Sweet Briar Plantation Slavery

This post has been on my list for an update for several months now. It’s hard for me to do, and I’ve been putting it off.  On the 10-year anniversary of saving Sweet Briar, I’m mourning her loss in a different way.  Without consulting alumnae, students, or faculty, the President and Board of the College declared a new admissions policy that excludes trans and nonbinary students from admittance.  I believe this puts the college on the wrong side of history. I believe that it harms people. 

I’ve stopped my annual giving to the college. I will say that I venmo the Brister English Project every Juneteenth.  If you are an African American who is interested in genealogy, Walter has created a huge amount of free resources for research. 

In addition to giving there, I’m thinking I also need to donate where it will protect our trans youth. I’m grieving Sweet Briar. I’d like to have more viable actions to fight for her. But until or unless this policy is rescinded, she’s dead to me.

Note: I am updating the original post to improve my use of language on these topics. 

Original Post (published in Feb 2017)

There is a 3300-acre swath of mountain and foothill in the blue ridge mountains that I love completely.  This rolling space south of Shenandoah has my loyalty.  Still, I have to sit and hold the fact that this place that I love so dearly was a plantation in the American south.

This red clay is the same clay that saw the blood, sweat and tears of the enslaved people that worked that land.

It’s my privilege that I could choose not to think about that fact when I was a student at Sweet Briar College.  To the college’s credit, it never shirked away from the fact. Here is the only surviving slave cabin (it is one of 28 that once stood on the property). Here is the enslaved peoples’ cemetery. Here is the uncomfortable history of your home, ladies.

The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities African American Historic Sites Database says:

“Though in an 1813 letter [Elijah] Fletcher condemned slavery as “a curse on any country,” by 1846 he was one of the county’s ten major slaveholders, with between 80 and 100 enslaved persons living at Sweet Briar. Fletcher recorded sixty-eight members of this slave population in his 1852 will.”

Indiana Fletcher Williams inherited Sweet Briar plantation and 37 enslaved people in 1858 when her father Elijah passed away.  The enslaved people nationwide would be freed seven years later. It was Miss Indie’s will to create a university – in perpetuity – that we alumnae used to save the school in 2015.  We think of her as our founder. We don’t refer to the fact that she owned people.

I’m glad the plaque at the burial ground calls the enslaved people from the Sweet Briar plantation Founders as well. I would love to see the college’s annual Founder’s day traditions incorporate more of this heritage and acknowledgement. Maybe they have – I haven’t been back in a long time.

White apologists like to point out that the enslaved people who lived with the Fletchers stayed on after emancipation. As if that were a sign of being treated well during slavery.  I don’t think that’s the whole picture. Perhaps they were related to the family. Did they have anywhere else to go?  It’s hard to say.

Again from the African American Historic Sites Database:

“Following emancipation in 1865, several freed Sweet Briar slaves settled near the plantation, continuing to work for the Fletcher family as paid laborers. For example, Martha Penn Taylor moved to Coolwell and worked as a nursemaid for Indiana’s daughter, Daisy. Martha had come to Sweet Briar in 1854 when Fletcher granted her written request to be purchased and thereby reunited with her sister, Mary, who was enslaved on the plantation.”

The Fletcher family – the ones who were freed in 1865 and had taken on their owner’s name – actually moved to a farm just off the plantation land. The Fletcher family still owns and runs that farmland. In fact, the family has their reunions there.

For so many families, slavery tore husbands from wives as they were bought or sold without recognition or acknowledgement of relationships among slaves. Children were sold from their mothers.  Most African Americans can not trace their heritage to a specific part of Africa. Most African Americans cannot trace their families across the United States from sale to sale of people. These things weren’t documented. Names were changed. Women were routinely raped by owners. (Update – adding another shout out to the Brister English Project for all of this work)

Even the anecdote above of Martha Penn Taylor and her sister Mary were sold and then reunited by a request of sale tells a story of loss of family and separation.

As one of the Fletcher family is quoted in the NewsAdvance:

Being on the same ground of her ancestors, Sheila Fletcher of Yorktown, Va., spoke of a feeling of pride.

“I’m a strong person because I know where I came from. I think it makes me a better person. I don’t have to guess my history, I know my history, and I get to be around my history.”

This family is one of the rare African American families who can visit the graves of their ancestors. Who can know where their ancestors lived, worked, and died.

I’ve got mysteries in my personal family tree – some that I might never solve.  I know how that makes me feel – how much I want to know more. How much I want to find a long lost aunt who looks like me, or a long lost cousin who shares my quirks.  This is not just an individual state for Black Americans. This is the norm.

This lack of history makes you feel like you don’t really know who you are. It makes you wonder about scents or songs that call to you – and whether that’s part of some deep genetic memory or just random.  It forces you to create your own personal mythology, instead of getting to inherit something solid from the past.

I’ve been sitting with the discomfort of this knowledge for a while. And sitting with empathy and listening to others speak about it. All I can do is acknowledge it. It’s frustrating. Empathy is fucking uncomfortable.

This is our heritage. All of us.

As much as I love Sweet Briar, I’m certain the Fletchers took part in the savagery. They owned people. They treated people like they weren’t human – even if they “treated their slaves well” (who knows whether they did, or what measure that means) – they owned people.  By virtue of owning someone and listing them as property to be divided in a will, they treated those people like they weren’t human beings.  That happened. It happened in a house and on the grounds of a place that I adore.

I sit here and think hard thoughts. What if I had to research my genealogy not via census records but by wills and property deeds? By bills of sale? I feel my stomach clench as I consider it. It’s nauseating.

Sweet Briar is part of my personal mythology. That land is something I connect with, regardless of genetics.  I’ve got to sit with the fact that the white people who lived there owned people. I’ve got to sip iced tea on the front porch with that fact and stare at it through the awkward silences.

My vision of Sweet Briar is one of understated old South gentility.  That understated gentility is utterly impossible without someone else doing a whole lot of sweating in a back room, in a back yard, and in tiny, dark cabins behind the big yellow houses.

I’m not a descendant of the Fletchers, but according to Ancestry DNA, I’m pretty doggone white.  I don’t think my family was ever a landowner sort (probably more sharecropper and moonshiner, given the anecdotes) but that does not absolve me.  I don’t get a “get out of shame free” card.

I grew up in the North. That doesn’t get me out of it, either. (Writing a separate post about that one – it’s prickly).

Slavery isn’t Where Sweet Briar’s History Stops

One of the things that I was shocked as an adult to discover was missing from my history books growing up was the terrorism of post-emancipation lynchings.  How freed African Americans were subjected to ongoing terrorism for the very purpose of keeping them in check. Under control. Well-behaved.  Throughout the Jim Crow era (1877-1950s), almost four thousand people died by lynching in the US.

The key to historically reporting lynchings was actually that they had to appear in a local newspaper. It wasn’t enough for someone to be tortured, hanged and killed.  It had to be in the paper in order to serve as a warning for others. The newspapers and media played a huge role in the ongoing racial stereotypes about African Americans.

What would it feel like to have to find this information on ancestry.com? That a grandfather or a grand uncle had been lynched? Gruesomely murdered by a group of people and gleefully written up in the paper? How would it feel to read that article? 

This era of American history is still in the shadows. We might talk about slavery. But nobody wants to talk about lynchings.  Naturally, I didn’t know the Sweet Briar area’s history at all.

I googled it and found an interactive map.  More than 90 people were killed between 1880 and 1926 were killed in the state of Virginia.  Oh, look, there’s one in Amherst in 1902. James Carter for had been arrested for his crime of lighting a neighbor’s outhouse on fire. He was kidnapped from his jail cell by a lynch mob and hung from a tree outside of town.  He didn’t get a trial. His executioners were his judge and jury.

I’m sickened by how many of these lynchings listed in this area – name after name – were for an “alleged rape.”  First of all, these men were not granted their constitutional rights of a trial (and honestly, if you look at the number of Black men who are killed without a trial now, it’s not all that different.)   Second of all, one of the things that was used to make enslaved people “inhuman” to their owners was the idea that they were “animal” like, and not really as conscious as their white counterparts.  Enslaved women could be raped for this reason. And enslaved men were to be considered dangerous predators to white women.  This sickening pattern of alleged rape after alleged rape… it is perpetrated by that lie, and it continued to grow and perpetuate it.

I keep googling about why the lynchings tapered off in the 1920s. (Don’t get me wrong, they absolutely continued to happen, but they really did taper off around 1925-1930.)  One factor was “The Great Migration” which refers to the movement of thousands of African American families from the American South to the American North between 1910 and 1940.  Lynchings were largely (not entirely!) a southern phenomenon.

The KKK came into peak horrificness in 1915, which I think signals a public disfavor of the graphic violence of lynching. Now the lynch mob wore masks, and covered their faces.   Interestingly, when the violent display of white supremacy ended, that was when the Daughters of the Confederacy were helping the nation proliferate with cheap mass-market bronze statues of Robert E. Lee to put in every town square.  I don’t think the mentality went away. I think the overtness of it became less socially acceptable. So it had to be sly. Sideways. Statues.

The recent events in Charlottesville felt like a personal violation. C-ville was a close neighbor to Sweet Briar. It was where we went for Saturday shopping outings and to hear local bands.  It’s all very close to the surface, and raw, for me, because that place is a part of that mental home.

Oh, and because I knew how to get to Appomattox from Sweet Briar, but didn’t pay any attention to statues off campus, I also had to google local monuments.  Well, look at that. All built between 1921-1924. The closest one is in the town of Amherst (right outside the gates).

Mid-Century Modern

My inner urge is to fast-forward to the civil rights era history. I want to skip 1925-1965. I want to skip it because I am tired. And because I want to skip to the happier news.

I am desperate to skip the Great Depression. World War II. But as I close my eyes and think about these eras, and all of the history I’d read about them. All of the Rosie riveters I’d seen were white. The gaunt dust bowl faces were white. My internal history books are whitewashed.  Of course the Great Depression hit African Americans the hardest. How could it not?  “By 1932, approximately half of Black Americans were out of work. In some Northern cities, whites called for Blacks to be fired from any jobs as long as there were whites out of work.”

I found this PDF version of a 1941 edition of the Negro Motorist’s “Green Book” travel guide. If you don’t know what the Green Book is, here’s a great write up.  Amherst isn’t on the list (go figure – after a lynching and a statue in the town, I’m not super surprised). But Charlottesville includes “tourist homes”, a beauty parlor, and a barber shop. Lynchburg includes homes, hotels, a road house, a tavern, a beauty parlor and a service station!  Looking at how spread out these towns with service stations are, I’m really wondering about 1941 cars’ gas mileage.  How easy it would be to be stranded in hostile territory.

NYT reports “During World War II, Sweet Briar was the first college in the country to have a group of female students sworn into the Women’s Army Corps before their graduation, according to the June 1944 alumnae magazine. These students took their oath on April 17, 1944, finished their last semester and reported for duty after graduation.” Okay, great! What about the area Black people? I’m sure they were doing something. Well, the men were facing the front lines and segregation at the same time.

Segregation is really another one of those things that my heart doesn’t want to tackle. How would a mother explain to her child that they can’t have a drink of water because the drinking fountain reserved for colored people was broken? A child doesn’t recognize and know how to sort differences or samenesses between people until age 5 or so. Or what mother has to find the right bathroom for the same child – that would be farther away, less well-equipped, etc?  Explaining race relations to a child in today’s world is impossibly hard. When everything was “separate but not-really-equal”? Yikes.

Desegregation Does Not Equal Diversity

Sweet Briar had to contest Indiana Fletcher Williams’ will in 1965 in order to desegregate the school.  It was quite a court battle, just as fascinating as the one in 2015.  In 1966, Marshalyn Yeargin was the first – and only – Black woman to enroll.  Yeargin-Allsop was a true pioneer of civil rights in higher education. She would go on to also be the first Black woman to graduate from Emory University’s school of medicine. I keep missing the Atlanta alumnae events that she attends, but I’m fairly certain I’d do the fangirl hand-wavy thing if I met her. Her work on developmental disabilities at the CDC is really important.

Yay! Forward movement! Progress!

Progress doesn’t mean momentum, unfortunately.

When I attended Sweet Briar in the late 90s, there was a sparse handful of Black students.  Maybe 5-10% of the overall population. There was an “International hall” in one of the dorms, and a handful of women from various countries across the globe.  But the vast majority of students at Sweet Briar were white. I’m pretty sure – based on the stats and photos we still get – that that’s largely still the case.

More of the staff and housekeepers were Black than the students. Off the top of my head, none of the faculty were Black, and only a handful of administrative staff members.

I know what it feels like to be a fish out of water – to a certain extent. Here in Atlanta – and particularly the area where I live (which is 65% Black), I have looked around a public place and seen very few, if any, people who look like me.  The problem with using this as a basis of understanding? I’m white.

In the grocery store – where I’m frequently the only white person I see the whole trip – the other patrons practically leap out of my way, and apologize. Yes, they are being polite. But I don’t see that response to other people behind me. It’s as if my progress down the pasta aisle is more important than that of a Black mother of three. (Trust me, it’s not. I’m just looking for marinara.)

There are social disparities at play regardless of the fact that we are laughing about the Kroger announcer together.  I cart around all of that feather-light privilege.

The Black women who went to Sweet Briar had to work harder, be smarter, be more patient than anyone I’ve ever met in my life.  I’m not surprised that I personally know three who went on to be lawyers (and two from Harvard, y’all).  I mean, we’re a go-gettery bunch to begin with. I’m suddenly not surprised that the Black women at Sweet Briar hung out together. It took less work. Less emotional labor than dealing with the rest of us.

I want to say “I can’t” imagine these things. But what I really mean is that I don’t want to imagine these things. 

There have been some really excellent pieces about the energetic toll of emotional labor. Women’s mental load in the house. And Black women’s emotional labor on social media.   In the white-ally write-ups I’ve read – greedily sucking up other people’s emotional labor – one of the very first tips is to stop asking other people to do that work for you.

It would be so easy to ask “what’s it like?”  and then pretend that my asking matters at all. Pretend like my asking isn’t just asking my friends to do the hard work of emoting and expressing.  And they do it anyway, because they love me. Because they need to. Because they need someone to understand. Because they need to be heard.  But in reality, I’ve just asked them to spend precious coffee time slogging through their representation of their racial experience when we could have been dishing about the books we just read.

It’s hard to listen without judgement or censorship. It’s hard to not layer on your own “at leasts” or your own “but not me”. It’s not about me.  And it’s even harder to fold myself in the emotional reality they are describing and let myself sit in it.  As a writer, I do this with my characters. Back when I acted, I did it with my roles.

How would it feel to be worried about Ethan being shot every time he steps outside the house? Just because he’s fifteen? Just because he looks grown? He’s been lifting weights. He looks strong. How would it feel to have the cops called on him if he decided to walk down to the gas station and a neighbor didn’t recognize him? How would he navigate the world if that was his experience?

Hell, I’m worried enough about the kid getting a learner’s permit. I don’t want to imagine what this layer of anxiety would mean.  But here’s the thing. I have to try to imagine it anyway.  Because that’s my job. That’s my emotional homework.