A note from the author

Last spring I spent two weeks on residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a beautiful residency that happens to be on the site of a former plantation. At that time, with the presidential election looming large in my mind – but also in the Trump signs I saw along the freeways of Virginia – I wrote this short essay about the colliding of history, and what it means to hold the past as we walk into the future.

Watching today as the president makes the trademark fascist move of choosing which press are allowed in the White House press pool, and as – with help from America and Elon Musk – Germany faces a far right government for the first time since Hitler, it feels like a pretty pertinent piece to publish now, almost a year later.

Find me on Bluesky, the non-Musk Twitter, and let me know what you think.

I am in Virginia and I can't stop thinking about slavery.

I am from the UK, a place that didn't see enslavement first hand, at least not on its home soil. It was packed away, discreetly, over there somewhere. We stayed home and sipped our cane sugar sweetened teas and spoke of the endless sun of our empire fondly. Although there exists an amendment I’ve always liked, oft attributed to American philosopher John Duncan Spaeth, that goes like this – “The sun never set on the British Empire, because even God couldn't trust the English in the dark.”

My Black father remembers my white family teaching him how to make the perfect cup of tea when he came from Jamaica to the UK to be my father – a plan that never really worked out for us. You only touch the teabag once, they told him, to take it out. And you never, ever squeeze it, because that can cause bitterness.

No, no – you let it brew for a few minutes and then lift it out, perfect.

Our dinner conversation is my favorite.

As the mother of two small girls, my conversations at dinner mostly revolve around school days, and silly jokes, and trying to bully children into eating their vegetables – so it is wonderful to share intelligent conversation about all manner of things over a meal. I am one of the few Black artists here and I wonder if they too find themselves thinking about enslavement, about the people who looked like us who were here on this property, once.

Across the road from the VCCA, on a companion site, is Sweet Briar College, a school that was a plantation, and there you can find an enslavement cabin. It is tucked behind the big house, and a new plaque (because until very recently no one even spoke of the plantation and the things that happened there; even Sweet Briar’s website is succinct) will tell you there used to be two dozen of these “homes.”

What happened to them? Did they, like the rebels, fall apart over time? Were they bulldozed, hastily, in an attempt to forget, to erase? Why does this one remain? This lone remnant, outside which they have planted flowers, painted the exterior, re-roofed.

It's almost ... sweet? It's almost... Snow White? I think of the word “defanged.”

I imagine the tourists who might see it and think, “Well that's not bad, is it? I'd live there, if I had to.” A gummy smile of enslavement, all the sharpness removed.

A photographer at VCCA is working with photographic paper, and displays his work on a studio tour. There are photos of trees, photographs taken looking up into the branches and because photographic paper exposes in sunlight as you take the picture, it gives the illusion of nighttime.

They are beautiful, and a little haunting.

I look at the branches of the trees, trees on this very property, and think about the things they hung there. Gory baubles that were eventually taken down. Nothing of the people lynched remains – but I see it still, as if I were there when it happened.

I take walks around the grounds of VCCA, which has been described to me as an “auxiliary plantation,” gifted to a daughter of the plantation owner as a wedding present.

The big house that was here burned down years ago, and now the halls of residence – the place where we sleep – lies on top of it. I look out on the landscape of trees, dense and beautiful layers of green that fade off into the distance, backed by mountains.

It's beautiful, but there's something suffocating about it.

I think of the enslaved people who – not too long ago really, in the grand scheme of things – must have occasionally paused from their labor to squint up into the humid air. They too must have seen the green. All those layers looking north, representing obstacles.

Perhaps they could get to the first copse of trees, but could they safely reach the mountains? And mountains are hard living, not enough food and bears and wolves and even worse things like men with dogs and guns. Perhaps they recognized the impossibility and went back to their work.

It's easy now to think of Harriet Tubman, of secret trails and of kind, white northerners. Easy to imagine what kind of person I would have been in those times, but the landscape drives home just how caged in they were.

Just how futile it must have felt.

But how do we live with the despicable stain of enslavement and the systems built from it that we are still tangled in today? Do we enshrine it, sweet and harmless, the last slave cabin of two dozen, a morsel of history watered down? Do we ignore it, bulldoze it, look up at 200-year-old trees and try to feel nothing?