mmmarilyn TUMBLS - White Plains (Cookeville, Tennessee)

July 15, 2011

White Plains (Cookeville, Tennessee) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

rachael-maddux:

I’ve been thinking a lot more about that Amanda Hess post about plantation weddings at Good yesterday, and my main issue with the piece now is just the fact that it really, really oversimplifies an issue that, in my experience, is actually quite tricky and also very present in the lives of a lot of Southerners I know—which is, how are we supposed to live here, in these states and on this land and in these cities and, often, in these buildings, that were either once the direct result of the enslavement of other human beings, or that at least sprang up because of or thanks to the economies of slavery, or the war that the issue of slavery was partially responsible for?

And I don’t mean “how are we supposed to live…?” rhetorically or dismissively, like, “Ugh, how am I supposed to live with this?” I mean it practically: What does it mean to us as humans, as Southerners, as possibly the descendants of either the white people that owned the slaves or the black people who were owned, to live in this world where vestments and monuments and attitudes of that world still exist?

The issue of negotiating history and our current contemporary lives and the huge but also sometimes not very huge gulf between those two is something that I think, in one way or another, most thoughtful Southerners engage with on some level in their lives. (Yes, probably even the people who Hess chastises for having their weddings on plantations, a “trend” that Good’s Twitter account quite simply calls “bad.”) It’s hard because so much of the very troubling legacy of the South’s past is so deeply interwoven in its present that I know I, for one, don’t even always notice it.

It seems like this is in part what Hess was troubled by about the plantation weddings—the spin that some of the venues put on their own pasts, which they may not even be doing consciously but just because that’s how the place has always been run and thought of itself (or maybe they’re more deliberate, focusing on the business savvy of the onetime white owners rather than the hundreds of human chattel he owned). She takes issue with just the flat-out misremembering of history, the glossing over, the shoving-under-the-rug of very very terrible things, even the outright flaunting and celebrating of those terrible things for glamor. I don’t doubt—in fact, I know for sure—that there are people, brides and grooms and whoever else, that engage in this all the time, and that it’s troubling and weird and is something that would probably be best if it was curbed. (The aesthetics of the South is a really complicated thing—the fact that the “old, rustic South” is gaining popularity as a wedding theme for folks not from the South is probably something that should be unpacked both from a design and a sociological/historical standpoint). I agree that this should be talked about and called out.

But it’s only one sliver of a very broad and strange and complicated spectrum, a spectrum that I feel Hess has reduced to one of its most glaringly terrible parts and condemned outright with a really stunning lack of nuance for a magazine and website and writer that I generally really respect and cheer for.

Something I also felt Hess skimmed over is the fact that plantations have modern functions well beyond hosting weddings, and what are we to make of those other activities that happen there in part because of the place’s natural beauty? Frustratingly unrecognized is a fact that very much complicates her argument, which is that plantations are not the only remnant of the Old South where celebrations take place—therefore not the only venues that, in her logic, should be perhaps absolutely out of the running for any kind of celebratory or festive event. A friend pointed out on Twitter that the UNC Chapel Hill campus was built by slaves—there’s a monument to them, but should the campus refrain from hosting lavish events of any type? That seems ludicrous, but doesn’t Hess’s logic suggest that? Is it hypocritical or disrespectful that many thousand (mostly-white) students over the past hundred or so years have paid many many thousands of dollars to receive an education that was not made available to the very people who built the place, and that for lingering terrible reasons is not even available to many of those peoples’ descendants’ descendants’ descendants? That sounds like a flip question but, well, yeah, it is massively hypocritical and disrespectful. It’s a huge contradiction, one of so many that define the history of and modern state of the South, most of which are so big you can’t even really see them so you don’t know you’re looking at them, but that even when they’re glimpsed and recognized, what are you supposed to do but live with the contradictions every day, sit with them, know that it’s never going to be resolved?

It’s easy to rag on wedding-planning-people because they can get ridiculous and there’s this cultural bridezilla strawman that everyone loves throwing punches at. And it’s easy to feel uncomfortable about plantations, and plantation weddings, because those places were the epicenter, the place where all the commerce and the humanity intersected, perhaps where the divide between slave and slave-holder was most pronounced with the slattern slave quarters and the elaborate owners’ manse. But pretending the issue starts and ends there is horribly reductive, and horribly frustrating and insulting to the people whose weddings are being called racist, or those who sympathize with the people whose weddings are being called racist.

Up at the top of my post here is a link to a Wikipedia entry about a home and property that has been in my dad’s mom’s family for generations and generations and generations. They were one of the first families to live in the area that eventually became the town where my dad grew up. The house and land has been lived in pretty consistently, I think, for more than 150 years. When the original family lived there, it was not a plantation—they did not grow cotton—but they had slaves. The woman who lives there now is a caterer and throws big parties there and rents out the land to people outside the family for events and club meetings and weddings. A step-cousin of mine was married there a few years ago. We had my grandmother’s surprise 80th birthday there earlier this year. These parties happened in a house and on a property where at one point in time human beings that were owned by other human beings lived and worked and died. Not only that—all the life that happened there over the last 150+ years, the life that keeps happening even today, because people still live there, happened in a place where human beings that were owned by other human beings lived and worked and died.

I guess you could call that “racist.” But that just seems too easy.

rachael kinda nails it here.