contributed photo
The concept of ‘Slavery’ was relatively generic to me, for most of my life. It was remote; the edges were blurred and unnatural like a fuzzy silent movie from the 1920’s. I understood it intellectually and spiritually, but it was not deeply personal; it did not touch me at my deepest core.
I knew the story of my mother’s great-great grandfather, Caesar Ravenel, and I even have a picture of him. He had been enslaved somewhere in South Carolina. He self-emancipated, escaped to Hilton Head Island, and then joined the Union army to fight against the brutalizing system that had dehumanized him. He survived the war.
Caesar became a personal hero for me.
And yet, ‘slavery’ was still something apart from me; a distant reality. The concept braised my skin; braised my emotions; braised my spirit. Like a bullet that simply grazed the outside of me, I could feel the burn, see seared reddened skin, but the wound of slavery was still superficial; no gushes of blood.
And then.
Two years ago, I entered the filigreed gates of “Brookgreen Gardens” in Georgetown, South Carolina. It was a rice plantation in the 1850s, known as Brookgreen Plantation. It was owned by Joshua John Ward, at the time the largest and wealthiest owner of humans who were enslaved in the United States.
Today, Brookgreen Gardens is a celebrated national center for art appreciation. It sprawls across the same plantation fields that trafficked in human flesh.
Standing in that space, I found it impossible to reconcile and balance the sublime and the profane: world class art surrounded by lush, manicured landscapes, on blood-stained, spirit-killing prior fields of rice.
Today, the botanical gardens there are described as the “floral jewel of South Carolina’s coast,” containing “the largest and most comprehensive collection of American figurative sculpture in the country, displayed in a stunning garden setting.”
In 1850, Brookgreen Plantation was celebrated as ‘successful’ because it enriched its owner, Joshua John Ward, by exploiting the labor of human beings who were enslaved. Plantation owners were celebrated (Ward was the 44th lieutenant governor of SC, 1850-1852). They basked in their prosperity, and were swathed in a veil of gentility even though they trafficked in human atrocity for profit. In 1850, Brookgreen was a legal forced labor camp and the site of unconscionable human suffering and desolation.
Standing at that place, on that land, ‘slavery’ became real for me. People died horrible deaths there; their blood was still felt, present in the soil. Their unmarked graves give silent testimony.
Standing there, at first I didn’t know how or what to feel. My thoughts and emotions were jumbled and at war with each other. I was walking around a former rice plantation, and I was keenly aware that my own family had a deep, verifiable connection to slavery.
I felt a wayward, unpredictable storm begin to blow through my mind and abrade my spirit. As I walked on the grounds, my personal storm was intensifying, from thin random gusts to swirling, tornadic and dangerous.
Things got worse for me on the “Lowcountry Trail.” Adjacent to the former rice field, the Trail displays artifacts and provides an ongoing narrative about the life of the enslaved there.
On the Trail, I passed the remains of the “overseer’s” residence, a kitchen, a smokehouse, and four stainless steel sculptural figures. These four figures represent the plantation owner, the overseer, an enslaved African male and an enslaved African female. Then, I saw an oversized wooden panel that listed the names of all of the people who were enslaved and labored in that rice field during the mid 1800’s.
I gasped. Two familiar names from my grandmother’s ancestral line: Catherine and George (Ward), listed together.
My South Carolina grandmother’s maiden name was Ward.
Joshua John Ward owned Brookgreen Plantation.
Could these be members of my own family, formerly enslaved here? My spirit told me it is true. (And subsequent DNA research showed that not only were Catherine and George my grandmother’s grandparents, but that Joshua John Ward was a likely DNA match as well.)
I was stunned and shaken. Slavery was now personal; no longer a mere concept, a social and economic system, or a fact of history. Slavery had become personal and pain-full because the blood of my ancestors was in the soil under my feet, and their restless spirits seemed to cry out.
That was the day my present and my past collided. I came face to face with history; not just my own, but how America’s history and mine are deeply intertwined. That was the day I understood why ignoring or undervaluing my history diminishes and distorts my identity.
That day reconfirmed that no one has more rights to tell my story than I do, or decide what space I can, or should occupy in my own country.
To those who are attempting to shred, deny, disrupt or appropriate my history or anyone’s history, I say How dare you!
When I was at Brookgreen for the first time, for hours I toured the grounds and was driven through the rice fields. I got a first-hand lesson in how complex and difficult it is to cultivate rice with today’s technology, and how much more difficult it was using primitive hand tools one hundred fifty years ago.
I also learned that the successful rice plantations in the 1800’s depended on the knowledge and expertise that Africans brought with them from Africa where they had already perfected the complex process of growing rice. Slaveowners actually sought out Africans with these skills and paid premium prices for them.
I visited two additional times after that, feeling spiritually connected to the place because of my ancestors — Catherine and George. And, it had begun to signify more than their burial site.
They lived and died in a country that both promised and denied them freedom, justice and human dignity — simply because of the circumstances of their birth. Brookgreen was becoming emblematic of how the magnificent promise of America had been shattered by its inability to respond honestly and humanely to the problem of race and racism. It had come to signify America’s venality, duplicity, and moral frailty.
America’s denial of racism is endemic, and its racial history is inescapable. This denial functions as mass delusion, a collective refusal to face our own shameful history. And yet, Americans live in what Toni Morrison called a “wholly racialized world,” even though many Americans have made an industry of trying to escape and deny it:
They deny that race and racism has meaning in the context of culture.
They deny that race and racism infect or inflect our thinking about, and behavior toward, people and cultures that are not white and European.
They deny that race and racism influence official policy and practice on the federal, state and local levels.
They deny the connection between race, power, privilege and success.
Our collective denial is also emblematic of the sinister nature of racism, and the sinister nature of racialized power, privilege, and control. Some of the deniers are shape shifters, and their denials are constantly morphing, often illogical or incoherent. Some have begun to chant: history doesn’t matter… talking about racism hurts white children… let’s focus on what we have in common — what unifies us, not what divides us… et cetera. Lately, many of those chants have become vicious, vitriolic, hysterical, and dangerous.
Often, the deniers are educated, cultured, credentialed, Christian, flag-waving self-proclaimed patriots. But they are disconnected from facts, disconnected from reality, and disconnected from demonstrable truths.
The deniers decry Critical Race Theory (CRT), warn against White Replacement Theory (WRT), and are quick to shout “Go back to where you came from…” to those who disagree with them — all while they appropriate freedom of speech for themselves.
Ostensibly, the controversy is about American history — whether to teach it or bury it, and the denial has become a scorched-earth assault on truth that smothers other voices and perspectives. However, this mobbish, seemingly irrational assault, is masking its true purpose. It is not about history or CRT or WRT. It is about power, privilege, social dominance, and control.
As I recently heard someone say: “We are racist today because we were racist yesterday.”
At times, it feels like Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies is playing itself out right before our eyes in our body politic. ‘Civilized’ Americans are descending into barbarism, brutality and violence in words and deeds on Capitol Hill, in school board meetings, and in large and small communities nationwide. It feels like this descent into barbarism marks a social, cultural and political decline, as well as an insatiable, uncontrollable lust for more Power by those who are already in control.
I am afraid.
Power is insidious and often invisible; power is self-perpetuating and self-satisfied; it purports to be ‘normal,’ making us comfortable with the status quo even when the status quo is killing us. It makes us believe that the structures of power are fixed and immutable, inevitable, and right.
Power force-feeds us the false ideology: “America right or wrong.” The powerful help us internalize the idea, even when it becomes self-sabotage. Power is sprawling, ubiquitous and deep; sinister and subterranean; it sometimes hides in dark places and sometimes parades itself in the light. It is tricky; sometimes magisterial, and sometimes cloaked in humility and selflessness. It feeds on itself, needing to expand. It grows like cancer but destroys the tissues that feed it.
If you have power, you can control what and how history is presented – the his-story we tell ourselves about wo we are and what we stand for.
If you have power, you can control what history is put into books, and importantly, who and what is left out.
If you have power, you can control whose voice is heard and whose voice is silenced.
If you have power, you can control whose experience is valued and whose experience is devalued.
Each day I stood on the former rice plantation that is now an art space, I felt sad and powerless. I asked myself: Can flowers and art and breathtaking landscapes ever erase or neutralize what lies beneath the surface, or whitewash the horror? Can flowers and art ever un-do the past, restoring the desiccated morality of slaveowners, or absorbing the blood of my ancestors, and the blood of all the others who died there?
Brookgreen Gardens is more than a ‘floral jewel’ or a ‘stunning garden setting’ for an art collection. It is a burial site.
It is the resting place for an unknown number of souls who worked, lived, and died on Brookgreen Plantation over one hundred fifty years ago. Their spirits are bound to the land for eternity. Their lives were a daily battle for survival in a country that did not love them. The flowers and art can be a way to say we must Never Forget those who died at Brookgreen Plantation — they deserve recognition, honor, and respect. So, in some ways it seems fitting that flowers and art mark the site of this sacred ground.
And yet, there are not enough flowers in the world to cover the stench of American slavery, and there is not enough art in the world to displace the tragic images of human suffering that took place in those rice fields.
Acknowledging the past honestly and objectively is the only way that we, the living, can learn from the atrocities of the past. We cannot un-write American slavery, or erase the stain of what many call America’s original sin. We can choose to face it.
Edited excerpt from Dr. Holmes’ book in-the-works, Finding My ‘Self’ on a Rice Plantation in Georgetown, SC: Meditations on Slavery, Being Black, and American. Dr. Holmes’ first book is: Justice in Search of Leaders: A Handbook for Equity-Driven School Leadership.
Connect with Dr. Holmes directly via LinkedIn or GLHOLMES@uscb.edu