Writing
…the fingerprints of the UDC are also still visible in history education today, suggesting that its most substantial legacy is not what its members constructed in bronze and stone, but what they created from paper and ink. Monuments can be taken down. Flags can be removed. Ideas are much harder to uproot."
Solemn, stirring, and hauntingly beautiful, each stanza is a variation on a single theme: Black Americans’ perpetual search for a safe place to call home. The idea of the Black homeplace encompasses more than just a physical barrier from the outside world. It speaks to a place, as bell hooks writes, “where Black [people] can renew their spirits and recover themselves.”
Rather than portraying the Black inhabitants of this antebellum house in positions of subjugation, Beyoncé recasts them as its rightful heirs and owners. Though compelling, these creative choices are not merely an artistic rendering of an alternate vision of the past. They also echo the many ways that post–Civil War Black Americans used the home as a site of self-affirmation and kinship and a safe haven from a hostile world.
I read this passage over and over again absorbing the weight of paternalism and ownership layered in each of the words: neat, respectable, quiet, well-behaved, servant…slave. The longer I stared at these words, the more I realized that I couldn’t leave Amanda and Juba at this point in their story. I had to find out more about them. I had to replace Duke’s words with new ones. Thus began my whirlwind journey into the genealogy of Amanda and Juba Carter.
“It is writing that truly rescues, that enables us to reach the shore, to recover.”