Southern Family Reunion: Visiting the Plantation My Ancestors Owned
During my last year in college, I found out that my family had a plantation in North Carolina during the first half of the 19th century. My dad remembers visiting the family land when he was seven or eight.
On that trip, he met a black family who lived near the plantation. They gave him candy, and they introduced themselves with the last name Foushee. At that age, my dad was disturbed by the fact that there was a black family who existed because his great-grandfather had fathered children by his slaves. My dad’s 10-year-old sister sobbed on the car ride home.
Last year my grandfather, James, decided he wanted to return to North Carolina a final time to visit the sites of our family history. I’d told my dad that I was worried about actually seeing the plantation. He’d thought that as someone interested in history I would want to see the physical place and hear the story. He reminded me that when I’d visited Germany, I’d made a point of visiting a former concentration camp. My sister said, “Yeah, but our family members weren’t Nazis.”
The North Carolina reunion trip started in my great aunt’s beach house. My grandparents had come from Tucson, Ariz., and I’d traveled with my dad from the Bay Area. My Foushee grandparents are the progressive members of this family branch. In the course of his life, my grandpa abandoned the south, became a Democrat and started attending a new-age Episcopalian church. He was, as my North Carolina brethren were fond of telling me, the only one who went west and never returned.
Three days of rain kept us inside stewing in conversations about the past. One afternoon, my grandmother, dad and I were sitting around a big wooden table listening to my grandfather talk about how “Gone With The Wind” truly captured the Southern experience during Reconstruction. We were surrounded by staple beach house magazines with cover pictures of meringues and crocheted dolls. A framed poem on the kitchen wall compared Jesus to a sand dollar.
My grandfather said the Southern landowners were understandably stubborn about changing their way of life. They had something that worked for them, their slaves were fine and they resented that the North made no effort to negotiate a deal with them. I kept myself from arguing with him.
Between rain spells, I took a walk with Pete, my dad’s cousin. Pete, perpetually at ease in a faded Grace Evangelical Presbyterian T-shirt, led our family in prayer before meals. The prayers always ended with, “in Christ’s name.” Some version of that phrase served as a bookend to most of his assertions.
On the walk, we talked about the group I work with that sends books to prisons, and how Pete’s wife leads a weekly Bible study in a women’s prison. I felt more connected with him than with any other relative in North Carolina. But his faith, which included a reverence of Ben Carson and a belief that God orchestrates every aspect of his life, made him unimaginably distant.
More than anyone else at the reunion, Pete focused on celebrating that we were a family. Throughout the trip, I kept looking for the aspects of family that are associated with being blood relatives. I was thinking about pride in a family name, a sense of a shared family story or some set of inescapable values. But Pete and I shared none of these things, which made investing in our connection seem like an act of will and endurance akin to distance running.
One night, my 91-year-old great-aunt Maryanne recalled attending the wake for the relative of her childhood “mammy.” The Foushee “mammy,” who was my young grandfather’s favorite cuddler, was the daughter of a woman who’d been enslaved by my family. Maryanne told us that the wake was the first time she’d seen a dead body. She remembered the room with nothing but a body laid out on a bed. Maryanne’s daughter laughed.
“I bet she couldn’t afford a coffin, so you know, they’d drop her in the bed and have people look at her like that,” she sneered.
When the rain stopped, grandpa James decided it was time to drive to the family plantation.
Somewhere, after hours of insistent green, we pulled off the road and parked next to a white clapboard church. We were in Gulf, North Carolina, a town of 144 people. The road in front of the church was named Foushee.
Beside the church was a graveyard that, like most graveyards, displayed the differences in financial status of the people who live in a community. Most tombstones came up to my calves; those that were taller than my father belonged to the McIver family, who historically were friends with the Foushees.
Maryanne said she always knew that having the last name Foushee meant that she “was somebody.”
A white man spilling out of dirt-baked overalls wheeled over to us on a golf cart. My grandpa asked him if he knew anything about the Foushee family.
I wanted to bury our family name in an unpaved 7-Eleven parking lot.
Nights before, my grandfather told the full story about the lives of my great-great-grandparents. Grandpa said that his grandfather had a slave named Annie. One day my great-great-grandmother told Annie to clean up because her master wanted to see her. My grandfather said this part, the part that preceded rape, the way he would tell a story about the family deciding to start a laundromat.
Behind us, the coffee machine bleated. The air was heavy with the smell of roasted chicken. My dad had prepared me for this conversation. My job was not to make my grandparents see things any differently.
I was silent.
There are people moving through the world with my last name because my great-great-grandfather enslaved their ancestors. The name feels like a rock sewn into my clothes.
The man in the golf cart laughed and told us that he, too, was a Foushee. Like everyone we encountered in North Carolina, he pronounced our last name Fa-shee instead of Foo-shay. Grandpa asked him if he knew anything about Giles Foushee, my great-great grandfather.
At that moment, golf cart man became the minor character in the novel who unexpectedly says something that allows every other piece of the story to fall into place. He told us he didn’t know much about the Foushee family but that, because the world was started by one being, we are all kin.
We didn’t actually find the family land.
I was relieved.
I feel wrong describing the descendants of my great-grandfather’s non-consensual mistress as family or kin. I don’t know what it would mean for me to feel connected or to feel like I wanted to be in a kin relationship with descendants of someone my great-great-grandfather owned.
There is a tension between thinking about family (as defined by blood) as something whose value is automatic and stable, and thinking about genetic family as something whose meaning is always negotiable.
Throughout the visit, I couldn’t stop thinking about how my own circumstances were shaped by my grandparents and previous generations.
The moment I remember most clearly from the North Carolina trip happened in the car with Pete, who drove me to Baltimore after the reunion.
He asked me what I’d thought about the trip, and about finding out that I had African-American kin. Up until that point, I’d held my tongue as he’d talked about true biblical adherence and the revolting trend of homosexuality in America.
I tried to say that I feel like white people in my generation rarely confront the fact that we continue benefiting from a system that originated in slavery. I didn’t say directly how this made me feel about having African-American kin. But I can’t separate having blood relatives who were enslaved from acknowledging how I have benefited from slavery.
He said, without pause, “Well you know people are still enslaved by drugs, by alcohol.”
I wanted to get out of the car. On a family trip, that is not possible.
Thanks for reading. Here are a few of my other stories on race, gender and culture.
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