At Stagville: Respect. Homage. Light.

 

Cabin at Slagville. Lucey Bowen, October, 2019

I first heard of Stagville Plantation from Michael Twitty. His life’s mission is to reconstruct the cuisine of his African and African-American ancestors, and to honor them. He holds them up to their proper place in the Southern tradition and in American culture.

At Stagville, he prepared a dinner in the style and manner of the Antebellum south, out of doors, as close as practicable to what the enslaved of the time would have cooked and eaten. For Michael, this meal was sacramental.

Stagville is about twenty five miles from Chapel Hill. Once upon a time, this domain of Bennehan and Cameron families, immigrants form Scotland, encompassed 30,000 acres and 900 enslaved people. The state of North Carolina has preserved a small section of this place for historical interpretation of a plantation fueled by the labor of enslaved people and sharecroppers.

I was afraid to visit Stagville, afraid of what I might feel. Horror? Grief? A month ago Michael blasted out an open letter, this one to visitors made uncomfortable by the presentation of slavery on Southern plantation tours. Michael wrote about the necessity of facing this history. “You miss out on magic …when you shut down your soul. Going to what few plantations remain, your job is to go with respect and homage and light.”

So two weeks ago, I drove north through the shopping malls of suburban Durham and into second-and-third growth forests. After some miles I turned down the gravel road to the visitor center, located down the hill from the two story house which was the Bennehan’s home.

Two school busses were parked nearby. I was early for the eleven o’clock tour. A volunteer guide welcomed me. As I’m a docent at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, I wanted to learn how Stagville develops  tours for school children and adults. The staff explained. “Stagville is dedicated to teaching about the lives, work, families, and culture of enslaved people on one of the largest plantations in North Carolina.” There are six different school tours; programs for elementary, middle and high school students.

Docent and site manager agreed that varied responses were expected.

With two other first time visitors, I drove to Horton’s Grove, a section that includes several two-story dwellings built in the 1850s by enslaved peoples. This was where Michael prepared dinner. The four-room houses were used continued by sharecroppers well into the 20^th Century, each room occupied by a family.

All was empty and quiet; only the docent’s stories brought history to life. I soon understood that everything about Stagville was engineered for profit, to extract the most work. Keeping the enslaved housed, fed, clothed, and healthy was just good business. Similarly, the enormous three-bay barn, located a half- mile away, was engineered for the care and feeding of the mules who pulled the farm equipment.

When I try to imagine myself as enslaved here, I feel fear. There’s a need to hide my thoughts, to say nothing, to give nothing away. Would I endure, survive, have children? Or would I crumble, nameless, forgotten in an unmarked grave?

Many people in Chapel Hill, Hillsboro and Durham are descendants of people enslaved at Stagville and its sister plantations. They have persisted in this place through the violence that ended Reconstruction, through segregation enforced with violence.

They have built community and family. What is the source of their resilience?

During the excavations and restorations of Stagville, a cowrie shell, two divining rods and a wooden staff were found near the dwellings. The cowrie is not native to the new world. On the wooden staff, a vine had created a helix resembling a snake. The staff had been secreted inside a wall. These fragments radiated spirit. Robert Farris Thompson, scholar of African and Afro-American art and philosophy, wrote of the cowrie shell’s importance to the Yoruba of West Africa, as decoration, as money.

A week after my visit to Stagville, I spent a morning drawing in the Ackland Museum of UNC’s small exhibit of African sculpture. I concentrated on a wooden figure, from Ghana. The name MOSES was engraved on one arm, and the other held up a staff with a snake wrapped around it. A few days later, the Bible scripture at church centered the staff of God that Moses held up when Joshua defeated the Amalekites.

Statue from Ghana, Ackland Museum, Lucey Bowen, 2019

         I heard that spirit when Rhiannon Giddens performed last week at the North Carolina Museum of Art. She accomplished something akin to Michael’s work. Giddens researches and re-assembles, and gives life to the music brought from the Europe and Africa to the New World.

Michael was right. Respect. Homage. Light: facing our history and learning more. May magic turn to miracle.

Up Close with the my Southern parts

Early Methodist Circuit Rider

Timing is everything. I arrived in Chapel Hill on the anniversary of the tumbling of the University’s Confederate statue, aka Silent Sam. On August 18^th, the New York Times published its 1619 Project. The Wall Street Journal followed with its three page Legacies of Slavery essays in its Saturday/Sunday Review Section. So here I am, wondering what I’m doing in this place, if not getting up close with the South and my Southern parts. 

A month ago, I was invited me to attend church at First Baptist of Chapel Hill, founded in 1865 as the Colored Baptist Church. To be in that historic and sacred place is a privilege. I love being there with my friend from water aerobics, for the warmth of the welcome, the immersive music, and Word. The minister, Dr. Rodney Coleman, is known as “The Pitbull of the Pulpit.” He can truly teach and preach.

His preaching reminded me of the stories of my sixth-great grandfather, the Rev. James Jenkins, born in South Carolina in 1764. He became a Methodist, and one of the first Methodist circuit riders. Known to his audiences as “Thundering Jimmy” or “Bawling Jenkins,” he was said to be a minister of rebuke and reproof, and not afraid to shout. Among other things, James Jenkins thought there was too little religion and too much pound cake at revival meetings.

Dr. Coleman tells me these days you can’t scare people into heaven. I’m glad I’m here in 2019, but I am forcing myself to wrap my mind around seven generations of my father’s family being Southerners. I do this to educate myself to the reality of the depth of their complicity in slavery. James Jenkins gives me a window into the mind of Southern ancestor. He self-published his memoirs, Experience, Labors and Sufferings, of which I have an original copy.

Rev. Jenkins spent decades preaching the circuits of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. Each of these required him to ride on horseback to reach the inhabitants of the back-country, some 300 miles round trip. In his 1790 worlds, settler were strung sparsely along the rivers, the Oconee, the Savannah, the Saluda, Big PeeDee, Little PeeDee and the rightly named Cape Fear River. He rode up one river to its headwaters, then through the mountains and down another. Vast sections of the interior were labeled Indian Territory. James Jenkins preached to back country settlers, to the enslaved, and to the people known as Cherokee.

What were his thoughts about the non-white people he encountered? He wrote that the upcountry white folk were primitive and superstitious. He disapproved of their funeral custom of offering cakes and wine, or supper, to the mourners.
He also condemned the funerals of colored people. A feast was offered, and then a play for the deceased, that he called a frolic, which lasted all night. He observed that a bottle was broken on the headboard and libation poured, or water and meal sprinkled on the grave. Jenkins condemned the superstitions of a man digging an alligator out of its den to turn it over, as an offering for rain in a season of drought.

Rev. James Jenkins, like most early Methodist ministers, began life on a small farm between the two Pee Dee rivers. At age twenty, he superintended the plantation of a cousin. He wrote “having some refractory negroes to govern, my temper became often excited, and I increased in vice daily.” A few years later he experienced his conversion to Methodism.

Although the early Methodist leader, Francis Asbury, condemned slave-holding,  members were not forced to manumit their slaves, as proposed. I wanted to believe that James Jenkins’ conversion was an attempt to repent. Evidently, he did not. According the the Census, in 1840, he held 8 slaves. Census Slave Schedules are columns of names, letters and numbers. Under the name of slave holder, the enslaved are listed by age and sex. These lists are the exhumed bones of slavery. Are they less horrifying because of the anonymity of the enslaved? The absence of names is part of the crime.

James Jenkins, 1840, Census Enumeration

 My great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s will makes the cruelty clear.  He gives his slaves, by name, to his sons and sons-in-law. They are valued as property, like cash, land, a gold watch, and the future children of the women. They were the capital with which the Rev. Jenkins' descendants made their way in the world.

James Jenkins' Will, including funds to purchase two young boys for son-in-law,
William Jefferson Croswell.

William Jefferson Croswell, 1850 Slave Schedule, showing the two boys.

           No doubt, the Reverend James Jenkins justified his Christianity with 18^th Century notions of race.  His descendants, down to my generation, benefited from his estate. My father was named for, William Jefferson Croswell, his great grandfather. But now, in 2019, we have 200 years of science, and the mapping of the human genome to teach us Jenkins' mistaken belief. 

Give us the strength that this generation will be the last to persist in ignorance of our shared humanity.

Racism, of the Environmental Kind

The admonition that we should protect all our neighbors from oppression, lest their be none to protect us when we are threatened, applies to the environment, local and national.

Tar Heel is the nickname, at first derisive and pejorative, for a North Carolinian, probably due to the turpentine industry of the 18^th Century. In 1893, the students of the University proudly gave that name to their newspaper, the Daily Tar Heel. Best I can tell, they’ve been doing pretty good journalism for a long time.

Just after arriving in Chapel Hill, I picked up the August 16^th  edition. On Page 11, I saw the headline: “Rogers Road sewer system unveiled after over 40 years.”

Turns out the Rogers Road sewer system saga is the familiar one of environmental racism and Tweed Ring style political buck-passing.. It is making people sick. Rogers Road is a pre-dominantly black rural enclave just outside of Chapel Hill. In 1970, sewer and water services and sidewalks were promised if residents accepted the location of Chapel Hill’s landfill in the neighborhood.

Almost fifty years later, the main sewer is completed. Meanwhile the landfill affected well water quality. Only a neighborhood association, RENA, fought the city and Orange County to deliver what had been promised two generations ago.

This is not so different from the Peninsula, south of San Francisco, where I’ve lived for the past 25 years. There, Romic, a chemical recycling plant that poisoned the air and ground in Stanford University’s version of Rogers Road, East Palo Alto. Redlined until the late 1960s, EPA has been home to African-Americans, Pacific Islanders and Mexicans. Affluent neighbors in Palo Alto were indifferent to the dangers posed to East Palo Alto. Finally, after fires and spills, the State of California shut Romic down in 2007.

Last week issue of the Tar Heel, I read “Over 60 North Carolina species lose federal protections.” This is a state that loves hunting and fishing. Yesterday, the New York Times told me that Trump has repealed a major clean water regulation. Streams, wetlands and other bodies of water will be affected. Yesterday, The White House announced it will curtail California’s car emissions standards, which had so reduced smog, and greenhouse gasses.

Perhaps this is environmental justice for all. The consequences will not be limited to minority communities.

My Southern Season

            Once again we’re making a home away from home. This semester my husband is teaching at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Once again, I’ll be writing about a place that is new to me.

            Before I begin, I decided to reflect on my particular perspective on this place.

What baggage---mental, emotional, spiritual--- comes with me? How might it effect my perceptions?

 I saw Singapore through the lens of my previous years studying at The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Still, there was much surprised me, like Lee Kuan Yu and the management of diverse languages and ethnicities of the city-state that calls itself “the red dot.” Much remained opaque, although English is widely spoken and written, and Singaporeans analyze themselves endlessly in the state owned newspaper and the state funded universities.

            To Switzerland I brought my early education in the French language, my study of European art history as an undergraduate, previous travel in France, Germany and Italy. I reveled in the layers of history, Celtic, Roman, and the formation of the Swiss Federation, and like Singapore, multiple languages. Still, much of the Swiss way of doing things remained a mystery to me.

            The mental baggage I’ve brought to Chapel Hill was packed in my earliest childhood by the most important woman in my life: my grandmother. Anna Louise Connor was born in Waxahachie Texas to a South Carolinian father and Irish Catholic immigrant mother. I can recall the Nanny’s warmth, the feel and odor of her aged skin. I can see the oasis of gentility she created in New York City’s bohemian Greenwich Village, furnished with finds she picked up in Asia, Europe and Mexico. I memorized the family history she preserved in her diaries and scrapbooks. I wrote a youthful story about sifting through those fragments. In short, I idolized her life as romantic and colorful, so different from my suburban existence in the 1950s and 1960s; so different from my no-nonsense died-in-the-wool Yankee mother.

            She was not a native to New York City. But even as an octogenarian, she took me on adventures in Manhattan: for haircuts at Best’s Department Store, to the pushcarts of Bleecker Street, to feed the pigeons in Washington Square and to devour lunch at Hamburger Heaven around the corner from her beloved Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Her cousins from the Carolinas, Mississippi and Alabama, came to visit on holidays, usually bringing pecans.

She had married another Southerner with family from both South and North Carolina. She and my grandfather established themselves in the mid-western city of Toledo, Ohio at the turn of the century. They oriented my father to the Eastern establishment. Widowed, she followed my father to the Big Apple.

            Before she died in 1967, I followed her trail, with travel to Europe and to South America. I balked at visiting Ireland, which persisted in its book-banning, birth-control blocking ways.

In spite of my abhorrence of the atrocities of Jim Crow and Southern resistance to the Civil Rights movement, I ventured South some five years after she died. I drove from Washington, DC to New Orleans. I stopped to visit her niece in South Carolina, who pointed me to our distant cousin, still living in the decaying white-columned house in the tiny piedmont town of Cokesbury. I searched for traces of Nanny when I visited Shadows-on-the-Teche in New Iberia, Louisiana, as she had, on a railroad trip from Texas to South Carolina.

Over the years, I have learned more about my Connor and Bowen antecedents in the South. I’ve learned that some were slave-owners; some were preachers, some tradesmen, some Irish, some Welsh, some Huguenots. Some fought in the Revolutionary War, some in the Civil War. Part of me wants to indict those ancestral Connors and the Bowens for their roles in the white people’s south. My grandmother never spoke of the dark side of her family history.

I’ve learned that other sections of the United States share responsibility for injustices to non-white peoples. Where was I when the Chapel Hill Nine sat-in at the Carolina Café and many marched down Franklin Street? I was in the auditorium of an all white high school in suburban Westchester County. I listened as a speaker from the N.A.A.C.P. explained what was happening in the South. I cried in incredulity that our Constitution, was failing to give Blacks the equality I thought it guaranteed. I did nothing.

So there you have it. Here I am, on hollowed ground. It is not my ground, and yet it is. All I can do is look, listen, read, tell you what I perceive, and hope you learn with me.