Don't Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender, and the Body by Savala Nolan

Author:Savala Nolan [Nolan, Savala]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, women, Cultural; Ethnic & Regional, General, Social Science, Feminism & Feminist Theory
ISBN: 9781982137298
Google: OPkDEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2021-07-13T23:19:40.928953+00:00

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My need to know the details of the family history battled against my reluctance to find out. Over a drawn-out crawl of weeks, I collected images of maps, my nose nearly pressed to the computer screen to read handwritten names of creeks and hills on antebellum maps. Having verified the deed, I wanted to locate the land. We’d had over a thousand acres, tobacco plants in nubby lines like cornrows, the sheds and barns where the tobacco leaves hung, dried, and became cigarette fodder amid the clumpy footfalls and soft, misty snorts of the cows and pigs below. I reviewed land taxes and land patents from the 1700s, processioners’ records, and topographical maps—and I think I found it. A satellite image shows our old acres to be green and brown and undeveloped now, bisected by a country road and Rattlesnake Creek, covered in patches of cleared land and patches of deciduous trees. Grainy satellite images are not enough, though; I felt, and feel, pulled to leave my footprints on that soil, to bring some of it home with me, maybe leaves from a tree or water from the creek. This isn’t about the Glass family to whom I’m related. I feel no need to visit the land in remembrance of them. This is about Filliss, Grace, and Peggy, who need my family’s acknowledgment. I need to bear witness to their lives on the land where they lived, and tell their spirits that I know they existed. It’s about my own enslaved ancestors, who, with sorrow, I realize I can only touch through Filliss, Grace, and Peggy. It’s a penance, and a pilgrimage.

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