If there are any words
that sum up the tragedy of Southern history it is those of the South’s most
famous literary son, William Faulkner, who wrote” The past is never
dead. It’s not even past.” Growing up in southern
Virginia, I was aware history wasn’t locked away, that it was not an object on
the shelf; history hangs oppressive in the air, like humidity in August.
It is this omnipresent
past that has been brought to the fore following the murder of nine parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and in
the effort to remove emblems like the Confederate battle flag that flew in
front of the South Carolina Statehouse.
I do not aim to
re-litigate the removal of these emblems, except to say that it is long
overdue.
Nor do I wish to address
the ongoing (how is it even ongoing...the men who broke the union were quite
clear about their reasons?) resistance to their removal, under the argument
that they somehow represent “heritage, not hate,” as though hatred of African
Americans were somehow not the heritage, as though the desire
of whites to keep blacks as chattel were not the primary motivation for the war
that spawned the symbols.
But underlying the
argument that symbols ought to be left in place is a more pernicious idea—that
the past is past, and ought to be left undisturbed. There is a sense
in some quarters that the injustices of the past have been completely redressed
in the last 150 years, and that America needs to move on, even as these same
people remained mired in their imagined history. Until we face this,
we’re stuck.
Because the past is not
even past.
* *
*
On Route 5 in Virginia,
traveling from Richmond down towards Jamestown, sit the remnants of a series of
what were once vast forced labor camps. Oh, the literature will call
them plantations, a name that calls to mind mint juleps on the veranda overlooking the
James on a summer evening. But they were forced labor camps—credit
for the term goes to the historian Ed Baptist, whose “The Half Has Never BeenTold” lays bare the roots of American capitalism in slavery—where those of
African descent were held in bondage for their lifetimes, as were their
children and, for a dozen or more generations, their children’s children.
Their names are
evocative: Berkeley (where the first thanksgiving was held), Evelynton,
Shirley, Westover and then, farthest east, Sherwood Forest. Sherwood
Forest was not always called by this name; it was called Smith’s Hundred when
it was granted in 1616. For almost four hundred years, then, it has been
a part of the Virginia landscape, and for most of that time all of the hard
work was done by enslaved people.
A house was built in
1720, and in 1842 the property was purchased by John Tyler, president of the
United States from 1841 when William Henry Harrison—scion of the Virginia
family that lived up the road at the forced labor camp called Berkeley—died a
month after taking office. “His Accidency,” as Tyler was sometimes
known, served only the one term, the sixth Virginian to hold the office among
the first ten presidents. He is best known today as the back half of
the famous campaign slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.”
It was Tyler who renamed
the place Sherwood Forest, and he stayed out of politics until the eve of the
Civil War. An avid supporter of states’ rights, he was also the
owner of seventy human beings and, though he is reported to have been a kind
master, he was still the owner of seventy human beings. He
argued against secession, then embraced it when he saw it as the only path
forward for Virginia and the other Southern states. Tyler was
elected to the Confederate House of Representatives in 1861, but died before it
opened.
In 1853, at age 63,
Tyler fathered a son. That son fathered late children, too, in 1924
and 1928. Those children, John Tyler’s grandsons, are still alive and one still lives in the house at Sherwood Forest.
Think about this.
John Tyler was born the year after the Constitution went into effect, the
year after George Washington assumed the presidency and his grandsons are
alive, three generations encompassing the life of the Republic, one
grandson living on the land that was worked by enslaved people. I don’t
wish to cast aspersions on him; he is not responsible for his grandfather’s
misdeeds. But he is a living beneficiary of the slave system that
his grandfather participated in.
Because the past is not
even past.
* *
*
What is the point of all
this? Simply that to say something happened a long time ago does not
free us from the consequences of the past. To say that accounts have been
settled does not make it so. All white Americans, to some extent, benefit
from the same system that bestowed a fine old house on John Tyler’s
grandsons. All black Americans, to some extent, continue to suffer
from the disabilities engendered by that same system.
In 1955, a living witness to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination appeared on television, a year before the last Civil War veteran died. As recently as last year
a North Carolina woman received her late father’s pension for serving in the
Confederate army. How many hundreds, or thousands of people, black
and white, are the children and grandchildren of that era? How can
it be over when it is still so close? And how can Jim Crow be completely a thing of the past
when there are so many living today who suffered under it? When so many of the
lingering aftereffects are still visible to anyone who bothers to look.
That is the point. The past is still
alive in all of us. All of the triumph and all of the tragedy of it
lingers in the air around us, weighing us down, threatening to drown us if we
don't struggle against it. And the only way to shed that weight is
to acknowledge it, truthfully, and to make good on old debts. Then,
though it will never be dead, we can at least learn to live with it.
Because the past is not
even past.
That doesn't make it our
destiny.
