'They never showed up to take a report'

The slave schedule

In today's NY Times (Her Family Owned Slaves. How Can She Make Amends?):

....Growing up[in Dirt Town Valley, Georgia], Ms. Marshall heard that her family had once enslaved people, but the history hit her in a visceral way 12 years ago, just after her first daughter was born. 

The baby was struggling to nurse. Ms. Marshall was nearly in tears. Her grandfather, Fred Scoggins, tried to offer some comfort.

“You know,” she recalled his saying, “you get that from the Scoggins women. Your great-great-great grandmother couldn’t produce milk, either. So they had to buy a slave.”

They called her Mammy Hester, he said, and he spun the same false narrative that some white Southerners use to soften the harsh reality: The family had treated Hester so well that after the Civil War, she remained with them.

Ms. Marshall began thinking a lot about Hester, whose milk had fed her ancestors. Then, about five years ago, she learned that the truth was even worse than she knew. 

Her mother-in-law, an amateur genealogist who works her Ancestry.com account with cheery enthusiasm, delivered the news. “Did you know your family owned slaves?” she asked, producing documents she had discovered.

“I felt like I needed a shot of whiskey,” Ms. Marshall said.

But it was easy to shove the family history aside. Her daughters were growing up. Her mother got sick with cancer and died. She lost her grandparents. “I picked out three coffins in five months,” she said.

Her father gave her the family farmhouse and three acres. When he dies, she will take control of the remaining few hundred acres.

Ms. Marshall started clearing out the house. She was sorting through her grandparents’ cast-iron pans and old furniture when she came across a dusty boot box filled with wedding announcements and newspaper clippings.

Inside was a copy of a county slave schedule from 1860 that her mother-in-law had discovered. 

This time, Ms. Marshall really studied it. Seven people were listed under the name W.D. Scoggins, her great-great-great-grandfather, identified only by their ages, genders and race. Her family had owned two men and one woman, all in their 30s, and four children. The youngest was 5 ½ months old.

“It took on a different meaning because I was going through their jewelry and their clothes,” she said. “I was like, this is mine now. The family story is mine. Am I going to stick this in a drawer and forget about it?”

....From her porch, Ms. Marshall routinely keeps an eye on the Kirbys, a [Black]couple in their late 70s who live just across the road. The relationship is a jumbled mix of shared history, familial love and unspoken pain.

When she was young, Nancy Kirby and her family were renters, living in one of the [share-cropper]shacks before Ms. Marshall’s grandparents bought that tract in the 1950s. Gene Kirby sometimes worked for Ms. Marshall’s grandfather.

There are few people around to help the Kirbys as they age....

One of the first things Ms. Marshall did when she moved to the farm was ask the Kirbys if her grandfather had left any debt to them unpaid. Mr. Kirby asked her to untangle a small land dispute. Ms. Marshall promised to pay him for the land once they get it surveyed.

Ms. Marshall can’t imagine offering them anything that they might interpret as charity. They wouldn’t even accept the gift of her grandmother’s chair....

“I would never want to do anything that would feel disrespectful,” she said.

But one afternoon last winter, Ms. Marshall walked across the road specifically to speak about racism. She brought a copy of the slave records, and arranged for Paulette Perry, 77, a cousin of Mr. Mosley’s who is something of a family historian, to join them.

At first, no one had much to say. They talked about Mr. Kirby’s tractors and who called Ms. Marshall the last time her cows got out.

Then they turned to issues of race.

“We never really had any problem with Black and white,” Mrs. Perry said.

“You just kind of knew where you stood and knew everybody,” Mrs. Kirby said.

The two laughed about how their brothers had to protect them from some white boys who threw stones as they walked home from school. How they hid under a bed, crying in fear for a half-day after someone pulled a prank and said the Ku Klux Klan was on its way.

The laughter faded. There were the hotel rooms Mr. Kirby was refused when he was on the road driving eighteen-wheelers, and the times he had to put up a fight to get paid....

And there was the death, at age 4, of the Kirbys’ son Gordon Eugene. A photo, with a lock of his hair, hangs in their den. On Sept. 10, 1967, a white teenage driver sped down the road not far from the Scoggins farm and struck him. 

Mr. Kirby saw it happen. “I was across the road holding my other baby in my arms,” he said....Mr. Kirby said he called the sheriff and the state patrol, but they never showed up to take a report....

See also Anti-Critical Race Theory Laws Are Un-American.

And ‘Rampant issues’: Black farmers are still left out at USDA.

Rob's comment:

The "un-American" trope should have been discontinued long ago by American liberals. In this country's history, nothing cruel and stupid is really "un-American."

These op-ed writers didn't use the term in their piece; it must have been an editor's decision.

Conservatives just don't want the real history of the country taught in our schools. Instead, we're supposed to pretend that it's a simple, proud narrative, from our noble slave-holding Founding Fathers to the present when racism continues to pollute our political life.

Reality check