How Do I Find Out if My Family Owned Slaves
Her Family Owned Slaves. How Can She Make Amends?
Stacie Marshall, who inherited a Georgia farm, is trying on a small scale to address a generations-old wrong that still bedevils the nation.
Stacie Marshall, who has inherited a farm in the northwest corner of Georgia, learned that her ancestors kept enslaved people. She is trying to bring that history to low-cal and assist heal her community. Credit... Nydia Blas for The New York Times
DIRT Town VALLEY, Ga. — Just before people started to accept the pandemic seriously, Stacie Marshall slipped into the back of a briefing room in Athens, Ga., and joined two dozen Black farmers in a marketing seminar called "Collards Aren't the New Kale."
She stood out, and non just considering she was one of simply two white people in the room. Ms. Marshall, 41, still had the long blond pilus and skilful looks that won her the Miss Chattooga County title in 1998. The win came with scholarship money that got her to a tiny Baptist college and a life abroad from the modest Appalachian valley where her family has farmed for more than 200 years.
Leading the seminar was Matthew Raiford, 53, a tall, magnetic Gullah Geechee chef and organic farmer who works the littoral Georgia country his forebears secured a decade afterwards they were emancipated from slavery.
He asked if there were questions. Ms. Marshall raised her mitt, ignored the knot in her stomach and told her story: She was in line to inherit 300 acres, which would brand her the first woman in her family to own a farm. She had big plans for the fading commercial cattle operation and its overgrown fields. She would call it Mountain Mama Farms, and sell enough grass-fed beef and handmade products like goat'due south milk soap to aid support her husband and their three daughters.
Only she had discovered a terrible matter.
"My family owned vii people," Ms. Marshall said. She wanted to know how to brand information technology right.
Mr. Raiford was every bit surprised equally anyone in the room. "Those older guys take probably never heard that from a white lady in their entire lives," he recalled.
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For almost three years now, with the fervor of the newly converted, Ms. Marshall has been on a quest that from the outside may seem quixotic and fifty-fifty naïve. She is diving into her family unit's past and trying to bit away at racism in the Deep South, where every white family unit with roots hither benefited from slavery and almost every Black family had enslaved ancestors.
"I don't have a lot of money, but I have belongings," she said during a walk on her farm last winter. "How am I going to apply that for the greater expert, and non in like a paying-penance sort of mode only in an it'south-merely-the-right-thing-to-practise kind of way?"
It's non easy finding anyone in this farming community of 26,000 she can talk to nearly white privilege, critical race theory or renewed calls for federal reparations. She tin can't even become her cousins to stop flying the Confederate flag. It's nearly heritage, not hate, they tell her.
Farming, family and unspoken bigotry are braided together so tightly hither that she tin't untwist them. She is aware that she sometimes stumbles across the line between doing antiracism work and playing the white savior, but she finds the history unavoidable.
"I tin can't just go feed my cows and not be reminded of it," she said.
Hers is the national soul-searching writ small: Should the descendants of people who kept others enslaved be held responsible for that wrong? What can they do to make things right? And what will information technology price?
Later on the seminar, the farmers offered some ideas: She could set up an internship for young Black farmers, letting them piece of work her land and keep the profit. Peradventure her Black neighbors wanted preservation piece of work washed on their church cemetery.
Or maybe — and this is where the word gets complicated — she should give some state or coin from the auction of it to descendants of the Black people who had helped her family build wealth, either as enslaved people in the 1800s or, later, equally sharecroppers who lived in 2 small-scale shacks on her state.
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"She is deep in Confederate state trying to practise this work," Mr. Raiford said when he went to visit her farm this spring. If she tin figure it out, he said, Chattooga County could be a template for small communities all over the Due south.
As the just young woman running a farm in the valley, Ms. Marshall already feels similar a curiosity. She expects that people will plow on her for telling the community'due south story through the lens of slavery. Y'all can't really hide from your neighbors here, which is the all-time and the worst thing nearly tight communities. Not long ago, she ended up in a CrossFit grade with Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican this region elected to Congress in 2020.
Ms. Marshall hasn't told most of her extended family unit what she is doing. "I will get some hell," she said. "There are people in this community that are totally going to turn when I beginning telling these things."
At the same time, she is protective of her corner of the S.
"I don't desire my family to be painted out as a bunch of white, racist rednecks," she said. "God, I am proud of every foursquare inch of this place — except for this."
Raised in the Faith
The rolling farmland in this northwest corner of Georgia has never lent itself to the plantation agronomics that in one case dominated other parts of the South. Today, about 300 small farms raise cattle and broiler chickens, and grow soybeans and hay.
Few make much money. The poverty rate has edged shut to double the nation'due south. Ms. Marshall, who is on the board of the local homeless shelter, sees people in need all around her. "It's really hard for people in Chattooga Canton to empathise white privilege considering they're like, 'Nosotros're barely getting by,'" she said.
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Over the years, her father and grandfather drove trucks or took shifts at the cotton mill to go on the farm running. At 68, her male parent, Steve Scoggins, yet works 3 p.grand. to midnight as a hospital maintenance homo.
Only x percent of the population is Blackness, a number that historians estimate was probably five times every bit high before the Civil War, and began to drop afterward Emancipation and equally African Americans moved north to escape the Jim Crow Southward.
About residents are evangelical Christians. It's such rich Trump country that the former president held one of his concluding campaign rallies v miles from Ms. Marshall'due south farmhouse. "Some good friends were at those rallies," she said.
Her father, who lives down the road, is as proud of his farm daughter equally a man could exist. He unabashedly supports her work against racism, only at the Dirt Boondocks Deli, he sometimes stays quiet when an offensive comment passes among his friends. All in all, he'd rather discuss his tractor collection and the fried-egg sandwiches his daughter makes him every morn for breakfast.
He as well supports Mr. Trump, and doesn't understand why in the world she started voting for Democrats.
In some ways, Ms. Marshall doesn't either. Her babyhood was steeped in conservative rural politics and the power of the evangelical church building. She left home to attend Truett McConnell Academy, a Baptist schoolhouse near the Tennessee edge, on a scholarship for students with ambitions to get a government minister or marry 1.
At that place she met Jeremy Marshall, a production of the Atlanta suburbs who was studying for the ministry. They married when both were 21, and went on to earn principal's degrees — hers in instruction, at the University of Georgia, and his in counseling.
They lived and worked for a decade at Berry College, a liberal arts school in northwest Georgia where they helped treat 400 evangelical students in a special plan paid for by the bourgeois WinShape Foundation. Simply terminal year, as the coronavirus striking, they decided information technology was time to move to the family farmhouse she had inherited.
Epitome
Between the pandemic and trying to go her artillery around how to run a farm, Ms. Marshall hasn't really reconnected with the big tangle of extended family and friends she grew up with. She'south a different person from the ane who left 20 years ago. Many things she accepted as gospel back then seem less clear now.
"Feminist was a dingy word growing upward in this area," she said. "And I began to realize, well, damn it, I think I am one. Some things just didn't fix correct with me anymore."
She is bracing for the family's thwarting.
"I don't recollect I take a greater moral compass or am more evolved than my family unit members," she said. "We all grew up beingness taught, 'Don't air your family unit's dirty laundry.' I gauge I am putting the laundry on the line."
'This Is Mine Now'
Growing upwardly, Ms. Marshall heard that her family had in one case enslaved people, only the history hitting her in a visceral way 12 years ago, simply after her first daughter was built-in. The baby was struggling to nurse. Ms. Marshall was nearly in tears. Her granddaddy, Fred Scoggins, tried to offer some comfort.
"You lot know," she recalled his proverb, "you go that from the Scoggins women. Your peachy-bully-great grandmother couldn't produce milk, either. Then they had to purchase a slave."
They called her Mammy Hester, he said, and he spun the aforementioned simulated narrative that some white Southerners employ to soften the harsh reality: The family had treated Hester then 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, most five years ago, she learned that the truth was even worse than she knew. Her mother-in-law, an apprentice genealogist who works her Ancestry.com account with cheery enthusiasm, delivered the news. "Did you know your family unit owned slaves?" she asked, producing documents she had discovered.
"I felt like I needed a shot of whiskey," Ms. Marshall said.
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Just information technology was piece of cake to shove the family history aside. Her daughters were growing upwardly. Her mother got ill with cancer and died. She lost her grandparents. "I picked out three coffins in five months," she said.
Her begetter gave her the family unit farmhouse and three acres. When he dies, she will take control of the remaining few hundred acres.
Ms. Marshall started clearing out the business firm. She was sorting through her grandparents' cast-iron pans and old piece of 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 actually studied information technology. Seven people were listed under the name W.D. Scoggins, her great-great-great-grandfather, identified but by their ages, genders and race. Her family had owned two men and one woman, all in their 30s, and 4 children. The youngest was 5 ½ months one-time.
"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 nearly it?"
She thought most her daughters. "I knew I needed to reframe this story for them and for the farm and for this community," she said.
Prototype
W.D. Scoggins had some other unsettling legacy. He acquired the family unit'due south offset tract of land, a mile or so from her farm, in an 1833 lottery that gave Creek and Cherokee land to white people. Key portions of the Trail of Tears start not far from her valley.
"So you figure out that y'all got stolen country that had the enslaved put on it, and your family benefited off that for a lot of years," said Mr. Raiford, the Gullah Geechee farmer who has become her friend and adviser. "At present you have to have 2 different conversations. It gets complicated real fast."
Asking the Preacher
If anyone in the valley could help Ms. Marshall begin her self-styled healing project, it was Melvin Mosley. He had been the assistant principal at her high school. He is also her father's best friend.
The two men met equally boys, when Mr. Mosley's uncle lived in one of the shacks on the Scoggins subcontract and worked for Ms. Marshall's granddaddy. Mr. Scoggins went to the white school, Mr. Mosley the Black i. Every book at Mr. Mosley'south school was a hand-me-down from the white school, but the boys didn't understand that their educations were different until they started comparison notes.
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"1 solar day he asks me, 'Did you lot choose white milk or chocolate milk today?'" Mr. Mosley said. "Man, we didn't have a choice. We didn't have chocolate milk. I didn't fifty-fifty know what a spit wad was considering we never got straws."
Chattooga County integrated its schools in 1966, when the boys were in seventh grade. In interviews, the men talked about how unfair segregation was, but their perspectives on the past are greatly different.
Both recalled joining the adults as they baled hay for Mr. Scoggins's male parent, and breaking for midday dinner. The Black workers ate outdoors. The white workers went into the firm.
"My mama would call them to come up in the house, only they said, 'No, ma'am,' and stayed out by that wall there," Mr. Scoggins said. "They were humble."
To Mr. Mosley, eating outside wasn't about humility. "Nosotros did what we did because that'south what you lot did," he said. "That was a sign of the times."
For decades, he taught in public schools and prisons. At 67, he is a preacher, and lives with his married woman, Betty, on l acres well-nigh Ms. Marshall's farm.
On a summer 24-hour interval in 2019, Ms. Marshall saturday in their one thousand and told them she wanted to kickoff sharing the whole, hard story of Dirt Town Valley, and make some kind of amends. She asked if she was on the right path.
Mr. Mosley always considered her a vivid daughter who should go to college — as he told her after sending her to detention for kissing a boy in the schoolhouse mechanic shop. His advice now was simple.
"Permit's say that's the water nether the bridge," he said. "You lot didn't exercise anything wrong." All she needed to do was to pour as much love on their valley equally she could.
"In all of our families, Black or white, there are some generational things that are up to usa to suspension," he told her. "And when nosotros break it, it is broken forever."
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He stood and took her hand. Mrs. Mosley joined them in a prayer circle. "Father in heaven," he prayed, "we enquire you but to continue to give her the courage and the desire to intermission the concatenation of racism, Lord."
On another visit, just earlier Christmas, Ms. Marshall sat with the couple at their dining room tabular array eating vanilla-scented tea cakes. She had brought a re-create of the slave records, and was seeking their advice on whether she should recoup Hester's descendants if she ever found them.
"People aren't looking for a handout," Mrs. Mosley told her. "Nosotros just want justice in all of the things that are going on. It's difficult to explain information technology to a white person, but if yous're a Blackness person you understand."
Gravestones With No Names
With the slave documents in hand, Ms. Marshall set out to delve deeper, trying to track downward Hester'southward descendants and to share what she had learned.
She began telling her story in lectures at Berry College. After George Floyd was murdered last year, she decided to bring students to the farm. The Mosleys and other Black neighbors and farmers sometimes come, sharing a meal and leading a word about race.
The visits include a somber walk out to the remains of the two shacks. No one knows exactly when they were built, or when the generations of people who lived in them started calling themselves renters instead of tenant farmers or sharecroppers.
"We always called it sharecropping," Mr. Mosley said. "What that means is that when you were living on a farm like that, you couldn't object to things considering you'd observe yourself homeless."
Early on, Ms. Marshall took some students to make clean upwards a nearby cemetery where a heritage group plants Amalgamated flags near the gravestones of Civil State of war soldiers. Scattered among the family plots are apparently stones marking the graves of the enslaved. At that place are no names on them.
The simply name Ms. Marshall has to work with is Hester'south. Finding her descendants seems all but impossible. The kickoff census taken afterward the Ceremonious War showed that Hester had go a landowner in Chattooga County, and that one of her daughters had married a man named Perry. Ms. Marshall recently establish what she thinks is his grave in a cemetery next to the historically Black church in Dirt Town Valley.
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There are dozens of Black people named Perry in the county, simply few other clues to their lineage. For many Blackness families in America, simply the scarcest genealogical records remain.
"I think this is really where white privilege slaps us in the face," Ms. Marshall said. "The context for my own family is that I can trace back and find names on historical documents."
She has pulled threads where she can, joining the county historical society and studying the genealogical work done by a distant Scoggins relative.
But genealogy hunts can be expensive and time-consuming. Ms. Marshall's days are already filled. Calves get stuck in the mud and take to be rescued. Goats need to be milked. There are children to enhance.
Even if Ms. Marshall tracked downward some of Hester'southward relatives, what and so? If she decided to hand over some land, she would have to find people who want to farm, or could at least shoulder the revenue enhancement burden. If she sold some of the land and gave away that cash, how to decide who should get it and how much to give?
Mr. Marshall is a full partner in his wife's antiracist piece of work, but he likens financial reparations to carbon offsets but for guilt-racked white people.
"Information technology's like, 'I'm not going to change my life, but tell me a dollar amount that would absolve me of guilt,'" he said. "That kind of transaction, whether it'south nigh the environment or racial inequality, is non going to create change."
Some leading thinkers on formal reparations, in which the federal government would give money to Black descendants of the enslaved to aid bridge the racial wealth gap and equally a form of healing, say individuals like Ms. Marshall should use their time and money to push button Congress to act.
Mary Frances Berry, the former chairwoman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, has chosen on the federal authorities to start a reparations Superfund. She said the small sum that Ms. Marshall could pay is no substitute for a government plan, and would only impoverish her. It would not be truly reparative, and could even be unsafe.
"The risk I am talking near is not merely about people shunning her, but the risk of people doing violence to her or her family," Dr. Berry said. "Some people may take it upon themselves to shut her up."
A Visit With the Kirbys
From her porch, Ms. Marshall routinely keeps an eye on the Kirbys, a couple in their late 70s who live merely across the route. The relationship is a jumbled mix of shared history, familial dearest and unspoken pain.
When she was immature, Nancy Kirby and her family unit were renters, living in ane of the shacks earlier Ms. Marshall'southward grandparents bought that tract in the 1950s. Gene Kirby sometimes worked for Ms. Marshall's grandfather.
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There are few people around to help the Kirbys as they age. A son lives in Ohio, but seldom comes home. A nearby niece pitches in, just tin can do just so much.
Ms. Marshall fills the role a daughter-in-law might. On holidays, she and her daughters evangelize country ham and breakfast casseroles. When her mother died, Ms. Marshall stumbled into their den and grieved, her head in Ms. Kirby'due south lap.
Ane of the start things Ms. Marshall did when she moved to the subcontract was ask the Kirbys if her grandfather had left whatsoever debt to them unpaid. Mr. Kirby asked her to untangle a small state dispute. Ms. Marshall promised to pay him for the land one time they go it surveyed.
Ms. Marshall can't imagine offering them anything that they might interpret as charity. They wouldn't even accept the souvenir of her grandmother's chair. Raising issues of reparations and reconciliation with them makes her uncomfortable.
"I would never want to practice 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 bundled for Paulette Perry, 77, a cousin of Mr. Mosley's who is something of a family historian, to join them.
At commencement, no one had much to say. They talked nigh 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 ii laughed well-nigh 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 one-half-day later 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 upwards a fight to become paid.
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Prototype
And there was the death, at age iv, 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 information technology happen. "I was across the route belongings my other baby in my arms," he said.
The teenager's mother denied that her son was the driver. Mr. Kirby said he chosen the sheriff and the state patrol, but they never showed up to take a report.
Standing on the Kirbys' porch, Ms. Marshall said her goodbyes and headed back beyond the route. The path to reconciliation still wasn't articulate.
"These are people that I love dearly," she said. "How do I put a number on what they have lived through?"
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/04/dining/georgia-farm-slaves.html
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