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Virtue, you preached, came from being beaten. Redemption from blood.
A person moved through the world with no knowledge and no assurances, only hope and faith to guide them
through the belief they were making the right decisions.
They were invisible men. Numbers and not names. They had lost the privilege of being seen, existing on the periphery from the rest of the world, lost and forgotten.
what Mira learned that day was how easy it was to let someone convince you of their truth instead of believing in your own.
To believe, one must care, and who’s to say anyone ever cared?
Choosing to end themselves rather than go back, because at least death would be at their own hand, and there was freedom in that choice, and they would be free.
Take a tour of the Woodsman house and afterward have an authentic antebellum dinner, only $89.99, a caption read. Want to have some quality time? Take the kids to our playroom and have houseworkers Louisa and Mary watch them for the evening,
Ew
Witness reenactments of field-workers showing the tobacco-picking process! Slave driver Tom will take a break from his work to explain how he keeps his crew in line!
What the fuck
None of the signs had names of any of the people who’d lived and died on the grounds. It had all been erased.
Who could look at this and not see it for what it was? To not see the slave system the cabin represented? Instead of a slave cabin they saw a modest-looking room they could have lived in and ignored the truth. None of them wanted to see anything else because the narrative that had been created affirmed whatever falsehoods people wanted to believe.
This was all a performance dressed up as a history lesson, and everyone who’d bought a ticket was here to play a part. She knew where she was supposed to belong, and it made her want to escape it.
To marvel at the twisted limbs of the surrounding trees, their branches climbing toward the sky, toward their heaven, and not see lynching trees.
She felt shame for participating, for coming and being complicit. She felt shame for the circumstances that had led to a place like this existing. Shame for the realization that even after all these years of progress, this was where we’d come, to this corrupted version of the past we all thought we’d left behind.
“Okay, where are you?”
Why would you interact with mysterious sounds
She’d lived in the false promise that because she was invisible, she’d be spared, and while she knew now this was a lie, she stayed crouched to the ground, hidden from view, too afraid of any other choice beyond watching as they worked.
They’d always known their weapons were their bodies.
The path to resistance was through what their bodies could do, and so they found ways to refuse at every turn.
It had not been lost on her that most of these jobs were service ones, and most of the people who’d taken them were black. And the visitors were mostly white; it was all haunting in its history.
This was alrrady established. Why is it repeated?
They think they’re absolved from the past, but it’s their past too. All our lives have been shaped by it, but they’re the ones who’ve ignored how, even though the past has made them who they are. They need to face what’s been done and we need to let them. And you know if the situation was reversed they’d leave us to die. You know it. You just don’t want to see it.”
“You’ve always done nothing when it needed to matter. Why can’t you do it now?”
BURN!
No one else was going to save them. They were the ones. Always had been and always would be. They were the ones who must save themselves.
No, it was always here. What she saw before her could have been this year or last, ten years ago or a hundred. The scene was the same, the story the same, and she knew its ending.
Above, the moon shone amidst the cloudless night sky, a moon that had once cast its light on the backs of her ancestors as they escaped for home, and she found a comfort in the thought. The same moon that had guided them would see her through.
