contributed photo
I woke up this morning, and Brookgreen spilled out again; I’m unable to keep that lid shut. Brookgreen is still battering my spirit even though it has been more than two years since my first visit. It has burrowed into my soul and spirit; it’s deep like the pain of ancestral memory.
Do those lush gardens, captivating statues, bridal parties, festive gatherings, and aesthetes clustered under Spanish moss-draped live-oaks obscenely mock the past? Can we ever really deny and ignore the horrors of the past? Will silence solve the problem?
Martin Niemöller’s poem, “First They Came” reminds us that silence can be deadly:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Silence is complicity; it is passive acceptance. When people die because of someone’s silence and denial, their death is not passive, it’s active. And, there’s nothing more silent than the grave.
There are many ways to justify silence. Some say that we spend too much time talking about race; some say that we don’t spend enough. Surely the perspective depends on whether you are the oppressor or the oppressed; the abuser or the abused. Whether you have the power of silence as part of your privilege; the power to deny hearing the ‘voice’ of another, the power to dis-empower.
Those who are silenced still have voices, even though they may be under-used or unheard. They still have points of view and perspectives, though they may be ignored or dismissed.
Silence supports stasis, and those in power who are benefitting from the status quo collude to maintain a cloak of silence around race. This corrosive silence amounts to an unspoken acquiescence to the dominant paradigm which affirms their right to the privileges and power they have.
We know that much of the silence around race and racism is fear-induced, and paralyzing in ways that not only prevents some of us from speaking out against racism and bias, it prevents some of us from acting against them as well.
We also know that fear can sustain and deepen silence. What do Whites fear when it comes to talking about race? According to author Beverly Daniel Tatum (Why Are All of the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?), some Whites fear:
“[i]solation from friends and family, ostracism for speaking of things that generate discomfort, rejection by those who may be offended by what we have to say, the loss of privilege or status for speaking in support of those who have been marginalized by society, physical harm caused by the irrational wrath of those who disagree…”
Moving forward means breaking the silence and unlearning or deconstructing bias in self-aware and intentional ways. Understanding that there is a difference between implicit (unconscious) and explicit (conscious) biases, and that there is often a disconnect between what we think we believe and what we actually believe. When we are willing to see and hear these hidden beliefs, we can heal and change them to reflect what is real and true.
Moving forward means not celebrating vestiges of America’s racism in the form of statues, monuments, or concepts that invoke human oppression, such as naming private upscale communities ‘plantations’ and romanticizing “the old South.” Slavery was horror-filled and base, one of the cruelest and most corrupt instincts of humankind.
Moving forward means accepting, rather than denying, that racialized values of human worth are very ‘American’ — then and now. Our love of the concepts of democracy and freedom co-exist with an addiction to racism, and most Americans don’t want to acknowledge our national contradictions or hypocrisy. Moving forward, we can change this self-imposed, dangerous mass delusion.
I am reminded of John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” a poem about war and death that I haven’t thought about in decades. As a child, I had to memorize it, because a teacher told me to. I had no idea what it was saying about humans and humanity, or how any of it was in any way connected to me, a Black child in a classroom in Harlem. I had a superficial understanding: Setting: a field. Plot: a wartime battle took place in the field, men died there, and now, the field is filled with rows and rows of poppy flowers.
I am reminded of it now, because Flanders Field was a field of death, and the Brookgreen rice plantation was a field of living death, and dying death.
“In Flanders Fields” is not simply a poem about death and dying and pain and loss, it is also about honoring the dead. Perhaps this is an entirely different perspective on the relationship between slavery on Brookgreen Plantation, and Brookgreen Gardens.
As a Black child growing up in Harlem, I was taught to revile the condition of slavery. Although I was not taught to revile enslaved people, I also was not taught to empathize with them, to honor or appreciate their humanity, or to think critically about their despicable circumstances. To do so would have meant challenging the power structures.
I internalized the idea that a slave’s association with a despised condition tarnished and diminished them, rather than elevated them in the eyes of society. Their implied lowliness was reinforced by the cluster of common, negative stereotypes that seemed to blame them individually for their condition.
Enslaved people were never presented as heroic or honorable, whether in history books, movies, cartoons, TV shows, or in popular literature. The psychic implications of their dark skin matching my own, in terms of a child’s developing self-image and identity formation, are disturbing. As I thought about Flanders Field, death and honor, I could challenge the ideas about slavery and enslaved people I had internalized.
Despite its history of denial, America has always had an aggressively racist social system. It has effectively used its identification with Democracy and Christian ideology to deflect and disarm criticism. This allowed white Americans to appropriate the moral high ground. But racism is toxic and corrosive, and it always seeps out.
Making enslaved people heroic would indirectly villainize the slaveowners and challenge the mythology of slaveowners as paternalistic “saviors,” barons of prosperity — rather than brokers of human flesh. When they were memorialized in paintings, plantation owners intentionally projected power and a sense of entitlement, and their family portraits suggested an inviolable commitment to family values.
This mythology, which amounts to self-imposed ‘mass delusion,’ was in sharp contrast to the de facto realities of plantation life for the humans they brutalized for generations and exploited for enormous profit. The re-construction of reality allowed slaveowners to feel good, justified, and validated.
Moving forward, we need new stories and images that re-imagine enslaved people as heroic: strong and fearless; smart and adaptable; indomitable and indefatigable, creative and wise; caring and spiritual. Above all, they need to be seen as people who were victimized but who refused to be victims, who were enslaved, but refused to define themselves as ‘slaves.’
It is heroic to hold fast to their humanity and become productive American citizens, despite being kidnapped from their African homelands and violently stripped of everything they had of value. These heroes fully deserve respect, dignity, and the full rights of citizenship.
It is heroic to overcome systematic attempts to extinguish your humanity, your spirit; your family, your people, and everything you value; it is heroic to fight back, even when you lack the traditional ‘weapons’ to do so.
It is heroic to survive, and thrive.
American culture has always honored bravery, especially when it means risking your life in defense of the ‘good.’ On the surface, this suggests that Black resistance to systemic oppression should and would be seen as heroic.
However, racism has mangled America’s sense of what is ‘good’ and what is ’bad,’ when it comes to slavery and Black people, so it is difficult to imagine Black resistance to white supremacy and control presented as ‘good’ because it implicitly demonizes the white power structures. Acknowledging Black resistors as heroes would be tantamount to white people acknowledging their own villainy, a damning self-critique. In a country structured to ensure white male supremacy and dominance, the overriding impulse would always be to crush any semblance of Black resistance while artfully articulating a transcendent morality.
Therefore, the familiar negative stereotypes which depicted enslaved people as dispirited, defeated and powerless conceal the true, persistent pattern of Black resistance to white supremacist oppression which is threaded throughout American history. Black resistance meant Black power, and this contradicted the mythology of Black powerlessness that was carefully constructed around slavery.
Denying others the opportunity to speak, doesn’t mean that they don’t exist or that you’ve managed to extinguish their humanity; their spirit; their inner being. There are millions of Black heroes. Some legendary, some known in small circles:
- Open revolts on the high seas on slave ships, like the Amistad Rebellion in 1839.
- Passive or sometimes violent resistance on plantations, like Nat Turner’s in 1831.
- The stealthy escape of enslaved individuals or families in the dark of night.
- Abolitionist-advocate and Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman.
- Writer-statesman-abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
- Astronomer Benjamin Banneker, Engineer Norbert Rillieux, inventor Sarah Boone, entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker.
- Those who resisted by teaching themselves to read and write, risking maiming, even death.
- Robert Smalls outsmarting a white sea captain, stealing a ship and piloting it to safety, saving his family and others.
- Henry ‘Box’ Brown, shipping himself out of the South in a box risking suffocation to be free.
- Harriet Jacobs secreting herself in the cramped eaves of a shack on a plantation for seven years to escape the sexual abuse of her owner. Unable to stand or walk, she subsisted in that airless, lightless environment until she could safely free herself, and escaped to the north.
- Some African captives choosing to drown themselves at sea rather than submit themselves and their children to enslavement.
These stories show incredible bravery, and are not anomalies. Yet, we have not been socialized to link heroism and enslavement; we have internalized the idea that these two concepts do not co-exist.
I have no pictures of Catherine and George (Ward); no images of their faces or body types; no sense of their personalities or dispositions. I honor them.
I cannot know exactly what their days and living conditions were like; what they feared; if, when, or how they found some measure of happiness as they toiled in the rice fields of Brookgreen Plantation more than one hundred fifty years ago. I honor them.
Catherine and George (Ward) are not simply names in little boxes on a family tree. They have shapes and blood and skin and bones and personalities and realities; they lived and breathed; they were enslaved, debased and bestialized. I honor them.
Their Black lives mattered; they chose life over death; they chose to resist oppression; they chose to survive. Their lives made my life possible. I honor them.
I see Catherine and George as individuals and as representatives of all of the other enslaved people who toiled in the rice fields at Brookgreen Plantation. I honor and celebrate them, and all of the African captives; 1.5 million who did not survive the Middle Passage, and the 11 million or more who did. Women, men and children who arrived on hostile shores to be objectified, publicly humiliated, paraded like beasts, subjected to ‘seasoning’ to break their spirits, and sold like chattel. They survived anyway.
They suffered the loss of identity; most of their ancestral lines will never be discovered. I honor and celebrate those women, men and children who suffered the loss of family and community, culture, homeland and history. They survived anyway.
Their Black lives matter to me. Their Black lives mattered to America, whether America acknowledged it or not, because the country’s greatness and prosperity are, in large part, attributable to their presence and skill and suffering and blood and loss and grief.
They survived, their survival is heroic and deserves honor and respect.
We cannot un-write the dishonesty, deceit or self-serving racism woven into our founding documents, stating the ideals of liberty and equality. We know that they were false when they were written.
Unfortunately, it seems that most Americans, then and now, don’t really want to lift the cover of national self-righteousness, or cede moral authority at home or on the world stage even though America’s hypocrisy about race weakens and undermines our stated democratic values.
However, unless we unlearn the negative beliefs and attitudes we have internalized about race, and the dynamics of racialized power, we will continue to relive the old ‘sins’ of the past, only wrapped in new garments.
From captivity and slavery, to eugenics and scientific racism, to lynching, to the systematic destruction of Black wealth and entrepreneurship (i.e. Tulsa, OK), cultural appropriation, structured and structural racism, medical experimentation, mass incarceration, all the while fighting and dying in every American war. And still — continuing to be denied full rights of citizenship.
Again, Doc Rivers’ words:
“It’s amazing. We continue to love this country, but the country doesn’t love us back”
We have a long, long way to go.
Even the definition of patriotism has been distorted by groups like the “Proud Boys,” who are flagrantly proud to be racists, and the Oathkeepers, who defile the basic American values of freedom and justice for all. In response to these new messengers of the old messages, many of us lower our heads or avert our eyes, remain silent, and move on with ambivalence — even though people are still dying.
Sadly, as a country, we spend too much time in denial, mythologizing the idea of an America that never was, romanticizing the concept of democracy, and too little time on the very hard work of actualizing equality, and freedom and justice, especially when it means uncovering painful or shame-inducing truths about ourselves as individuals, or about America as a nation.
Brookgreen Gardens can represent a nexus between the past and the present; a way to remind the living that we have a responsibility to the dead; a way to celebrate their spirits, their humanity, and their will to live.
Brookgreen Gardens can remind the living that it is possible to use the past to bring people together to fight oppression and hatred; to generate healing inter-racial and inter-cultural conversations designed to promote personal transformation.
Brookgreen’s flowers and art can, and hopefully will, be a way to honor the dead, and celebrate life and hope and the possibilities for changing the future.
Like it or not, as Baldwin wisely warned us, “We are trapped in our history, and our history is trapped in us.” There is no escaping this no matter how much some people try to erase or sanitize America’s history. No matter how hard we try, we cannot simply remove the parts that make us uncomfortable or that challenge our fixed sense of a racialized social order.
The question is, will we face our complex tangled history, and allow the past to inform the present and future in reconstructive ways, or will Democracy be no more than an abstract ideal forever beyond our reach?
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. Read Dr. Holmes’ Meditations on America Part 1: Race, Rice & Power and Meditations on America Part 2: Mis-Education & Oppression
Connect with Dr. Holmes directly via LinkedIn or GLHOLMES@uscb.edu