Reflections from the South
Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground.
Genesis 4:10
Scripture teaches us that the earth beneath our feet carries memories of violence. One doesn't need to travel very far in the South to find those memories.
Enslaved children tossed and shaped the bricks that make up much of South Carolina's pre-Emancipation buildings. It was a labor-intensive process for anyone, let alone a small child to be doing. At the McLeod plantation, I learned that if you run your fingers along the surface of many buildings in Charleston, you'll find small finger-shaped divots. These imperfections and blemishes are the leftover marks of the enslaved children tossing bricks back-and-forth to dry them out and ready them for the kiln.
When I touched my fingers to the little grooves, I heard blood crying out.
Unmarked concrete blocks still stand outside of wealthy homes in Charleston. If you take a tour of untold Charleston history with Franklin of Frankly Charleston, you'll learn that these were auction blocks for enslaved African American people forcibly sent across the Atlantic. No monument or plaque commemorates what took place here. You just need to know what to look for. Once you know, you can't unsee what's there.
As I stared at the concrete block standing just a foot above the ground, I heard blood crying out to me from the ground.
Robersina Gathers-Faneite grew up in poverty as one of the last renters renting from the McLeod Plantation. She left the Plantation in the late 1960s and swore never to return. She became a nurse through her persistence and built a life for herself making house calls until one day, she answered a call at the plantation she grew up in.
She was so appalled by the conditions she saw, she spent her nursing salary paying rent for and renovating the appalling plantation cabins she grew up in for the people who still lived there. She painted one of the cabin windows like they were stained glass and converted it into a chapel. Toward the ceiling, on the wall, she painted:
ROMANS. 8:16... CHILDREN OF GOD. MISSION MATTHEW 28:19-20
WE WELCOME YOU, ROMANS 15:7
AND WE LOVE YOU, 1 JOHN 4:7-11
THE LORD BLESS YOU, AND KEEP YOU: NUMBERS.6:24
What strength and determination must you have to turn the very location of the unspeakable horror and trauma you and countless others faced into a holy site? Robersina shined the light of the Lord in a forgotten place, trying to give dignity to her own people and community. I felt the divine in this space with more clarity and conviction than I've ever felt in any cavernous chapel. The redemptive presence of the Lord felt so palpable that I fell to my knees.
As an urban professional of the American coasts, I find myself in a socioeconomic class that much prefers jetsetting to London instead of Louisiana, but the most moving experiences I've had in my life of travels have been in the American South. The South is an ongoing battle of historiography with skirmish-after-skirmish over narrative. This richness is flattened into a single story by those who haven't visited and that is fundamentally unfair. Just as one can find no shortage of stories of oppression, patriarchy and violence in the South, if one opens one's eyes, one can find stories of redemption, grit and persistence.