he rode in an ambulance while you followed behind. Remember how it felt to walk free. Remember how the wind grazed your back, the sun warmed your cold heart. Brave colt, noble steed, do it again.

Yes, in My Backyard

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Although I grew up in Lancaster County and wrote a book about its storied Fulton Theatre, I’d been largely ignorant of its African-American past (and present) until this past weekend, when I joined Joe McGill and members of the Slave Dwelling Project for an overnight stay and series of public events in the county.

In the town of Columbia, where we spent the night, I learned about the surprisingly large enclave of free blacks who settled there before the Civil War—a bold “in-your-face” to whites living south of the Mason-Dixon line (some 15 miles from Columbia) and to the dozens of slave catchers who set up shop in Lancaster County during the first half of the 19th century. Columbia’s blacks seem to have been alternately sheltered and attacked by their white neighbors. (In a troubling prelude to our own times, Columbia’s white working class rioted against the town’s African Americans in 1834—upset that brown people were “taking” their jobs.)

In downtown Lancaster, I learned about 20th-century discrimination against black workers in Hager’s Department Store (“I was just light enough to get a job as an elevator attendant,” remembered Leroy Hopkins, emeritus professor of German at Millersville University). I heard a poignant rendition from performer Amanda Kemp about what it’s like to “walk while black”—protected, to a slight degree, from white fear and aggression by her reassuringly female pink and green ensemble. (Black boys like her son, Kemp said, have no such protection.) On a walking tour of African-American heritage sites in Lancaster, I saw the city through a new and welcome lens.

Missing from most of this, though, was a clear picture of the history of slavery in my home county. Lancastrians are eager to celebrate the county’s decisive role in the Underground Railroad—a result in part of its strategic geography. But what of its less celebratory past? Slavery came to Pennsylvania in 1636, according to Randy Harris (who led the downtown African-American heritage tour), and enslaved people inhabited the city until at least 1840. To the question of whether (and where) enslaved people were auctioned in downtown Lancaster, Randy had no answer. Ditto the matter of where enslaved people lived. Aside from a few documented sites and records—the plantation of the 18th-century slaveholder and Revolutionary War General Edward Hand; letters in which the 18th-century slaveholder (and town magistrate) Edward Shippen described the purchase of an enslaved woman—there’s little physical evidence of Lancaster County’s century-long involvement in slavery.

Randy’s tour included a stop at a pair of underground cisterns where abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens and his mixed-race companion, Lydia Smith, are believed to have housed African Americans fleeing slavery. But the city’s more difficult history—its deep complicity in the slave system, even after Pennsylvania abolished slavery in 1780—remains largely buried. When I was researching my book on the Fulton Theatre, I discovered lists of enslaved African Americans who were incarcerated in the town jail after running away from their “owners” in the early decades of the 19th century. Many were sent back into slavery. I also found newspaper accounts of the thriving cotton mills Lancaster opened in the 1840s—mills that helped perpetuate Southern slavery while boosting the Lancaster economy. Thaddeus Stevens himself praised their role in the city’s fortunes.

The weekend visit by the Slave Dwelling Project was a welcome reminder that, like the slave dwellings Joe McGill is working to preserve, this part of Lancaster’s story demands attention.

Blues

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This week in Chicago, I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art for the first time in several years. It’s not generally my thing, contemporary art, but I’ve always found the place deeply thought-provoking. This time was no different. Howardena Pindell—an artist whose work I didn’t know. But trusting the MCA (and the nice guy at the front desk who recommended her show as he sold me my ticket), I went. I was drawn in at once by her exuberant color, and the strange, nit-picky way she numbered grid paper in her early work—an homage to her mathematician father, the labels claimed—and the intricate transition from those fetished numbers into hole punches inscribed with numbers, into hole-punched canvases, into beautiful, hand-stitched paper assemblages scattered with punched holes, bits of glitter, talcum powder, thread.

I was merrily absorbed in all of this when I was taken up short by an abrupt transition—Pindell’s car accident in 1979, from which she emerged semi-amnesiac. Now the hole-punched abstract canvases took on more urgency. She began affixing scraps of paper—images, slivers of postcards from friends, fragments relevant to her lost memories. Titles repeat the word “memory,” as if by insisting on memory she might recover it. The work is recognizably hers—the vibrant colors, the obsession with punched holes, stitched paper.

And then the show’s great revelation: a vast and brilliant blue oval of sea (or sky or both) reckoning with the Middle Passage and Pindell’s African ancestry, titled Autobiography: Water/Ancestors Middle Passage/Family Ghosts (it belongs to the Wadsworth Atheneum). Here, in this impossibly beautiful blue piece, she conjures the stitched-together nature of memory, collective and personal. We see a female body, capped with a self-portrait of Pindell herself, cut from and stitched back into the broader canvas, which is scattered with images conjuring the slave trade, including the notorious diagram of a slave ship with its packed human cargo. And in its midst is this body—alive, fragrant, contemporary. The arms and legs are patched with small images of eyes. She is both an eye and an I. A witness—in a place where she was meant to be only cargo, eyeless. I-less. But here instead, like an Egyptian goddess, she sees all.

The piece feels one with Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route, in which Hartman, a descendant of enslaved African Americans, attempts to stitch together the “gaps and silences and empty rooms” of her history. “Alongside the terrible things one had survived,” Hartman writes of those who endured the Middle Passage, “was also the shame of having survived it. Remembering warred with the will to forget.”

I’ve got evidence that my own great-great-great-grandfather purchased an imprisoned African from the illicit slave ship Wanderer in 1858. I too am working with scissored truths to reconstruct a history from this destruction. So blue and beautiful from a distance, the sea: so cruel in the details.

Modifications

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In the midst of the debate over Confederate monuments, I’m reminded of the statue of Strom Thurmond that stands in front of the South Carolina state capitol. I saw it last year for the first time and was struck by the palimpest it’s become. The base of the statue lists both his accomplishments (minus, of course, his decades-long segregationist vitriole) and his children,  including Thurmond’s mixed-race daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, whose story did not emerge publicly until several months after her father’s death.

What’s so striking about the monument—and a partial argument, I think, for keeping some of these statues intact and in situ—is the very obvious way Essie Mae’s name has been added to the list of his children. And the very clearly edited number of those children:

Strom Thurmond Monument 1

I’ve been told the reason the number “five” is smudged is because so many hands (many, if not most, of them African-American) have reached up to touch it—as if to prove this isn’t a mirage. Like a medieval relic, that edited number bears witness to a kind of miracle: the fact that the state of South Carolina, which until 2015 flew the Confederate flag over its state house, acknowledges, even honors, Essie Mae’s existence.

Context is everything when it comes to these statues, and I’m with those in the museum world (including Lonnie Bunch III of the National Museum of African American History) who’d like to see them preserved in museums, where viewers can probe their full and complicated meanings, rather than out-and-out destroyed. Meanwhile, let’s all work to make public as much of this sorrowful history as we can. Some parts of the story have seen entirely too much public light. Some have not seen remotely enough.

In the Archives

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When I was working on my life of Lorca, I often asked myself the question Lear asks, late in Shakespeare’s play, about Cordelia: “Have I caught thee?” It’s the biographer’s essential question: have I managed to transcend time and circumstance and geography to know what makes/made you tick?

I find myself asking it again as I try to make sense of my forebears—the Scarletts of Georgia, who built a small fortune using the labor of human beings they bought and hunted and enslaved. I’m especially curious about the man who started it all—Francis Muir Scarlett, my great-great-great grandfather, who fled from England to Georgia in 1799 and by 1812, at the age of 27, was a plantation overseer, and within another decade, a planter, slaveholder, and state legislator.

He’s a squirrely guy. I’ve got one photograph of him, above, undated. He left little in the way of a paper trail—mostly legal documents and ads for runaways. But last month I got a tiny glimpse of Francis Muir Scarlett in action.

I was trawling the Journals of the state legislature at the Georgia Archives, outside Atlanta, and found multiple references to Scarlett. One, from 1826, showed him in action, in his “room” in Milledgeville, demanding to know why a fellow legislator—a Mr. Powell, from Darien—had published a private letter. The back story is complicated and involves bank business, but the description of Scarlett caught me:

Mr. Scarlett then rose, got the document, and handed it to Mr. Powell, who read it and made no remark about it, nor evinced any surprise.

There he is, my ancestor, fleetingly alive and in action. I can see him in a firelit room, dark suit and white shirt, black tie, as he brandishes the incriminating letter and confronts his peer. It’s a rare moment.

The state legislature Journals reveal other details: that Scarlett was more interested in infrastructure (canals, bridges, ferries, roads) than in questions of slavery or Native American rights (both of which preoccupied lawmakers in the decades he served). Tto my delight, I learned that Scarlett voted in favor of divorce every time he was asked to weigh in. (For a married couple to divorce, both houses of the state legislature had to authorize it.)

But have I caught Francis Muir Scarlett? No way. Try to fathom why he embraced the slavery business, and I’m stumped. Was it simply circumstance? Geography? Need (or greed?)

Could he have said no? I go round and round, wanting to understand how and why he did what he did. It’s clear he wanted to be wealthy and powerful, and it’s equally clear that in early-19th-century Georgia, those tended to go hand-in-hand with enslaved labor.

And what about the women—Scarlett’s wife, daughters, daughters-in-law? Women confined to parlors and birthing rooms, for whom marriages were arranged and dowries compiled, for whom legal rights did not exist. (When Scarlett’s daughter Mary Ann became a widow, her vast inheritance passed directly to her father.)

Unlike the Grimké sisters or the actress Fanny Kemble, who published a chilling eyewitness account of the appalling conditions on her husband’s Georgia plantations, my female ancestors did not, so far as I can tell, speak out. They clung to the family business, it appears, and to their comforts—as I fear I would have done in their place.

I’m working, still, to catch all of them.

Lost Causes

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I’ve been reading Faulkner: Sound and Fury a couple of weeks ago, now As I Lay Dying. (When I mentioned him earlier this year to the undergrads in my first-year seminar, one of my Chinese students groaned. “Faulkner!!! He’s impossible.” Tough enough for a native English speaker, I agree. I can’t imagine grappling with him if your first language is Mandarin.)

But the wonderfully self-contained Sound and Fury sheds obscurity as a dog does its coat in spring. Once I’d finished the novel, I circled back to the beginning and reread that astonishing first chapter in Benjamin’s voice. The plot and characters emerged from hiding. I was thick in the Compson fold.

It strikes me that Faulkner was of the same generation as my grandmother (b. 1898) and of Margaret Mitchell (b. 1900). I associate Mitchell, of course, and to some degree my grandmother, with the infamous Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Mitchell’s paean to that fantasy is well known. Reared on the same post-war brew of regret and recrimination, my grandmother shared Mitchell’s reluctance to forgive. While her Missouri-born husband reveled in histories of the Civil War, my Georgia-born grandmother shunned any such reading and repeatedly warned me, “There are some things we don’t talk about.”

I doubt she read Faulkner. But I’ve got my grandmother’s 1936 copy of Gone with the Wind on my bookshelf, and I remember her mentioning—proudly—Mitchell’s use of our family name (Scarlett) for her heroine.

It’s instructive to remember that Faulkner published Absalom, Absalom! just a few months after Mitchell’s novel came out. Faulkner’s novel sold around 7,000 copies, as compared to Mitchell’s millions, and then more or less vanished from bookstores. “I seem to be so out of touch with the Kotex Age here,” he complained. His only other pronouncement on the GWTW  phenomenon was that “no story takes a thousand pages to tell.”

Today, of course, Faulkner’s thorny novel holds up far better than Mitchell’s. Morally, socially, politically, it’s a much more digestible read—although Mitchell’s storytelling still slides easily down the throat.

I was intrigued to learn this year that few of my 18-to-21-year-old students are familiar with GWTW. They know of it, that is, but unlike earlier generations, most haven’t seen the movie, let alone read the book. That strikes me as good news. For too many decades, going back to my grandmother and her peers and extending well through my own generation, readers—especially women—have warmed to Mitchell’s facile tale of chivalric masters and loyal slaves battered by vulgar Yankees.

Faulkner’s the one we need now. “What is it?” he asked of the ideology we associate with the Lost Cause:

Something you live and breathe in like air? a kind of vacuum filled with wraithlike and indomitable anger and pride and glory at and in happenings that occurred and ceased fifty years ago? a kind of entailed birthright father and son and father and son of never forgiving General Sherman, so that forevermore as long as your childrens’ children produce children you wont be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed in Pickett’s charge at Manassas?

Faulkner knew Mitchell and her ilk—they were, after all, his contemporaries. He knew where their obsessions led. We need only look today at the controversy surrounding the removal of Confederate monuments in places like New Orleans to know that in the second decade of the 21st century, Mitchell’s vision breathes on.

Exposures

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This odd photo has come down to me along with reams of other documents from my grandmother. I never paid much attention to it until a few weeks ago, when I was rummaging through the family scrapbooks again in search of some detail about my Scarlett ancestors.

The picture—or pictures, for it’s a beguiling double exposure—dates from around 1899. My grandmother (the infant in the wicker baby carriage) was born in 1898. The house under construction behind her is the replacement for the family manse, which burned to the ground in 1897. The setting is Brunswick, Georgia, specifically a tract of acreage called Oak Grove, once the center of my great-great-great grandfather’s cotton empire, worked by hundreds of enslaved men, women, and children.

My grandmother had always told me how poor she was growing up in Brunswick in the first years of the 20th century, in the aftermath of the Civil War and its lingering privations. She belonged to the same generation as Margaret Mitchell, and like Mitchell, she imbibed the stories of the lost South at the knees of grandparents and great-uncles and aunts who had lived the thing. The lessons stuck. “It still makes me mad at those Yankees stripping the Southern families,” my grandmother wrote to her son in the 1970s.

The photograph suggests otherwise. It’s all there: the fire, the ruin, the loss. But there, also, is this baby in a wicker carriage, being tended, as of old, by a black woman. Forty years after the war, my ancestors were re-creating the life their ancestors had known. In the background, I can make out the silhouettes of men—possibly black—building the new Scarlett homestead (which, incidentally, looks a lot like the house of Margaret Mitchell’s grandparents in Clayton County, Georgia).

This is not a poverty-stricken family: the women wear wasp-waisted dresses, mutton-chop sleeves, little straw boating hats, stockings. Renoir could have painted the scene. My grandmother’s carriage sits on enormous bicycle wheels. Her nurse, a woman named Mattie, wears a starched white apron over a dark underdress. They are peering into a new century—one that will claim them all, claim the house under construction, yet still not free the people building it from the attitudes and prejudices of the past.

Here is the double exposure of family I’m trying to untangle: the story behind the story, the second image, the one that accidentally slipped into the portrait my grandmother so carefully composed, the only one she wanted me to see.

Artifacts

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“To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.” —Colette

 

In late January, on an unexpectedly frigid day, and despite a sore throat, I spent four hours inside Mexico City’s great anthropology museum. I’d been there once before, when I was 13, on a visit with my grandmother and brother. The museum was then four years old. It’s held up beautifully: still that bold stone exterior, at once hard and undulating; that astonishing umbrella-like roof shading its massive interior courtyard.

The day was overcast and damp, and the museum unheated. I’d worn nothing warmer than a summer raincoat. A cold day made worse by the raging wound at the back of my throat.

But the galleries held me. One after another, they told their stories. Mostly in stone and clay; occasionally in wood, fabric or paint. Figures two, three, four-thousand years old engaged in the stuff of everyday life. They watch, they crouch, they harvest and prepare food, they stare down from impossible heights, they give birth. They are noseless, faceless, dead, bleeding, about to kill, grinning. They’re being devoured by a snake, a jaguar, another being as powerful as they.

I lurched between admiration and horror. In each gallery, something whimsical called out: a squatting rabbit, a cat, a man cuddling a dog to his chest. In each gallery, something appalled: the sacrificial altar or slab where hearts were offered to the bloodthirsty sun. A display case holding the deformed and decorated skulls of child slaves who’d been purchased at the market for sacrificial slaughter.

I lingered for some time over the last of these, grateful to the archaeologists who’d excavated these artifacts and deciphered the grisly story they represent. Unnerved by that story.

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Reconstructed Slave Cabin, Kingsley Plantation, Jacksonville, Florida

Why unearth the past? A man at the gym asked me the other day why I’m digging up the story of my slaveholding ancestors. I gave the obvious answers: because it’s important, because we need to confront the truth, because this country has done so little to acknowledge the brute realities of our history—slavery and Native American genocide, twin foundations of so much that we regard as American progress. 

Those are easy answers. The tougher one is how are we perpetuating this history in the present? I’ve often wondered how my ancestors could live their relatively comfortable lives within sight of the slave cabins. (How those ancient Mexican civilizations could carry on with business after murdering enslaved children …) But then I ask myself: what are the slave cabins of our era? The inequities on which my comfort depends? The shorn mountaintops of West Virginia? Detroit’s failing public schools? Chicago’s impoverished neighborhoods?

Each generation solves and complicates. We leave behind marvels of beauty, artifacts rich with story, actions and attitudes too callous to explain.