*Deep breath*
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I'm probably going to delete this diary in a couple of days, because some of the information that follows is not just personal, but potentially identifying (less by other users, more by extended family/friends.) I know that runs counter to site practice, but please indulge me on this one. There's a lot going on here.
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So...
A few weeks ago my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer and passed away within the space of just over a week. I ended up spending, on and off, about two or three weeks back home with family. I missed a lot of site activity during that span - lord knows I had a lot to say about the Nemtsov murder, and probably still will - but it also gave me time to learn more about my family, exchange information with relatives, and open some doors that had never been available before.
See, my family history is a little weird, and very incomplete. My grandfather - the one who'd been married to my recently passed grandmother - was emancipated at a young age, and we never got to know any of his siblings, or much of anyone on that side of the family at all. He'd spent much of his childhood at an orphanage, not because he had no living family after his parents passed, but because the remaining family left him there. Genealogy was never a priority.
In the years since his death in the late 80s, his children - my dad, my aunts and uncles - had pieced together some portions of the family history, but they were mostly stymied by our branch's exclusion, not to mention the difficulty of obtaining (or even reading non-English) documents that traced our family back, as it turns out, as far back as the some of the earliest European settlers in Louisiana. And so there we were together last month, opening up these inquiries again, sharing what documents we had and what we knew existed, and that led my brother and I to start researching - online and aggressively - and opening up cans of worms we now wish we hadn't.
I'm not just talking about the usual family embarrassments. Yes, we have multiple places where our tree doubles on itself, with first cousins marrying each other and causing identical last names to collide across different branches. And at least three of my distant ancestors were keeping second families alongside their "legitimate" ones, creating a confusion of heirs and legal obligations. And yet...
Look, I had very few illusions going into this, or so I thought. If some of my family's really been in Louisiana since the early 18th century, there was little doubt that at least some of them - if not most, or all - would be implicated in the trade that made Louisiana such an economic powerhouse in the first half of the 19th century. By the time Louisiana became a state, I had some six or seven different family lines already established there, and they didn't settle there for the weather. They were there to be farmers, which meant they probably owned slaves.
We expected this, sort of. What we didn't expect was learning that one of our forefathers - a 4x great grandfather who'd immigrated from France via Haiti - had a reputation for exceptional cruelty to his slaves. It's hard to verify this clearly and unambiguously, given that most of the people in a position to document this kind of thing generally didn't, but suffice to say that there's evidence from multiple, independent sources: there are records indicating bodily mutilation (whether he'd done it himself, hired someone to do it, or "bought" him that way is immaterial), many of his slaves ran away and were hunted aggressively, and at least a few ran off to join the 1811 slave revolt, the largest in U.S. history. The latter's heads were chopped off and mounted on pikes in the center of New Orleans as a warning to other slaves.
What are you supposed to say to that? My brother and I exchanged a few texts - oh, fuck and such - but the blunt force of documents was overwhelming. Slavery was an evil institution even in its most allegedly "benign" forms, but here was something far from benign. That's not to suggest that any of my other slave-owning ancestors were somehow better, or less cruel, or more conscientious about the evils of that institution - God only knows what I haven't found yet. And I'm fully aware that there's an enormous amount of privilege in being able to say, at the age of 35, that I'm only now having some inkling of the force of that history hitting me in a way that's more than just intellectual. Of course I've read slave narratives and history books growing up, but the details were always abstracted for me in the same way that other historical details - the death of Napoleon, the discovery of penicillin - were filed away, like index cards going into an exam. I knew (or thought I knew), but I didn't understand (and still don't, which is why this has been so hard to shake.)
It was no longer abstract, and I was - I am - sick to my stomach, not just because of the details themselves, but because of the way I've allowed my own ignorance to shut out something I had to have known, somewhere in the back of my head, was not just a possibility but a probability. What exactly did I expect, after all?
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During my trip back to Louisiana, my parents, who are recently re-arrived in the area themselves, took me to a nearby plantation. They wanted me to see the grounds (which are kept up with elaborate gardens) and to check out the gift shop because - and this isn't a joke - it was the closest thing to a bookstore within an hour's drive, and they knew I liked to read.
Turns out the plantation did have a surprisingly large and well-stocked book section, including difficult-to-find texts discussing the area's history, some in French, locally printed and otherwise unavailable online. It also had a section on slavery: two shelves, maybe three. One shelf had about a dozen copies of the Henry Louis Gates-edited anthology, The Classic Slave Narratives, a children's version of Northup's Twelve Years a Slave that I didn't know existed, a dissertation with appendices listing the major slave owners in antebellum Louisiana, and one or two other books. That was about it.
Opposite those shelves were two or three bookcases of confederate apologia, an assault of rebel flags and terrible taste. There were more books by Walter Kennedy, neo-confederate author of (I swear I'm not making these titles up) Lincoln's Marxists, The South was Right!, and Myths of American Slavery, than there were actual books on slavery, and that's just one of the authors represented. (Myths of American Slavery may be the most perfectly titled book ever, given its contents.) Alongside the prolific Kennedy's works are volumes like Lincoln Über Alles: Dictatorship Comes to America and Southern by the Grace of God, biographies of Robert E. Lee and Andrew Jackson, etc. This is more than just routine self-hagiography. As one of the first Confederate apologists wrote only two years after the war, "All that is left the South is the war of ideas," an acknowledgment that the real war, the war against Reconstruction and equality in the short run, and over capital-H history in the long run, had just begun. Nor is it an exaggeration to argue that the South lost the Civil War, but won the aftermath. This plantation, like so many others, treats the Confederate experience as its noble history, and the slave experience as its footnote.
But as (better, more honest) historians have shown, there would be no American South (heck, no America) without slavery. It is not extricable from our history, like some unsightly skin growth, nor from the present-day consequences of that history. And part of what this genealogical search has done for me is collapse that distance in a personal way.
The more we looked, the more we found. Some of my family, the large landowners, must have been involved with the institution of slavery in its earliest colonial days. As for my 4G grandfather, he wasn't trained as a farmer but a pharmacist: we first found him at the age of 20 in rural France, in a town where the family had lived since at least the 16th century, already parent-less and splitting the inheritance with his brother. The family was listed as bourgeois in the record books, and their uncle was the longtime priest of their parish. As the revolution approached, 4G traveled to the colony of Saint-Domingue (contemporary Haiti) and, according to ads he placed in Port-au-Prince newspapers, tried to earn his living as an apothecary, building business with slave-traders and developing "more durable" ways for them to brand their slaves. Between the French revolution and the Haitian revolution, he tried to leverage his status as a businessman against the toppled aristocracy (he was, for readers of Haitian history, a petit blanc in the pompon rouge corner), but like many of his social status, he did not extend that newfound democratic spirit to the people he regarded as racially inferior. When those ostensibly inferior folks revolted, he fled to Louisiana and managed to marry into a large landowning family.
They flourished, they spread, they bought property - they bought people; they married, they intermarried, and their descendants spread all over contemporary Louisiana and a few other states. The plantation is no longer there; all that's left is a cottage built a century later by his grandson, a different branch of the family than mine. 4G's family tomb is a two-story jumble of bricks on the verge of collapse, though the marble plaque, in French, looks recently refurbished. It's choked with weeds, and the lone and level grasses stretch far away.
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You can't change the past.
Part of what drove me to write this diary, besides the need to vent this frustration in an anonymous forum before taking the next step, is the question of how to take this new information, which I can't change, and put it productively toward those areas I can.
Of course it's bigger than me, or my family: that plantation bookstore could serve as a synecdoche for the state at large. When traveling around Louisiana, you can visit something like fifty different antebellum plantations, whose brochures include words like "grandeur", "beauty", and - this one's especially galling, all things considered - "halcyon", and usually with little more than a nod (at best!) to the people who worked those properties, built those homes, and died on those grounds. Only a handful of plantations offer any kind of acknowledgement or documentation of the economic realities that made their "grandeur" possible, usually in the form of a refurbished slave quarters, that ugly appendage that mars the otherwise picturesque grounds. It wasn't until five months ago, nearly 150 years after the end of the Civil War, that a plantation dedicated to the slave experience opened to the public - and even then, only because of the tenacity of a private investor.
I'm not a cynic: truly, some things are changing for the better. The local universities have great collections available to researchers, and we now have institutes like the New Orleans African American Museum that weren't around when I was growing up. Last year, Oak Alley, the most famous plantation in Louisiana (that isn't on a liquor bottle), set up an excellent slavery research database that lists all the available information on the plantation's enslaved workers. I'm not a cynic, but I also don't believe that the universe has any necessarily moral arcs, that we are responsible for creating the world we want to live in, and that other people are happy to create their version of that world for us, if we let them. Southern apologists have had a century and a half to tell their story, and these stories of sadism were erased, downplayed, or forgotten. My family certainly forgot, and each generation puts us one step further from wrestling with our own legacy, not just for ourselves, but for the living descendants of the people they hurt, and the families they destroyed. Those families live there now, many of them just down the road from where the original plantation stood. We know they're part of our story, not just in the broadest sense, but because they share my 4G grandfather's last name.
I'm still coming to terms with a lot of this, and what to do about it. I have a lot of questions yet, and the path forward isn't so clear. We're working on that part. Some time in the next few weeks my brother and I are going to start talking to the rest of the family about our history. It's not going to go over well; we're the castoffs from a family of Limbaugh-listening conservatives who'll be ready with layers of denial-armor. It's not us. It was nearly two hundred years ago. We're not responsible. Why should we...?
But we should, and we will. Today is the 150th anniversary of Confederate surrender. I know there's a movement to get this day declared a holiday. It's not what the Walter Kennedy readers of the world want to hear, but if our history - pointedly: ours, not just mine - is to have any meaning in the present, it can't stay forgotten in the past.