My family owns several hundred acres on an island outside of Charleston, and we have owned them since the 1820s. In recent decades we grew trees on the land. I grew up with them, those loblolly and long-leaf pines planted in straight lines on either side of the state road. Viewed across the rows, the trees looked like any Lowcountry forest, dark, irregular and impenetrable. Viewed down the rows, the trees made perfect parallel paths into the distance, heavy with evergreen shadows, drawing us with unnatural gravity into the dark unfathomable distance, opening a path onto the hidden, unknowable things of a southern plantation.
A storm took the crop several years ago, snapping the trees like so many pencils stood in the ground. We didn’t see it coming. We didn’t have insurance. We sold the scraps for mulch, made enough to cut and burn and plant again. Another round dealt in hope; farming is always a gamble against the times. The new trees now stand chest-high, struggling against vine and bramble in their adolescence. Soon they will tower above the brush and shade out their weaker-kneed competition, but for now their diminished height leaves our land curiously exposed. The house, the river, the family graveyard. Even the servant graveyard is more exposed, though still hidden from the road. It stands overgrown in a corner of the fields.
The servant graveyard is made up of several dozen graves, most unmarked and recognizable only by the slight depression of collapsed pine coffins. Black house servants and field hands and their slave forebears could rarely afford to commemorate the lives of their loved ones with any permanence. A few graves have metal markers, a couple have marble headstones. One particularly small depression has a low brick wall around it, no more than two feet by four feet, and is covered in brambles, collapsing.
As children we avoided the graveyard unless we were telling ghost stories by lamplight. There was a story about the island I once heard and often retold, about a servant boy who ran off with the daughter of a plantation owner. The father chased them down on horseback, and when their carriage overturned on the twisted roots of an ancient live oak the father and his brothers hung the young man on its heavy branches. Whenever I told the story I’d point to the biggest oak within sight, nod, and say, “There--that one.” My grim silence always proved convincing, sometimes even to myself. After all, I could never be sure it hadn’t been on that tree, or on the next.
We built forts in the pine forest, and cut trails through the rows to connect our outposts. We followed deer and rabbit paths, shallow indentations in the needles like channels for our feet. In the winter we whittled cane spears and improvised muskets, raiding Indian camps and pirate ships until it grew dark and the old cast iron bell called us home. My cousin and I lived on opposite ends of the property, divided by seven houses of relatives. At the sounding of the bell we would stash our weapons and part ways, he to the Northwest, and I the Southeast, to our respective homes and dinners and anxious mothers. On special occasions we would camp in the forest, building small fires to ward off the darkness. We camped just south of the servant graveyard, east from the pits that were likely dug by slaves to process Carolina indigo.
My family arrived as second-wave immigrants to Charlestowne just before the War of Independence, French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution and seeking a better life. We found one. My great-great-great-great grandfather rose quickly to prominence, rubbing shoulders with the leaders of South Carolina’s colonial period until he was sent as a delegate to the Continental Congress. He owned vast properties across the state, thousands of acres of planted crops and a few stately homes. He owned a house on Church Street downtown. And he owned people, and likely a great many. He was offered a shipment of over a thousand slaves at one time according to some preserved letters we’ve found, but apparently passed by the opportunity. And sometime around 1820 he bought our small plantation on Johns Island, a ferry or two from Charlestowne, sprawling alongside a tidal river.
By the time my grandfather acquired it, generations later, the family had lost its prominence. The War between the States, a bankruptcy, and a house fire had taken most of our belongings. My grandfather farmed the land and repaired state school busses to pay the bills. My grandmother was a school teacher and kept children of her own. They ate what they grew or caught or shot, and drank sulfurous water from the ground. Fifty years after the well was dug the Clemson extension would test the water and declare it ‘unfit for plant or animal consumption,’ though I swear, it makes the best sweet tea in the South.
When my grandfather retired from farming seasonal crops, he gave away or sold land to cousins of varying degrees and planted pines on the rest. He planted the pines by hand, one at a time, in straight rows behind an ancient pickup. He farmed trees to maintain the agricultural tax subsidy on the land and to have a little nest egg; the storm dashed that nest to pieces, so he started again. He let someone else plant this time and regrets it. Blindfolded children could have drawn straighter lines. Still the pines grow, and every month the trees bury what stands behind them, inches at a time. My house, the river, the graveyards.
My family has lived here since 1820. Few people have roots like that anymore, roots like those of tall pines that do not spread but dig deeply into one place. The taproot of a pine grows so deep that a pine will break in half before it uproots. A powerful oak will overturn, leaving upright a wall of earth and matted roots attached to its fallen trunk. A pine bends until it snaps clear away. A storm can kill such a tree, though it cannot move it.
My family knows this land. Every slope and hollow, every towering pecan, every petering ditch. The dirt roads have names tied to their all-but-forgotten past. We remember them. We’ve plowed these fields for so long that the furrows are cut into our feet, our minds, our souls. This is my home. It’s who I am. I am a child of the plantation.
And so were they. The bodies in the servant graveyard belonged to children of the plantation, too--the smaller grave from one such child that never grew, as I did, into southern adulthood. A child of the plantation lies hidden behind the forest, while I tell ghost stories about her cousins. A child of the plantation like me, and not like me at all.
I used to tell my friends that we’ve been here since 1820, and with pride. I hesitate now. I don’t know whether it was Fergusson that slowed my tongue, or Mother Emmanuel. Serving in a majority-minority congregation for a time had much to do with it, I know. By whatever cause, I hesitate. I stutter.
I am a child of the plantation. I reaped its many benefits, and I still do. I walk the fields that slaves once plowed. I don’t know if their backs were as scarred as the earth beneath them, but when we plow the fields for our gardens we still find their numbered metal tags and shards of the pottery they made for cooking and eating. I swim where slaves once loaded crops onto ships to be sold in town for my great-great-grandfather. The colonial dock posts are still visible in the ground, kept from rot by the salt and the sand and anaerobic silt. But the posts are slowly disappearing as the bank erodes, slowly erased with the stories of cruelty they witnessed. I sit at the kitchen table and watch the river drift lazily by. One hundred and fifty years ago slave quarters would have blocked my view, standing between today’s tree fort and tire swing.
I am a child of the plantation. I live on the fields of her history. I benefited from it. I still do. Other children of the plantation felt its violence, and profited not at all. Still don’t. History is not so removed from the present in the South. My grandfather knew a man who fought at Antietam.
I am a child of the plantation, and I am not sure what that means anymore. My childhood was idyllic and its glories true. To deny them would be wicked and as false as denying their despised companions. There is glory here, and also such storms as swallow forests whole. Storms which threaten to lay bear what our hearts have buried, to overturn what will not give way, to break what cannot be overturned.
Only one tree has ever withstood such a storm. On it hung a dark-skinned man and a king, strange fruit as hung on so many southern trees. The church of which I am a minister has long claimed the one and not the rest: the cross and not the live oak, grace and not repentance, forgiveness and not penance, reconciliation and not justice. We have believed that unmerited favor is not costly. We do so at our peril. For the king who suffered comes again, riding on the clouds of judgement. The storm we expect for our enemies breaks first on the household of God. It rewrites our very landscapes, our histories, our lives- whether or not we have surrendered to its coming. And no one knows the hour of this storm.
The Rev. Drew Miler serves as the Pastor of Statesboro Anglican Mission. He loves fiction, sad music, river sailing, good coffee, and trees. All the trees.
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