Them Cotton Fields
Thanks to the stories of stories of Uncle Remus and images of slaves picking cotton in Gone with the Wind—among many other influences—the portrait of the primary purpose of American slavery bears almost absolutely no resemblance at all to the historical reality. Smiling black faces glowing beneath the Dixie sun is not exactly as an appropriate venue for the art of nostalgia:
“They picked in long rows, bent bodies shuffling through cotton fields white in bloom. Men, women and children picked, using both hands to hurry the work. Some picked in Negro cloth, their raw product returning to them by way of New England mills. Some picked completely naked. Young children ran water across the humped rows, while overseers peered down from horses. Enslaved workers placed each cotton boll into a sack slung around their necks.”
The Greatest Generation
The generation of Americans who came of age in the 1940’s, won the war against fascism and came back home to turn America—briefly—into the lone superpower on the planet is not without its own closets filled with skeletons. This is also the generation that over a rose in hate crimes against fellow black Americans to such a feverish peak that it paradoxically brought the whole system down upon them by 1960s:
“During the height of racial terror in this country, black Americans were not merely killed but castrated, burned alive and dismembered with their body parts displayed in storefronts. This violence was meant to terrify and control black people, but perhaps just as important, it served as a psychological balm for white supremacy: You would not treat human beings this way.”
Jamming Traffic
One of the consequences of systemic racism least well-known among the general public is its impact upon the reason city dwellers sit mire in bumper-to-bumper traffic at least twice a day every day. City planning working in tandem with the expansion of the highway system through the 1950’s and 1960’s operated on a racially-charged design flaw still stimulating road rage more than a half-century later:
“In Atlanta, the intent to segregate was crystal clear. Interstate 20, the east-west corridor that connects with I-75 and I-85 in Atlanta’s center, was deliberately plotted along a winding route in the late 1950s to serve, in the words of Mayor Bill Hartsfield, as ‘the boundary between the white and Negro communities’ on the west side of town. Black neighborhoods, he hoped, would be hemmed in on one side of the new expressway, while white neighborhoods on the other side of it would be protected.”
Pecans
Cotton is rightly the iconic symbolic crop encapsulating the hideous abomination of humanity relative to slavery. But when it comes to the economic abomination of slavery, it is the pecan which is king, not cotton. The intricate relationship between cotton and the South and slavery is known to everyone, but few outside Dixie are aware of deeply entrenched pecans are to southern culture. And it is a grotesque testament to that culture that the only reason this is so is because of a slave known only as Antoine whose genius for grafting crops transformed the pecan tree—which was a money-loser in its natural state—into a cash machine for plantation owners. The imagery of vast fields of pecan trees is the true image of southern culture: created by blacks to be enjoyed by whites without a clue as to the depth of its depravity.
