So Nottaway Plantation has burned to the ground.
I have some feelings about this. My paternal ancestors came to Texas from Mississippi; there’s a plantation house that had their name on it in downtown Natchez. There’s also a town, by which I mean a collection of mobile homes, 20 minutes away by car, where the working plantation, more correctly known as the farm labor camp of enslaved persons, was. No guesses as to the nominal race of most of the modern residents. Also no guesses about whether they’re my distant cousins. Possibly not all of them, but definitely some of them.
When I was a kid, my parents took me to Natchez for the Natchez Pilgrimage, which is still a thing, though apparently far less of one than it was when I was a kid and my school still used Johnny Reb as a mascot. I went to Natchez again as an adult, about twenty years ago, still interested in the history but noticing much more strongly that the only history told was that of the white enslavers. And I’ve also done some touring around New Orleans, where I have in-laws, though more of the houses there at later dates talk about enslavement in more detail.
I don’t remember going to Nottaway, but I might have. Or I might not have; it’s more about the rental business for events and weddings. I’ve only ever been interested in the historic homes where the history, even the sanitized versions I learned early in life, is emphasized, and not the commercial uses of the homes. Even the houses people are still living in are more interesting than the ones that are primarily wedding venues.
For the record, I got married the first time on my college campus and the second time at a bed and breakfast in Houston. It never occurred to me to get married at a plantation.
But I was raised in the (white) generation where that was an aspiration. There was a lot of history I didn’t learn until adulthood: the “Memorial Park Riot” of 1917, where Black soldiers mutinied after racist abuse and were court-martialed, and 19 were executed; the Tulsa Massacre of 1921; and, as you can imagine from a student at a school still using the “Confederate flag” and Johnny Reb into the 1980s and beyond, a lot about slavery. In other words, our teachers and the adults around us all lied to us, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by omission. Sometimes because they’d also been lied to, and hadn’t listened to Black voices around them, or hadn’t heard them.
So there’s a dual vision there for me: what a beautiful building Nottaway was. And it was built by enslaved persons as part of a labor camp: not a death camp proper but certainly one where people were worked to death. And people still want to get married there! I can’t clap my hands for the burning of it, but I sure can’t be upset about the people who are clapping.
And I hope it’s not rebuilt, but left in ruins. Rebuilding Nottaway as a wedding venue not only continues to sanitize the history of enslavement and white supremacy, it vindicates that history. Black kids learn early about what slavery means. Let’s not lie to another generation of white kids about it.
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