Slavery Happened Here

For me, as a northerner, slavery seems distant to me. Of course, I know it happened not that long ago and I know it was horrific and that we see the modern evidence and effects of it, but it hits me in the same manner the Holocaust does: that it happened in another place and time. In fact, the Holocaust may seem even a bit more real to me, having had some in my family who actually survived the camps.

As a northerner, other things seem more real to me: inequality certainly is real to me. Segregation is very real to me. The fact that things weren't ever great for black folk in the north either is real to me. But the actual bondage? That doesn't seem as real. It didn't happen on the land I consider to be my home. My family never owned any slaves--almost all of them came to the US around the turn of the 20th century or after WWII, and the few that came earlier settled in the north woods of rural WI.

Don't get me wrong--I'm not an idiot. I know how every single white person in the US has received an unfair benefit or advantage due to slavery, even to this day. It's the slavery itself that seems so abstract in my mind--that while I know it happened, the tie that binds me to it seems indirect and indistinct.

I'm in KY this week and I've been down south several times before, including to the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham and the civil rights marty's memorial and the capital building in Montgomery (which features a prominent portrait of old Governor Wallace). But these sites, too, reminded me more of social inequality than actual slavery (the two, of course, being irrevocably historically connected--but a connection going further back both chronologically and mentally than Jim Crow).

But yesterday on a hike at Mammoth Cave, of all places (not even deep South), the park ranger started talking about the history of slavery on the site--that slaves originally mined the saltpeter from the cave, built the tourist hotels, cooked the food, gave the early cave tours--all for free.

"Who were these slaves? Were these local people who had owned rights to the cave who'd brought them here?" I asked. Yes, the ranger explained to me. Local people who were living on the land discovered the profit to be had from the cave, and exploited it--both the natural resources and the human labor. There is a cemetary along the trail where some of the slaves are buried--most in unmarked graves but for one, who was given a headstone some years after his death by a European.

The unmarked graves astounded me. Why were they unmarked? The ranger said researchers have tried to find out who they were, but they have been unable to. And my first thought was, "well, then they obviously didn't try hard enough." But, of course, these researchers were professionals--is it possibly that these graves represented people whose names have actually been obliterated from human knowledge? What about their families? How is it possible that there isn't someone, somewhere, who has knowledge of who they were? Who might have records, even a diary? It is almost too hard for me to comprehend that no one in this world knows who they were.

It seems like the final injustice to a person's life and memory--an unmarked grave, and obviously it was intentional. A final degradation.

The ranger was white, and to hear her talking about it--I don't know, it just hit me. That on this very land--not just "here" in the US,--people were enslaved. That people were bought, sold, owned, inherited. That a few families reaped immense profit and luxury on the backs of the free labor of many--and I was actually standing on one of the very sites where it occurred, looking at the graves of the very people who acted out this chapter of history. And for those few moments, it felt more real than it ever has.