I HAD TOUCHED THE FACE OF SLAVERY…
Yesterday I took a trip back into history. I visited three Virginia Plantations upon
which Black men and women were enslaved from the eighteenth to the nineteenth
centuries, nearly 200 years. As I approached
the grounds as a free and enlightened Black man I realized countless of my
ancestors had trod the same steps from birth till death without any hope of
escape. Today we have no idea how they
were actually treated, but as certain things emerge from the dust we catch a
glimpse of the perverse hatred and mistrust that surely existed between slave
and master. One example was a relic
plate used for slaves to serve their masters because it was considered to be
socially degrading for a white person to take a cup or a glass, a book or pen or
anything directly from the hand of a Black person or slave. Yet in striking contradiction Black women
were trained as midwives to deliver the offspring of their masters in one of
the most personal and intimate rituals known to man, childbirth. Such instances fully expose the
superficiality of classism and racism. The
absurdity of such a practise is again exemplified by the fact that Black slaves
prepared the food by hand having first grown and harvested it by hand only to
serve it in its final form on a silver tray to create the ridiculous appearance
that it had not had contact with a Black person and that there had not been any
actual physical contact between slave and master in the merest of things such
as the handing a drink of water from one person to another. While musing over these and other peculiarities
I was reminded of the hilarious British comedy, “Keeping Up Appearances”
wherein the main character, Hyacinth, is eternally obsessed with the public
affirmation of a her fantasized nobility.
The zaniness of Hyacinth’s pretension is justly mirrored here save that
it is not just a harmless sitcom it actually played itself out in the
enslavement and degradation of millions upon millions of men women and
children. In order to understand and
appreciate slavery for the horror that it truly was one has to be able to measure
it against simple, rational and ethical standards. Simply because these were the established
standards of the day does not absolve them from being wicked and evil practices
because the standards of human dignity are universal and this is precisely why
slavery was abolished with the American Civil War. In simple, common terminology racism is “Doing
Too-Much”! Racism goes all the way
across town and back to do something rather than just reaching out and doing it
in a few seconds. Racism expends
unjustified resources in order to appear to prove a point that really does not
exist. Racism is all smoke and mirrors,
hocus pocus, a mindfuck, a hoax a scam!
But when I think of the countless lives that were wasted just to prove a
point that was never valid I cry tears of pain and sorrow.
Visitation of America’s Plantations by Black Americans is a
necessary pilgrimage that will serve to cleanse our hearts and souls of racism
by bringing us full circle, face to face with the dirty, unfiltered truth. Only time can hide the outrageous atrocities
witnessed by these silent temples of inhumanity now calm and soft in the
brilliant sun. The stocks and whipping
posts are long since rotted in the moist southern air, trees bearing the whips
lashing are felled or dead. Every eye
that witnessed the horrors of slavery and every tongue that might have told its
nightmarish stories has long since died and been buried in the wet sanguine
clay. What we now have to rely on for
understanding are our instincts as human beings. When we see the harsh relics of slavery no
matter how gold or silver gilt they might be we see a mortal struggle between
master and slave crushing and extinguishing any hope of dignity or freedom in
Black people, a despicable war in which any means necessary to subdue a person
of color was ethical. When I return to
those hallowed grounds, hallowed by the pain and sacrifice of Black slaves and I
will return, I will do so to properly mourn them. I will touch the face of the living earth and
knowing that my ancestors remains are lying someplace beneath my feet I will
touch my heart and then reach up into the sky to symbolically release them, a
gesture I know is merely a personal sign of humility and understanding designed
more so to free my own mind for surely they have already been set free by death
itself…
Written by David Vollin
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