Digging Out The Roots

A long time ago, I visited a plantation that belonged to my mother’s family. It was the first time I picked a watermelon from a watermelon patch and the first time I felt the somnolent charm of the deep south.

This plantation like all plantations prospered for 150 years off slave labor.

Well, times change. Time passes. A younger generation stands to inherit. One of its members challenged her ancient relative, the present owner, with what she feels is his guilt because of slavery. She told him he should be ashamed of himself, bringing tears to his eyes.

I wondered how to weigh the weight of his deep personal pain against the weight of her enlightenment.

Those of us—nearly all of us!—who inherit the fruits of that poisoned past will have to come to terms, sooner or later, with our inescapable connection, if not our guilt and responsibility for the past.

But as another relative, gifted with a moderating voice, explained, “You can’t change the past, but you can change the future.”

How many of us who blame our relatives or even ourselves for the past are actively engaged in changing the future? It is always so much easier to blame.

We inheritors, five or six generations removed from slavery, did not buy or sell slaves or live directly off the proceeds of their labor. But it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that every cent of our inherited money is stained with blood, or if not with blood, with sweat and tears.

But our elders may never forgive us for smashing their faces into that truth. And our elders are precious.

The few of us women who are as radical in their opinions as I am knew from the beginning the price we would pay: anger, exile, disinheritance.

The younger generation may not yet know this.

So inheriting the plantation may require believing that the “old folks” did “roll on the little cabin floor/all happy, all merry and gay”—a line in Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home”, still sung by thousands of wet-eyed attendees at every Kentucky Derby.

We lived in the land of the re-invented as Tom Stoppard shows in his play Leopoldstadt where reinvention depends on forgetting. But can we re-invented moderns cast off that burden of guilt? If I could trace back every dollar I inherited, would it lead to two Virginia plantations owned by my great-great-grandmother?

But it would also lead not to money but to the life of my great-great aunt Rose Caperton and her farm—not a plantation—in West Virginia where she drew water from a pump well into the 1960’s and lighted her drafty old house with gas lanterns and coal fires. We inherit independence and courage, which in the end matter more than money.

And since every weapon we are donating to Ukraine, every long-range missile now penetrating deeply into Russia, is bought with our tax money, are we not also responsible for death and destruction and the nightmare of nuclear war?

We don’t think that way, but it seems to me this is more important than the vexed history of slavery.

I once belonged to a group that was trying to persuade the IRS to allow us to earmark our tax dollars for what we wanted the money to be spent on. Few would have chosen war. But the effort went nowhere.

We want to sleep at night. We want to live reasonably happy lives. And now here come the midterm elections which may endanger even those small possibilities.

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