They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred. It is a pride that says, “Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach.” It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned with. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children. Voluntary. To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof.
My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South. Born and raised in Nashville Tennessee, Harvard graduate Caroline Randall Williams is an award-winning poet, young adult novelist, and cookbook author as well as an activist, public intellectual, performance artist, and scholar.
If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument.
July 3, 2020 The statue of confederate general Stonewall Jackson was removed on July 1, 2020, in Richmond, Va. The dream version of the Old South never existed.
A minority of fathers treated these children well, sometimes providing educational or career opportunities, or manumitting them. Black America’s constant whining and complaining, its excessive chauvinism and racial animosities have a lot to do with the violence and crimes perpetrated by its lower class representatives.
It’s long past time to … Such children were born into slavery, through an American legal doctrine known as partus sequitur ventrem. Whiteness. A monument-worthy memory.
Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. The New York Times; Last edited on 9 October 2020, at 04:11. By Caroline Randall Williams Ms. Williams is a poet. I don’t just come from the South. My Body Is a Confederate Monument", Plantation complexes in the Southern United States, Slave health on plantations in the United States, Treatment of the enslaved in the United States, Historically black colleges and universities, Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC), Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Black players in professional American football, History of African Americans in the Canadian Football League, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Children_of_the_plantation&oldid=982598897, Short description with empty Wikidata description, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 9 October 2020, at 04:11.
Caroline Randall Williams (@caroranwill) is the author of “Lucy Negro, Redux” and “Soul Food Love,” and a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University.
No. You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand.
I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. I do my best teaching and writing here. This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one.
I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.
My skin is a monument. Named by Southern Living as “One of the 50 People changing the South,” the Cave Canem fellow has been published and featured in multiple journals, essay collections and news outlets, including The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, CherryBombe, Garden and Gun, Essence and the New York Times.
Born and raised in Nashville Tennessee, Harvard graduate Caroline Randall Williams is an award-winning poet, young adult novelist, and cookbook author as well as an activist, public intellectual, performance artist, and scholar. And here I’m called to say that there is much about the South that is precious to me.
I am a great-great-granddaughter.
My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Here are some tips.
Caroline Randall Williams (@caroranwill) is the author of “Lucy Negro, Redux” and “Soul Food Love,” and a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University. The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence, to be bad actors. Content is available under CC BY-SA 3.0 unless otherwise noted.