Patricia Williams - Giving a Damn: Racism, Romance and Gone with the Wind

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Copyright Patricia J. Williams 2021

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Home by Warsan Shire, copyright 2014. Reprinted by permission of the author

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Source ISBN: 9780008404505

Ebook Edition April 2021 ISBN: 9780008404512

Version: 2021-04-13

Here was the last ever to be seen of the Knights and their ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave [] it is no more than a dream remembered.

It was not a kind thought that flitted across my mind while I waited at the airport in Montreal. The weather was bad, my flight was late and I was having lunch on the American side of the terminal, listening to a big, jovial man talking about his sons wedding on a former cotton plantation in Charleston, South Carolina. The man was discussing ordinary things the weather, the bride, the wine served, what music they played. Everyone, he said, was dressed in antebellum clothing: So much fun! is how he summed it up.

Dancing on graves! is what went through my mind. And then, quick on its heels, a well-disciplined self-flagellation, a socialized apologia: Am I being uncharitable?

The man and his companion passed on to the vast quantities of beer consumed at the reception. How rowdy, but yknow happy-rowdy the grooms fraternity brothers grew as the night progressed and how certain he was that nobody slept that night, heh-heh-heh.

The second unkind thought that passed through my mind was: I am so glad that neither this man nor his son nor his sons beer-guzzling frat-bros own my body.

I suppose a bit of explanation is in order here: The overwhelming majority of African Americans are to some degree the carnal issue of precisely that heh-heh-heh. I, for example, am only the third generation of my family whose body is not legally owned by others. My maternal great-grandmother was born a slave. My maternal great-grandfather was a white slaveholder who impregnated her sometime around 1860 in order to increase his livestock of plantation labourers, his stock of lives. It was not just sport to rape ones slaves: the children therefrom were valuable currency, investments in their owners wealth by virtue of their potential for profitable divestment.

The poet Caroline Randall Williams is the great-great-granddaughter of Edmund Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selmas Bloody Sunday Bridge is named, as she put it in an op-ed succinctly entitled: You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body is a Confederate Monument in The New York Times on June 26, 2020. Writing about the removal of Confederate monuments, she observed that there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred. To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof.

Americas history is one in which Black and white families are traumatically interconnected. But that history is repressed. The pain of it echoes across generations. Nearly all Black Americans are the thoroughly mixed progeny of white slaveholders, the violence of whose paternity is variously misperceived as a biological stain, an unfortunate mutation, a legal non-fiction, a dark political taboo.

The scars of slaverys violence are hard to talk about. My mind drags the details into the present involuntarily, for, like any taboo, these feelings are deep in my autonomic system, as persistent reiteration, as terrible hallucination. A thing which has lost its idea is like the man who has lost his shadow, and it must either fall under the sway of madness or perish, wrote Jean Baudrillard.

Growing up, I was protected, insulated, cautioned and by some measures made paranoid by my grandmothers narrative: They the always-watchful they! might own your body, but they can never own you. That was her sound advice, a coming to terms in the present with a very complicated past. I am safest, I learned at a very young age, when I can discipline myself to leave the body behind. It is a mystery, a kind of magic, to be raised both within and without oneself; to see and to see oneself seeing. That is the stress that W. E. B. Du Bois called double consciousness, this sense of always looking at ones self through the eyes of others, of measuring ones soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. It is also a kind of madness to dissociate from ones deepest organs of knowing; to cut the cord to the lifeboat of the present, and trust that past and future will form the raft upon which you might purchase your own survival.