I HAD TOUCHED THE FACE OF SLAVERY…

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