Slavery is America’s pre-existing condition
We are two people welded together by personal history and this country's legacy of slavery
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TOPICS: AMERICAN HISTORY, EDITOR'A PICKS, PERSONAL ESSAY, SLAVERY, THOMAS JEFFERSON, LIFE NEWS, ENTERTAINMENT NEWS
(Credit: Courtesy of the Author)
This is a photograph of America’s pre-existing condition. It’s true that it’s a Truscott family photograph rather than a depiction of a sick person, and it’s not a recent photo, either. In fact, it was taken over half a century ago in Loudon County, Virginia, by my grandmother in the summer of 1951, just before my father went off to war in Korea. I’m on the left, age four, and on the right is my mother, Anne Harloe Truscott, and standing between us behind the rose bush is my brother Francis Meriwether Truscott, who was then about two years old. Walking between two buildings in the background wearing sweat-stained Army khakis is my grandfather and namesake, Lucian K. Truscott Jr., who only six years earlier had commanded the 5th Army in northern Italy until he took the surrender of Kesslering’s forces at the end of World War II. What we are doing in the photo was picking Japanese beetles from the rosebush and putting them in a Ball quart jar of kerosene held by my mother, a task which had been assigned by my grandfather, who thought of it as a good way for little boys to earn their keep.
When I first found this photograph in a shoebox in my father’s closet not long after he died, everyone in the photo was familiar to me, including the black girl standing just behind my brother. She is wearing what would have then been called a servant’s uniform: a black cotton skirt and blouse with detachable white collar, cuffs, handkerchief and apron, all of them starched stiff. Her head is tilted forward, and at first glance she appears to be watching what we’re doing with that rosebush. But if you look closely, her eyes are looking up, directly into the camera, and she is smiling not shyly, but slyly. The photograph was intended by my grandmother to be a picture of her grandchildren and daughter-in-law, but the moment belongs to the African-American girl in the servant’s uniform. Standing at its center, she dominates the picture with her body language and skin color against the whitewashed clapboard side of the farmhouse behind her. She is the only person who beckons to the camera with her eyes. Her smile comments enigmatically on the people kneeling before her, and by extension, on the whole scene — the garden and the farm and my family and grandma and grandpa and what we were like back then, and how she felt about us, and how she felt about herself at the moment the shutter snapped. When I found her in Loudon County many years later, I learned that this photo is in fact a comment on our pre-existing condition.
Even though this photo was taken when I was only four years old, I remember that day clearly. For my whole life, I’ve been able to form a picture of grandpa’s farm in my mind’s eye — where the barn and the outbuildings were in relation to the main house, how the formal garden looked in the back yard, and where the creek was just down the hill on the other side of a horse pasture. I remember that mom and dad and my grandparents would sit in the back yard in the evening having cocktails, and Frank and I would go down to the creek and throw rocks into the water. I remember that Frank and I used to wake up in the morning and scamper down the narrow staircase next to the kitchen and run out the back door to the barn, where we chased chickens and played with a litter of kittens. I remember that we were looked after by a young black girl who had a high, squeaky voice. And I remember that one day, she took us for a walk down the dirt road about a mile to her house, a small log cabin on the side of the road next to several others just like it.
I don’t know why I remember so much about grandpa’s farm, unless it was because that summer was the first time dad left us and went away for a long time because the Army said he had to. It had to have been traumatic not only for Frank and me, but for mom, as well. Maybe when dad left it was so painful that I ended up salving the wound with memories, to protect myself from the first time in my life I realized that dad might not come back. Or maybe it was the summer of my memory’s natural awakening, because the months and years that followed are just as fresh to me. My memories of that summer are those of a child, but the understanding I was looking for when I found the photo was that of an adult.
The picture is my Rosetta stone. All of its elements were present throughout my youth: mom in a thin cotton dress with a ripped seam in the armpit and summer espadrilles with a hole in the toe doing something with Frank and me in the absence of dad, who was following Army orders, gone off unquestioningly to whatever hellhole the Army had sent him; my brother Frank, intently and silently focused on what’s going on; grandpa looming in the background, coarse, impatient, scowling with much on his mind, looking like he’s on his way to chew someone’s head off; a black maid, hired by the family for a practical reason, such as looking after the boys, but in actuality, standing there very much aware of and amused by our struggle to follow grandma’s edict to be on our best behavior in the presence of “the colored help.”
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The more I studied the picture, the more I thought the girl in the picture held the key to unlocking its mysteries. What were we doing out there in the garden on what must have been a stiflingly hot afternoon in July? Where was grandpa going, and why did he appear to be so pissed off ? What might have mom been thinking about as she crouched next to us in her shabby summer clothes? What was going on in our lives on the farm in Bluemont in the summer of 1951?
Her name is Ruth Basil and she was born less than a mile from the farm of the photograph in the log cabin we visited alongside the road from Bluemont to Centerville. The cabin was built in 1865 by her great-great grandparents just after they were freed from slavery at the end of the Civil War on land that was sold to them by the man who had owned my grandfather’s farm and the families themselves, including Ruth’s.
When I flew to Virginia some years ago and went looking for Ruth, I had a hard time finding her house because although the cabins were still there alongside the road, they were unrecognizable, as they had been covered in aluminum siding. But there they were, still occupied in Ruth’s case and that of several others, by the families of the freed slaves that built them. Ruth was 16 at the time this photo was taken, only 12 years older than me. She knew her great grandmother, who was born before the end of the Civil War, which means that Ruth grew up with a woman who had been a slave.
At the time this photo was taken, slavery wasn’t so long in the past — only 86 years, in fact. I have friends who are 86. Hell, in only 16 years, I’ll be 86. That’s how close we were in 1951 to slavery. That’s how close we still are today, that Ruth grew up in the home of a great grandmother who had been enslaved, that my grandparents bought that farm from the family of slave owners who had owned her family, that she still worked on that farm.
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