America is a beautiful thing…
Damn it’s a beautiful evening here in Cleveland, Mississippi. I spent the day riding north from Natchez on Highway 61, The Blues Highway. My motel room cost $50.00. No coffee, no wi-fi.
Last night in Natchez, I stayed at John Quitman’s house, a National Historic Landmark. Quitman owned four plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana and four hundred people. The estate is described in writings as antebellum, a fancy word that means Quitman’s enormous wealth, acquired through slave labor, was acquired legally. Quitman died in 1858, his daughter sold the estate in 1914. These days, they call it the Monmouth Historic Inn & Gardens.
There is a malaise about the Historic Inn & Gardens, a brooding sense that something’s not right, a haunting guilt that within the painstakingly manicured gardens, fountains, statues and period-decorated rooms and canopy beds, that we’re celebrating a history better left to revile; that the savagery and human suffering that built those buildings and planted those hedges is a tragedy rather than a weekend getaway.
As I wandered the grounds and read the signs and placards, I learned that in 1834 Quitman purchased 15 people among them Harry Nichols who became his personal valet. In modern times, it’s tempting for the visitor to see the busy black serving people and the bald white manager with his wetted lips and ingratiating smile, as direct decedents of the antebellum state. And maybe they are. And maybe it’s just a job.
Later in the evening, I laid alone on the well-manicured grass in the dark and stared at the stars and thought about all the people over the centuries that had laid on their backs in that same spot or near to it and stared at those same stars through their pain, rage and despair; a torment that the black and white abstractions of words can only fail to describe. Indeed, we are insulated from the brutality and anguish of our history by centuries of failing words. The faces that stared at those same stars for all those hundreds of years, those same damn stars, stared accusingly back at me. That is our history.
It’s been two hundred years but there are signs of wear. My fellow guests at the Monmouth were white, mostly older and overweight, and drove newer mid-price sedans. They smiled at me at breakfast, a curiosity with my motorcycle hair, my jeans and my Equal Justice Initiative t-shirt (from the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama; a token protest). The drive into the estate is rutted and unpaved, shutters are askew and need paint, the gift shop sells expensive white-lady jewelry, the much-vaunted breakfast was eggs, grits, bacon and clumsily sliced cantaloupe and musk melon; Waffle House is just as good. The room was fine, I don’t think I’ve slept in a canopy bed before. My trip into antebellum history cost $200.00.
