Nottoway Plantation burned to the ground this week (week of May 11, 2025).
Reactions have been mixed.
Here is an Instagram response from food historian and all-round mensch, Michael W. Twitty, author of The Cooking Gene, A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South.
I shared an upclose look at the problem in this post, where I recalled my abhorrence at a witnessing a wedding being set up at Boone Hall Plantation near Charleston.
TL;DR A local historian pointed out that absent wedding income the historic site would’ve been turned into a golf course.
I saw fingerprints of enslaved brick makers in the structures there, so I can attest to the power of preservation. Still how to square the dissonance?
Compare: grinning selfies (real or staged) in front of the conflagration or reposts of whiny white laments with the caption, “Cry harder, Scarlett.”
Here’s a powerful poem read on FB this morning.
And then there’s this, posted on FB by the founder of The Slave Dwelling Project, Joseph McGill.
Another place to celebrate is Whitney Plantation, a historic site that does not rent its space for weddings and parties.
What are your thoughts? In spite of the historic preservation ideas that underpin some of the noncelebratory responses reported here, I’ll admit to finding the photo of the classically-constructed Southern Big House on fire extremely satisfying.
A million and a half people on the verge of starving and I wonder how is being on the verge of starvation different from starving itself?
Last night I made pasta. Defrosted sausages and heated them in a pot of jarred red sauce. A husband-away meal. Plated it up. Ate only a few bites, leaving enough to save for today. Too much to give the dog in other words, the dog who I guess is better fed than a million or more people in Gaza.
My husband would’ve eaten the pasta and sausage with gusto and I suddenly wonder if his healthy appetite and omnivorous palate have given me an inflated sense of myself as a cook.
Tortellini, the name, was inspired by the belly button of Venus, did you know? So said one clue in one Sunday puzzle or other.
Many friends recently cancelled their subscriptions to the NYTimes to protest ongoing failures in reporting — the relentless old Joe coverage based on a shitty poll that the Times themselves conducted being the final straw.
That’s why I did my Wordle and Connections this morning in a fugue of guilt. Why let principles interfere with enjoyable, habitual puzzle-solving though? I have so little else I tell myself when really I have so much. A full enough stomach to turn my nose up at a perfectly respectable bowl of pasta, for starters. A dog who loves me. Closets full of warm clothing which I still need but look forward to not needing in a matter of weeks.
I have enough long-sleeve shirts to give four or five away because I don’t like the necklines or the color, one a dusty blue that I never want to put on. I can order gum arabic without a second thought and plan to devote two solid morning to making ink out of wasp galls discovered out back, ink that I don’t even know what I’ll do with.
I can use expensive sake to make risotto because there’s no Chardonnay in the house and I live in a house where these usually is Chardonnay somewhere — in the fridge upstairs, or the fridge downstairs, or resting in the mini-wine rack. You heard that, didn’t you? The part about having two fridges?
I hope there are a succession of weeks where I can wear a long-sleeve shirt, one with a neck-line I like of course, and a light cardigan, weeks when I can leave the windows gaping open with maybe a fan or two running, before the stultifying heat arrives.
The stultifying heat used to limit itself to a string of days in late July or mid-August. You could certainly get by without AC. But now some years the heat arrives before I’ve even gotten all the storm windows raised, dropping like a wet blanket on the landscape, making gardening or walking a chore and forcing us to close our windows. All of them.
I am so tired these days. I try not to say that even to myself but there I am mid-afternoon frequently of late saying not out loud but emphatically to myself, I’m exhausted.
How many years have we been doing this, a fellow traveler asks. It’s creeping up on a decade. The frothy ribbons of fear, the grunge of despair, the hyper vigilance have long since taken up residence and gotten to know each other. They don’t care if the windows are open or closed as long as the internet and cable are functioning.
Yesterday I brought that sake-infused risotto to a friend — she is grieving a sister who died and died suddenly due to medical neglect and/or outright error — and I forgot my phone, the phone with the credit card wallet. It felt weird. Like having sex without protection or entering a party where you can’t remember the name of the host.
I’d intended to stop and get flowers and a sweet bite, but I could only scrounge up nine dollars — eight from the eyeglass drop down compartment in the car and one from the treat pocket in my hobo bag. So I only bought flowers.
Counting out those bills felt so strange, almost awkward and to realize that was to realize how in between I am, for I also find it strange to call up my square code and scan it — where? where do I scan it? — to get my Prime benefit, generally something like $1.89 off the total.
Amazon owning WholeFoods, Facebook catering ads to conversations (not even KEYSTROKES), Facebook owning Instagram, the hideous helmsmanship of a racist, immigrant billionaire over on Twitter or X, formerly known as Twitter (— imagine being such a dick that you force people all over the world to utter or print those extra words over and over — X, formerly known as Twitter), what a conflagration!
Such hideous monopolies and intrusions make it hard to offer more than a shrug at TikTok and the idea of an adversarial superpower harvesting data from our people. I mean it’s not like Amazon or Facebook are exactly on our sides, are they?
I know my kids are smart enough to not to input phone numbers, addresses, birth dates — I hope.
On TikTok, I have yet to get past the Chinese hip hop dancers and the comical wombats at feeding hour, so it astonished me to learn yesterday that some huge number of people rely on the platform for their news. All of their news.
I started with starving Palestinians and so perhaps I ought to come back to them. Good gracious, I want to say, fuck the pier Joe, just cut Netanyahu off!
Can you imagine if Biden lost to a corrupt, autocratic megalomaniac who needs to return to power to avoid going to jail because he couldn’t say no to a corrupt, autocratic megalomaniac who has to hold onto power to avoid going to jail? No wonder I’m tired.
My old habits of outrage will not get going these days. I hardly recognize myself sheathed in a passive silence. But to support one feels like condemnation of the other — a regular funhouse mirror tunnel of allegiances. And to protest the killing, the genocide, too much is to risk everything here. I am committed — committed — to re-electing the guy with a brain and a moral compass.
It was so easy to stick a Black Lives Matter sign on my lawn. Give to the good causes. Take history on. Our history. American history.
But it was so complicated to take down, after a horrid and violently brutal few weeks of IDF retaliation, my I STAND WITH ISRAEL sign.
And then, a small defeated part of me wonders if perhaps in fact I know as little about the fight for racial justice as I do about the Middle East. Is that possible?
This is one of many Middle Passage quilts that I’ve made over the years. I began it a long time ago (2013?) while reading about the transatlantic slave trade but didn’t bind it until last week.
All the usual reasons for delay pertained, prime among them that I am a better starter than finisher. I lose track. Things pile up. But also this: early on a reader of this blog suggested that I was not “staying in my lane.”
All these years later, I say fuck that. Not fuck her, but fuck that. Fuck that. (Cultural appropriation discussed in part here and here and again here).
I will never tell Black women what to think or how to feel, but it certainly matters to me that learning about the history of slavery has made me a more informed, more sensitive person. A better citizen, a better reader of novels, a better writer, a stronger and more informed consumer of American culture and politics.
Before continuing, I have to thank the cadre of readers here, mostly older white women like myself, who have let me know over the years that what I share about American history and race is meaningful to them. It’s not that I set out to teach per se, but by sharing what I’m learning and having you along for the ride, the learning gets amplified and transforms what would otherwise be a solitary process into a communal one. It really matters to me. YOU really matter to me.
I like quilts to stand on their own, leaving interpretations up to the viewer but I thought in this case it might enhance the experience of looking if I were to explain the visual connections between fabric choices and the Middle Passage. So here goes.
The triangular shapes refer to sails. I suppose they could also refer to the triangular shape of the trading routes but I didn’t think of that until just now.
Adapted from History Crunch website
Swatches of indigo, bubble motifs, fish prints, and a black swirly-spiral print call to mind the Atlantic Ocean.
The half-circle black and silver print (at the bottom, above) looks African to me. The black and deep green hand-dyed swatch IS African.
The inclusion of a map print refers to the shores at either end of the Middle Passage — say, Sierra Leone on one side and Charleston on the other.
The brown stripes and the green lozenges both refer to the ship itself. The brown stripe is suggestive of the planks, while the green lozenges call to mind those illustrations that depicted Black bodies packed in the hold below deck.
One reason it’s important to focus on the Middle Passage now and again is because the number of people who died en route is often overlooked when relating the costs of slavery. It’s a huge number.
A conservative estimate puts lives lost en route at 1.8 to 2 million. Another 1.8 million died while housed in the barracoons awaiting transport. Another 1.5 million died during the first year of laboring here.
So one way to look at this is — roughly 14 million Africans were kidnapped to yield 9 million slaves.*
It is hard to wrap one’s mind around these numbers.
My photo from the Lynching Memorial in Montgomery
Check out the Equal Justice Initiative’s website — it highlights, among other things, the lesser known slave-practices and sources of slave-related profit in New England.
Below is another Middle Passage quilt. You’ll notice many of the fabrics are the same.
I’ve linked to these novel-adjacent pages before, but here again is a kind of warm up exercise done in the style of Colum McCann and describing the Middle Passage. It’s called Water Was.
* these figures and the framing of the figures came from a documentary I was watching about a week ago. I tried to back track and figure out what it was. No luck. If I do, I’ll come back with attribution.
I’m in the bank’s anteroom with Finn while my husband gets a few documents notarized. The branches of the apple tree outside bobble in the wind. It’s a cold wind.
A Black woman comes in for the ATM. She takes out cash. I know this by the number of dings and the shuffling sound of bills. I want to turn to her and say something corny or sympathetic like, “Go Fani Willis, am I right?” But of course I don’t because part of the point is that Black women deserve a little privacy.
The probing, off-base, and ultimately offensive questions about cash at that ridiculous hearing show, commentators said, how little white people know about how Black people move through the world — having cash being a simple and effective way to afford safety in some situations.
Later, TV on. More hearing, more coverage.
How many times does Mika have to say, “She had a right to be angry” before I start to clench my jaw? She and Joe have two hours to fill, but still. And then this: ‘Fani Willis was angry’ — definitive — but ‘the questions seemed offensive’ — conditional.
I hope the Judge shuts this crap down soon. There simply is no there there.
***
P.S. Here’s the guy (below) that started this whole disqualification business. As DA Willis emphatically pointed out, HE’s the one on trial.
* Doing oppo research.
PPS Initially I wondered whether it might be prudent for DA Willis step down rather than jeopardize the entire RICO case. After seeing her, I didn’t think that, not even a little bit.
PPPS Now that Alvin Bragg’s criminal fraud trial has a date, I hyperventilate less about the Georgia case. If re-elected, Trump won’t be able to pardon himself of a conviction in that case either.
Picture this: a well-heeled white woman standing next to her shiny SUV in front of the artists’ cooperative that we were about to visit. Hear her going on and on about how great Selma is. Well worth more than a single day of your time!We have great churches. We have great synagogues… (huh? One of us is Jewish, but did SHE know that?)
I don’t doubt that Selma is a great place, one that deserved more exploration. We skimmed the surface, in and out in a few hours. We walked over the famous bridge, had lunch, quickly visited two “interpretive centers,” grabbed some ice cream, and were off.
But Selma’s obvious state of decline made me sad. Really sad. It struck me as emblematic of decades of misguided Republican “trickle down economics” and racist policies. Downtown was dead and further out wasn’t better — peppered with shacks, run down apartment complexes, boarded up gas stations.
Maybe the city gleamed before Covid, but I kind of doubt it.
We had lunch. Or tried to. I’ll give this place points for style, for friendliness, and for an earnest effort. But boy was it a miss. The food sucked, I mean really sucked. And we waited and waited for it, even though there was only one other group there.
Across the street: a faded Israeli flag and a neon sign reading: gentle human / thank you for coming.
Alabama River
There were two interpretive centers (that seems to be a new name for museums) — one on one side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge and one on the other. One was compact and polished with well-produced audio-visual presentations and a nice gift shop. The other was folksy, expansive, and more than a little worn at the edges.
The less-polished place started with an introduction by the guy at the front desk. It was elevated speech, nearly oratorical, with much mopping of the brow. Inside, we quickly appreciated the museum’s attempt to honor the “foot soldiers” of the Selma/Montgomery march. There were news clippings affording detail not found in more mainstream reporting, lots of photos, and even plaster casts of some of the protesters’ feet.
I was too tired to avail myself of the many resources at the other interpretive center, although this portrait (below) certainly caught my eye.
Sheriff Jim Clark, known for his violent temper
He looks like a monster, doesn’t he? He’s the reason Selma was chosen as a site for the march to Montgomery. His reactive, racist brutality could be depended upon to make a spectacle.
Finally, before leaving town we visited the “Candy Lady.” The place was almost deserted and the owner thanked us profusely for coming in and buying a few bowls of ice cream. That seemed revealing of two things: one, that she was possibly hurting for business and two, that in casual encounters people in the South are so much nicer than Northerners. By miles. It’s almost disorienting how much nicer Southerners are. Especially given the history.
Dated March 19, 1965. Seen at the museum at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis
