Two Gardens

I recently visited Athens, Georgia, with family members, where we walked through the Garden Club Founders Memorial Garden on the University of Georgia campus and later along some of the pathways of  Georgia's State Botanical Garden. We had been to the State Botanical Garden previously, but there are always paths to walk that we haven't tread before. The Founders Memorial Garden is a much smaller garden, with concrete sidewalks and formally arranged garden areas; the larger State Botanical Garden has both formally arranged gardens and leaf litter trails that wander over ridges and under canopies of native and exotic trees. This time we stayed to the concrete paths and formally arranged areas.

Garden Club Founders Memorial Garden, Athens, GA

State Botanical Garden, Athens, GA

pond in Garden Club Founders Garden, Athens, GA

partial view of larger pond at the State Botanical Garden, Athens, GA

The weather was especially pleasant on the morning of our visit to the State Botanical Garden, as a cool front was blowing through, wafting away the clouds that had brought days of rain to the area. Tom and I noticed gardening techniques that we would like to transfer to our much more modest gardens (which are in great need of weeding and care at the end of a very wet summer).

Among the beautiful flowers and trees, the tiniest inhabitants carried on with their lives, largely unmolested and unnoticed.

This inchworm rolled up the loose threads of his silk thread as he climbed it to the canopy of a tree.

This spider hung suspended over an interpretive sign.

Every garden needs a yellow and black Argiope (garden spider).

This cricket was tucked head first between the stamens of this flower until I startled it from its bed.

Our walks in these gardens were among the highlights of the trip, as we lingered on benches and shared our reactions to the beauty of a natural world artfully arranged.  But the bitter sheen of history marbleizes these otherwise beautifully clear memories of our visits to these Southern gardens. As we were walking from the Garden Club Founders Memorial Garden and exiting the UGA campus, we passed two historical markers, one commemorating the desegregation of the University of Georgia in 1961, and the other memorializing the university's connection to the Confederacy.

Just steps away from each other, the signs attest to the bitter fruit of the South's "peculiar institution" and the pernicious effects of the hesitancy in acknowledging the culpability of one's ancestors in a bloody war. The second sign, as our daughter pointed out, was established in 1991, over one hundred and twenty five years after the end of the Civil War, and still the creators of this sign chose to designate that war as "the War for Southern Independence." These two signs represent the tension between two views of the South: graciousness and gentility, freedom loving and loyal; brutal and tribal, oppressive and paternalistic. So many fail to recognize the venom that remains in our failure to reconcile this dichotomy.

What We Cannot Deny: The Tangled Web of Ancestry

I’m not sure what, exactly, excites people about exploring their roots. Perhaps it’s an inherent urge to identify tribal connections. Perhaps it reflects an underlying need to establish one’s “worth” and to validate one’s existence. For some people, I’m sure, the excitement is in exploring rather than in identifying the branches of the genealogical tree, the “sussing out” of secrets and hitherto unknown connections. Others, such as I, just love a story; we’re caught up in the drama of individual lives almost submerged by the sands of time. Every person’s genealogical search is different, and nowhere is that difference so stark as the difference between the search conducted by a white person in the United States and that of an African-American. And nowhere is that search so fraught with tension as a search in one’s Southern background. If you’re African-American, you run up against slavery and the unpalatable truth that at one point, you’re going to be searching not through birth and death certificates but through bills of sale and property records. If you’re white, you’re likely to discover that no matter how humble your roots might be, there’s probably a slave-owning ancestor somewhere in your family history. (And if you have a conscience, that discovery is going to make you queasy rather than pleased.)

A recent New York Times article discusses the roots of our First Lady, Michelle Obama, whose family history so tellingly reveals the tangled history of the South. Michelle’s great-great-great-grandparents were a slave girl, Melvinia, and an unknown white man. Melvinia took the surname of her slave owners, Shields. After the death of her original owner in South Carolina, Melvinia found herself in Georgia, one of three slaves owned by her former owner’s daughter and son-in law, Christianne and Henry Shields. This couple had four sons, still at home and ranging in age from 19-24, at about the time Melvinia became pregnant with her first of four children. Whether or not one of those young men or some other young white man visiting the 200-acre farm is the father is unknown. After the Civil War, Melvinia worked as a farm laborer on a farm next to that of one of the sons, Charles Shields, until she eventually moved further west near the Alabama state line.

Melvinia’s child, Dolphus Shields, from whom Michelle Obama is descended, was light-skinned enough almost to pass as white. What some white folks encounter when they search their family roots is a similar ancestor who decided to pass as white and thus was integrated into the white community in the South, the family’s losing in time the knowledge of their slave past.

I was struck, as I read the article in the Times that Melvinia Shields, the eventually emancipated slave, is a sort of African-American opposite to my husband’s great-great-great-grandfather, Paul Cook: black, enslaved, illiterate and great-great-great-grandmother to Michelle Obama; white, wealthy, well-educated, and great-great-great-grandfather to my husband. Born in Rhode Island, Paul Cook was not an original child of the South, but as a participant in the sugar refining industry in Louisiana in the 1800s, he certainly profited from African-American labor. According to his obituary, he settled in New Orleans in 1846, and went into the western produce business until, in 1866, he got involved in the sugar refining business. The history of African-American labor in the cane fields from which that sugar came is not a pretty story. And yet, four generations later, the great-great-great-granddaughter of the slave is First Lady of the United States, and the great-great-great-grandson of the Southern merchant works for a non-profit organization.

As I delve more deeply in the background of the Armstrongs, Nugents, Cooks, Whites, Robbs, Greenes and all the ancillary branches of my husband’s family, as well as my own, I know I will run up against this Southern dilemma: how to discuss—or, rather, WHETHER to discuss the relations between the white ancestors and their black slaves and servants and whether to reveal what we would now identify as bigoted attitudes. If one is honest and true to history, one will confront what one finds and reveal that information in all its tangled glory and infamy.

Further Information: Searching for Slave Ancestors

• Tamie Dehler, “Searching for Slave Ancestors Requires a Strategy, Terre Haute Tribune-Star, 12 January, 2008.
  
• Tony Burroughs, “Commentary: Tracing Michelle Obama’s Roots—and Yours, special to CNN.

Decatur Book Festival 2009, First Day

Yesterday we attended several afternoon events of the Decatur Book Festival, sponsored by, among others, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Dekalb Medical Center. The day was overcast, and when my husband and I set off on the mile-long walk to downtown Decatur, a few stray drops of water fell from the sky. However, there was no significant rainfall to dampen the spirits of the crowd in downtown Decatur. Our daughter attended some events at the teen gathering in a dance studio near the downtown square, and then she and friends went to lunch together.

Tom and I first went to the Decatur Public Library Stage to hear Niall Stanage, an Irish journalist who covered Barack Obama's election. Stanage first gave us the international perspective on Barack Obama, nothing new, of course, to those of us who keep up with the news, but it was good to be reminded that Obama's election "really redeemed an old idea for America" that had been eroded over the years by the Bush administration. Stanage said that while there is a small margin, a fringe on the left, that has an "implacable" resistance and dislike of America and its power, most Europeans have a fondness for America. The Bush administration policies, however, had seriously eroded that goodwill (for example, in 2000, Germans had a 70% favorable attitude toward the U.S.; by 2007, that goodwill had dropped to 30%). Barack Obama re-invigorated the fondness Europeans had for America.

What was really interesting to me, however, was the audience's response to the clips of Obama's speeches that Stanage showed to illustrate his points. The first clip was the very hopeful speech Obama gave at the 2000 Democratic Convention, the one where he says these rousing lines: "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is a United States of America." I could feel the energy in the room as these words echoed in the small auditorium. People clapped after every speech with the kind of enthusiasm I remembered from the election. I swear, the middle-aged guy next to me was crying, removing his glasses and wiping his eyes. Now, cynical far-right Republicans would call this Obama-awe. I think it's something way more important: it's hope. There still remains among us liberals the hope that the country can be re-united; that we are the United States of America. But the radicals on the right, what Kevin Drum and others call the "fever swamp crowd," have just about eroded that hope in their terrorist takeover of the national dialogue.

After Stanage's speech, Tom and I parted ways to attend different events; he attended an environmentalist presentation, and I walked to the First Baptist Church of Decatur to hear Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. Blackmon has written an exhaustively researched book titled Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II. The title pretty much summarizes the point of the book, and that's how Blackmon began his presentation, with a summary of his book, a summary of the re-enslavement of African-Americans in the South in a kind of neo-slavery, involuntary servitude. He reminded us that many of the early fortunes of the "fathers of Atlanta" were built on this practice of servitude and that many Atlanta-based companies we know today tie back to the brutal practices of another time.

There is an American mythology that "Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves" that Americans cling to, totally removing from memory the brutality of the early twentieth-century. Thousands of African-Americans, Blackmon said, are alive today who were born into defacto slavery in the 1920s and 1930s. Georgia and Alabama particularly supported this practice, for their economies depended upon free or cheap labor: agriculture, mining. These southern states "used the criminal justice system to create a new slavery and the fear of this system to intimidate African-Americans." As just one example, Blackmon described how a black man who wanted to leave one farmer and work for another had to get permission from his original boss. If he did not, he would be charged and slapped with a fine. This is just a small example of the ways that African-Americans were intimidated. Of course, we all know about the Jim Crow laws. Right? I left this presentation determined to buy Blackmon's book, but all the venues were out of their supply; I'll have to order it later.

Tom and I later met up for a poetry reading that ended with two very moving poems by Patricia Smith. The last one, written for the 34 victims left behind in a nursing home during Hurricane Katrina, brought tears to my eyes.