In the summer of 2004 my cousin got married in Richmond, at
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the very church where Jefferson Davis was
worshipping in April of 1865 when a messenger from General Lee informed him
that he needed to get while the getting was good. It is a glorious old church, one whose current ministry does
honor to contemporary Richmond. We were delighted that my cousin and her fiancé
had chosen our two girls (then six years old) as ring bearers. During the rehearsal my job was to keep
our son (then two) from causing too much of a ruckus. His wanderings led me around the periphery of the sanctuary,
giving me a chance to examine up close St. Paul’s legendary stained glass
windows. The most impressive of
them depicted the scene from Exodus in which young Moses renounces his
upbringing in the house of Pharaoh to side with the oppressed Hebrews of his
origin. A text noted that the
window had been commissioned many decades ago to honor Robert E. Lee.
I kept looking at the window and piecing together the
analogy it was suggesting – “So Moses sided with the Hebrews, Lee sided with
Virginia” – and my awe at the window’s beauty quickly gave way to another kind
of awe, the awe we often feel when confronted with the audacity of Confederate
apologists. I wanted to stop
the rehearsal and call everybody over to the window: “Hey, y’all, check this out! Look what they’re implying with this window. These people think slaveholders were
the captive Hebrews and Abraham Lincoln was Pharaoh and Robert E. Lee was
Moses. The oppressors are the
victims. WOW!”
Of course I did NOT disrupt the rehearsal, but I remember that window as a window into the upside down ideology of those who
would ennoble the Confederate cause, their determination, in the face of all
evidence and logic, to mask the antebellum South’s essential criminality behind
a façade of victimization and honor, even to sanctify it with a Biblical gloss. If you have read even a few pages of a
slave narrative it is difficult to stomach this stuff. I came across it again recently at a
concert on the square in Decatur, Georgia. It was a beautiful spring evening. A fun retro jazz band was playing lively tunes for a few
hundred wine-sipping Decatur Bobos spread out comfortably on blankets and lawn
chairs. The location of our
seats gave me a good view of one side of the monument to the Confederate fallen
that sits before the old Dekalb County Courthouse. The monument explains the motives of Confederate
soldiers thusly:
These men held that the states made the
Union, that the Constitution is the evidence of the covenant, that the people
of the state are subject to no power except as they have agreed, that free
convention binds the parties to it, that there is sanctity in oaths and
obligation in contracts, and in defense of these principles they mutually
pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
So that’s what they were all about. They were an army of Ashley Wilkeses, offended to the bottom of their genteel little hearts that the Yankees hadn’t behaved like honorable gentlemen and followed the rules.
Maintenance of involuntary servitude didn’t even enter into their
thinking. And maintenance of Jim
Crow certainly didn’t enter into thinking of the folks who put up the
monument. Riiight.
The most visible contemporary manifestation of this effort
to sanitize the permanently shameful has been the officially sanctioned,
conspicuous display of the Rebel flag in public places, under the preposterous rationalization
that such displays are about honoring Southern heritage and have nothing to do with the
slavery and segregation of the past or subtler forms of racial subjugation in
our own time. Thankfully, this
practice appears to be ending at last, but it has gone on for years. From 1956 until 2001, the Rebel flag
was the most prominent part of our state flag in Georgia. In 1993, with the Atlanta Olympics on
the horizon and the state flag rapidly becoming not just a national but an international embarrassment, Governor Zell
Miller made changing the flag part of his legislative agenda. Things got hot. Much of the debate centered on the motives
of the (100% white) elected officials who had placed the Rebel flag on the
state flag in 1956. The flag’s
defenders contended the Rebel flag was there to honor Confederate bravery –
“heritage, not hate” as they say.
The flag’s opponents argued that the timing of the change – in the midst
of the South’s resistance to Federal directives to end racial segregation –
told us all we needed to know about why the Rebel flag found its way onto the
state flag in 1956. The Rebel flag’s
supporters won in 1993 - it wasn’t until eight years later that it was finally
eighty-sixed from our state flag.
But Zell’s 1993 appeal to the General Assembly to change the
flag, failure though it was, still resonates:
For four brief years - that's 1.5
percent of our state's entire history - Georgia was a member of the
Confederate States of America. Yet it is the Confederacy's most inflammatory
symbol that dominates our flag today. We all know why. And it has nothing to do
with the bravery of the Confederate troops. You may quibble all you want about
who said what in 1956. It is clear the flag was changed in 1956 to identify
Georgia with the dark side of the Confederacy - that desire to deprive some
Americans of the equal rights that are the birthright of all Americans, and
yes, the determination to destroy the United States if necessary to achieve that
goal . . . We maintain as a symbol of our state a flag that challenges the very
existence of the United States of America. And a flag that exhibits pride in
the enslavement of many of our ancestors.
When it comes to the matter of enslavement, Confederate
apologists are fond of pointing out that most white Southerners, perhaps two
thirds of them, did not own slaves.
Fair enough. But it stands
to reason that a great many of those non-slave owners aspired to be slave
owners someday, given the economic status that ownership signified. Moreover, considering the way things
went down over the hundred years after slavery ended, there is no way to plausibly argue that the great mass of Southern whites were not heavily invested in a brutal system of white supremacy.
As for me, I don’t have to wonder whether any of my ancestors owned
slaves. I know. A few years ago, one of my boredom-inspired late-night Google searches brought forth a
troubling document. Below
are portions of the last will and testament of my great-great-great-great-great
Grandfather (on my mother’s side), Pleasant Robertson, of Oglethorpe County,
Georgia, recorded in 1859:
Third, I give and bequeath to the
children of my son Elijah D. Robertson one seventh part of my estate for one
mule heretofore advanced to their father valued at sixty dollars, also one
hundred dollars - and also one Negro
girl named Jane, advanced to his daughter Victoria valued at Three hundred and
fifty dollars, in the distribution of their portion of my estate among
themselves, and I hereby appoint G.G. Milner trustee for the said children of
my son E.D. Robertson to take in hand their portion of my estate and see that
it is distributed among them as before specified, as they may become of age or
marry ---
Later:
Fifth, I give and bequeath to the
children of my daughter Susan Milner and to the children together and borne of
her body, one seventh part of my estate, requiring them to account to my estate
for one Negro girl named Ann heretofore
advanced to my daughter Susan Milner valued at three hundred and fifty dollars.
If you are a white person with deep roots in South (as I
am), you probably suspect that if all the information about your ancestors were
at hand, there would be something like this in it. Some Robertson genealogist made my suspicions
real, replacing the abstraction of slavery with real people, with names, with prices. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in his celebrated letter to his son, "Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own . . . For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history." Yes. And if I could read the
wills of all my ancestors from that generation and the ones before it, I’m quite sure there would be more
Janes and Anns for me to reckon with.
What am I to do with this knowledge? Noting the date of the will, I could reflect with a smile
that Jane and Ann’s days of bondage were about to end, but everyone knows that
liberation did not lead to equality or security for freed slaves or their progeny. I could hope
that Pleasant Robertson was a kind master, but Frederick Douglass taught me the
cruel folly of trying to use the humane behavior of individual slaveholders to
mitigate the moral taint of slaveholding: "My feelings were not the result of any marked cruelty in the treatment I received; they sprung from the consideration of my being a slave at all. It was slavery--not its mere incidents--that I hated. I had been cheated. . . . the feeding and clothing me well, could not atone for taking my liberty from me.” I could tell myself – and I do – that my more
immediate ancestors were forward-thinking and forward-behaving on race, perhaps atoning
somewhat for my distant ancestor's participation in “the bald, grotesque, and
unwarrantable usurpation” that was slavery, as Mark Twain put it. But that’s not enough. I’m standing on the shoulders of all my
ancestors, Pleasant Robertson among them, and my parents, progressive as they
were, profited from white supremacy, notably in the well-funded segregated
schools they attended. They passed
a legacy of privilege on to me. Would it be possible to locate Jane and Ann's descendants and make reparation? Would that be justice? Or is it enough for me just to do my part in remedying the pervasive racial inequalities in our system? I don’t know.
I’m confident of this:
the very least I can do is never attempt to dignify or justify or excuse
or sugarcoat the slaveholding of my ancestors.
The idea that people like Pleasant Robertson were about
“sacred honor” is hokum. He
was about keeping his $700 worth of Jane and Ann.
1 comment:
There was no brick handy?
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