The portico fronted the white plantation house like the smile of a sociopath. I got out of the car and stood there, staring at the ancestral Woods home, aware that enslaved people had built this house, hoisted the six columns of the portico, framed the walls, built the roof, cut the windows.
In the nearly two years since Charlottesville, I had begun to sporadically research my family’s history, between writing assignments. The ignominy of my family radiated in countless directions—slavers tended to marry slavers—but I kept finding myself returning to the story Dad had told me about his grandfather Dr. I. M. Woods, the most illustrious member of my family, who had murdered a Black man in Clarendon County and fled to hide out in Texas before being welcomed back with a fulsome embrace.
He fascinated me because he’d had a clear choice. No one could say he was just a man of his time—history had placed different options clearly before him. When his father died in the late 1850s, I. M. was too young to inherit slaves directly—though some were put in a trust. When the Wo-ah started, he could have chosen to leave home and join the Union Army. Instead, he was an enthusiastic Confederate, who fought for four years to maintain his right to own and torture people. After losing the war, he could have made another choice. Reconstruction offered the possibility of a multiracial democracy in South Carolina. He killed a man to redeem white rule, which he later encoded as law.
Each of these actions was a choice he made, and by thinking about why he’d made those choices, I figured I might be able to learn something about my own whiteness and the way it functioned both in my mind and in the world around me, the world I help to make with each of my decisions each day. And so I went to the home where I. M. Woods had lived, both as a boy and again when he returned from the Wo-ah, his older brothers dead, to take over the family farm, which would have to function, for the first time, without the labor of enslaved Africans.
I looked out at the yard and the fields beyond, green flora shimmering in the heat of the horizon. Enslaved people had farmed this earth under the threat of whip and lash. The people who’d propagated me tortured this labor out of them. How many enslaved people died in bondage here, were buried in this earth? I wondered.
How could a white person bear to live here? I wondered as I got out of the car. But it’s not just that white people can live in old plantation houses—it’s that we desire to. Plantation homes were considered the height of respectability not long ago, and elite resorts still proudly call themselves plantations, which should strike us as monstrous as an elite, gated community at Auschwitz.
A lot of antebellum mansions are now museums or wedding venues, but smaller manses such as this one have remained in private hands and are cherished. Whatever details I knew about the house came from an old photocopy of a “tour of homes” listing that detailed its restoration with a loving pride.
I felt exactly the opposite. As I walked through the yard, I was filled with so much shame that I thought, or maybe wished, that the earth itself might swallow me up as it sometimes did to people in mythology.
The sound of a barking dog followed me as I walked up the short brick steps onto the porch. Even though it was summer, Christmas lights were draped in a triangle from the center of the portico roof to a column on either side. A weathered wicker couch and two chairs sat off to one side, wilting in the humidity, as some wildly flowering bush reached toward them with overgrown branches.
The shutters and the door were a stark black against the white paint. A knocker hung from the mouth of a brazen lion mounted just above the peephole. A mane of cobwebs was spidering around it on the door. I avoided the lion and used my knuckles to knock. Rather than stare at the door, I turned around to inspect the yard. A giant dead oak stretched out in the center, its bottom engulfed by a lacy clamor of saplings and weeds.
Dad and I had planned to come and see Henry, who was his cousin Mary Lou’s widower, and their son Ricky at the old Woods house in order to look over documents that Henry had. But Dad had fallen off a ladder trying to clean my aunt Gaile’s gutter and hurt himself pretty bad, and so I had come alone. Henry was suffering from dementia, but Ricky had said they would put aside some folders of old documents they’d amassed for me.
I didn’t even know what I was looking for, but I hoped to find some clue about I. M. Woods that might help me understand our own world, as irrational as that might seem. It was also a chance to connect with real people, my family, whom I didn’t know very well.
I knocked again and then took out my cell phone and called Ricky.
“Give me just a minute,” he said when he answered, his voice gruff and scratchy like mine. “Come around the side and I’ll meet you there.”
As I made my way around the house, Ricky emerged from the side door with a cigarette in his mouth. He had a thick dark beard and stepped toward me with a forward-sloping gait.
We shook hands and he invited me in.
“Dad, you remember Bay,” he said to Henry, a tall, bony bald man, who was sitting slumped in a chair in the darkened living room. I had not seen either of them in years.
Henry straightened each section of his long, crooked body until he rose out of the recliner. We shook hands, and the three of us stood there sharing news of various family members for a few minutes.
“So you’re interested in the family history?” Ricky asked.
“Yeah,” I said, although I felt a little silly saying it. I’d been pretty dismissive of the genealogical craze, which struck me as inevitably aggrandizing and romantic. It wasn’t surprising that only porn was more popular than genealogy online. For white people, it was so often an onanistic enterprise of ancestral aggrandizement—how did everybody trace their lineage back to some nobility, while nobody seemed to ask what it means to come from monsters?
Of course, plenty of people did ask that—but most of them were not Americans. The Germans had, of grim necessity, made an art of it—and self-examination has helped them resist the lure of hate in the years since the Holocaust. But instead of inheriting an attitude that swore, “Never again,” I’d inherited one that promised, “The South will rise again.”
I didn’t know how to talk about that with Ricky and Henry. If they were strangers, I would be comfortable initiating the conversation in journalistic mode, or if I knew them well, I would feel free to talk and argue as I did with my dad. But I knew Ricky and Henry just well enough to not know how to talk with them. At least that was what I told myself, while wondering why it was so hard to discuss what I really wanted to know about our family’s history. Whatever discomfort and reluctance I felt proved to me that there was something powerful lurking there just beneath the surface, something that still held a serious emotional charge today.
Standing on these floors that had been leveled and laid under the threat of the lash, I thought again of the concept of miasma, the inherited curse. I wanted to ask Ricky about that, about how he felt about living here.
“I don’t know where a lot of the stuff Daddy had collected, the documents and all, went to,” Ricky said. “But we put together some stuff for you.”
He showed me a map on the wall that purported to show the 1775 grant from the king giving this bit of land to the Woods clan.
Then he seemed to answer the questions I was too pusillanimous to ask.
“That room is haunted,” Ricky said suddenly.
He was pointing from the hallway where we stood across the large living room and into a smaller parlor on the other side of the house.
“Haunted?” I said. “Like a ghost?”
“I’ve seen her clearly,” he said. “A Black girl, about thirteen years old.”
I didn’t know if I believed in ghosts, but I could hardly imagine how the house would not be haunted. Even if it was not an actual ghost, the horrors of the house itself constituted a haunting.
“My brother said he seen her all the time,” Ricky continued. “Always in that room. I came in one evening and there she was as plain as day. Probably a slave. Thirteen or so, little braids, a white dress.”
“What did she do?” I asked.
“She didn’t seem mad or nothing,” he said. “She just sat there looking at me. Surely she was a slave.”
Ricky was directly addressing the grave reality of the house’s history. He was not hiding from it, in a way that felt refreshing but also flat, affectless.
“Somewhere around here there is a will that deeds a slave in it,” he said. “You want to see it?”
“Yes,” I said in my reporter’s tone. “I’d love to see any documents you have.”
I wanted to know more about Ricky’s experience of this ghost and what it meant to him, but I didn’t know how to get into that conversation with him, and I turned to the documents when I should have plumbed our emotions.
Ricky walked toward the kitchen. I lingered there looking into the haunted parlor, cast in the kind of shadows sunlight never hits and tinged with the mustiness of a hundred years.
This house felt like a symbol for South Carolina, for America itself, in all its genteel horror. This building I was standing in had been built by people who my family thought they owned in the same way that so much of the country was built on that bitterly coerced labor.
I understood how so many northern whites had been able to wear cotton, profit off it, without thinking about the conditions under which it was grown, because I did something similar every day when I used my iPhone with a vague knowledge of the horrible conditions the construction of that device required.
But to live in this house in the nineteenth century in the middle of a concentration camp and to consider that way of living the natural, right, and highest form of human life while witnessing, and inflicting, tremendous suffering every single day—that was almost unimaginable. Who could live among people and believe them to be property?
We white people have still not asked this question of ourselves, failing to interrogate the mindset that made us. There is some deeply fucked-up shit just a few generations back, and it is still destroying us. And we won’t ever be able to look at it as long as we want to heroize men like Thomas Jefferson. By any moral standard, a human who believed he had the right to own other humans is a monster. We have to come to terms with this as a culture, or else we shall remain monsters as individuals, granting ourselves all the same ethical excuses and heroic fantasies that we grant the slavers we still memorialize. Their fantasies formed our minds. We must exorcise them.
A perverse part of me wanted to see the ghost, wanted it to mean something. I was, like so many well-meaning white people right now, waiting for a Black savior to come and tell me the answers—only now in spectral form.
Waiting for a word from the parlor, I missed the opportunity the ghost had already opened, the opportunity to talk with Ricky about the family’s history, to wonder together how they had managed to live such monstrous lives and to figure out what it means to be the heir of that kind of horror. Instead, I stood there, chicken. I was trying to discover something, and yet I was scared to really talk about it.
The phrase white guilt had recently become popular, but most people thought of it solely as a subjective state—the way white liberals feel when confronted by race. But I was thinking that this ghost haunting Ricky and his family was a manifestation of white guilt, whether only in their minds or in this space where they continued to dwell. The ghost demanded we recognize what our ancestors did. White guilt was an objective fact. Not a feeling. We are guilty whether we recognize it or not.
When I walked into the kitchen, Ricky was hoisting a crumbling old valise onto the table. I started going through the case while he talked and smoked cigarettes for the next half hour. Mostly there were pictures of Henry and his wife, Mary Lou, when they were young. He hadn’t said much before, but standing tall and bald in the corner, Henry livened up as I flipped through the pictures, recounting the story behind each one. It was moving, but it was not the history I was looking for. I was seeking something further back, something like the ghost, that might help me see what had been hidden. I wanted to know the debt we owed.
“Want to go to the cemetery?” Ricky asked.
“Sure,” I said, happy to get out of this house and back into the fresh air, away from the ghost and the smoke and the dust.
When we walked outside, the day had reached a thrumming peak of humidity. I started sweating immediately, in the few steps between their door and the car I’d borrowed. I got in and followed Ricky and Henry out to the Midway Cemetery, a couple of miles from the old house. We parked in the church lot across the street and dashed together across the country highway. As soon as we crossed into the graveyard, Henry bent down and began picking weeds. Ricky and I ambled around the rows of stones planted like a Tartarean crop awaiting harvest at resurrection. We paused our peregrinations over the flat granite grave marker of Ricky’s grandfather:
Richard Ryan Woods
Nov. 18, 1893
Sept. 23, 1973
“I was named after him,” Ricky said, a buzzard circling the skies over us. “I always heard that Dr. Woods, Irvin McSwain Woods, our great-grandfather, named him Ricky after an Irishman who had saved his life at Gettysburg during the Wo-ah.”
“What?” I said. “I was told that my grandfather was named Hernando Jennings Woods because a Mexican woman saved Dr. Irvin McSwain Woods when he was hiding out in Texas, and he named the son after her husband.”
“Oh no,” Ricky said. “Irvin McSwain had a brother named Hernandez. He died in the Wo-ah. You can find him in the slave schedules and the census. He was named, I think, after a Spanish general.”
Family lore is made up of twisted, distorted, half-heard whispers warped in time. The story I had heard about the name was a mashup of other stories, a mess of misunderstandings passed on again, always in whispers, always in whispers.
“Do you know any more about that Texas story?” I asked.
“That he killed someone?” he asked. “I never heard no more than that.”
We kept walking. There on a flat stone, the carved name faced the sky.
Dr. Irvin McSwain Woods
July 17, 1841–Jan. 21, 1921
Beside it, on an identical stone of speckled gray granite, age-worn and stained, was his wife’s name.
Lydia McFadden Woods
June 30, 1857–Oct. 22, 1933
Beside these horizontal stones, one stone stood vertically, made of a more roughly hewn rock, with the figure of a sleeping infant on top.
Mart. Gary
Son of
Dr. and Mrs. Woods
Feb. 8, 1892–Aug. 3, 1892
“That son was named after a Confederate general,” Ricky said. “He obviously died as a baby.”
Ricky lit a cigarette, and I stared for a moment out at the hazy pines, trying to place the name. I turned and saw Henry still bent down in his plaid shirt pulling weeds.
“I should get going,” I said.
While saying this, I knew that I had not spoken to them directly of whiteness or about the shame and guilt of our shared history. I was still constrained by the omertà that made such discussions off-limits in so many situations. It wasn’t exactly that I was scared—but I stalled out of something that felt like family politeness. That is the purpose of ideas such as family decorum: to keep us all from having to confront the truth. The South had such an elaborate set of manners because the reality they were intended to hide was so noxious. Perhaps had Ricky and I gotten drunk together, we would have grown comfortable.
As we got into our cars and drove in different directions away from the bones of our ancestors, I cursed myself for failing to be more direct with my family, wondering why I couldn’t say that our past troubled me and I saw it as a challenge. I had written it in the Washington Post for the goddamn world to read, and I couldn’t sit at a table with a cousin and try to have a real talk about whiteness.
But I had still learned a few things. When I got home, I looked online for the 1860 census and for W. H. Woods’s 1855 will. As I used my fingers to enlarge the scrawled print on the PDF document I pulled up on my iPad, I saw Ricky was right. When William Hagood Woods died, he willed twenty-three people whom he had enslaved, dividing the “property” between his second wife, Charlotte Woods, who was I. M.’s mother, and his two sons by his first wife, Hernandez and John, who shared a name with my father and with me.
Hernandez was about twenty years old in 1860 when he inherited a twenty-seven-year-old Black woman, a seven-year-old Black girl, a four-year-old Black girl, a sixty-year-old Black woman, a seven-year-old Black boy, a thirty-three-year-old Black man, and a twelve-year-old “mulatto” girl, who was likely either his half sister or his niece. Among a dozen people “passed down” to I. M.’s mother and Hernandez’s stepmother Charlotte, there was a one-year-old “mulatto” boy who had also likely been fathered by one of the white Woods men.
Rather than feeling superior to my ancestors, I wondered if I would have been any different, if I would have been any better. I tried to imagine what it would be like to inherit that kind of raw power, the power of life and death over human beings, at the age of twenty. Hernandez inherited that dominion. The Civil War ended the legal sanction of that dominion, but it did not eradicate the belief that it was right. That belief sickened me, but I tried to keep thinking about it, forcing myself to actually encounter it. What traits of mine come directly from the mindset that had allowed my forebears to buy and sell human beings? My entitlement, my belief that I should always be heard, my rebellious streak, my moral forgetfulness, my objectification of others. The conditions in our worlds were different, but how distant are my traits of character from those of Hernandez Woods? I wondered.
Again my mind turned to Hernandez’s younger brother, my great-grandfather Irvin McSwain Woods. Like me, he’d had choices—and he chose, it seemed, to overthrow Reconstruction in the name of creating a new apartheid system that would come as close as possible to slavery. In every iteration, whiteness is an imitation of its earlier, more extreme form. Jim Crow tried to approximate slavery, and the current Republican party was dead set on fashioning a form of whiteness as close to Jim Crow as it could manage.
But there is another way. Whiteness had been invented to justify the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of Native Americans, and when the slave system collapsed under the weight of the general strike of the enslaved and the war, there was a chance to try to undo whiteness, to deal with the trauma it had wrought.
But the whites knew how bad the slave system had truly been, and they were terrified that Black people, if they had any power at all, would demand revenge. They were certain of this desire for vengeance, because if anyone treated them the way they had treated their slaves, they would be ready to burn down the world. And so they covered the crimes up and enforced the cover-up with violence while trying to claw back as much power as possible. They passed down the cover-up and the attitudes it protected to their children, where it became history, holy writ, and a replacement of reality.
Expanding on my attempt to trace the lines of whiteness as a whitewash, I started going more places—archives, slave sites, the locations of lynchings—in an effort to make myself really think about what this horrible past means to me, what it means to us, collectively, and especially to all the people who are not white and are harmed by our unexamined whiteness.
At the beginning of 2020, Nicole and I arranged to spend a month in South Carolina at my uncle Richard and aunt Susan’s house, while they were away. Nicole was on a sabbatical and would spend her days writing, and I would drive from there to various archives around the state, which, I came to realize, had been one of the longest-standing and most brutal totalitarian regimes in history, where the small white minority had staked its entire identity and culture on the ability to extract absolute value from and exert absolute control over the Black people who made up a vast majority of the state’s early population.
Thinking about the brutal mechanics of such control must have utterly destroyed the moral capacity of those who insisted upon such a vile task. The white minority outlawed drums, limited movement and congregation, prohibited education, created policing with slave patrols and badges, prohibited Africans from bearing arms but mandated white males always be armed. Almost the only laws impinging on the liberty of white males involved punishment for failing to be properly vigilant against the enslaved majority; they required white men to punish any insurrectionary activity with brutality, detailing precisely where and how heads were to be placed on pikes along the road.
I found it easy to trace the policies of South Carolina’s current politicians back to these deeply totalitarian slave codes. But I was trying to do the harder thing and see where their legacy reverberates in me.
Just as my pale and freckled splotchy skin is the place where I meet the world—part me and part world—my whiteness is where my subjectivity intersects with the power structure of race, capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy.