— By Leslie Stainton
Not long ago, a colleague suggested I stop writing about my enslaving ancestors because, as he put it, “no one wants to hear the story of the oppressor.” Any oppressor, he meant.
This colleague happened to be a white middle-aged man, deeply committed to racial justice and openly apologetic about being white. In what he clearly meant as helpful advice, he told me Black readers would at best be indifferent to the story of my enslaving ancestors and at worst be harmed by it. Why would you revive this history? he asked, and told me to read three essays: Aurora Levins Morales’s “The Historian as Curandera”, Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts,” and Claudia Rankine’s and Beth Lofredda’s “On Whiteness and The Racial Imaginary.”
I did and found all three inspiring—less the cautionary tales I think my colleague intended than provocations to keep researching and writing. Rather than halt my efforts, in fact, each of these essays offered guidelines for how to move forward in healing ways.
There’s no question we need to move forward. The story of the white American oppressor has for too long been wrapped in Gone with the Wind fantasies that hurt all of us, especially Black Americans. I’m not the only white descendant of enslavers who’s keen to upend the lies.
My Georgia ancestors, the Scarletts (speaking of Lost Cause emblems), committed atrocities that went unpunished and untold. I’ve found deeds, inventories, wills, shipping manifests, newspaper ads, letters, census records, and eyewitness accounts documenting their crimes. At the height of their wealth, my family held more than 400 people in bondage. How did they amass such power? What, besides their own enterprising greed, enabled them to legally buy, own, sell, and abuse hundreds of human beings over the course of at least five decades?
I share Hartman’s sense of connection when she says, of her efforts to research and write about the system that enslaved her African forebears, “this writing is personal because this history has engendered me.”
It’s engendered me, too—but as a descendant of the oppressor, my role and responsibilities toward this history must be different.
Hartman raises important questions in “Venus in Two Acts”:
- Can stories serve as a form of reparations?
- Do the possibilities raised by the replication of violence outweigh the dangers?
- How can we tell our stories truthfully when there’s so much we don’t know—so much we can’t know?
I’ve asked these questions myself. The facts that I’ve recovered about my ancestors and about the people they enslaved belong to a history my family tried to obliterate. If I want to repair some small part of the harm my forebears inflicted, shouldn’t I look for ways to share these truths—recognizing, of course, the inherent difficulties of doing so? To retreat from communicating what I’ve learned would, after all, be to consign these facts once more to oblivion, as Hartman notes.
Early in my research, I discovered a series of family letters that described a rebellion against my ancestors by a group of enslaved people in 1862, during the occupation of the Georgia coast by the U.S. Navy.
Letter from enslaver Fanny McDonald Scarlett describing revolt of enslaved men and women, including King and Matilda Hippard (transcribed)
The revolt was organized by an enslaved man and woman named King and Matilda, who seized boats, clothing, and other provisions from the Scarletts, and together with nearly two-dozen other enslaved people, including children, made their escape one cold March night. It was a perilous journey under dire conditions—besides the dangers of drowning or getting lost or caught, they were sailing through waters patrolled by Confederate soldiers. My letters don’t reveal what happened next, but military and census records confirm that the group made it to freedom—and even led troops from the occupying U.S. Navy to supplies of corn, peas, and potatoes on abandoned Scarlett properties.
With help from a Georgia genealogist, I learned that “King and Matilda” were King and Matilda Hippard, a married couple who returned to Brunswick after the Civil War to raise their family.
Article about King Hippard, April 4, 1885, Brunswick, GA
Many of their descendants still lived in the area. I reached out to them by phone, and later attended an extended Hippard family reunion in Brunswick, where I explained what I knew about King and Matilda and shared copies of the Scarlett family letters describing their escape. One descendant wrote afterward to tell me how proud she and her family were to learn “that my Heroic Great Great Grandfather, King Hippard, would risk his life to provide supplies to the Union Army, and help several slaves to freedom. This is something we will truly cherish.”
In “The Historian as Curandera,” Morales urges those of us researching and writing the histories of oppression to practice “medicinal” history—history that includes the restoration of a “sense of identity and possibility” to the “dehistoricized.” I hope I’ve done that by sharing the story of King and Matilda Hippard with their descendants—and, through this blog, with a broader public. I hope this work of personal atonement and reparation can serve as an example of what “medicinal” history might look like as practiced by a descendant of the colonizing culture.
In addition to making personal connections with linked descendants, I’ve worked to share all relevant records in my possession—including letters, photographs, legal documents, and census records—with libraries, archives, databases, and other repositories so that people of African descent can access names, dates, places, events, and other information crucial to an understanding of their ancestors’ lives.
I hope my research is meaningful to Black Americans. Equally important, I hope my work inspires white Americans to acknowledge the horrors of slavery and the century of racial terror that followed. Because, as Hartman says, “our age is tethered to theirs.”
Will some people turn away from the stories I choose to tell? Possibly. Will I make mistakes, capitalize on my white privilege, get defensive? Undoubtedly.
“This is a nasty business,” Rankine and Lofredda write in “On Whiteness and The Racial Imaginary.” “It’s messy, and it’s going to stay messy. There will be internal tumult as we write and read one another.”
But if we don’t make the effort, we’ll stay stuck in a past that seems bent on perpetuating itself. It’s incumbent on all of us engendered by this history to use our research and writing to try to re-envision our shared history—to examine what we’ve inherited from the past and to confront the many ways that race has shaped that inheritance. Only then, as Rankine and Lofredda suggest, can we “make way for a time when such inheritances no longer ensnare us.”
Author: Leslie Stainton is a sixth-generation descendant of enslavers in Glynn County, Georgia. She has been a member of Coming to the Table since 2010, including two years of service on the CTTT Board. She is the author of two nonfiction books, Lorca: A Dream of Life and Staging Ground: An American Theater and Its Ghosts, and is working on a book about her slaveholding Scarlett ancestors. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with her husband.
©2023, Leslie Stainton. All rights reserved.
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Thank you thank you thank you
The power of Leslie’s research and of her act of sharing her findings with her linked descendants is the first way in which her work gives the lie to the comment of her colleague. Her integrity in connecting us to the articles the colleague recommended knock another hole in his statement. If Leslie hadn’t begun writing about the oppressor, I would never have been led to those other writers’ work. The statement is fully shredded by the conversation emerging in print (so far) that her story has generated, helping all of us descended from enslavers think and feel more deeply about our own heritage. Thank you, Leslie, for persisting.
We are going to dig more deeply into this subject at our Writing Pod Gathering on April 11th! Stay tuned…..
Hi Leslie
I’m so glad you’re not giving up on writing about your ancestors. I, too, was inspired by Hartman’s article, and thank you for the other two references to help those of us writing about enslavers to do so with sensitivity and awareness. Thank you!
Yvette
I am so proud of writer Stainton pursuing these stories of her family and adding to the emerging stories of the enslaved people they owned. Only through honesty can our history as a country be revealed and the beginning of a real story of this land be told. It is a beginning started with African writers centuries ago. We cannot survive without an authentic history told by indigenous people and enslaved people—we must have all the voices to know who we are as a nation.
Thank you for this! I needed to hear it.
Nice work, Leslie! This inspires me to write my answer to that (silly) question posed to you and will do so with my African American linked descendant and cousin in a few weeks. In the meantime I also find what the letter reveals about Whiteness extremely interesting. While nothing particularly new emerges here I think some of the comments by the letter writer warrant discussion. I’ll come back to that in a bit as well. Hope to hear from others!
I am particularly interested in Fanny Scarlett’s shock and sense of betrayal at what the enslaved of her plantation have done. No sense at all of awe, of compassion, of even admiration for all. For me, this goes to all the ways we white people still refuse to attend to our realities and feed ourselves sweet stories of how, in Fanny’s words, “God knows, we have tried to do right.” She comes across as a kind and thoughtful person, referring to those held in bondage as if they were family members, pain at how Tony ( “poor fellow”) will likely face a “traitor’s fate,” but indicating no inclination to speak against that. While none of us enslave other humans today, we have inherited many of these traits of rationalizing, mesmerizing, romanticizing, and other forms of self-delusion that result in damage to others. We need to look at these and how not telling these stories is just one more example of that delusion. The extent to which we keep ourselves in chains will dictate how unlikely we are to deeply understand others’ enslavement. It would be interesting to dive into Fanny Scarlett’s letters and diaries to detect any awareness of her own lack of freedom and deep desire to escape her gilded cage.
Hi my name is Jeffrey Hippard son of the late Andrew, I am very impressed learning about my family through your book and all your research, and I am very interested in, learning more about, my family history.