From the Ashes

I told myself all week that I would write about this today. And now today has come and I have just about lost the will to make it happen. Will anyone read it? Will anyone care?

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The Nottoway Plantation burned down on Thursday, May 15th. Had you heard?

A plantation on fire may feel like justice. But echoes of slavery haunt Baltimore, too Leslie Gray Streeter, Baltimore Banner

Nottoway Plantation persisted into this century by erasing what it really was: a forced labor camp of the enslaved. They sold themselves as a romantic wedding venue with picturesque views. The audacity of that floors me.

A while ago I saved this exchange on Twitter which illustrates the historical disconnect which allows this sort of travesty to continue. The first response comes from someone who objects to the comparison of places like Auchwitz with American enslaved labor plantations.

I don't think that's the same thing to be honest. The site here is kept as it is as a reminder and a solemn place of reflection. Places that were plantations are completely changed and designed for weddings. You don't have to co-opt other places to make a point.

Here’s the response from A. Adar Ayira, a Baltimore leadership professional in the field of racial justice.

That plantations are not kept as places of reflection re U.S. crimes against Black humanity says EVERYTHING. Many of us with ancestors enslaved in those places know them to be solemn places of reflection. We also know what it means that white society — to their shame —does not.

That’s exactly what I’m sensing in this paragraph from Streeter’s piece about Nottoway:

The reason it’s so easy to have a wedding at a plantation rather than, say, a Nazi concentration camp, is that Americans have not reconciled with “the true, full history of African Americans’ journey to and in this country,” Terri Lee Freeman, president of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture, wrote in a statement.

We have not reconciled. Not just in Louisiana, and not just in Baltimore, but here in Howard County where I snapped this photo at the Harriet Tubman School and Cultural Center.

 

It reads:

Many of the early settlers established plantations after being granted land by the proprietors of Maryland. These plantations were located throughout the Upper Arundel region stretching from Elk Ridge to the Patuxent River and utilized enslaved African labor from the late 1600s until 1864 when slavery was abolished in the state of Maryland. Then, in 1865, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States.

a. Doughoregan Manor 1717

b. Folly Quarter/Carrollton Hall 1730/1832

c. Oakland Manor/Font Hill Manor 1700s

d. White Hall/Hickory Ridge 1749

e. Howard Lodge 1750

f. Waverly 1756

g. Ellerslie 1763

h. Cherry Grove 1766

i. Round About Hills/Peacefields Plantation 1773

j. Longwood Plantation 1780

k. Walnut Grove Plantation 1780

I. Duvall's Range 1795

m. Hammond's Inheritance 1810

n. Montrose/Huntington Farms 1844

o. Oakdale 1838

As long as we make it possible to sidestep truth and reconciliation then we make it possible to hold weddings on the sites of stolen lives: torture, rape, and murder. 

It’s a prison. A private jail. A forced labor camp. Here is where generations of human beings were held against their will. It doesn’t matter how carefully it is preserved or how beautifully it’s decorated. It’s a living monument that our country was founded on the worst kind of injustice. See how pretty it is…the house of horrors. Honoring History

In the days since the fire at Nottoway I’ve seen some online accounts bemoaning the “loss of history” when the plantation house was reduced to ashes. I strongly disagree. The only reason Nottoway existed was because of their systematic suppression of history.

Perhaps what went up in smoke in May 15th were the lies. And wouldn’t that be a relief?

Village Green/Town² Comments