On a warm day at the end of February, Dad and I stood knocking on the door of the Clarendon County Archives. I had been in South Carolina for a month, but I had not been to Clarendon County yet—even though, more than any of the other details of my family history, I wanted to know about the lynching Dr. I. M. Woods had participated in.
Dad had driven down from the suburb where they lived, and we’d had lunch at McCabe’s, his favorite barbecue place, before coming to the archive. I was worried that he would hamper me—or worse, make racist or insensitive remarks about whatever history we might find.
Dad now looked like a stooped old man. He’d gotten out of his car and walked to the archive’s door limping on a cane, his face wan, his beard looking almost yellow in the sunlight. He’d had to hoist himself up the three steps to the archive building. I was worried about whatever was happening with his health, but I didn’t want to diminish him by saying something.
The door was locked. I peered in through the glass. I didn’t see anyone, and immediately I grew frustrated. I’d told them I was coming. I’d called to verify my appointment. I usually had more patience, but something about me was off that afternoon, everything irritated me.
A month of poring over old racist documents about my family, a month of thinking nonstop about the vast web of crimes my ancestors had engaged in, had started fucking with my head. I didn’t know what I’d do with all of this, how I would be able to go back to my regular life and talk about it, how I would be able to face my Black friends when I got home to Baltimore. I had been delving into this racist history as a way to fight it in myself, to learn the roots of so many problems white people were causing right now, but after spending a month thinking through racist thoughts all day and observing them more acutely than I’d ever done before, I wondered if it was actually making me more racist.
Standing there outside the empty office, I felt like a fool. It would have been better for me to not do this, easier for me to pretend that this racist history of my family had no relation to me nor I to it. I should have just kept reporting on police—done something useful.
Dad looked weak and frail standing there with his big belly and his white beard, gripping the handrail. His leg had been giving him a lot of problems, and they thought it was something wrong with his spine. He shifted his weight and winced.
Suddenly the door opened. The archivist, a Black woman named M. L. Witherspoon, emerged from the shadows inside. I’d been corresponding with her about my great-grandfather, but I had not known that she was Black. Standing there at the door, looking at her brown skin and friendly smile, I felt vulnerable. It had been naive and racist for me to even assume that the archivist was white, and I was immediately disappointed in myself. My own unexamined assumptions about race polluted so many of my thoughts, reminding me that I would still always be a human being, acting on a partial view of reality. I would never be perfect, but I could always revise my erroneous impressions. That seemed to be the point.
We walked in, and Dad started cheerfully explaining to Witherspoon that he had grown up down the road and that we were looking for information about his grandfather.
“It’s rare for someone of my age to have a grandfather—” Dad said, and then he paused. I knew he’d normally finish the sentence with “who fought in the Wo-ah.” But Dad stopped himself short, recalibrating. He finished the sentence with “who was born in 1842.”
Even though Dad would never admit it, in that moment he had been aware of the weight of this history and what it might communicate to someone with a set of experiences that were not like his. In that moment, he saw our history through Witherspoon’s eyes and, I think, realized that bragging about a Confederate grandfather would necessarily sound racist.
It felt at first like progress, but then I began to second-guess. Instead of facing our reality as white men with a racist past in America, Dad quickly improvised to avoid past truths, covering over the unpleasantness of reality with a more neutral birth date. It was good that he took Witherspoon’s perspective into account, but this impulse to hide the truth also spawned the false version of history that formed and deformed his view of the world. It was his inheritance, and he had tried his best to pass it on to me.
I smiled awkwardly, anxious but now feeling a bit relieved that Witherspoon was Black. I thought that she might understand my mission—even if I didn’t—and aid me in my hope for redemption. I thought she might see me as a good white guy who desired to tell the truth about America’s racist history. I wanted her to validate me as a less bad white person because I was doing this research. I recognized this feeling. Because the harm of whiteness lands primarily on people of color, and especially women of color, white people who are trying to do better expect to be praised by Black women for not hurting them. It is a ridiculous proposition, but it courses through the breast as an emotional need.
On the other pole of my emotional state was the fear that my interest in my family’s past might come off as prideful and racist, especially with Dad there. I could imagine how many whites visited there looking for information about their plantation home or the illustrious Confederate ancestor they’d named a child after.
“I’ve made some copies for you,” Witherspoon said to me.
She handed me a manila folder. When I took it, I could tell there were only a couple of sheets of paper inside and I was disappointed, having hoped for a more robust representation of our family’s historical record.
“You can use one of these tables to look through it,” she said.
Dad hobbled up beside me on his cane as I sat down and opened the folder, looking through a stack of census records extending from the 1840s through the 1910s. Then I came to an 1847 newspaper ad put out by William Hagood Woods, I. M.’s father and my great-great-grandfather. The article read:
Absconded, from my premises, on Friday the 5th inst, my Negro man Joe. Joe is a stout heavy built fellow, about five feet high, with a scar on his forehead just over one of his eyes; he is rather slow in speaking when first spoken to, with a kind of sly-looking smile on his countenance. A reward of Five Dollars will be given for his apprehension and delivery at my residence, or Ten Dollars, if safely lodged in any of the district jails in the state.
In the top left corner of the ad, there was an illustration of a black man with a walking stick and a traveling bag, looking over his shoulder. Sitting there between Dad, an elderly white Republican man, and Witherspoon, a much younger Black woman, reading this description from my ancestor, I was overcome by a vertiginous sense of shame, my mind stretching in two directions, wondering what Witherspoon was thinking about me and hoping Dad would not say anything to make this moment worse.
The meaning of the notice was indisputable—there it was in newsprint. The ad meant that at that time any white person was free to apprehend Joe and they would receive a reward for doing so. If the three of us had been standing there in 1847, Dad and I would have been permitted to take Witherspoon into custody because she was Black and we were white.
I. M. Woods was five when his father placed this ad offering a reward for the capture of a man he thought he owned, and I wondered how such an atmosphere would warp the mind of a child. I contemplated how that warping had been passed down to Dad, and then to me. Our family psychology had been shaped for generations by a mindset that conceived of Black people as mere property. I knew that this domineering mentality or miasma could not have been lost after two or three generations, because I was still seeing evidence of it today.
Only four days earlier, a couple of hundred miles away, in Brunswick, Georgia, two white men had seen a Black man named Ahmaud Arbery jogging through their suburban neighborhood. Gregory McMichael and his son Travis got a pistol and a shotgun and got in their pickup truck with a Confederate flag decal on it and they began to chase Arbery down, the son armed in the back of the truck. When the chase passed the house of another white man named William “Roddie” Bryan, he joined in. His lawyer later said Bryan “[saw] someone he doesn’t know followed by a truck that he does. He does, with all due respect, what any patriotic American would have done under the same circumstances.”
Bryan used his own truck to try to block Arbery, hitting him with the vehicle at least once. Eventually Arbery stopped, and Travis McMichael got out of the first truck and shot him. And, to make sure there was no confusion, called Arbery a “fucking n*****.”
At that point, no charges had been filed. The prosecutor cited a law that stated a “private person may arrest an offender if the offense is committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge.”
Gregory McMichael later told investigators that he “had a gut feeling that Mr. Arbery may have been responsible for thefts that were in the neighborhood previously.” His knowledge was his “gut.” The trust of the white gut, the belief that the white man apprehends reality correctly, also governed the advertisement placed by my great-great-grandfather W. H. Woods. His ad articulated the power of whites to act upon the Black body as their gut saw fit.
I kept turning through the pages, looking at the culture I’d inherited. When we want to turn away, to close our eyes to the reality that racism belongs acutely to us white people, that’s when we need to look closer, pay attention. Only a relentless search for self-knowledge can help us find our way out of this nightmare we help make.
The three of us stood there in an awkward silence until Witherspoon discreetly went back into her office as I continued to thumb through the pages. Dad stood beside me at the table, propping himself up. I turned the page.
I hadn’t found the names of the people that the Woodses enslaved, but looking through the census records Witherspoon had collected, I could see that our family lived next to the McFaddens, who owned a mansion and held more than one hundred people in bondage in 1850.
“Lydia McFadden was my grandmother,” Dad said, leaning forward on his cane to peer at the page.
“I guess they were neighbors first,” I said, thinking how every marriage of slaver families, every branch of the generational tree, only complicated our guilt. I was no less descended from Lydia McFadden than from I. M. Woods, and she had been raised in an environment where one hundred people were deemed to be property. She was my great-grandmother. How many lives had my direct family destroyed?
“We should probably get going soon,” Dad said.
“Yeah,” I said.
We were both hours from where we were staying, and I had to get up in the morning and drive back to Baltimore.
I was both sad and annoyed that I had not discovered any details of I. M. Woods’s crime. I felt like a detective in a backward crime story where I had a culprit and no victim—the traces of the man he’d killed had been wiped away entirely, it seemed.
This crime was small compared with the monstrous history of “owning” hundreds of people, accounting for countless deaths. But that does not mean that this murder does not matter. A person dead is irreplaceable, and somehow, I felt that if I could sweep this lynching away as if it was insignificant in the face of the greater crimes, I would just be giving myself an out, an excuse to go about my life as a sleepwalking white man, exercising all my power blindly.
I knocked on the door to Witherspoon’s small office to tell her we were leaving.
“I just wanted to thank you,” I said when she gestured for me to open the door. “We’re going to head out now. I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for, but I’ll be back.”
I thought I would be able to talk to her more freely without Dad there anyway. I could tell her more about what I was looking for without worrying about him saying something racist or starting an argument with me. Again I imagined the kinds of white people who came into that place looking for the moonlight-and-magnolia version of their forebears.
As she walked us to the door, I noticed on a shelf the book Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion by Peter H. Wood. It was an astounding book that had opened my eyes to the truly totalitarian origin and nature of South Carolina’s history. It had helped me see the extent to which the white minority had set out to fashion an ideology of race in order to dominate the Black majority. I wanted to mention it—but not because I really wanted to talk about it. I wanted to signal that I was coming from some kind of allyship, some racially good place, but when I realized that, I stopped myself, because I thought it would be like mentioning that rapper you love when you meet a Black person or talking about feminism in order to get a date.
The afternoon sun streamed in through the windows and cast a golden glow as we walked toward the door.
“I’ll be back again sometime soon,” I told her again.
“Definitely stay in touch, and I’ll keep an eye out for anything else about Dr. Woods,” she said.
As I turned, I looked down and noticed a big binder on the floor labeled “McFadden.”
“You know, he married a McFadden,” I said, pointing at the red binder. “Dr. Woods did.”
“Oh, we have a lot in there,” Witherspoon said.
In retrospect, it seems there was weight in her words. I want to think that she’d left it there to catch my eye on purpose and was trying to reveal to me something important, but that is just another fantasy.
She picked up the binder and hoisted it onto the surface of the aged wood table in the middle of the room. All three of us, my father, the archivist, and I, began to flip through the binder.
I reached down and turned the page:
“Dr. Woods + Maiden Slave.”
The words, typed in bold font, leaped off the page at me.
In pencil, someone had drawn a line from Dr. Woods and written “I. M. Woods” and above it “W. H. Woods” with a question mark after each.
Another hand-drawn line connected “Maiden Slave” with the name Eliza, followed by another light, hesitant question mark.
Below those names, in printed ink, a genealogical chart extended, documenting several generations, on pages and pages, detailing different unions, generations rising and falling, starting from Dr. Woods, a white man, and Maiden Slave, a Black woman.
I had come looking for evidence of a murder and I’d discovered what seemed to be a rape.
We all three stood there looking down at the paper in silence.
Eliza, it seems, had a child named Liza, who married a man named Major McFadden, a Black man who had likely been enslaved by my great-grandmother’s family. They had eight children who had children who had children, sprawling out on page after page of names.
“There’s a whole other family,” I finally said of the revelation that my great-grandfather I. M. Woods seemed to be great-grandfather to a number of Black people as well as to me. I meant “Black family” instead of “whole other family,” but I didn’t say it.
I looked at Dad, nervous but also curious about how he might react. He smiled, awkward, and blinked.
This is why it is hard for white people to talk about race. How did Dad and I acknowledge what this chart was saying, what the hand-scrawled names above said about us? What was the appropriate response? There is no appropriate response, and yet a response is demanded.
The lines drawn on the pages, the lines connecting the subsequent generations to an act committed by Dr. Woods against Eliza, held me there, frozen.
“Would you like copies of that?” Witherspoon asked.
“Yes, please,” I said. “Do you know where these came from? Like who donated it?”
“Let me look,” she said.
I continued to flip through the McFadden files as she walked over to a desk at the side of the room. I noticed the dust motes in the air by the window in the corner and the way her blue blouse shimmered in the light.
“No,” she said. “That must have come in here before my time. And I don’t see any record of it here.”
I had known on a theoretical level that it was likely we would have Black relatives, but such facts are much easier to bear in the abstract. Looking down at the McFadden book, I imagined that a young I. M. Woods—he was eighteen when the war broke out—impregnated a woman enslaved by the parents of his future wife.
Such relations were another part of the system of slavery that white people do not think of. We may acknowledge the horrors of sexual abuse that enslaved women must have suffered, but we don’t think about what it means for us, as white people, that our forebears, the people who decided we would be white, practiced a systematic kind of rape, driven as much by the capitalist desire for wealth accumulation—offspring would increase the family’s property—as by lust.
The particularities, the details, made it feel real, too real, which was why I had to keep looking. Details work by association, and now this information forced me to confront my whiteness and my family’s past as if looking directly into a mirror.
Then I thought of I. M. Woods the legislator—he had passed laws intended to limit the rights and freedom of his own Black descendants in an effort to keep these families apart, to hide and displace his Black offspring from his white and to privilege the white over the Black, legally and financially. All of I. M.’s white children had the chance to go to college. My grandfather Hernando quit the University of Maryland after two weeks to run off with a vaudeville singer, and he ended up with little of the family’s wealth, but far more, I was sure, than the Black family ever got.
I thought of a story Dad had told me about I. M.’s youngest son, Steve. When he was a child, the doctors told I. M. that Steve only had a short time to live. I. M. did everything possible to give Steve a good life. Once, at a horse race, Steve was infatuated by the winning horse, and I. M. bought it for him. But Steve didn’t die young. He lived a long life and never had a real job. He only applied for a Social Security number when he was sixty-five and could start collecting. That, I thought, is whiteness.
Dad and I walked out the door. He struggled with his cane to make it down the three steps into the parking lot. My own legs felt weak as I struggled with what I had just read about our lineage.
“Want to see that new nature walk you pointed out?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said, hoping that the swampy setting would be a good place to contemplate what we had learned and what it meant. We drove in silence to the new boardwalk over the Pocotaligo Swamp and walked out on the trail suspended up over the water, which reflected the trees and the sky, creating an endless loop as I looked out over the soupy scene.
“What do you think?” I asked as we stood there, looking out over the swamp.
“About what?” he asked.
“What we found,” I said. “Dr. Woods and Maiden Slave.”
He shifted his weight and reapplied that involuntary smile.
Below us, a dragonfly landed on the surface of the black water, sending concentric circles outward in every direction, expanding until they merged into stillness.
“On the one hand,” I said to Dad, looking up from the dragonfly, when he still hadn’t said anything, “I think it’s a great thing. There must have been a hundred names on that chart. They are all our family in some sense.”
“I don’t know of that many Black Woodses around,” he said. “Of any, really.”
I was surprised that in a small town like Manning, Dad wouldn’t have known about a Black Woods family if they were around. But then I remembered that he had lived in a Jim Crow apartheid system that was designed to keep Black and white separate and unequal.
“I think they may be McFaddens and not Woodses. It was in the McFadden file and not the Woods file,” I said. “And we saw on the census that the McFaddens lived beside the Woodses in the previous generation. So I think he must have raped a woman enslaved by the neighbors. But then that means he would have later also married their daughter?”
“I’m not sure if Great-Grandmother was from the same McFaddens as the ones next door. There were a few different branches of McFaddens.”
“But it seems like he raped a woman enslaved by whichever McFaddens,” I said.
“I don’t know that it would be rape,” he said.
I thought about the ghost of the thirteen-year-old Black girl that Ricky had seen in the parlor of the old Woods homestead.
“How could ‘Maiden Slave’ consent?” I asked.
“Well…,” he said. His face paled against the shadow-cast swamp.
“Owners and slaves had relationships all the time,” he said. “Just look at the Democrat Thomas Jefferson.”
He laughed. I tried to offer a small chuckle.
“Whether it’s Sally Hemings or Eliza, it is impossible for someone who is enslaved to consent,” I said, frustrated that I even had to say this. “Because you have to ask what would have happened if she said no.”
“I guess so,” he said.
“So there’s this whole family that is our family—but they might not want to know us at all because it comes from that!” I said, spitting into the water.
He nodded.
“It would be nice to meet them,” he said. “I’d love to know our Black relatives. I wouldn’t have anything against them.”
“I know, Dad, but what I mean is they might not want to know us. They have a reason to have something against us,” I said.
“We didn’t have any more to do with what that man did than they did,” he said.
“But it seems that he and the other white men like him worked awful hard to make sure we had it better than them,” I said. “He made sure that story was hidden from you—although whoever made that chart knew a lot.”
“Yeah,” he said.
We stood there in silence a few more minutes until it seemed like we had nothing else to say.
Dad limped heavily on his cane as we walked back to the car. The doctors thought it was a cyst on his spine and wanted to operate. He was scheduled for surgery in two weeks and, because his bad heart made anesthesia dangerous for him, I realized it was possible this might be the last time I saw him. Even with this knowledge, I was ready to go. Not just to leave him and to leave Manning, but to escape my home state again. To be back in Baltimore, where I could resume my life in the twenty-first century.
But we were going to make one more stop first.
We drove a mile or so to the courthouse, where there was a plaque dedicated to Dr. I. M. Woods, who was the district’s representative in the statehouse when the building was constructed.
In front of the courthouse a stone Confederate monument loomed, a soldier standing at attention atop an obelisk thirty feet above the square, overlooking the tobacco-and-cotton town’s main drag.
The soldier is leaning on a rifle and looks, from beneath, as if he’s holding a big boner in his hand, a priapic satyr statue uniting rape and enslavement in Italian marble.
“‘Erected to the soldiers from Clarendon County who served in the War of Southern Independence. Charleston, 1861–Appomattox, 1865,’” I read aloud.
“‘The War of Southern Independence,’” Dad said, the euphemism too much even for him.
I walked around the obelisk and read the next panel, which said the monument was erected in 1914.
“‘As we view their patriotism through half a century past; as the last time stage of their deeds recedes, their lustre brightens; generations unborn will proudly claim their ancestry.’”
“This generation unborn is not impressed with their luster,” I said.
“You are claiming their ancestry, though, aren’t you?” he said.
“Not proudly,” I said. “I would reject it if I could.”
“You can’t change the past,” Dad said.
I turned to look at the courthouse.
“No. But we can change the present. This is in front of a courthouse. How could there ever be a fair trial held here?” I said. “A statue like this is clear intimidation. Every Black or even northern defendant should challenge the venue.”
We said goodbye that afternoon in the shadow of the monument. Ordinarily, when we hugged, his belly would repel mine, bouncing it back a little, keeping our faces from coming too close. But now in my arms he felt frail, and I felt his beard against my face, and it whisked me back to my childhood.
He had willed this world to me, one where a statue like this could sit for a hundred years, unremarked upon, in front of a courthouse, proclaiming devotion to the idea of white supremacy for which the white men of this region, white men like my great-grandfather and his brothers Hernandez and John, had been ready to die.
This monstrosity was my inheritance. It was all of ours.