[Kelly Doyle’s essay refers both to Susanna Ashton’s USC Press collection of South Carolina slave narratives I Belong to South Carolina and to Caryl Phillips’s essay “Home” that concludes Phillips’s The Atlantic Sound. IIt was a remarkable coincidence that the very semester we were reading these texts saw the unveiling both of a statue to Denmark Vesey, leader of a planned slave insurrection in Charleston in 1822, and of a statue to Judge Waties Waring. The landscape of Charleston’s “well-forgotten history” that Kelly describes now has a couple more items to combat our selective public amnesia. SKL]

5/2/2014 12:43:46 PM

Kelly Doyle

Charleston: The Land of Historical Exploitation

To prepare for this exam I decided to take a travel through time through what I thought were major markers in the history of slavery and racism in Charleston, very much in the vein of what Caryl Phillips accomplished in his piece entitled “Home” in The Atlantic Sound.  I hope to speak to the greater issue of Charleston’s forgotten history through the many ways in which it presents itself.

When most people think about Charleston, they think of the preserved beauty of the idyllic South. They envision vast plantations, stately homes, manicured lawns, and a history of class and culture: read Gone with the Wind.  It is this vision that directly aids in Charleston being the number one tourist destination in America, a surprising fact given the dark, but well forgotten history of this city. However, even those who consider themselves residents of Charleston, myself at the beginning of this course included, are surprisingly ignorant of the embedded racism and willful ignorance of these facts that surround them.

Being a Northerner transplanted to the South and not being familiar with living among places so connected to slavery, I therefore didn’t even know to be conscious of the history of slavery around me. This course opened my eyes to the hidden history and legacy of slavery in the world, and specifically Charleston, and both how prevalent this history is and how it has been silenced and taken out of the public consciousness. It seems as if the unconscious consensus is that slavery is something that needs to be silenced; if we talk about it, it will only take longer for its effects to disappear. I strongly disagree with this point; ignoring slavery will only increase our misunderstanding of each other and history and aid in our inability to connect with the past.

I oriented my time-travel through Charleston on the downtown peninsula: Broad Street, East Bay Street, The Battery, The Citadel’s campus, and the College of Charleston’s campus. My intent was to look at these significant historical places with a focus on slavery and racism and propel myself through that history to the present. I passed an overwhelming number of tourists with maps, horse-drawn carriages carrying eager tourists, and hurried locals. My tactic for this assignment was simply to watch my surroundings and see what inspiration came to me. It was an overwhelmingly depressing experience, as I imagined. Charleston seems to exist as a mere playground for the willful neglect of truth.

The Exchange Building on East Bay and Broad Streets afforded me the most shocking and absurd view of the evolution of the history of slavery in Charleston, and it is where I will focus my energy in relation to my walk through downtown. Last Saturday, April 26, 2014, when I set out to do this assessment of “historic” downtown Charleston, there was a young woman taking her bridal portraits on the steps of the Exchange Building.  She was happily posing in her white wedding gown and seemingly ignorant of the significance of this building for the history of Charleston and slavery in the South (the similarities to the film Sankofa were not lost on me). The open air market of the Exchange Building was where the selling of slaves occurred in Charleston. I wondered if this young woman even knew this fact or if it was just a stand-in for any beautiful Charleston building in which to house a grand affair. Did it matter what she knew? Either way, her ignorance highlights what our culture has been so successful in doing: forgetting the history of slavery. In looking at the website for the Exchange Building, I found what I already knew, that our official history is complicit in glossing over the history and legacy of slavery in Charleston. The description of this building completely ignores the truth and makes it benign to make tourists and residents alike feel more comfortable so they can remain blissfully ignorant of the facts. This forgetting widens the divide between white and black and is what keeps racism alive in our country. Charleston seems to actively encourage this through the shameless promotion of the town as a tourist attraction for economic gain. Downplaying Charleston’s history of slavery, the slave trade, and overt racism is what allows tourists to come to Charleston guilt-free and unaware of a reason to be guilty despite this historical exploitation. Why would the powers-that-be risk these wonderful gains for the unsavory truth? They wouldn’t and do not.

I think the answer to the question for this final, “what does it mean to read this material/these narratives of slavery here in Charleston, SC in 2014” can only be appropriately answered by another question:  why does Charleston willfully ignore its past, its true history? While I have taken away many things from this course, this is what I have taken away from these readings and lectures in relation to Charleston. As evidenced through my walk through downtown Charleston, the support of this history is apparent, but ignored for a plethora of reasons: economic, social, and tradition to name a few.

In the history of the slave trade, 40% of slaves that entered the United States came through the port of Charleston. An important fact for both the history of Charleston as well as for slavery in America, and yet it is one that many do not know.  Susanna Ashton’s collection of slave narratives, I Belong to South Carolina, helped put into context South Carolina’s involvement in the slave trade and slavery. These narratives mention and name specific places that are intangibly tied to South Carolina and the Lowcountry and because of this I think it was an excellent first read for the class. The slave narratives that I have read in the past have served to connect me to the atrocities and horrors of slavery. However, Ashton’s collection changed the way I think about Charleston and slave narratives. Rather than these narratives being a connection to an almost incomprehensible past in terms of place, time and the horrors described, they seem to be happening in real time because I can place myself in the context of the narrative. I can envision the places the narrator speaks of and almost transport myself through time to view South Carolina or the Lowcountry in the context of slavery in a way that I had never previously been able to do with other slave narratives or the history of South Carolina. Instead of being words on a page, the narratives were able to reach me in a different way because I could envision the history alongside the present within one particular place, South Carolina.  As a start, I think it would be beneficial for these narratives to be taught in South Carolina schools specifically to move away from the willful forgetting of South Carolina’s participation in slavery and racism.  While I think the slave narratives of Olaudah Equaino and Frederick Douglass are extremely important and should be read by students, putting these narratives in a specific context to orient South Carolina students to the world around them would serve as a way to improve the willful ignorance of South Carolina history. While none of these South Carolina narratives have made it into the mainstream canon, that in no way diminishes their importance and potential for bridging the considerable gap in understanding South Carolina’s and/or Charleston’s role in slavery.

While Ashton’s collection speaks to the past of South Carolina, Caryl Phillips’ piece, “Home,” speaks to the present of South Carolina. “Home” is about Phillips’ experience in Charleston trying to find information about Judge Waties Waring, and the silences that surround his history in Charleston. Phillips’ article speaks poignantly about Waring but also the culture of Charleston, that of loss and a forgotten past. As Phillips traces his story through Charleston, Broad Street, Sullivan’s Island, Magnolia Cemetery, and the United States Customs House on East Bay Street, he is commenting on the profound absence of consciousness he encounters from both sides, white and black. I get the sense from his text that even though he is an outsider in Charleston, he is one of the few who understands the weight of the social and cultural climate here. As he describes walking through Charleston, he is constantly questioning the silences and the areas, both physical places and in our thoughts, that are closed off to Charlestonians:

The rhythms of Africa floating over Charleston. White men and women dancing behind      the United States Customs House. Somewhere in the distance, around the corner and      out of sight, Sullivan’s Island. And before Sullivan’s Island? Africa. And the vessel’s              European port of departure? Its home port? Its home? … Ghosts walking the streets of      Charleston. Ghosts dancing in the streets of Charleston. (Phillips 265)

Phillips is able to put the present in context with the past in a way that really helped me understand the duplicity of Charleston: the willfully ignored or the silenced truth, and the way individuals and groups are complicit in their willful ignorance.

What speaks to the future for the history of slavery and racism in South Carolina and Charleston are two things: the first being Glenn McConnell who has been “elected” the next president of the College of Charleston and the second being this course which is proof that there are people who care about the real history and its impact on Charleston and the world around us. The institutions in South Carolina are still actively complicit in ignoring the racist sympathies and silencing of the beliefs in what should be an important leader for the Charleston community. It is therefore extremely important that those who understand the hypocrisy in this institutionalized forgetting continue to learn and grow in the history of slavery and racism and continue to inform others, like this class has done for me.

5/2/2014 3:41:11 PM

Works Cited

Phillips, Caryl. “Home.” The Atlantic Sound. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2000. 223-65. Print.

Filed under: Jubilee Project

[Although I said that I would be publishing these essays in no particular order, this fourth one follows logically from Kadri Naanu’s, since it ends with an account of the author’s visit — with Kadri — to Fort Sumter, and both students’ dismay that none of the staff at the Visitor Center there could even direct them to Toni Morrison’s “bench by the road.”  Before that moment, however, AS has already raised a series of interesting points about her role as a New Jersey-born woman now a teacher herself  (in middle school and at a community college), and she goes on to ask whether living in Charleston gave her access to the texts we were reading or whether the texts we were reading gave her access to Charleston.  SKL]

2 May 2014

Time Stamp: 10pm (1/5) – 1am (2/5)

Dr. Lewis –

I considered submitting a handwritten letter, but decided this would be more legible. I think this letter will provide you with what it has meant for me – a white teacher – to read these texts here and now, and hopefully give you a few other “something[s] of value.”

***

Although my mother always told me stories of the racist slurs and attempts of violence against her friend A. (my “Aunt” A) while they back-packed America and Europe, I don’t think I fully understood the cultural work both my mother and my aunt decided to take on in the 70’s.  We spent many summers with my Aunt A. and cousin V., so while I knew that they weren’t my “real” family it hardly felt otherwise. And both women – which I think I’m only beginning to understand now – took on the not-so-easy work of beginning to break down barriers at the personal and familial level. My mother lived in a small South NJ town with only whites, and my Aunt A. lived in Newark with only blacks. Although I could tell you some fascinating stories about their friendship and they ways in which they taught V. and I to interact (especially with one another’s hair, which [retrospectively] I see the importance of), I think the one thing my mother stressed to me as a (white) girl was that the world was going to work for me in ways it wouldn’t for V. My mother did not quote any Peggy McIntosh or Richard Dryer as Seddon does, but I think her point was the same: check your backpack full of white privilege at the door and do not walk around with something as counter productive and self indulgent as white guilt. I was to be aware of history, act accordingly, and work to change and challenge both the culture and myself as I grew into the world.

But despite all her lectures, I am unsure of what that world was or is, and if 2014 is even close to what both of these women hoped it would be. And even if changing my own view seems within reach, challenging the world around me is much more difficult to negotiate. Just last month I walked by student waving a Confederate flag on the College of Charleston campus, his poster claiming it championed diversity. I was taught to hate that flag and be suspect of anyone who loved it. But since moving to Charleston I’ve seen that flag every day, not just on campus in support of Glenn McConnell. And even after this class I keep wondering how exactly to confront this. I do not tell people it bothers me that they have this flag on their home…or their belt buckle, which seems especially perverse since it’s typically men. In the end, I did not confront the student. I thought ignoring him might be better than giving him a chance to get the attention I perceived he wanted. And would I just be another white liberal up in arms about a flag that does not “really” concern me?

As a white public school teacher (I taught middle school) and current technical college adjunct, I do not want to be like many of the abolitionists in the text we’ve read who co-opt narratives for a cause, or the few “good white folks” in Morrison’s Beloved. If I saw myself at all in these texts – and I think it is important that I often did not see myself – it was as these white people. There is a real danger here, I think, to end up as the kind of “moderate white” Dr. King addresses in his letter from Birmingham jail – the kind of white that claims equality and justice and yet does very little to dismantle the structures of white power and privilege that provide them their lives. (Not to suggest abolitionists didn’t do productive work.) I wonder if in walking by that student I was guilty of such moderation since now (I think) I have the right language for that discussion. When I first started teaching, I felt like I did not have enough history or the right language to address race in the classroom – especially as a twenty-one-year-old white woman just outside of D.C.

So thanks to these texts, this class, and much of the news, I spent most of this term at Trident Tech attempting to confront race (and gender) in open and productive ways, continually pointing out where whiteness and maleness were assumed as “neutral” within the texts or selecting works that directly challenge that assumed cultural narrative. Although I could have done this in another state, I think having access to this course in the context of Charleston changed how I approached teaching. Simply being in Charleston, surrounded by the immediate history of slavery and engaging my students with that history, deeply affected how the class engaged with the texts and one another. I often brought news about Glenn McConnell and items from your class to mine (like the Quashie painting and the news about the ironing board). I tried to explain that it was important to me, as a person and as an educator, to be taking a class like this in Charleston as I did not grow up here and felt sorely my lack of historical knowledge. I think this ultimately helped to build a dialogue that – while academic – was less student-teacher oriented and more student-student oriented in a way that allowed for a different kind of communication than if I asserted my teacher hat.

In many of these discussions, I admitted to my lack of knowledge, explained that for three hours each Monday I was also a student having my concept of the world challenged (in ways that I believed productive). Most of the time this allowed for meaningful and challenging discussions about the past and present day Charleston, and my students expressed genuine interest in trying to work out these issues with one another, or even their own gaps in historical understanding. But, I did have one student (the only white male) tell me after classes that he was tired of reading about “women and black people;” however, on the last day he finally admitted it was not “so bad” that I constantly presented ideas that were altogether different from his own. I like to think this means I did something right, and that attending this class has better equipped me to make my classroom a productive social and political space.

But I am also very aware that all of this came from the mouth of a white person, and sometimes I honestly do not know what that signifies. I want to challenge the way the world works, but I don’t want to be the “good white folk” or the blind abolitionist. In short, I do not want to set up a classroom paradigm that reads “white savior.”  My fear is that this would be quite easy to slip into. If someone were to take a snapshot of my class, it would depict a white person in the front and mostly black people in the seats. I am not suggesting I feel guilt over this, as I agree even that is a kind of privilege, but I think it is important I recognize this dynamic

A good paper would come full circle and reference my first story, but since this is a letter, allow me to close with another narrative I think you will find valuable in light of this class.

Kadri wanted to see Ft. Moultrie and the Toni Morrison bench, and I was able to take her last Friday. (I also wanted to see the bench because even though I had seen the fort, I never remembered seeing a bench like that near the beach.) The first time I was at the visitor center, I didn’t have the kind of historical appreciation for the little bit they do have on the Middle Passage in the museum. I think in my memory, there was much more on the Middle Passage and slaves and less about white soldiers, but I concluded it was probably because this class has changed so much of my framework for Charleston. Not that that two Yanks (my husband is also from NJ) didn’t love to point out the distinctly Southern white-washed narratives around town, but now I feel more acutely aware of the poor attempts at recognition and remembrance. I don’t know what is worse: the token gesture, or none at all?

After Kadri and I spent some time discussing the above question in the museum, we asked the (white) lady where the Toni Morrison bench was located. She had no idea about the bench, or even who Toni Morrison was, so she asked two (white) men who were also working at the park where it was located. Looks of confusion all around. I’m not entirely sure why I expected this to go otherwise. I do not know which one of us was more stunned, so we simply thanked them and walked out to explore on our own. Listening to Kadri process this encounter was fascinating. I think it was a clear testament and connection to Charleston culture that, while explained in class, became very real to her as she witnessed it first hand. Whose surprise was greater that none of them knew the name Toni Morrison? I still could not tell you.

We finally found the bench, and we couldn’t decided if perhaps it was appropriate it felt sort of wayside and underwhelming or that is was sad it overlooked the oil-tinted marsh water and a broken down boat. There were also two half eaten rotting apples near the bench, but I assume those aren’t always around. What surprised me, at least, was this sense that the texts we read (particularly, I Belong to South Carolina) so affected my access and perceptions of Charleston. At first, I very much thought of it in reverse – that having moved to Charleston gave me a better access to the texts. Ultimately, I think it is a combination of both; however, I’m more inclined to say that the texts are what have given me a different view of the area I hope to call home for at least another year.

Although your exam question was quite clear – what does it mean to have read these texts in Charleston right now – the answer is rather subjective to each student and my own response could have manifested in many ways. However, I decided on the stories about campus, teaching, and Kadri because it was in all those circumstances where I felt my education do what I think an education should do – that is, affect my daily life and make me (re)consider how I function in the world. And I decided on a letter because: 1. I love writing letters, 2. I wanted a slightly less rigid form and tone, and 3. you put the word “experimental” on the assignment sheet and that seemed like an invitation. So, I hope I did this right for the test, but mostly I hope it was “something of value” as your assignment sheet could be boiled down to that one statement.

– AS

Filed under: Jubilee Project