Julia Park Tracey

October 17, 2022October 27, 2022

Chesapeake! and Ghosts

“On your left, hidden almost totally by the trees, is Warwick, whose oldest section is believed to date back to the 17th century. In 1749, the house’s mistress, Rachel Revell Upshur, was bitten by a rabid fox and developed rabies. Her servants smothered her in her feather bed to end her suffering. There are tales of ghostly visitations by Rachel, and when it rains, it is said, her blood still appears on the doorstep of Warwick, left there when she was carried into the house after the fox attack.” — Washington Post, March 31, 1989

So we went here yesterday. It was a little off the beaten path but worth the venture. I thought it was a ruin or a shell, abandoned, but it turned out that someone still lived there. But as we drove in the dirt lane (clearly marked as a public street, but what used to be the grand entrance to the 4000 acre Warwick plantation), there were signs of life. A child’s play structure, curtains, a mowed lawn at the smaller residence on the right… and on the left? A graveyard. An old cemetery, for family.

But the NO TRESPASSING signs everywhere made us reluctant to get out and explore. It’s private property. People have guns. The haunted house legend has attracted lookyloos. They are annoyed. I will write to the local historical society and see if I can determine who is buried there. But one thing I’m betting: it will be White folks, not the enslaved. Not out front where everyone could see.

I really just wanted to see the ruins but it turned out not to be a ruin, so I was unable to explore or do more than snap some quick photos from the car, and take a soil sample for memento. People get techy about their property, with good reason.

We left there, and drove farther up the peninsula. At another point we crossed the Mattapoony River and that is where another Upsher had several thousand acres and of course a lot of enslaved workers to do his bidding.

“Take the oyster-shell road to the left and drive for six-tenths of a mile, until you reach an attractive mansion, Brownsville. John Upshur built Brownsville in 1806, adding the wooden portions three years later when visiting relatives made the main house too cramped for him. President Grover Cleveland is said to have stayed here during his fishing trips to the barrier islands. The mansion and grounds are owned today by the Virginia Coastal Reserve, which makes its headquarters there.” — Washington Post, March 31, 1989

We were unable to get to that spot, Brownsville. Time is flying and we have been on the move constantly. I have been trying to keep track of all that takes place, and am grateful for my phone. The sheer number of photos is overwhelming. We stopped for two nights in Chincoteague, to rest and see birds, wild ponies, and take a pontoon boat out to see the islands and water. We saw dolphins out in the open water, and so many seabirds. It was truly magical. Excellent seafood and a picnic on the beach. I named the enslaved people who had lived in Virginia while I stood on the beach, the great Atlantic behind me. See my Facebook page for that video.

Tomorrow we head toward Newport News (a former family plantation), and then to Richmond, stopping at Shackelfords along the way — more family heritage there. And more after that. Thanks for reading along.

We spent the past two nights on Chincoteague Island with wild ponies, birds, and dolphins.

October 15, 2022October 27, 2022

Arkansas Black

We bought apples from the farm table at the Hogs and Hens Festival in Abbeville, and my favorite has got to be Arkansas Black: The crunchiest apple ever, with a durable skin that you have to really bite through, but that makes them good for storing or shipping. I had a bite of a Jonagold and it was all but mushy. NOPE.

It’s a bold name, Arkansas Black. The color is red as rich wine, and the flesh creamy inside. If I could buy those regularly, I would, but as a once-in-a-lifetime treat, delightful. Similarly, this road trip is not something I can do every day, but at least I have this opportunity to do it. I have been posting videos every day since Wednesday and finding them cathartic, breaking silence on the lost people who lived and worked on my ancestors’ plantations. It brings out the trolls, but I am quick with the delete button and the block function.

I do not, as Jane Austen once wrote, write for such dull elves.

There was no land to visit nor acknowledge, although we were on Cherokee lands earlier today, at the Saluda River, and here in Fayetteville, we’re in Manu-Catawba , Skaruhreh/Tuscarora and Lumbee traditional territories.

We stopped for a break at the Saluda Riverwalk and looked for birds. We saw double crested cormorants (common on the West Coast), but I had never seen a kildeer nor a pine warbler or American redstart before. I had many good looks at my new friend the Northern cardinal. It was a good (healing) birding day out in nature. Also saw turtles in the river and sunning on rocks. And what do you know? General Sherman burned down the textile mill right here when he marched through to Atlanta. So we had a little history lesson as well.

As we continued north and east, we finally saw more cotton fields. There was so much rain earlier in the week that we expect they were waiting for it to dry out before cutting. My ancestors grew cotton, or rather, their enslaved workers plowed, planted, grew it, cut it, hauled it to the gin or seeded it by hand. I needed to see a Southern cottonfield. It felt necessary. My next hope is to see a tobacco field or otherwise connect in some way with a tobacco farm or shop.

I made a video this evening when we settled into the hotel, when I had a little alone time to set up and prepare. I have so many spreadsheets, detailing as much as I have gathered about plantation names, locations, acreage, crops, where and when, who owned it, what generation it was, and when that branch joined into the family. I look backward to see what wealth each new branch brought in. Most wives seem to have come from landed families. Wealth marries wealth. There are not a lot of Cinderellas in my history. Wealth is generational, mostly, and usually the next generation does as well or better.

I looked at the land rolling by, at the many dried-up soybean fields, parched without enough rain, and I felt the slight humidity of an October afternoon, thinking on how awful it must have been in high summer before electricity, ice water and air conditioning. No wonder there were dog-trots between houses, screened porches for sleeping, and palmetto fans. Life is usually lovely, if you’re genteel and wealthy. Life was hard, so hard, for the unfree.

I think every day, what must it have been like? I feel it, I hear it, I wonder and think, but I can’t know. I can only imagine.

October 14, 2022October 27, 2022

Tracing the Dunns

Dunn Creek, site of former plantation of our 4th great grandfather John Dunn, 1830s.

We left Georgia and crossed into South Carolina at the Savannah River, where one finds the boundary line, today. I looked on the Native Lands map and it said we were in Muscogee lands. I imagine it was Muscogee land back in 1830 but at that time, the John Dunn family had a plantation, and under their possession they also had a small group of enslaved persons — a middle-aged woman, a younger man, and four children, whose names have been lost to time. The Dunns gave their name — or took possession of — the local creek that ran through their property. Dunn Creek is findable on Google maps and it helped me find the land that had been under the Dunn family for at least a generation. More research on Ancestry helped as well.

We meandered way out some backcountry roads in South Carolina to a small town called Edgefield, which was the Dunns’ town, and then out some further backroads until we found the creek. I scooped up a little of the red earth near the creek and I spoke aloud the story. I wish I could have said their names but the folks are not even remembered by name, only by category — like possessions, like species, not like people, not like breathing humans with hearts. It breaks me to know how we are connected and affected so. I will be speaking these people’s names where I can, as close as I can get to the places where they lived.

Abbeville, SC: Stuck in the past? Facing the future?

We went onward to Abbeville, where other Dunns lived and enslaved people. We are here for the night, in a haunted hotel. We walked around the town square, and of course there is a monstrous white obelisk singing the praises of the glorious Confederacy, as in so many Southern towns. But there’s also this new sign, from 2016, acknowledging the harm of lynching and naming those who had died by lynching in the past century. That is progress. Abbeville is where the first call for secession came from, and where the last meeting before declaring the war lost took place. There’s a place called Secession Hill and a Secession Street. I think they should change the names because THE SOUTH LOST THE WAR. There is no glory in losing. Because you were wrong. You lost. You’re done. Own up and grow up.

I’m kind of over it. I wish they were, too.

I’ve only seen one Confederate flag, however, all along our journey so far, and that is also an improvement. Last time I was in the South, 2015? Those flags were everywhere.

But the past is also present. There are signs in the walls, under our feet. Trinity Episcopal Church in Abbeville was built before the Civil War, and stood through it, and stands witness to how many racist abuses? How do you call yourself Christian and hate your brother?

And who built this church? Slaves.

Who paved the brick streets here? Who made the bricks? Who cut down the trees and cleared the roads and built the houses? Enslaved people. You can’t touch a thing here without the hand of an unfree person having smoothed it for you first. Abbeville was founded in 1764 by Huguenots who left France for what? Capitalism. Cotton, lumber, rice, whatever they harvested, it was by the blood, sweat and tears of enslaved folks who died doing the labor in the sultry, diseased air of the Carolinas. Yellow fever and malaria? A scented handkerchief won’t save you. Try and stay hydrated?

I sound a little bitter. I’m bitter about the way people were brought here, about how America continues to treat Black and POC, women especially, and how hard White folks have made it for the most basic of human dignities for anyone not a White dude (believe Black women! Help find Indigenous women!). It’s not a new gripe. I’m probably repeating myself. I’m outraged and inwardly seething and I’m wearing out good shoe-leather to see what I can dredge from the past and bring to light. Whatever it is.

Thanks for reading.

October 13, 2022October 27, 2022

Marching through Georgia

It was a rainy kind of day, starting with light drizzles, turning pretty nasty, dumping buckets of rain, lighting and thunder and a few spinouts (by other cars). Not what we’re used to in dry California. It was lovely and a little alarming, but afterward, the skies broke open and beautiful sun rays flashed across the clouds as the sun set. What a pretty thing to see. We started out from Jasper, Alabama, and went to Birmingham to pick up my sister from the airport, and then headed east to Atlanta. Stopped to pick up coffee and snax from a gas station (gas $3.26/gallon).

From the back seat of the rental car, I caught a glimpse of a soggy cotton field — many, in fact, but the rain was almost torrential at that point so I got just a quick photo from the car window. I have a deep curiosity to see a cotton field in bloom, as well as a tobacco field, to give me a chance to wonder at the scope of work they entailed, and what my ancestors so hungered for. I like to see things, not to believe them, but to give life to the memory or the idea.

Our intention was to go to the cemetery in upper Atlanta and see our 2x great-grandparents’ grave. But we tried to talk out what memories we had of them and their descendants, stories we had heard from our mothers, and it seems the grandpa, William, though respected in the community, was not well liked at home. Neither was the grandma, Hester. I have a portrait of her, a 40-ish smiling woman, hanging on my wall, a pose taken in the 1900s or 1890s. Someone, perhaps a naughty grandchild? has poked holes in her face where her nostrils are, so she looks like a pig. I can’t imagine this was a sanctioned act, as photo portraits were not cheap and there might have been a spanking involved. I don’t know a thing about Hester, but I wonder what she was like, or how she treated people, why her photo was so defaced. Who gets turned into a pig? Not a saint. Not a beloved grandmother.

My own grandfather Rae Bailey was christened William Raeford, named for his grandfather, and Rae so despised William, an itinerant Baptist preacher who Rae called a “hypocrite,” that he changed his name to Raeford Luther, taking his own father’s name instead. Imagine so despising your namesake that you changed your name?

Between dumping rain and unfamiliar roads, the idea of tromping through a cemetery to visit the graves of two not-so-beloveds helped us decide to skip that visit. Instead, we headed to the hotel for naps, poring over maps and documents for tomorrow’s adventure into the next state, and then a delicious Southern dinner in a Kennesaw tavern. Shrimp and grits? Um, yes ma’am. Also, locally brewed beer in cans, and a grapefruit Ricky (pink gf with vodka and elderflower, so tasty!)

When we arrived at the tavern, awaiting some more cousins to join us, I heard a bird calling, and held up my Merlin app. We heard the beautiful call of a Carolina wren — and a cardinal! I looked and looked…

…And there she was. A Northern cardinal–Red head, more brownish body, and I caught her in a photo. You’ll have to trust me. Today I added seven birds to my life list: Carolina chickadee, golden-crowned kinglet, blue jay (not our Western scrub jay or Stellar’s), tufted titmouse, Eastern phoebe, Carolina wren and Northern cardinal.

Huzzah! #birdnerd

By the way, I specifically named this post “Marching through Georgia,” because my Southern great-grandmother Willie-Doris detested the song. She refused to hear it played. She was the founding member of the Daughters of the Confederacy chapter in Portland, OR, and she was very proud of her Southern roots, Southern accent, and her alleged relation to General Robert. E. Lee. Although I remember this great-grandmother, who lived to age 99 (she was Doris Bailey’s mother), and she gives me my long-life genes, I find her white supremacy impossible to excuse. She was the epitome of a charming Southern hostess, wherever she lived — and a perpetrator of some of our family’s worst snobbery and affectations. “My sons will never work with their hands” or “My sons will never wear dirty collars*,” she was known to say. (*back when collars were detachable).

I have a lot of thoughts about this lady, whose china sits in my cabinet, whose genes linger in my cells, and the genes of her forebears, generations of folks who disdained their servants and slaves, and anyone who looked like them. I can’t change what was, but I can expose it, I think, and hope sunlight will purify it, somehow. Anyhow, we did not go visit her parents’ graves today.

And I’m #notsorry.

October 12, 2022October 27, 2022

Turbulence

It was a long day that began very early in my cozy bed with cats and husband, and alarm ringing at 3:30 a.m. The aircraft had a mechanical issue that added almost an hour to our wait time on the tarmac, and was followed by a bumpy ride, and steeplechase through Dallas-Fort Worth’s huge airport, and barely a bathroom stop before sliding into my seat on the last leg to Birmingham. The first leg was so bumpy I dry-swallowed a Xanax and it hit me in time to keep me from clawing my seat-mate as we rumbled above brown Texas, green Louisiana and Mississippi, and red Alabama. I don’t enjoy flying, and I had started the adventure with my anxiety at a 9.5 and was above 11 the rest of the day. Or twenty-11. Anyhoo, no, I did not drink a thing. It was still (too early in the) morning for a long, long time. Also, yes, I wore my mask all day. I was a lone masker in a sea of naked faces.

I found myself listening to a couple of playlists for self-soothing, and when the one I call Ebullience (for joy, excitement, energy) ended, it started up the playlist I call Rage, which has a lot of Beyonce/Lemonade in it. I put that list together after Austin died, and I needed something to accompany me as I ran, or tried to run, and get myself to do the 5K. (I only made it to a 3K, but it was still a triumph for couch-potato me.)

Nevertheless, I enjoyed listening to Queen Bey, and then the Allman Brothers came on, “Tied to the Whipping Post,” and I took a deep dive into hearing this white man/men singing about how their broken hearts were the same as the unfree being scourged into raw meat or to death. It’s a song with a lot of rage in it, and I had added it to the list for that reason back in 2019 when I was feeling a lot of rage about Austin’s suicide. But it struck me completely differently on this trip, flying right over the former slavery states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. White dude with a broken heart just doesn’t get to compare his sad day with the brutality, the enormity of 400 years of state-sanctioned violence. It is this thoughtless kind of action that I hope to purge from myself–this kind of ignorant, nonchalant racism, where a song that sounds like fun turns out to be a sick anthem. It’s hard to say goodbye to pieces of art or artists who we once admired, but if the message is toxic? It’s time for me to release my enjoyment of Southern rock (headbanger that I used to be) and try a little harder. Pay a little more attention.

Growth doesn’t come when you sit in the same chair and eat the same boogers, my friends.