The past isn't even past

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.