Plantations might appear to be a black and white challenge, however they by no means really are. What seems black and white shortly blurs into grey—grey created by intertwined bloodlines, complicated storylines, and centuries of omission. On the coronary heart of that grey area are descendants of the enslaved, like myself, caught in the course of all of it.

The current hearth at Nottoway Plantation, which lowered the “large home” to ashes, serves as a stark reminder of the complexities we navigate to uncover the reality of our historical past.

Our ancestors have been important to those plantations, but their tales are not often given heart stage. If they’re talked about on excursions, it’s usually solely as a result of they have been thought of “attention-grabbing,” “gifted,” or “magical” sufficient to be added as a subplot. In the meantime, we—their descendants, nonetheless grappling with the legacy of slavery—are fortunate to obtain even a footnote.

Nonetheless, we persist. We endure tone-deaf excursions, cringeworthy “bachelorette get-a-way” advertising and marketing, and vacationers taking selfies in entrance of former slave quarters. We commerce consolation for readability, and peace of thoughts for only one extra piece to the puzzle of our ancestors’ tales—and, by extension, our personal.

As a Black lady stewarding two plantation homes in Louisiana, my relationship with these locations is something however black and white. In truth, I’m scripting this from the porch of a type of plantations, taking cowl from an incoming storm. I can’t assist however surprise: Is my shelter right here an indication of how far we’ve come, or a reminder of how far we nonetheless should go? The sky overhead turns a well-recognized shade of grey.

Stewarding plantation homes isn’t simple. There’s at all times one thing to restore. Their previous, nevertheless, can’t be fastened like home windows. However via my work with The Descendants Challenge, a nonprofit group I co-founded with my twin sister Pleasure, I’m dedicated to utilizing these painful legacies—and these bodily areas—to uplift our Black communities.

That’s why the lack of Nottoway saddens me. Not due to what it was, however due to what it might have been—within the palms of its Black descendants.

Nonetheless, I do know the true historical past of Nottoway, like all plantations, doesn’t reside within the large home and even within the land. It lives throughout the Black descendant group. And that group remains to be underneath menace—from the identical plantation-to-pollution legacy that has reworked our lands, like my group of Wallace, into Louisiana’s “Most cancers Alley.”

Preserving the previous is significant. However so is defending the longer term—and the well being—of Black descendant communities. As conversations start about restoring Nottoway, we should additionally restore one thing extra significant: the rightful place of Black descendants in these narratives and the pressing struggle for his or her survival.

That’s not simply historical past—it’s our actuality. And that reality ought to be as clear as black and white.

Banner and her twin sister Pleasure Banner based The Descendants Challenge, which stewards the Woodland Plantation.

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