Echos of Abraham

Posted on http://www.bobcesca.com/

FOREVER
Posted by Elvis Dingeldein.

My great-great-grandmother’s great-great-grandfather was a man named Minor Wilkes, who was born in New Kent County, Virginia, in 1734. He died in 1811, and left a will bequeathing to his many children various and sundry workaday items: a feather bed; a saddle and bridle; the odd cow and sheep; a whiskey still (though he declares, oddly, that “only my wife is to have the use of it”); a few calves and hogs. But scattered throughout Minor’s will he also passed on the following less-fungible property to his wife and children:

I lend my wife two Negroes Ned & Pat during her natural life; I give to my daughter Jincey Winn one negroe man Julis to her and her heirs forever; I give to my daughter Ann Winn one negroe man Stephen; I give to my daughter Patsey Winn one Negroe Girl Clary; I give to my daughter Susanna Wilkes one Negroe boy Dick; I give to my daughter Sally Snead…one Negroe Girl Lucy to her and her heirs and assigns forever…

Forever. How crushingly apt that promise must have felt to Ned or Pat or Lucy in 1811, the Emancipation Proclamation still half a century in their futures. And with what speechless wonder would they gaze upon the figure of Barack Obama, nearly two centuries after their lives and liberties were handed down like chattel in Lunenburg County, Virginia. But where the sight of a free African-American man standing at the threshold of our country’s highest office might have stunned them to awed silence, how effortlessly fluent that property of Minor Wilkes’s would have been in the fierce rhetoric stoking the fires of the McCain campaign and its feverish legions of “real Americans.” Ned and Pat, Lucy and Stephen would have no trouble deciphering the epithets and slanders hurled at this black candidate for president, and they would understand immediately that maybe things hadn’t changed in this country so much after all.

Like many white Americans of a certain social caste with deep roots in the antebellum South, I’ve always suspected my ancestors were slaveholders. It was an unconscionable but not uncommon joke on the Country Club fairways of my hometown in southern Mississippi that “those people” -- or the singular “that one” -- ought not get too uppity, as our great-great-grandfathers probably owned theirs, and they hadn’t had a steady job since. I grew up laughing at these jokes because adults did, because I didn’t know any better, because my parents and their parents were infallible. But until very recently -- until I found Minor Wilkes and his Last Will and Testament while on a search for my family’s shameful American roots -- I had no real proof that my forebears owned human beings, and they certainly had no names.
Ned. Pat. Julis. Stephen. Clary. Dick. Lucy.

Five “Negroe” men and two women. Handed down as property, with the hogs and the cows and the feather beds, to the children of Minor Wilkes and their heirs, forever. When my great-great grandmother’s great-great grandfather signed that document on March 9, 1809, it was notarized by Messrs David, William and Jesse Abernathy and became a legal document empowering Minor’s heirs to the lawful enslavement of seven human beings. They had names, and hopes, and dreamed of change. They had mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers, scattered to the four corners of a burgeoning Republic that had failed, 33 years before, to liberate all of those equally-created amongst us. That Declaration made a promise of parity once again under siege by agents of intolerance and the subtle noose of insinuation.

That my forebears owned black men and women bears no weight on my respect for Barack Obama or my decision to vote for him. I’m a proud American and a Democrat and Senator Obama most closely represents my political and moral ideology. That my forebears owned black men and women is, however, one of the many reasons I would never vote for Senator John McCain or his craven, feckless and vapid running mate. That an American politician could so easily forfeit his sacred and hard-won honor to the altar of race-baiting and fear-mongering in pursuit of office defames the memory of those seven Negro men and women in my own ignominious personal history, and sullies the House that for them and generations of their kin would always be White. If Barack Obama represents the Better Angels of our national character, then John McCain and Sarah Palin are those shoddier souls that would have our house divided, forever unable to stand.

Ask Ned. Ask Pat. Ask Julis and Stephen and Clary. Ask Dick and Lucy. Ask them how a house divided fell upon itself, and so ground its foundations to dust that a man like Barack Obama could see it united again in Change, and Hope. Forever.