Watch it Burn

Today our country (well, more specifically, the internet) is watching as a 166-year-old Louisiana plantation home burns all the way to the ground.

There will be no recovery.

There is…Nottoway to get it back.

(Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.)

The truth is, I braced when I saw these articles trending because I knew exactly what was coming: the same discussion, the same outrage, the same arguments and sharp-edged barbs.

I’ve seen this moment play out my whole life.

It’s the tension of growing up Southern.

Of watching people you know fight to preserve something they also refuse to fully name.

It’s heartbreaking.

It’s a deep, deep fracture in our communities.

And it's a pain you just learn to live with.

These stories, these arguments, they all feel the same. They just hit publish with new cover photos.

Today it’s a plantation.

Tomorrow, an antebellum beauty pageant.

In the fall, it’s a fraternity holding an “Old South” celebration, dressing up like Confederate soldiers and dancing with women in hoop skirts.

Tale as old as time, or at least as long as I’ve been here.

The line between understanding the grief of our shared history and defending the pride of it has always run straight down the middle of Black and white in the South.

And while I do see some of my pilgrim-descendant cousins finally waking up to that pain, it’s not enough.

Not nearly enough.

So I clicked on the article, and the comments did their thing. One half mourning the loss of a “beautiful piece of architecture.” The other half exhaling, even celebrating because—for once—the trash took itself out.

I read as a Black man commented that he believed his ancestors were speaking. That this was a reckoning, a long-overdue cleanse.

Aaaaand that did it. That kicked the whole anthill.

A woman named Susan was especially mad, hammering out comments like it was her doctoral thesis…all in the name of “preserving history,” of course.

“History is being erased, can’t you see that? This is loss for everyone. If those walls could talk, the stories they would tell!!!!!”

But Susan… you don’t want those walls to talk.

Not really.

Not if they’re telling the truth.

Because if they did, they wouldn’t be whispering stories of picnics and parties on the lawn.

They’d be screaming. With horror. With loss. With the sound of lives stolen and bodies broken.

And I can’t even take you seriously when you say this is about “preservation.”

Was that what this resort was doing—when Becky and Chad were posing out front with their wedding party, looking like they wandered off the set of Gone with the Wind?

That’s not preservation.

That’s theater.

You don’t see Germany transforming concentration camps into picturesque Airbnbs. You don’t see abandoned child labor factories turned into candlelit wedding venues.

Because people with a conscience don’t romanticize places of deep human suffering.

But here in the American South, we’re still serving mint juleps on back porches where people were tortured and calling it tradition.

I used to be a realtor and let me tell you, if someone is murdered in a house, nobody will touch it.

“Bad energy,” buyers say. “Dark history.”

But turn that murder into systemic, generational slavery?

Suddenly it’s charming. Suddenly it’s a showpiece.

Y’all wouldn’t buy a house where one person died tragically, but you’ll throw a whole entire party at a place where hundreds were enslaved AND killed?

That’s not reverence.

That’s moral rot.

And maybe that’s why my heart feels so hardened.

Because usually, I would care when someone loses something valuable. But in this case, the loss is so damn imbalanced.

I just need people to bring the same damn energy to the fact that human lives were razed on that property.

For me, there’s too much blood on the ground to care about the wood in the fireplace.

I’m sorry, but I don’t feel sorry.

In these circumstances, the conversation shouldn’t be about the loss of architecture.

It should be about our loss of humanity.

We all came into this world naked, without a single belonging and that’s exactly how we’re all going to leave. You won't carry your porch columns into the afterlife.

What really matters, in the end?

The truth is, there’s only one appropriate way to preserve places like this: Turn them into museums.

And if that’s what Nottoway was doing, I would probably be mourning, too.

But cmon, y’all. That isn't what this was.

Tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Otherwise, it’s not preservation.

It’s propaganda.

The confederacy isn’t a heritage I celebrate.

It is, however, my home’s sad story.

And what I know is that the truth of that history isn’t found in the woodwork or the intricate chandeliers or the manicured lawns. It isn’t told by the beauty of the architecture from its time.

History lives in the echoes still humming through the floorboards. The sound of children being ripped away from their families, the crack of a whip into human flesh, the screams of women being raped in the kitchen...while the men played poker and the housewives tightened their corsets and poured another sweet tea.

I will not mourn the burning of a house built on human misery. In my opinion, none of us should.

Call me Sherman, I suppose, but today I’m whistling Yankee Doodle.

Sometimes it feels good to watch it burn.

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