Sometimes the Story Writes Itself

Institutions of higher learning are highly competitive. They align themselves in divisions and conferences to highlight that competitiveness in sports and other activities. They tout their prowess in academics to impress potential students, grants, and donations. More recently, some institutions of higher learning have been delving deeper into their roles in establishing and, or maintaining the chattel slavery that once gripped this nation, while some continue to be in denial.

Recently, I made a visit to the University of Mississippi, an institution of higher learning that is embracing its role in chattel slavery. This would be my second visit sponsored by the University of Mississippi Slavery Research Group. UMSRG is a group of faculty members working across disciplines to discover the history of slavery in Oxford and on the University of Mississippi campus.

That is a tall task, being that this is, Mississippi.

For years, I’ve been intrigued by finding fingerprints in the bricks of antebellum buildings. The idea of searching for fingerprints in the bricks of historic buildings seems to be catching on nationally. These fingerprints are tangible evidence of the presence of the enslaved people who made the bricks, those who helped build this nation. Since my last visit, students at the University of Mississippi have been encouraged to find fingerprints in the bricks of antebellum buildings on campus. The students did not disappoint. They found several prints in several buildings. I met some of the students and their professor at the site of one of the buildings and saw all their excitement as they examined their findings. It was explained to me that the means exist to examine bricks to their most minute particle.

In my travels, I come across people who have a passion, education, and skills for saving extant slave dwellings. It is rare for that person to be African American. One such person is Jobie Hill.

 

Jobie Hill is the founder of the Slave House Database, a central repository of information pertinent to all the known slave houses in the United States. She created the framework for the database in 2012 while working as an architect for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), part of the Heritage Documentation Programs division of the National Park Service. HABS has completed surveys of slave houses at approximately 485 sites in 26 states. Her goal is to survey all of the HABS-documented slave houses in the U.S. No small task.

It seems that every time we meet, we have an intellectual discussion about preserving slave dwellings and we don’t always agree. Our discussion this time was about the volume of slave dwellings built in Mississippi versus southern states on the east coast. Prior to secession, South Carolina and Mississippi were the only two states with a population of enslaved people greater than Caucasians. They were also the first two states to secede from the Union. I contend that the built environment supporting the enslaved population was sparse in Mississippi because they operated in a more transient mode rather than plantations. Jobie contends that the built environment for the enslaved in Mississippi was on par with southern states on the east coast.

Jobie was there to give a lecture titled: “Saving Slave House” and she did a beautiful job.

Since my first trip to Holly Springs, Mississippi in 2011 to participate in the first Behind the Big House Tour, it was my desire to conduct a sleepover at Rowan Oak, the home of Author William Faulkner. We almost pulled it off in 2012 only to have the verbal promise rescinded. 

Some institutions of higher learning are addressing their roles in institutionalized slavery. One common approach is to form commissions to research the matter of chattel slavery’s connection to that institution. While some institutions of higher learning are far beyond the research phase and are implementing actions in accordance with recommendations, some institutions are still in denial of their participation in that peculiar institution.  The University of Mississippi Slavery Research Group is in that research/ implementation phase. It was their involvement that yielded the chance to spend a night in the historic kitchen of Rowan Oak.

William Faulkner fans, fear not, it is not now, nor has it ever been my intent to associate Mr. Faulkner with the institution of slavery, his date of birth, September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962, makes that impossible. It is the slave dwelling on the property that keeps my interest.

So, I continued to belabor my host Carolyn Friewald about my experience of people not showing up for these sleepovers. She proved me wrong, because she mustered a robust group of 20 people, 10 of whom would spend the night in the kitchen house.

Jacqueline Knirnschild was one of the participants. Here is her eloquent account of the event. It is published in a new online magazine. Click here for the link. 

Slave Dwelling Sleepover
Jacqueline Knirnschild

“Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light…” I heard a faint voice singing at Swayze Field as I wandered around Rowan Oak, trying to imagine what the property looked like in the 1850s when it was the Sheegog Plantation.

That night, as part of the Slave Dwelling Project, I was going to be sleeping in the brick structure behind the main house, which was once used to house enslaved workers. The non-profit organization helps to preserve slave dwellings and offers overnight stays to deepen understanding, foster discussion and raise awareness.

Robert Sheegog, a planter from Tennessee, built the original framework of what we now fondly think of as Faulkner’s home. Records show that Sheegog claimed eight slaves in Oxford in 1860 and that he regularly hired out his slaves to the University.

When Sheegog owned the property, the main house was smaller than what we see today, but the detached shed structure has not changed much. Sheegog probably used the outbuilding as both a kitchen-laundry and to house Simon, George, Dave, Lila, Nancy, Frances, Phillis and two more unnamed people.

The names and monetary values of these seven people are all the information we have thus far about the enslaved residents of the Sheegog Plantation. As I moved sleeping bags into the shed, I thought of the Chancery Clerk’s Office inventory, which listed 40-year-old Simon’s worth as $800 and 14-year-old Lila’s as $2,500.

I tried to imagine what their lives were like: George sleeping next to his wife Nancy on the dirt floor, their 10-year-old daughter Phillis in between. I thought of Toni Morrison’s book Beloved – was Frances or one of the other enslaved women raped like Sethe was?

“O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave,” the singer finished, signaling the start of the baseball game. With grotesque images of the torture that these slaves must have experienced swirling in my mind, I was instantly disgusted at the hypocrisy of the Star-Spangled Banner lyrics.

I wondered how many of the people standing for the national anthem would want to sleep in a slave dwelling. I wondered how many of them had the state flag waving proudly outside their homes or in their dorms. I wondered how many of them knew about the history of the Sheegog Plantation.

When I had told my friends I was going to be sleeping in a former slave dwelling, they were confused. “That sounds like something from a horror movie!” one exclaimed. I was surprised – I thought everyone would jump at such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

But as Joseph McGill, founder of the Slave Dwelling Project, had said earlier that day in a lecture, “As a nation, we are still in denial of this thing called slavery.” McGill told stories of plantation tour guides using euphemisms such as “shipping business” and “servants” to describe the institution of slavery.

After eating dinner, we sat down in a circle of lawn chairs for discussion. The group consisted of McGill, ten students including myself, and four professors.

Some black students shared stories of microaggressions – one girl said white people have told her that she is pretty “for a black girl”. Southern Studies professor Jodi Skipper said that next time the girl should ask the person, “what is black?” to get those who ask to think more deeply about the roots about how we are socialized to think about each other. The tendency to see others as essentially different from us means that we often see ourselves in a hierarchy, better or worse than those of another group, and not simply human.

“Slavery made race and the idea of race is the problem,” Skipper said, which made me think of my biological anthropology class last semester. We learned that “race” is a social construct that actually has no biological genotype evidence.

As geneticist Sarah Tishkoff points out, we have to distinguish between “ancestry” and “race” – ancestry is a statement about an individual’s relationship to others in their genealogical history, whereas race is a pattern-based concept without clear-cut boundaries.

To show the absurdity of race, we can look to Brazil’s use of the Fitzpatrick scale – a numerical classification of human skin color. In order to “prove” that he was Afro-Brazilian, Lucas Siqueria went to a dermatologist who found that his face was a different skin type than his limbs. Such bizarre appearance-based techniques are used because scientific evidence of race does not exist.

Skin color is a product of external environmental factors, not genetic formula. Where there is a lot of exposure to sunlight, people have darker skin, but genetically speaking, dark and light skinned people are the same. In fact, the greatest differences in human genetic codes are those un-related to appearance. Our blood type and ability to taste bitter flavors make us biologically different, whereas race was culturally constructed by 18th century European pseudo-scientists such as Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus who described Africans as “sluggish, lazy and careless” and Europeans as “vigorous, very smart and creative.”

But unfortunately, as poet Adrienne Rich once wrote, we are “living in the earth deposits of our history” — such scientific racism paved the way for slavery and colonialism, which continues to affect the daily lives of many Americans: just the other day, two black men were arrested at Starbucks while waiting for a friend to show up for a meeting.

The conversation at Rowan Oak shifted to American history education – all the students talked about how their K-12 schools inaccurately taught them that the Civil War was about states rights, not slavery. In a Southern Poverty Law Center study, only 8% of the high school seniors surveyed could identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War.

“Lost Cause” ideology claims that the Confederates fought heroically and honorably to maintain the “Southern way of life”, but the 1861 Mississippi Declaration of Secession reads, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.”

And in the Corner Stone Address of 1861, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said, “Our new government is founded upon… the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

Enslaved laborers also built the original UM campus structures and worked on campus as cooks, waiters, housekeepers and groundskeepers, which is described in the new contextualization plaque near the Croft building. “Slavery was a system underpinned by exploitation and violence… slaves suffered beatings and other abuses documented in University records,” the plaque reads.

One white undergraduate student in the discussion circle at Rowan Oak said he struggled to confront historic truth while also maintaining his pride as an American.

But history professor Ann Twitty pointed out that although the University, the South and the United States enslaved and oppressed Africans and African Americans, that does not mean we have to hate our school, state and country.

Twitty made a distinction between adoration and love, which is key in confronting all parts of American history: a child adores someone or something and sees it as faultless perfection, whereas an adult loves someone or something in spite of their flaws and mistakes.

Why infantilize yourself when you can experience complex and mature love? Twitty ruminated amid cricket chirps in the dark night. It is possible to both love Ole Miss and acknowledge that the University heavily promoted slavery, she said.

I thought of all the tailgating alumni who live and breathe Colonel Reb and wished that they could have been present at the slave dwelling sleepover. I wished they could realize that those of us fighting to take down the Confederate statue are not doing so out of hate for the University, but rather out of love.

As I voluntarily laid down on the dusty brick floor that night, I thought of the enslaved bodies who had slept there before me not by choice. I wondered if they had loved the U.S. in the complex way I do.

Jacqueline Knirnschild

Behind the Big House VII

So, my ultimate reason for going to Mississippi was to participate in the Behind the Big House Tour in Holly Springs, Mississippi. While monotony is good for changing the narrative, it challenges your creativity when writing the blog for the account.

Chelius Carter, co-creator of the Behind the Big Tour wrote beautiful accounts of the event, and here they are. Chelius is also a member of Preserve Marshall County.

“Behind the Big House” Program – 2018: The Laundress

This year’s program we focused on a single site: the Hugh Craft House (1851) and its attendant slaves quarters/kitchen (ca. 1843) and those period activities which took place in the domestic area between the main house and its quarters.

We were very fortunate to have deeply committed historic interpreter Tammy Gibson, coming down from Illinois to join us for her third year. She volunteered to interpret an enslaved person in the role of a laundress.

Here she is demonstrating the arduous daily task of doing the laundry for a large family – the slave owners, to a group of regional students. In this case, she is working for the the Hugh Craft family, which was a rather extensive household who were very much in the public view of antebellum Holly Springs, Mississippi.
Hence, A LOT of laundry work to be done!

Much thanks go out to Tammy Gibson, who provides much depth and authenticity to Preserve Marshall County & Holly Springs, Inc.’s unique educational outreach program in historic preservation: the “Behind the Big House.”

Brick-making demonstration at the 2018 “Behind the Big House” Program

This year, I believe for the third time, we had the pleasure having a local artisan, Dale DeBerry on hand to demonstrate how brick was made in the 19th century and for centuries before that…largely by the work of enslaved people. Read the Old Testament book of Exodus chapter 5: verses 6-18.

Assisting in Dale BeBerry’s historic interpretive station was Wayne Jones…a man of many talents – who proved to be providential in getting our hog-cooking underway!

Both Dale DeBerry and Wayne Jones are proven assets to Preserve Marshall County & Holly Springs, Inc.’s (PMCHS) “Behind the Big House” Program…as they can deftly capture and hold a group of students attention. These men are Performance Art at its best, as they clearly share a passion for illustrating to our visitors the labor-intensive task of making bricks and bring much to the program.

Dale DeBerry’s own artistic skills in clay extend to creating face-masks, inspired by his African heritage and regional lore. Dale’s clay masks are much appreciated donations to PMCHS’ annual silent auction at “Wrecking Ball” fund-raising event, when he has been able to share with us.

Much thanks go out to these two men for assisting PMCHS’ unique historic preservation initiative that seeks to interpret the many aspects of slavery’s legacy in Marshall County and Holly Springs.

The closing event for the 2018 “Behind the Big House” program…and a certain end for a particular porcine friend:

HOG-OL’-OGY: The process by which a hog’s fate is decided towards providing sustenance for a slightly higher species by selecting out a certain porcine’s life of contented rooting up the ground and snortin’ about vs. “abbreviation.”

O.K., so I get this text from Michael W. Twitty, prior to his joining Preserve Marshall County & Holly Springs, (PMCHS) Inc.’s seventh year of the “Behind the Big House” Program asking, “Chelius – can you get me a half-shoat?” Puzzled, and not wishing to appear overly stupid, I text my wife Jenifer Eggleston, “Jen, do you think this “shoat” is some weird auto-correct for “goat?” She agreed then…quickly corrected with a “Whoa!…Google tells me that a shoat is a newly weened pig.”

So I go looking for a smallish hog and after a couple of unsuccessful attempts I wise up and call our friend and PMCHS’ partner (North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic) Kenny Brown, who lives out in Marshall County…to whom I did not have to explain what a “shoat” was. Kenny knew quite well and within a couple hours, he had found us a small hog and we arranged to determine its fate.

Kenny brings it into town, saying, “I know it’s a bit bigger hog than ya’ll were looking for…” We were laying for about 60-70 lbs. dressed out…this fellow was dressed out at around 100 lbs. Hmmm….

So I try for several hours to find someone experienced with the proper tools to cut up this hog to a manageable size for Michael’s purposes. Mind you…a hog has to cook for a certain number of hours and those hours were ticking away. I’m a bit worried, but not overly stressed yet.

Another of our historic interpreters, Wayne Jones – who was busy illustrating the art of brick-making with Dale DeBerry saw my predicament and said he knew a man who could help us out and Wayne was “spot on” – for in a matter of minutes, Mr. Tracy LeSeur came by with his friend, Mr. Chester Holland…a man who proved to be quite adept with a butcher knife and hatchet, when it comes down to the finer art of “Hog-ology.” For his trouble, we gladly gave him the other half of the hog that Michael’s program plans did not need.

Meanwhile George McDaniel (University of Mississippi volunteer) and I prepared the pit and Micheal Twitty, with Tammy Gibson’s assistance, set into to giving this pig a good massage of spices; Tammy is a passionate historic interpreter volunteer who comes down from near Chicago, IL to participate in our program and adds much to its authenticity.

So this hog, who gave “the full measure” for our program…being THE ONLY program participant who didn’t go home…provided a most delicious ending to PMCHS’ “Behind the Big House” Program and to be quite candid, provided an excellent illustration as to why these domestic chores went on behind the big house – out of public view. This year’s program, from all appearances and accounts…was thought to be the finest one we’ve had in its seven-year history!

As you can see from this brief tutorial in “Hog-ology”…a program like this has a lot of moving parts, requiring multiple layers of collaboration, cooperation and just knowing who to call and/or knowing WHO knows who to call. Our deepest thanks go out to all our partners, volunteers…and our porcine friend from Marshall County…whom we knew only briefly, yet savor the memory of that relationship.