Finneran: It’s a Black Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand

Friday, October 09, 2015

Tom Finneran, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Two recent trips have shed a lot of reminder light on our country’s racial history. It’s an ugly history to consider.

Two weeks ago I was in Nashville where I took a tour of President Andrew Jackson’s country estate, the Hermitage. Last week I was in Charleston, South Carolina where I visited the Old Slave Market Museum.

Consider a slave mart, where people, fellow human beings, were sold to other human beings as if they were dogs or cattle. Charleston’s place in the North American slave trade occupies center stage so I suppose that it’s a form of progress that the city’s leaders have opened up a museum which candidly reveals the daily evil brutalities of slavery. There is no coverup at the Museum. The truth is ugly. That truth hurts. And that truth explains in large part why there is still so much racial distrust and suspicion in the year 2015.

As the Irish well know, mental scar tissue gets easily passed from generation to generation……..so much so that notwithstanding many decades of impressive Irish success in the professions, in politics, and in the arts and sciences, there is still a painful awareness of the family tragedies spawned by the British occupation. Death, disfigurement, torture, and imprisonment were daily reminders of man’s inhumanity to man. The human cargo borne westward by the coffin ships of the Irish emigration was a social refuse made wretched by hatred and violence. In that regard they were quite similar to the slave ships plying the Middle Passage.

Of course there was the mercenary aspect of the slave trade as well. Indeed, hatred and violence were companion ingredients in the service of a powerful and toxic greed. The Irish passage was one of utter desperation. The slave passage was all about money. Humanity got trampled.

My tour of Jackson’s Hermitage estate was instructive. Frontier life was a very hard life. There were few amenities, even fewer labor-saving devices. Farming of any kind is brutal back-breaking work. Cotton farming might be the worst of all. So guess who got the joy of these many exhausting tasks? Jackson’s slaves.

Slave quarters buildings still stand on the grounds, silent sentinels to harsh lives and hard early deaths. Outside one of the slave quarters is a plaque which captures an exchange between Alfred, a trusted reliable slave and Roeliff Brinkerhooff, a tutor hired by Andrew Jackson Jr. for the benefit of his young children.

Brinkerhoff recalls that “Alfred was a man of powerful physique, and had the brains and executive powers of a major-general. He was thoroughly reliable and was fully and deservedly trusted in the management of plantation affairs”. Brinkerhoff ran into Alfred on evening on the grounds but found him “unusually reticent and gloomy”. Looking at Brinkerhoff, Alfred asked: “You white folks have easy times, don’t you?” “You have liberty to come and go as you will”. Brinkerhoff told him that freedom has its own burdens, arguing that every person in every station had a load to carry and that he was the wisest and happiest who did his duty and looked to a world beyond where all inequalities would be made even. Alfred responded quietly with the essential question for good and decent men and women everywhere---“How would you like to be a slave?”

History is a tough teacher. There are as many evil acts as there are splendid examples of human behavior. And legacies linger………thus the ongoing tension between black and white America. Slavery, the horrific nature and practice of slavery, has sown a suspicion and distrust of white America. Sure we fought a Civil War about slavery, sure we have a black President, sure we have had black generals and Secretaries of State and Education, sure we’ve made remarkable progress on many fronts. But slavery seared souls, it killed mothers, and fathers, and children. And its legacy lingers.

So yes, “it’s a black thing” and it’s not really hard to understand.

Tom Finneran is the former Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, served as the head the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, and was a longstanding radio voice in Boston radio.