I had begun to dread my phone calls with Dad.
“Well, what about Nancy Pelosi wearing a kente cloth?” he asked one day as I tried to talk to him about the history of Edisto.
“What about it?” I said, sighing.
During the year of quarantine, which began only two weeks after Dad and I returned from the archives in Manning, I spent days obsessively organizing the notes I’d found at the archives and tracing my family’s infamy back further and further with each day. Every bit of research stripped away another piece of the mythology that surrounded my life as I realized how deeply white supremacy ran in South Carolina and my family. Sure, I’d known South Carolina was racist, but I somehow hadn’t understood that racism had been the defining feature in its politics and culture.
Edisto Island, far from being the idyllic place I had romanticized growing up, was in many ways the dark heart of the slavocracy. On the island, in 1830, to take a random year, 318 white people enslaved 4,233 Africans. By 1850, the Baynards alone held 718 people in bondage on the island. Sherman’s field order of 1863 gave the land to those who had been enslaved there. Two years later, the US government returned the land to the white slaver rebels. A committee of newly emancipated freedmen submitted a declaration to the US government declaring my people, the whites of Edisto, “all-time enemies.”
You ask us to forgive the land owners of our Island. You only lost your right arm. In war and might forgive them. The man who tied me to a tree & gave me 39 lashes & who stripped and flogged my mother & my sister & who will not let me stay In His empty Hut except I will do His planting & be Satisfied with His price & who combines with others to keep away land from me well knowing I would not Have any thing to do with Him If I Had land of my own.—that man, I cannot well forgive. Does It look as If He Has forgiven me, seeing How He tries to keep me In a condition of Helplessness
This had been in the archive all that time and my family chose not to see it, or not to believe it. We had all continued to erase the reality of the people our ancestors had enslaved. That infuriated me, the way they willfully overlooked evidence to inculcate pride in themselves and their lineage.
But it wasn’t only the ancient past. I thought about the trip I had taken to Edisto right before Grandmother died, when I told my cousin Michael the story I had heard about our grandfather lynching a man. I recalled the way the Black man at the bar had looked at me, and my face burned with shame.
I figured now that that man at the bar had been around sixty that night of our brief encounter in 1995. If my estimate was close, then he would have been twenty-five years old when the lifeless body of a twelve-year-old Black boy named Fred Robinson washed ashore on the beach in 1960 with its eyes gouged out and its skull crushed after he was accused of teaching white girls to dance. The boy’s mother would urge the FBI to close the case because of the threats she had received from the island’s white folks.
The Black man in the bar would have likely remembered 1963, when the state decided to close every single state park in South Carolina rather than accept a court ruling desegregating the beachfront park a few yards from where we stood. A group of Black activists, the “Edisto 13,” were arrested trying to integrate the beach in 1965. It wasn’t until 1966 that the first Black man was finally legally allowed into the water, only to see the white family already swimming there scream as they rushed out of the water, as if he had leprosy.
The Black man at the bar would surely have heard that the town of Edisto Beach had been incorporated in 1970 as a result of the integration of the beach, after a group of angry white citizens started to lobby for an entirely white jurisdiction so that they would not be subject to the island’s Black majority. And he would have had to know, for his own safety, that the town of Edisto Beach had remained a “sundown town”—one where no African Americans were allowed after dark—well into my own lifetime, when my friends and I would walk on the beach at night.
I knew none of that when I felt all puffed up and offended that he would somehow see a connection between me and my great-grandfather, about whose crime I was loudly talking. I was aggrieved and angry then, lost in my illusion of innocence, operating in my whitest register.
But now I was aware that, despite the blinders of whiteness, Dad must have also known all of that recent history and he must have kept it quiet. He was, as my father, at least partially responsible for my ignorance.
And the more I learned, the less patience I had with his willful and insistent refusal to recognize reality.
“Come on, Dad,” I said. “What does Nancy Pelosi have to do with anything?”
“I bet you didn’t know that the tribe that used the kente cloth owned slaves,” he said.
“I’m trying to talk about our family, which you always taught me to be proud of, but when I bring up the real history, suddenly you care about a group of people whose name I’m sure you don’t even know. What tribe is this that interests you so much?”
“I can’t recall their name right now,” he said.
“But you care more about that than the incontrovertible proof we have that our direct ancestors were involved in a monstrous practice for hundreds of years, causing endless suffering to thousands of people?” I demanded.
“It wasn’t endless,” Dad said. “The slaves were freed and the playing field was leveled and after that everyone was just responsible for lifting themselves up. If some people fail to do that, it’s not my fault.”
“Level playing field,” I said. “OK, take the Seibels family. I came across that name in the slave schedule the other day. They made at least some of their money as a big slaver family in Columbia—which they then used to start the insurance company that you worked for and loved so dearly. When you taught me how great it was, ‘a homegrown company right here in Columbia’ and all of that stuff, you didn’t mention the vast head start they got from stealing the lives and labor of thousands of people.”
“They were in Columbia—think of how much they lost when Sherman burned the city,” he said. “And you didn’t see them complaining about it.”
“How much they lost?” I exclaimed. “All they ‘lost’ was the claim to human property. I mean, you were standing there with me when we found that genealogical chart. And you know that your grandfather then went into the state legislature to help pass Jim Crow laws that advantaged your dad and his siblings over them and theirs. All of your dad’s siblings at least had the chance to go to college and medical school and whatever they wanted. How many of the Black siblings did that patriarch give that opportunity to?”
“My daddy never finished college, and we were—”
“As poor as the Black families you lived around,” I said. “I know. But that’s because your dad blew his chance. But he and his siblings all inherited opportunity and wealth. The Black descendants of I. M. Woods only inherited Jim Crow oppression.”
I had been unable to verify the genealogical chart or to find any living descendants who knew anything about “I. M. Woods + Maiden Slave,” but eventually I did learn, as the racist and sexist heading suggested, that the genealogy seems to have been put together by a white rather than a Black family member, and I felt somehow dirty for being fascinated by it—as if it was just another instance of whites attempting to monitor Black people whom they saw as property.
Shortly after the kente cloth argument, I wrote an email to Dad, his brothers, and one of my cousins, asking if they knew of any Black Woodses or McFaddens who had been close to the family back when they were growing up. They did not. But in that exchange, I discovered why Dad had been interested in helping me with my research, at least in part.
“I’m going to tell all of your friends that your ancestors…were slaveholders,” Dad wrote to his most ardently Democratic brother, who was on the thread.
On another occasion, he gloated about how the Klansmen of his grandfather’s generation were all Democrats.
“From Granddaddy to today, it’s the Democrats who are bad for the Blacks,” he said.
Dad was trying to use my research to score points against his brothers, whom he still seemed to resent for their college degrees and for the flak they gave him over his support for Trump.
I was so disappointed in him, and my heart broke a little bit. But I was not really surprised. As the election approached and he made it clear that he intended to vote for Trump a second time, I knew he had no interest in the reality of our history. If he did, he would not want to make America great again. It was all just ammunition in his endless quest to seem right, regardless of the truth.
When I asked him how he could vote for a racist, he told me that “Joe Biden is the most racist man in America.”
I was reluctantly going to vote for Biden, though I despised the corporate Democrats and considered Biden a mass-incarcerating warmonger, but when Dad’s hyperbole cast him as the most racist man in America, he reminded me again that he had boiled politics down to its basest foundation—scoring a point against your opponent. The more I challenged him, the more he deflected, and if I kept pushing, he would cite his health—he now had to use a walker to get about and was facing a second surgery—to stop the conversation.
Throughout that summer, the operations of whiteness were on a garish display. Armed antimaskers protested state governments and plotted to kidnap governors who were declaring lockdowns or mask mandates over COVID. Video of the three white men lynching Ahmaud Arbery was released, showing that the prosecutors had mischaracterized what had happened in their initial refusal to charge the perpetrators. A white woman was filmed threatening to call the police on a Black man because he’d asked her to follow the laws and keep her dog on a leash in Central Park. A police officer, Derek Chauvin, was caught on camera kneeling on the neck of George Floyd as he cried out for his mother and died. A seventeen-year-old white kid, Kyle Rittenhouse, drove to Kenosha, Wisconsin, with an assault rifle to protect property and ended up killing two protesters.
Each of these instances, overwhelming and daily, filled in an aspect of whiteness. I kept thinking about a passage by Frank Wilhoit that had been bouncing around online recently.
“There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect,” he wrote.
At first, I mistook the author for Francis M. Wilhoit, who wrote an important book about the “massive resistance” to desegregation, and so I read the quote in that context. It turned out that Frank Wilhoit was another person entirely, a classical composer. Still, his passage gave me the perfect definition of whiteness, which I’d been struggling to define even for myself. Whiteness was the belief that people defined as white should be protected but not bound by the law and that everyone else should be bound but not protected.
It was the logic of the police officers who broke the law beating protesters all around the country each night; it was the logic of the so-called Karens who are always ready to call the cops on Black men, even when they are the ones breaking the law; it was the logic of Trump, the logic of my dad, and it had so often been the logic on which I acted.
Each stage of rebellion in my life had been another way of saying that I should be protected by the law and not bound by it. This logic came directly from my ancestors, the slavers who’d arrived at Edisto Island in the late seventeenth century, and had been passed down all the way through the wretched generations to I. M. Woods and the terror campaign against Reconstruction. Law in South Carolina had been designed to bind the enslaved population and protect the slavers. That logic has not changed, and that was why I tried to explain to Dad over and over again that it was important for us to understand our history.
The more research I did, the more the necessity of reparations became obvious. It was clear that Congress needed to do some bare minimum to finish the job that Reconstruction had left incomplete—thanks to people like my ancestors. But I also began to see the need for personal microreparations. It seemed obvious to me that I had an obligation to do something directly beneficial if I could. I didn’t want to be a savior or to force my beneficence. I didn’t want to signal my virtue like all the corporations putting Black Lives Matter statements on their websites or like the cops kneeling with protesters, but I felt the need to do something practical.
I’d spent much of my career writing about criminal justice. Day after day I had seen young men marched into the reception court, where trial dates are set, only to be turned away for another few months because of some scheduling conflict that a lawyer might have, another few months in chains without having been convicted of anything.
When a local legal group I trusted began to post about the juveniles awaiting trial, which meant they had not been convicted of a crime, in COVID-infested jails, when the only barrier to home detention for many of them was an inability to pay the fee of seventeen dollars a day necessary to be assigned an electronic ankle monitor, I knew that this was a small way to begin stumbling toward repair. The home detention practice—known as e-carceration—is itself unjust and cruel, but at least the kids would be home, where they could be free of COVID.
I had always refrained from giving money in any realm I might write about, but to me freeing Black boys from chains was more important than any journalistic moral dilemma I had. The government stimulus check had just been deposited into my account, and what better way to kick-start governmental reparations than by funneling federal money toward freeing the same youth the government was simultaneously trying to lock up?
I immediately donated half my check, which would only keep one kid out of lockup for one month. I spread the rest to people I knew in the service industry or spent it at Black-owned businesses and a little later donated another $600 to help keep one more kid e-carcerated rather than incarcerated. The action was deeply imperfect—I was giving money ultimately to a private e-carceration company that had a government contract—and minuscule, but it was a small attempt that I could make personally, without waiting for the government entity itself, at actually performing reparative action.
My ancestors had been responsible for the enslavement of thousands of people. And as a reporter, I had sat there and watched as Black men accused of crimes walked around in chains as impassively as they must have sat at the auction block. Whether I took pride in those ancestors or felt ashamed of them, whether I was earning hundreds or millions of dollars, I was part of the deeply unjust system they had created.
It was also my responsibility to keep digging for answers about the ignominy of my family because I knew that only when we know the cost can we begin to count the enormity of the reparations that are due. And I didn’t feel bad about violating any journalistic moral code because, the more I read old newspaper accounts of Reconstruction, the more I realized how deeply white supremacist so much of American journalism had been. I realized that relying on news accounts was the fatal flaw in my book about the “Witchdoctor Sheriff.”
The Beaufort Gazette, I discovered, had not even acknowledged the death of Robert Smalls, unquestionably the most important person to have ever lived in Beaufort, only years before Ed McTeer became sheriff. I knew then that my old book was unwittingly racist, as I too had been for much of my life, repeating the fabrications that had been handed down as fact. I needed to renounce the book. But when I looked down at its cover, my larger concern lay in my own name, which I now saw clearly as a problem. It marred every introduction and every greeting. I could not change it, like Malcolm X or Amiri Baraka, because to do so would be to conspire with my ancestors to cover up their crimes. But neither could I let it sit there on the cover of a book like a monument to bondage and torture, to the cutting of ears and the burning of flesh, to rape and to murder. The furies do not forget.
Though there was a long tradition of Black people casting off “slave names,” I had never heard of a white person renouncing, or even questioning, a slaver name. But as Confederate monuments began to come down around the country, I wondered again, What is a name if not a monument?
I cannot use my name, and I cannot change it.
The question of what to do with my name—which was also my father’s name—became a question of how to deal with my father.
The culmination of my argument with him came after supporters of outgoing white supremacist president Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol on January 6 in an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election. The insurgents were following almost precisely the same playbook used by the so-called Redeemers who’d managed to overthrow South Carolina’s state government—and ultimately the entire Reconstruction regime—in 1876.
We were discussing the January 6 insurrection on a Zoom call with Mom, Dad, Nicole’s mom, and our nephew the next day, still reeling with shock, trying to make sense of it. Then Dad derailed the conversation.
“You know what nobody is talking about,” Dad said. “The crazy Democrat who shot at those Republican congressmen while they were playing softball.”
“I can’t with you,” Nicole said to the screen as she got up from the couch, throwing up her hands in frustration. “That is so wrong.”
“Goddamn it,” I yelled. “That was five years ago. Do you really think that is relevant now?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Of course you do,” I screamed. “This is your fault. You supported this, you brushed it off. I kept telling you this would happen because it is the same thing your goddamn grandfather did. I wasn’t surprised at all because the plan was easy to see.”
I’d tried to tell him all this before: how Reconstruction in South Carolina was overthrown when a group of Red Shirts—members of various local “rifle clubs” who would prevent African Americans from voting—tried to steal the election and then stormed the Capitol and occupied it until their candidate was declared the victor through a racist and pusillanimous compromise.
The entire plan had been concocted by a man named Martin Gary—the Confederate general whom I. M. Woods named a child after in 1892.
Martin Gary had refused to surrender at Appomattox and joined up with Confederate president Jefferson Davis, who’d convened the final cabinet meeting of the Confederacy at Gary’s mother’s house in South Carolina. Later, Gary became known as the most fervent and violent white supremacist in the state where secession began. He regularly predicted and called for a full-on war between the races. He was terrified of democracy because he was terrified of the “numerical negro supremacy” in the state.
As some white South Carolinians advocated a “qualified” franchise for Black men who held property or had educations, Gary called openly for a “white man’s government under the dominion and management of the sons of the Caucasian race.”
In 1876 Gary crafted the “Edgefield Plan” to use violence, intimidation, terror, and ballot stuffing to steal the election for Wade Hampton, a Lowcountry “bourbon” and celebrated general running for governor.
After the coup, Wade Hampton’s name was ubiquitous. Both Mom and I attended Wade Hampton High School in Greenville, and for many years I drove daily on Wade Hampton Boulevard. Hampton was one of the politicians, like Trump, who could inflame white violence and then claim neutrality. “Good people on both sides.”
But Gary stood solely for white supremacy and to name a child after him, that could only mean a deep devotion to the cause.
“I tell you there are certain men you must put out of the way—men you must kill…they must be killed; for they are the leaders of the negroes,” Gary said in one campaign speech. “Go in masses, armed and try to force the negroes to vote our ticket…shoot them down and cut off their ears, and I warrant you this will teach them a lesson.…Even if we are not elected we will go to Columbia in force, surround the statehouse, and tear it down, and show them we will rule.”
Pitchfork Ben Tillman, a Gary acolyte who later became a US senator, explained away the thousands of murders committed to steal the election that year. “Gary’s doctrine of voting early and often changed the Republican majority of 2,300 in Edgefield to a Democratic majority of 3,900,” Tillman later boasted. “It was Edgefield’s majority alone which gave to Hampton a chance to claim to have been elected.”
There was a standoff, with both sides declaring victory. When the election was called for the Republican, Chamberlain, Gary led an army to march on the capitol in Columbia. They stormed the building and occupied it until finally Hampton was declared the legitimate governor. Martin Gary had executed a coup.
I. M. Woods named a son after Gary fifteen years later. The newspaper noted I. M.’s service to the cause, noting that “whenever the Democratic party is endangered, there is no man in the country that will do more to dispel the threatening clouds than Doctor Woods.”
When the red hats stormed the Capitol in 2021 the same way the Red Shirts had in 1876, I felt a sort of culminating, existential break. Time was doubling up on itself. The arc of history was not bending toward justice, but it was bending. It was history and hate that rhymed.
The next day, on the phone, following our contentious Zoom, I called Dad a coward.
“Why do you always just try to push everything away?” I demanded. “If you support the attack on the Capitol, you can just say it. That’s what your ancestors did, and they turned their insurrectionists into ‘Redeemers.’ And you played along with them, but you’re just a coward.”
I was furious because I knew the January 6 storming of the Capitol would not have been possible if white people like Dad hadn’t whitewashed the crimes of the Ku Klux Klan, of I. M. Woods, of Martin Gary and Wade Hampton and Robert E. Lee and all the rest of them. And I knew that his silence would help whitewash the Proud Boys and militias and QAnon acolytes who had tried to overthrow the government.
I thought about the parallels between Dad and his grandfather I. M. Woods. Both were raised to exist in a state of vast inequality—Dad in Jim Crow and I. M. in the slavocracy—and suddenly, at around the time they became adults, they found themselves facing a world whose beliefs were contrary to those upon which they had been reared.
Instead of realizing the horror in which he had been raised and repenting, I. M. did everything possible to restore the slavocracy. He helped create a phantasmagoric version of whiteness that insists on its own outraged innocence even as it revels in violence. That was the whiteness Dad inherited, the whiteness of lynching and of Jim Crow and of the “massive resistance” to school integration, which resulted in the Lamar Riot, where angry white crowds rocked and overturned school buses carrying Black kids. That was in 1970, two years before I was born.
Lamar was in Darlington County, the home of Dad’s favorite racetrack. Two years before the riot, in 1968, George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, campaigned at Darlington as part of his presidential run. “George Washington founded this country, and George Wallace will save it,” NASCAR founder Bill France announced before the race.
Then Wallace spoke. The crowd of more than fifty thousand people went crazy. “Damn, the crowd cheered him more than Richard Petty,” one observer noted in a news story I found online.
When Dad tried to teach me to love NASCAR, he didn’t mention any of this history. Because by the time I was born, the whiteness Dad had inherited from I. M. had entered a new, post–Civil Rights stage where it no longer spoke of itself openly. Instead, it used terms like crime, welfare, busing, and affirmative action to air its grievances and consolidate the power and property gathered over the centuries.
Dad told me to be a proud rebel, to be proud of being southern, to wave a Confederate flag, but he never told me about the horrors of our family holding people in concentration camps of tortured bondage. He told me that the family had owned slaves, but in telling me, as his mother had told him, that the slaves were happy, he covered up the true nature of the institution, which, far from being benign, or even peculiar, is a unique and epochal evil, demanding a moral response from the descendants of its perpetrators.
And so I tried to tell these things to him. But now he would no longer listen.
I write my name, his name, and I cross it out.
I must let the crimes in my name remain legible while acknowledging the rank horror of their criminality. Nothing is adequate, but something is required. The only possible solution, as flawed and makeshift as it may be, is to cross my name out, allowing both the word and the slash through it to stand.
Baynard Woods.
The slash through my name serves as full disclosure, bright-yellow tape, cordoning off the crime scene without hiding it.