[quote]
UPPER MARLBORO, Maryland (AP) – A tumbledown shack believed to be the only slave cabin left in Prince George’s County will be restored in the field where it was found.
And surrounding it will be a neighborhood of million-dollar homes, most of which will probably be owned by African-Americans.
<snip>
Sevag Balian, president of Haverford Homes, said the rebuilt cabin may be used as a community center.
But he said just having the cabin in the middle of a wealthy neighborhood made up mostly of black homeowners carries enormous symbolism.
“Here we have African Americans who were slaves, and now it will be an estate community inhabited predominantly by African Americans,” he said.
[quote]
Not sure if this is ironic, or a symbol of how much has changed for the better. Just thought I’d share.
Chicken George will be showing us how to fox-proof a henhouse without compromising the aesthetics of the adjoining whipping wall, and Toby and I will be stuffing hay, feathers and dung in the rafters to keep out the weather and to reduce the pneumonic drafts that will accompany the bitter cold of winter in the coming months.
And of course we’ll be doing all of this under the light of the full moon as the daylight hours will find every able bodied buck up to his elbows in cotton and blood in the fields bringing in the last of the cotton crop under the loving guidance of Massah’s attentive whip.
There was some cotton grown in the southern parts of Maryland during the days of slavery. There were several textile mills that used it for making sails.
I wonder what Thom Filicia could do with a slave cabin. (Probably mirrors to open it up and make it seem larger, and an Ikea daybed to maximally use space.)
I wonder what Thom Filicia could do with a slave cabin. (Probably mirrors to open it up and make it seem larger, and an Ikea daybed to maximally use space.)
When I was a little bitty teeny-tiny boy, my family lived for a year in an antebellum house in a small Alabama town (near Auburn, if you know AL geography). Not only was one of the slave cabins still standing, it was still occupied by a very old black man who had lived there all his life. He paid no rent (the house was one room with a tin roof, so it would have been $1 per year if he had) and so he insisted on weeding my mother’s flowers and doing other odd jobs to earn his keep. He had electricity but was afraid to use it because he thought it had killed his favorite cat (which it might have). He sort of came with the house, though we weren’t told that when we bought the place; my father used it to introduce me to southern history, but I was more intrigued at the fact he used an outhouse.
The specter of slavery is odd in the south. The church my family attended had a slave balcony; when my father died his funeral was mobbed (he had once been active in politics so he had a million acquaintances) and several colleagues from a black school he had once taught at came to the funeral late and, the sanctuary being full, sat in the balcony, so as I passed under it I saw a bevy of black faces looking down and remember thinking of the striking historic reenactment. In one of the stores downtown in the same city there were holes in the wall where there had once been shackles to restrain slaves who were about to be sold back when it was the courthouse. My family has a voice recording of my grandfather’s aunt/step-grandmother (it’s a mixed up family tree) as a very old woman in the 1950s discussing a slave auction she had witnessed as a little girl during the Civil War when slaves were being bartered rather than sold for cash (a side of beef, a plow, etc.) and some of the buyers were blockade runners taking them down to Mobile and from there to South America (where slavery was still legal).
The bloody palimpsest aspect is actually one of the most distinctive things about the south.