The House That Cotton Built

The House That Cotton Built

 

There’s stillness: the whispers of trees and soft winds that make them heard. They’re talking to us; we’ve come to listen. Plantations are vast, empty, filled with invisible souls and their all-too-audible cries; these acres are not that. Off a gravel road and tucked behind a rickety fence is our land: tall pale grass, trees touching the sky, whispers—calling to us. It was my grandfather’s father’s land. He scrimped and saved for his last decades to own something in this country. He lived and saw on that land: the beauty, the violence, the desperation. What does the world look like when it’s just land, life, and death? He’s in the whispers, talking to us now, reminding us of what we feel: our history, here. It’s heavy.

I was young the last time I went, too young to put meaning to the weight of our trip. I guess the more precise thing is to say that, save for my hugs from Nana and Pop-Pop, I hated Texas trips. In Texas, everything is too flat, too tan and grey. I was a city girl; visiting the country felt like stepping backward in time. Nana and Pop-Pop’s lazy town of Van Alstyne boasted a dry cleaner, a Sonic, and a gas station down the road from the maze of houses we were in the midst of. I wondered how we’d escape when the town realized we were hiding amongst them.

Every few visits, Nana would decide it was time to check on the land. We would load up in the car: Pop-Pop would turn on his SirusXM stories, Nana would reminisce aloud over them, I would fall asleep in my mom’s arms watching the dull concrete of winding highways, the cows grazing in overgrown fields, the sky that went on for too long. When we got to our land, we would stand for a few minutes. The realization that real life happened here never dawned on me properly: This is where Clif Cotton grew up, where he brought Paula Pillars when she needed a family, where he picked her cotton years before they would build a life together; where my Pop-Pop learned to make waffles and love Westerns; where his father told him he would pass down all he owned and that all he owned was to pass down. I wonder if those eighty acres are what feel most like home for them. For me, they just feel.

*

America’s story is one of land, capitalism, and slavery. Snatched from the shores of a land we called mother, my ancestors’ bare feet touched down on soil not their own and they became the beginnings of severed stories. They left Africa human and they arrived without agency, without control: they arrived labor machines. Families and tribes mangled, treasured and royal surnames stripped, lives transplanted, stolen. A nation built on an economy of people turned to property. This story, gone and past, stays held somewhere in the winds.

Restricted on the west by the Appalachian mountains, the colonies were a product of the conquered country’s geography.1 The Appalachians, by the degree of their angle, had the ability to determine the story of a people. They start their journey south considerate enough, running through the center of Maine. Up there, the Atlantic crashes against the rocky base of the mountains, allowing people to harness hydroelectric energy. Factories and assembly lines, I remember learning. Perhaps we could have been a nation built on a manufacturing economy. 

Starting around Maryland, more by Alabama, and completely by Georgia, the Appalachians give up being our defender: The base of the mountains is too far from the coast to do any good in factories. Without rocks to thrash against, the waters have no current, no stream of energy to tap into. To get anything out of the land down there, someone would have to put work into it. What they don’t tell you about white Southerners is that they were smart—smarter, even, than they must have known. They couldn’t have understood the extent of trauma they were inflicting on generations of people: Scarring fathers, children, and mothers, inscribing blemished memories into the genes of their eggs, forcing a wound into the next generation of a society desperate to forget it. Had the Southerners known this, surely they would have bragged about their accomplishment. No, Southerners just knew that to be anything on their land—they were possessive by now, their land—they couldn’t be the workers. Down there, the coastal waters were useless for power, but it did a beautiful job of watering the land, keeping it fertile and ready for exploitation. The Southerners got some whips, bought some people, and set to work. 

Had the mountains hugged the coast all the way down, history would be different. Different land, different circumstances. Perhaps we could have been an industrial country, built on our historic ability to harness nature. Perhaps it was just a matter of land. Did the mountains know, as they made their southward journey, that they were damning us for centuries? Is this the story the land wanted? Regardless, their angle was the first domino in hundreds of years of brutal history.

When the North built the Erie Canal, connecting New York and its Atlantic ports to the Great Lakes, everything changed.2 Southerners had happily accepted the Appalachians’ curtailing of the western half country, knowing that it allowed for an even split between slave states and free states, but by 1817, Northerners were determined to find a way around the mountains, to get products somewhere new: West.3 Then they could expand their industry, make more money, create a larger economic base for the country to be built on.4 So they started clearing the land and blasting through the rock to create a waterway. 

In the South, masters worried. Of course, they were smarter than you think—smarter than I think, anyway; they had thought this little project through and knew by, say, 1819, that they had a problem on their hands. While they lived like kings down South, they saw they had it all up North: ports to import and export materials, factories to produce something worth selling, and canals to ship it anywhere. By 1820, Southerners knew what was coming: To protect slavery—their slavery—they could not be part of the same country as the North. When the Erie Canal shipped its first good in 1825, Southerners were, no doubt, sitting on a wrap-around porch, drinking lemonade and discussing their new, separate country, more than forty years removed from its creation. 

*

This is America; we are in this land: our hands worked it, our blood watered it, our bodies were the trees, our souls in the winds. Here is where we sang, where we gathered, where we kissed our babies goodnight. We tended to the earth with care, moved about homes with a silent, gentle touch, and found survival in observation: learning where to hide bread for later, which floorboards creaked between this room and the next, when the night was dark enough to dream of stealing away. This is where we were brutalized: whippedhitdruggedrapedhanged, everything in between. This is where we mourned bodies we never saw, clung to fathers never the same, prayed for beloveds gone missing after daring to grow too big. 

Our names were stolen, stories erased, skin stripped, but the land remained. (I wonder what it looked like to them; I can close my eyes and hear the lazy noises of the South: the drawling hum of bugs echoing long “y’awwwll”s, the clink of ice in too-sweet lemonade, droopy trees resting too idly, too elegant to have witnessed so much. I wonder if it’s all as unnerving to them as it was to me or if, worse, it’s simply the sound of home.) When I was thirteen and learned what “poetic” means when applied to real life, I thought I would buy our plantation one day (after I married rich). I thought I would make it something: a museum or a family space or, at least, a writers’ retreat. Just as my grandparents went to check on their land, I imagined planning trips a few times a year. I imagined the house—the main house—one day being filled with my life: their lives, reclaimed. 

I’ve since learned some things: that to marry rich enough to buy a plantation might not have wonderful implications; that slavery was more than torture: it was a conspiracy that included systematically hiding personal records; that white Southerners were far smarter than they knew, creating a pressure for those who found freedom to remove themselves forever from their histories; that plantations are haunted in the real way; that though I am only five generations removed from slavery, knowledge of our story is a privilege we’re not privy to; that, perhaps, there is no true reclamation for stolen lives. Records get fuzzier and fuzzier each generation; even a hired genealogist will only be able to trace back one additional generation with mild certainty. We don’t get to know where we come from, which plantation our ancestors worked to the bone, which names belonged to us before we were given the names of our oppressors, the family we owe our chance to. The personally devastating history of slavery is only as accessible to us as history textbooks make it. There is no plantation that is mine, no one space I can confine our brutality to, no land with all the secrets, waiting to be found. There is no story on our terms. 

The genealogy report was my mother’s Christmas present to my Nana: she gifted her a deviant father and the rest of the family some understanding (and to another poor family she gifted a half-sister). There is no more land for us to collect, no long-lost relatives to reconnect with, no new understanding of the brutality that preceded our arrival in north Texas. There is only a father with a gold tooth (a detail my mother remains shocked by), a vague history told by our oppressors, and eighty unincorporated acres near Harris, Oklahoma. We spend so much time desperately trying to remember while forgetting; we forget what to remember properly, which wounds hurt most. Standing on our land is the only proof that we—all of us, all the way back in the line—were truly here. Listening to the stories of the wind is the only way to feel what that meant. 

What if leaves could say thank you to roots for being able to see the sun? Do they look down to what supports them for strength, or toward the sky? 

Our land is a puzzle piece of a missing picture, a single star in the complex constellation that makes life for me. From there, my ancestors look down on us, watching. Here, they live in the winds and trees, the grasses and the skies, the lives embodied by that land, and us. 

  1. Sandra Johnston, “The Geography of Slavery Overview,” Encyclopedia.com, last updated March 11,  2021.
  2. The History.com Editors, “Erie Canal,” History, Last updated August 21, 2018.
  3. C.G. Woodson, “Freedom and Slavery in Appalachian America,”  The Journal of Negro History 1, vol.  2 (April 1916): 132-150.
  4. The History.com Editors, “Erie Canal.
 
Back to Top