Peel, peel, peel. Learn, learn, learn.

“Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family.”

-Kofi Annan

I never thought I would be living in the Deep South studying the history of slavery and its economic impact on the rest of our country. This journey began with a library card and an insatiable amount of curiosity. And now, two years later, I continue to peel back the layers of our country’s history, each historical fact leading me down another path with even more questions. This is the first story, my story.

I grew up in New York. Not New York City, which is what people always think when I say New York. I grew up 80 miles north of New York City where the George Washington Bridge separates the concrete city streets and honking taxi cabs from the rolling farm lands and pastures of stinky cows. I think it would be pretentious to say I grew up not seeing color because where I lived, there weren’t many people of color. Everywhere I looked, everyone looked like me. We had the occasional Latino surge during the summer, when migrant workers filled the fields of Pine Island, bent over, working long hours, harvesting rows of green onions. The few Black students in my high school were all athletic and I couldn’t score a touchdown from half court, so I didn’t really hang out with them. I never stopped to think how they must have felt being a minority in a majority white school. My dad worked for the Federal Bureau of Prisons so he saw color. He saw color every day but never talked about his job. He left for work every morning wearing a clip-on tie and a grimace, and when he came home, he nodded hello, napped on the couch for an hour before making dinner. The most culture I was exposed to was on Friday nights when my brother, sister and I watched Family Matters and hiked up our pants. Impersonating Jaleel White’s character Urkel, we would take turns shouting, “Did I do that!”

In school, I learned the basics about the Civil War and slavery like most of the rest of the country. But at the time, I didn’t think much about it. My teachers were all white. The only thing I remember from high school history is the date Dec. 7, 1941. That’s the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. Mr. Carpenter, my 11th Grade History teacher, asked it as a bonus question on every test. If you were to ask me who won the Civil War, I would have said the North, but if you asked me if the North participated in slavery, I would have said, “Absolutely not.” I didn’t think slavery ever happened in the North. I was very, very wrong.

It’s easy to simplify the history of slavery when it’s so complicated. The truth is that the whole country benefited from the economic impact of slavery. The banks lent plantation owners money to finance their land and those plantation owners listed their enslaved people as collateral. The cotton picked in the South was sent to textile mills up North. Wealthy plantation owners often vacationed in the North, bringing one or two enslaved people with them on their trips. While most people in the North may not have condoned slavery, many looked the other way when they witnessed it. Slavery was a collective choice and every state benefited from the exploitation and violence against human beings. The North and South were equally profitable and accountable for it.

That’s a hard truth to admit. But it still has to be taught.

I spent a good chunk of my late 20s and early 30s arrogant about all of the things I thought I knew. I was a journalist and reporting can do that to you. It’s a career that organically exposes you to a thousand different people and topics. Journalists know a little bit about a lot of important topics but time, limited space and deadlines often deter the needed deep dive. I worked at newspapers and magazines in rural Maryland, my home of Orange County, NY, New Orleans and eventually Baton Rouge.

In 2019, I taught a pre-GED prep class part-time to a group of adults. All of the students were Black. And they lived very different lives than I lived. I felt like I taught them a lot that first year, and it was great. Every Tuesday and Thursday morning, for three hours, I broke down the class into lessons about writing, history, math and science. Sometimes our conversations would become personal. As they learned they could trust the space we shared, they opened up and I learned about their lives. I started to understand how their circumstances shaped the trajectory of their lives and how most of the circumstances were out of their control.  I’m not sure my younger self would have listened as much as I did that year. But I’m glad I did.

In the spring of 2020, I dusted off my library card and logged onto the East Baton Rouge Parish’s digital library. We were a few weeks into the beginning of the pandemic, and I was 17 years into living in Louisiana. My husband and I were working from home. Our kids spent their mornings sitting in front of an iPad and laptop at makeshift desks doing virtual school. I had a few hours before I had to help them transition into their next lessons.

I was curious about plantations. One of the students in the pre-GED class had shared a story with the class before the pandemic. She was a bus driver and said she was afraid to get off of a charter bus she drove to one of the more touristy plantations because her friend told her that they would kidnap her and keep her there. I didn’t know much about plantation life. I lived near one when I worked in New Orleans and every fall, the plantation would host a big festival, complete with women in hoop skirts and live Cajun music. I knew enslaved people had lived there but I didn’t know the extent of what they had endured on the plantation. And the fear in my student’s voice continued to stay with me during the early days of the pandemic.

So I began researching the history of plantations in Louisiana. I started with a few names of plantation owners, which led me to census records and then to the 1850 and 1860 U.S. Federal Slave Census Schedule, complete with tally marks indicating an enslaved person. But no names. Everything was in cursive and hard to read, but I kept peeling back layers of information. Every path led me to more questions, more information and more questions on that information. I wanted to know who these people were. What were their names? Where were they from? How did they get there?

Peel, peel, peel. Learn, learn, learn.

Those documents led me to the basement of City Hall where I lifted heavy volumes of Sheriff’s Records and Probate documents, and I found even more information. I discovered names and ages of human beings being sold and willed to prominent families in Baton Rouge. I kept peeling back layers of history and discovering more and more pieces I didn’t know. I documented and created spreadsheets and visited gravesites. On a particular warm summer afternoon, I spent the day searching for the headstone of a former enslaved Civil War soldier in the Baton Rouge National Cemetery. From there, I crossed the street found the tombstone of the man who purchased him.

That field trip led me to information about the Civil War and all the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know.

Peel, peel, peel. Learn, learn, learn.

For the next year I spent any free time I had, visiting plantations across Louisiana. I drove to the Whitney Plantation and Oak Alley, neighboring plantations about an hour from Baton Rouge, that tell two incredibly different stories. I stopped and stood and felt. I learned that the levee system was built by enslaved people. The sugar shipped to the north was originally picked by enslaved people. Everywhere I looked, there was another story. Another layer. Another realization.

I voraciously looked through old online newspaper articles, dating back to the 1830s. There were ads for “Runaway Slaves” and information about “Slave Auctions.” I printed more documents, created more spreadsheets and began making a timeline. I watched numerous documentaries and cross checked the information I had obtained with second and third sources. I read first-person slave narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project. I cried when they described their fear of being separated from their parents, the shame they felt when they were ignored, the pain they felt from being whipped and tortured. I learned about legislation that was passed that made it legal to own another human being but illegal to teach that human being to read or write. I read about the dangers of sugar cane production. I found articles about the life of Confederate and Union soldiers. In six months, I had learned about 40 years of history.

But still, I wanted to know more. I wanted to understand how it all connected in the 20th and 21st centuries. It didn’t take me long to find the connection. I learned new words, like red-lining and Black Codes. I researched Jim Crow laws and voting rights. I pictured what Homer Plessy and Rosa Parks must have felt like when they took a stand, by refusing to stand, more than 60 years apart. I listened to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech over and over and over again until I started reciting it in my sleep. I studied mass incarceration rates and the history of privatizing prisons in the United States. I plotted the incarceration numbers on a bar graph, watching them slowly climb since 1865. I learned the roots of the Black Lives Matter movement. I felt like my appetite for a history I had never learned, could not be satiated.

Peel, peel, peel. Learn, learn, learn.

I studied the history of the Ku Klux Klan, looking at how its influence surged and declined in accordance with the passing or failing of reform legislation following the passing of the 13th Amendment. And with every discovery and every trail I followed, I discovered that all roads led back to slavery.

I felt like I had discovered something that was so obvious but so completely obscure at the same time.

And this realization was transformative. I began seeing things differently. I noticed disparity more. Most of the people attending the football games were white, but most of the people working at the football games were Black. When I drove on the Interstate, I could see exactly where its construction divided entire neighborhoods and those neighborhoods – once full of families and businesses – were now dilapidated, houses shuttered and vacant, businesses frozen in time, moldy and covered in graffiti. Many of the poorer neighborhoods in town sat on the same land that large plantations used to occupy. After two years of research and reading, I learned that while slavery may have ended 157 years ago, its effects continue to be felt daily.

A free library card and a hefty dose of curiosity changed my life. I hope that someone will read this and start their own journey to understanding the complete history of our country. If you share the information you learned, you may get a lot of uncomfortable silences, and lowered eyes and often polite subject changes.

It’s OK. This is uncomfortable information.

Share it anyway.

February 9, 2022