Burn, Baby, Burn – Nottoway Plantation and the Inconveniences of History

During this time of unrelenting cruelty, it’s refreshing to hear good news.

Good news like a former slave plantation burning to the ground, namely Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana – the largest pre Civil War plantation in the South still standing.

But it stands no longer. It lies in ruins and smolders.

You’ve seen the celebratory memes on social media – the ones with Frederick Douglass and Harriett Tubman grinning ear to ear as that monstrous vestige of slavery conflagrates into ashes.

You’ve seen pictures of Black people smiling in celebration in front of the fire from a safe distance.

Those pictures resonate.

They resonate because they beg the question about when history is safe enough to preserve and when should history be consigned to fire and ashes.

I’ve been on a number of plantation tours – mostly in the Carolinas because there are few left in my native Georgia. (Thanks, General Sherman!)

While great care is taken to emphasize the horrors of slavery and to reassure some of the tourists that those days are long past, there are always things said by docents that rankle and infuriate.

Statements like:

· “Miss Lucy was always invested in the lives of the slaves on the plantation” (Was she really?)

· “She loved them like they were family” (They why did she let them live in ramshackle cabins, worked them from sunup to sundown without pay, and whipped and tortured them? Did she ever chain her sons and daughters and lay a whip to their backs?)

As a lover of history, I understand commemoration. I believe that some history must sometimes be preserved and protected. (More than anything, the truth must be taught).

I believe that there is legitimate value to memorializing and having monuments to difficult times.

But when monuments and memorials touch thoughts and feelings that lie too deep for tears.

When they stir up rage and rancor,

When they remind you of all you’ve lost that you will never regain,

history carries a different perspective.

My olive skin is a reminder of forced miscegenation.

My last name is one that some ancestors had forced upon them, their real names lost via slave ships and the buying and selling of human flesh.

I can’t experience the joy and excitement of tracing my genealogy back centuries because much of it has been lost.

Some of my ancestors were listed as property along with bales of cotton and piles of tobacco leaves.

Nameless and faceless – just an acknowledgement of their race, gender, and age.

No better than cattle, no more human than a piece of machinery.

Some of my ancestors may have willingly come to these shores.

They may have chosen to come here for a better life.

They may have decided to leave their homeland for religious freedom, greater independence, or other reasons.

But they had a choice.

Some of my ancestors were snatched up, shackled up, and thrown into dirty, dank ships where they made to lay in their own urine and excrement.

They were fattened up before the ship reached shore.

They stood on platforms while other human beings gawked and examined them.

Looking at their teeth as one would when buying a horse.

Violating their personal spaces.

They were purchased like inanimate objects.

They toiled without reason or compassion.

They suffered unimaginable humiliation and degradation.

They didn’t choose when they slept or what they ate.

They couldn’t marry or have children without living with the threat of their family being separated.

They were whipped and beaten.

Raped and mutilated.

Coerced and castrated.

Their lives were only vaguely human, lacking wholeness and any wholesomeness.

They lived lives of desperate cruelty and unmitigated suffering.

I don’t care that some White couples thought Nottoway was a cool place to be married.

I’m unbothered that it was a gathering place.

I don’t give a damn that the parish president where Nottoway was located thought that it reminded people of “the grandeur of…our region’s past.”

One person’s grandeur is another person’s torment.

Some of my ancestors could speak to the wisdom of maintaining the remnants of Auschwitz, preserving it so we can remember what happened so that it won’t happen again.

Perhaps I am not that wise.

Perhaps if I could live for centuries removed from slavery, distanced from forced segregation, lynchings, poll taxes, and colored restrooms, I might be able to gain a different perspective.

But my life is only sixty years removed from most of those things.

I wouldn’t care if every remaining plantation spontaneously combusted and burned to the ground.

I don’t need their existence to remind me of who I am and what I have lost.

I don’t need them to validate my thoughts, feelings, or emotions.

What I need, what Black people in America desperately need, is to be certain that slavery could never happen again.

Given our president and our government, there couldn’t be less certainty.

Regardless of how certain or uncertain I am about the past reemerging and becoming a present or future horror, as for Nottoway and every other southern plantation, I say without fear and with a healthy dose of malice,

Burn, Baby, Burn.