Savannah, Day 1

The first day we met here:

That is the Georgia Historical Society. We didn't spend much time there beyond the first day because it has to be open for, you know, research and stuff on the other days of the week. Still, beginning in a nice, old, historical building with woodwork, and books on a balcony, was a good way to start.

I was a bit anxious as to how long the walk between the hotel and the historical society would take, so I started out early following, of course, a tasty breakfast of cheesy, buttery grits. Mmmmm....grits! Sadly, they don't serve shrimp on them in the morning, but they were fine just the same. I had grits nearly every morning, and boiled peanuts for dinner twice.

In fact, to digress upon the food, grits and boiled peanuts are two things that I ate regularly when I was a little girl in New Orleans. Now, I'm not big on restaurants nor am I a foodie, hence I was eating boiled peanuts for supper and free grits for breakfast. Most everyone else in our group, however, saw eating as a major component of their visit and went to eat a places like Paula Deen's ("overrated" was the general consensus) of Mrs. Wilkes' Boarding House (it received the rating of: "Oh. My. Gawd! It'll make you jump up and slap your mama!") for lunch and dinner. As much as everyone enjoyed their meals, one woman said, "I felt like I should buy a cookbook, but everything they kept bringing was fixed just like my grandmama fixes it. This is how WE cook." They enjoyed it because it was how their grandmamas or mamas cooked, and the cooking cut across color lines. We all came from the same place in culinary terms.

In any case, on Day 1, after the grits, I headed out into the steam, fogged glasses and all. Turns out the historical society wasn't quite as far as I thought, even after taking a wrong turn or two. To kill time, I went into Forsythe Park to review the readings for the day. This is Forsythe Park:
Except, I took this picture the following Saturday afternoon. On Monday morning, the place was deserted. So, I sat down and pulled out my books.

Savannah has a homeless population who leaves the shelters in the morning and hang out in the parks all day. While I sat there, one guy approached me. He didn't beg or ask for money (although it became clear that he wanted a donation as the hour progressed). He introduced himself and began to tell me his story.

"I am Ed Barnes, the Fountain Poet," he said. "I'm on a mission to save these young folks from making the wrong journey." He had been molested by his step-father as a child, and ended up homeless by 16. Then he had a revelation from God that he needed to have faith, and use his gift of writing, and keep other young men from falling off their paths. So, he had taken to writing and self-publishing his poetry in an ever-evolving volume called The Ghetto Child. "I tell God that I will work until I get $20 dollars each day," he told me. "Five dollars goes to me and the rest goes to the book. I just want to get my message out."

Yeah, I know, the money. I seriously would have given him the whole $20 just for sitting there and telling me his story and entertaining me for nearly an hour and giving me blog material. On top of that, I found him rather fascinating because he was a bit like an itinerant minister, and his poetry (good or not) reflected a deep need to communicate and create and even to be loved for himself. Then, as he told me this story, the other homeless people wandered through the park and I got this glimpse of a life that is entirely alien to me. Of course, I didn't have a dime in cash on me, so I told him that I had a blog and that I would write about him to help him get that word out. Here is his picture:

Then, I had to be on my way.

We opened our meeting with introductions. Later conversations with the Lead Historian, who was in charge of of the workshop, revealed that most people were a bit surprised that the Georgia Historical Society employed such young, hip, together people. As Elmo -- God love Elmo! -- put it, he expected the Lead Historian to be an old gray-haired man in a seer sucker suit, one of his assistants to look like Winston Churchill, and the other to look like Marian the Librarian. That was most decidedly not the case (and not a few of us -- attached or not -- had the hots for the Lead Historian, including Elmo). On top of that, they had their shit together. They anticipated everything, and when things were about to go wrong, they solved them right then and there, even when we were on the Sea Islands, without questionable cell reception.

Our first speaker was Alexander X. Byrd, who showed us how to give a lesson on the trans-Atlantic slave trade. For me, the content of his talk was not new, particularly after the seminars that I had attended last year. I found his method of teaching masterful, and will entirely rip it off to convey more efficiently and effectively the Atlantic scope of slavery, European perspectives of African regions and ethincities, and the ways that African traders manipulated Europeans there on the coast. In our discussion, he made us "bracket" our understanding of racism in the trade, and to "assume good will" of the parties involved in order to have us understand the motives of the people involved. This was very difficult, let me tell you!

Our group included many non-historians, however. One woman described his lesson as "paradigm-shifting," and another became unsettled and insisted that he was letting the white people off of the hook. Byrd responded that we can talk about power within particular transactions and in particular places, but we must also consider the context of the larger, imperial transaction. By lunch time, we all agreed that he had given us an amazing presentation not just on the trade, but also on how to help students have a more nuanced understanding of what exactly happened and why.

After lunch, our speaker was Erskine Clark, who spoke on his book The Dwelling Place. He spoke in particular about the interactions and widely varied perspectives of life on the James Colcock Jones rice plantations, and also how that "assumed good will" can go horribly awry in the face of self-interest. He said something in response to one of our cohort, which affected me as if he had hit me in the gut and which I had to ponder all week -- and even still do. The woman asking the question is a pastor in her church. Clark is a professor of religious history and a devout man himself. Jones was a devout slave owning minister. "How do you feel about him?" she asked Clark. "How can you, as a Christian, sympathize with him?"

Clark paused. "This is the white south," he said. "I love it. It is me. It is where I came from and what I am, so I can't help but love it. But, I abhor what it has done."

This was a powerful and disturbing statement for me. Clark has made some peace with his history, found some space between where he has come from and that "burden of southern history," the knowledge of its wrongness. I understand this tension. The tension runs through my family life, and it runs through my understanding of myself as a white, southern woman. I cannot, however, reconcile that abhorrence with love. I abhor what the white south -- where I come from, what I am -- and I hate it. So, I hate myself and what my white skin stands for; but I cannot escape it, and it is why I am drawn to this part of American history. To try to escape it, in fact, I would consider an act of sheer cowardice.

That was what I thought, sitting there in the Georgia Historical Society. That thought became the bass line of my week, and is, in fact, a bass line in my teaching and my research. My students look at me on the first day of class and think, "what is this white lady doing teaching me about black history?" I often wonder myself. For the rest of the week, that thought became one with the humidity, an inescapable presence against my skin.