After the Whitney

It was 2018 when I went for the first time to the Whitney Plantation with my wife and daughter. It was a powerful experience to be walking the grounds where the atrocities sanctioned by our government actually happened, giving a new weight to the stories I had read. The second time I went with my 2019 Jazz Course was even more powerful, as we were led by an expert guide who knew the surface stories, the underneath stories and the greater narrative that drove them all. He engaged with us, asked us questions and time and time again, parted the curtain to reveal Uncle Sam pulling all the levers that created and sustained the horrors. I remember the silence in the car on the way back, so thick and dense with the tangible heaviness of letting the grief soak in.

 

So now in 2024, we prepared the Jazz Class as much as one could to expect something difficult and may I confess, I was disappointed it didn’t quite happen. Some chose the self-guided audio tour which was necessarily informative but distant. Those who went with the guide—myself included— heard a young woman rushing through her script without engaging us or even being prepared to answer simple questions off-script. She was emotionally detached, so so were we. I’m still glad we went and I’ll find out tomorrow how people experienced it, but it was far from what I hoped for. 

 

Still I came away with my own takeaways, found a promising book in the bookstore filled with many promising books, bought a T-shirt that I will wear in a workshop sometime as a conversation starter and came a half-an-inch closer to articulating what I think needs to be done to move towards genuine healing. But my surprising first takeaway was this:

 

Since the expected deep sorrow wasn’t coming, I focused on the trees and the water and the birds and felt something unexpected. The trauma of centuries of injustice concentrated in these few acres is huge. Perhaps it can never be wholly healed. But walking the grounds I imagined these ungrieved wandering ghosts, whose stories were never told, whose murderous deaths were never acknowledged with an apology, who witnessed from the other world the “white devils” continued to cause their unceasing mischief, I imagined them all now noticing all sorts of people walking these grounds feeling the sorrow and outrage of what happened, feeling the pain those enslaved, raped, beaten and murdered endured, reading their names on their plaques. I could feel how that might make a difference. How that birdsong might be announcing some genuine relief and release from all those long years of restlessness, unable to “rest in peace” because too few knew them or missed them or grieved them as they deserved, finally coming to rest. 

This is not a theory designed to make me feel better as someone with white (though technically Jewish) ancestry, but a felt intuition coming from the heart, in conversation with live oak trees and the songbirds. 

 

More coming up about what this might mean.