Dear friends, it burdens my heart to have to say this: I mourned the burning plantation, but I am not racist.
On my recent Foote Notes podcast, we got into the discussion of the beautiful plantation that recently burned down. I recounted the agony I felt in my heart as I watched the rich history it held burned asunder, the whispers it held no longer able to sweep across our ears when we visit.
I shared how my MeeMaw always used to love taking us there, detailing the old days of history and the wicker picnic basket picnic dinners that held finger sandwiches and drumsticks. It was passed down to her by my great-great-MeeMaw and so forth. To me embracing the history was a dichotomy. On one hand, we all well know the sordid institutions that were held within some plantations, yet, the people who emerged from them are families. They have stories to tell. Histories. Legacy. Voices.
And it is when I visited that plantation as an adult, I could feel the ties to the past, but the welcoming embrace of stewardship toward the future, of taking responsibility to give voice to those who were voiceless, to not let the hushes that those terrible institutions use to muzzle those beautiful people and their stories remain in place. Visiting that porch, I would enjoy looking out on those fields, imagining myself 200 years ago, listening to the whispers, the desires for freedom and equality, and knowing that I now had the power to let those stories ring free and to teach future generations these things.
But all was lost. The beautiful architecture, built by the hands of those who had their voices silenced. The songs that they would sing, those that we can still find in hymnals. Those who did hold them in esteem, but were oppressed by an Institution and history they felt more powerful than they could be.
And in all that we still have families. As we sit in a time, when an administration is renaming military bases under the names of Confederate figures and generals, teaching points of what happens when we celebrate destruction and oppression is very relevant.
Warning: The following video was created by millennials making light of a beautiful historical landmark burning down. Please warn anyone before viewing and be prepared to counsel them as the pain they feel when watching this will likely make them weep something fierce.
Then I saw this, and I just felt a terrible pain in my heart. Twenty-thousand thumbs up in approval and comments gloating and basting the marinades of derision all over the topic.
In this day and age, we need to tell each other’s stories. Silencing the past only enables giving power for the same mistakes to be made in the future. One of the most handsome men to traverse the pages of history, the mysteriously gorgeous-eyed Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, once said, “We are born on the same soil, breathe the same air, live on the same land, and why should we not be brothers and sisters?”
And that is why we mourn division, and that is why I write here today. Dear friends, please receive this wisdom: let us learn from the past and use the edifices from it to stand upon, take charge as we look at, and let our voices ring into the fields of the future, teaching the coming generations the lessons we learned, but not leaving our families, our legacies, behind.
Yours In Earnest Goodwill and Comaraderie,
Dr. William S. Foote
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