Sunday Rewind: When Plantations Burn, Black Folks Cheer. A short history.

Recently, the Nottoway Plantation in White Castle, LA burned to the ground. It was the largest remaining pre-Civil War mansion in the South and had been turned into a poplar historical site and wedding venue.

When the news broke that Nottoway had burned, Black people cheered.

In a resurfaced video, a tour guide at Notoway can be heard romanticizing the benevolence of the ENSLAVER who once owned the plantation, John Hampden Randolph.

In the video, she shares all of the “good” things he did for the human beings he owned. To be honest, the cheeriness and intentionally-placed inflections in her voice turned my stomach. What I heard in her words weren’t just descriptions, they were arguments. She was making the case that:

“slavery wasn’t that bad — at least not here.”

“this plantation’s master was one of the good ones.”

“see! he even let the n*ggers pay for their own food!”

When I saw that a famous Southern plantation had burned to the ground, my first thought was, “I wonder what the people enslaved there might think about this?”

Over the years, I’ve come to enjoy reading the oral histories of the formerly enslaved. There is often so much poetry and subtle wisdom packed into their words! As a Black man from the South, there is something deeply familiar in the way that their musings, expressions and flat honesty jump off of the page and knock around inside my head.

I wanted to hear from the ancestors, and I knew exactly where to look to get answers.

In late 1864, Union General William T. Sherman made his famous “March to the Sea” from Atlanta to Savannah, GA. Notably, Gen. Sherman and his troops burned almost everything on their route to the ground; a city, towns, plantation mansions, cotton gins, railroads, crops and bridges along the way were all destroyed. Anything that could help the Confederacy gain traction or shelter was lit on fire.

Sherman’s “scorched earth” approach to warfare defined post-war Georgia. The City of Atlanta’s official seal, for example, prominently displays the word “Resurgens” (‘rising again’ in Latin) with a phoenix taking flight from fire. The residents of Madison, GA pride themselves on their city escaping the fire because, allegedly, Sherman or one of his men thought the city was too beautiful to burn.

An often overlooked element of Sherman’s march is the fact that it also acted as a mass-emancipation event. Historians chronicle that thousands of enslaved Black people across Georgia, joined, guided, and assisted Sherman’s Union soldiers as they trekked across the state.

But there’s one INSANE story from Noah Andre Trudeau’s Southern Storm that you should know about!

During Sherman’s march, one of his squads — the 102nd Infantry of Illinois — pulled up on a plantation in Georgia where they found a large mound of harvested cotton set ablaze. Next to the cotton they found an elderly Black man sitting back, watching it all burn.

It is important to note that these troops were on the front lines of the war, so they were kind of confused about who could have done this. Naturally, someone wondered aloud, “Who started this blaze?” and the Black man answered, “You Yankees did it, and I’m glad of it—it would never have done me no good [anyway].”

Plantations like Nottoway, and the one this elderly Black man was enslaved on, were the physical manifestation of the worst possible things that could happen to a human being, so I’m choosing to believe that the elderly Black man started that fire himself — one of the many acts of Black defiance tucked away in the margins of history. And who knows, maybe the ghosts of Nottoway started that fire, too.

I won my second Webby Award last month! A few weeks back, I asked you all to vote for me and you showed up big time! 🙌🏾

Thank you for all of the support, kind words, and for being on this journey with me. Here are a couple of pics of me from the award ceremony this year.