“Horton Grove”

Creators of Justice Award 2020 | Third Prize: Essay (tied)

Robert Wallace has published more than 60 essays in various journals, including most recently in Proximity and Aethlon. He is the author of the novel A Hold on Time. His short-story collection As Breaks the Wave Upon the Sea is forthcoming in 2021. Robert worked as a social worker for 35 years. 

The soul that is within me no man can degrade.

Frederick Douglass

Past Penny’s Bend, tucked into the northeastern part of Durham County, North Carolina and off a bend on Old Oxford Highway lies a tract of land that enslaved people labored on.  This land, referred to as Horton Grove, was part of Stagville Plantation, and is now owned by the Triangle Land Conservancy.  Comprised of over seven-hundred acres, the preserve, TLC’s largest, opened in 2012.  

Cut through the heart of the preserve, a mile-long gravel road, punctuated by the occasional mud patch, hole, and rut winds its way to the main parking lot, surrounded on three sides by natural grassland.  It is here where I park my car.

Here’s the first thing you should know:

I am a sixty-three-old white male.  I consider this an unremarkable fact, though I know in America this isn’t an innocuous revelation.  Race matters.  So does gender.  So, too, do pronouns.  You should know, too, that I have lived in the Durham area since 1979, having moved from the North shortly after graduating from college.  

After ensuring my small running pack is filled with a banana, an energy bar, and a bottle of water, I adjust my pack so that it sits high up on my frame and snugly against my chest.  There are two information kiosks at the beginning of the trail.  I study them briefly.  The preserve has a little over seven miles of trails.  I plan to run them all at least once.  

I begin by walking through the grassland.  The trail is wide here, the grass is mowed close to the ground.  In the fields the native prairie grasses stand tall as basketball players.  The golden-brown panicles of the Indian grass reach as high as eight feet in places, easily providing cover within a matter of a few feet away from the parking lot.  Grasshoppers chopper out of the grasses and onto the trail, hopping onto my pant legs, their chuffing sound lasting mere seconds.  I start running when I enter the forest.  

In the early 1830s, when Frederick Douglass was a boy of sixteen, his slave master arranged for him to work another farm for a year.  The farm overlooked the Chesapeake Bay.  Douglass, who was born a slave and hardly knew his mother and believed his slave master was his father, pined away for his freedom while watching boats sail down the Chaptunk River toward the Chesapeake Bay, which eventually led out to the open sea.  He penned his longing poetically in his first autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself when he wrote, “Those beautiful vessels robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition.”  On a particularly brutal August day, Douglass succumbed to heat and illness while working in the wheat fields.  The overseer beat him.  Still, Douglass couldn’t gather the strength to rise.  After the overseer gave up on him, Douglass crawled and stumbled his way to the nearby forest, where he subsequently hid.  After he rested for a bit, Douglass was determined to inform his master of his condition and seek protection.  

Barefoot, he walked seven miles through the woods which were chock-full of briers, tearing his feet bloody.  

In the 1700s and 1800s the land in Horton Grove wasn’t forest.  It was fields where crops such as tobacco, corn, potatoes, and wheat were grown.  TLC has now named the forest trails after enslaved families that worked the land.  Most of these families were born in America, though their forbearers—if they could be traced—were likely born in Africa.  As I weave my way down the Justice Trail, my stride crunching over several inches of fallen orange-red leaves on this November morning, I’m careful to not trip over the exposed tree roots.  The trail empties out onto the gravel road, where I stop to take a drink of water.  There is a kiosk here that provides a tidbit of information about the Justice family.  More importantly, perhaps, there is a picture of the family, starting with Mildred, and some of her children, and their families.  Mildred was born in 1883.  Although she is obviously no longer living, many of her descendants still reside in the Durham area.  And, of course, she comes from ancestors who were born slaves and worked on the plantation. 

I run down the gravel road for about a half mile, and enter the Sowell Trail.  The trail is a loop covering less than a mile.  There are several down trees, most of them I can jump over, but there are a couple that I have to stop and either walk over or duck under.  The trail circles a pond.  There is a small bench in a clearing that overlooks the pond, and I ponder about sitting there a minute or two, but I decide to run on.  On the Stagville website there is a genealogy link that lists the known slaves that worked on the plantation.  Sam Lem Sowell, born in 1833, is listed as the earliest known Sowell.  The site doesn’t give his date of death.  Nearly forty other Sowell’s are listed as descendants.  Lovena Sowell, daughter of Sam Lem Sowell, was born in 1865 and may have been the first child born at Stagville not a slave. 

The Great Barn at Stagville still stands.  It was the last structure built on the plantation, finished in 1860, just before the beginning of the Civil War.  It is a large structure, some 135 feet in length.  The barn held mules, which were the pre-tractor beasts used for work in the fields, and for pulling wagons.  After leaving the Sowell Trail, I walk around the barn.  The white-painted planks are massive.  All the work was done by slaves, and by hand.  They would have had to fell nearby trees, drag them by mules to the site and work the trees by hand.  Some slaves would have worked at the plantation sawmill, where logs were planed and cut into lumber.  At the time when the barn was built, the Bennehan-Cameron family owned 900 enslaved people.  Many of the enslaved men became skilled craftsman.  The Great Barn was at its time one of the largest in North Carolina.

Just down the road are slave quarters, along with the original Horton home, which was purchased by the Bennehan family in 1823, along with more than 400 acres of land.  The slave homes are unpainted, two-story buildings, which, according to a kiosk, have been partially restored.  I walk around each of them.  More than one family would have lived in each building.  I try and imagine families living here under forced bondage.  The fact that I’m standing on soil that actual slaves walked on, suffered on, bled, and died on, is wrenching.  Something stirs in my gut, and I don’t know what to do with it.  I look around me at the woods where I have been running, and I picture the landscape as it was prior to the Civil War.  It was a land of fields—a landscape that supported the labor of hundreds of black people.  There was no place to run.  No place to hide.  When Douglass thought back on his days as a slave, it was the hard days in the fields that he recalled as a boy and as a very young man to be among his most wretched.  He called it “the bitterest dregs of slavery.”  Recalling those first six months as a field slave, he said: “It was never too hot or too cold; it could never rain, blow, hail, or snow, too hard for us to work in the field.” 

Here is what D. H. Lawrence once said when he looked for a metaphor to explain the soul:  

This is what I believe: That I am I.  That my soul is a dark forest.  That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest.  That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back.  That I must have the courage to let them come and go.

Here’s something else you should know:

I have no idea if we have a soul.  Or if gods of any sort come and go.  But I feel that conjuring up the forest as a metaphor that explains the nature of the hatred humans often demonstrate toward each other explains nothing.  In fact, the forest can be a place to hide.  In literature the forest has often been depicted as a force of evil, or a place to fear.  But fugitive slaves hid out in the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina for decades, away from marauding slave catchers.  The swamp may have been a challenging place to live, but it provided cover and was far better than being a slave and toiling all day in the sun-drenched sky with labor-intensive crops like cotton and tobacco.  Although Harriet Beecher Stowe set her lesser known anti-slavery novel on a plantation—not unlike Stagville—the title character in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, lives in the swamp, along with other escaped slaves, where they hid from slave catchers before making their way, almost always at night, to the North, often as far as Canada.  In reality, however, thousands of escaped slaves actually never left the swamp, choosing instead to make a life in various forests of pine, Atlantic white-cedar, maple-blackgum, tupelo-baldcypress, and sweetgum-oak popular, and in the vast, watery world that encompassed at one point nearly a million acres.  Among the maroons were communities of not only runaway slaves, but free Blacks, Indigenous peoples, and even castaway white people.  These groups would find high ground in the wooded swamps that provided cover from not only slave catchers but other groups that tried to flush them out.  However, due to the ecological nature of the swamps, which are not only dense with trees and plants but abundant in insects, poisonous snakes, and alligators, marauding white men, including militias, found it impossible to navigate the terrain, and were largely unsuccessful in eradicating the unwanted castaways.        

Behind the Great Barn begins the Jordan Trail.  I run this trail until it connects to the Walker Trail, which winds its way up the preserve until it connects to the Peaks Trail.  The Peaks Trail reconnects back to the main parking lot.  I stop running to walk the trail in the grassland again, eating a banana as I walk.  Once back in the forest, I begin running, looping around until it comes back to the parking lot via the Holman Trail.  I decide to run down the gravel road all the way back to the Great Barn where I reconnect once again with the Jordan Trail.  This time I connect with the Walker Trail going in the opposite direction where I eventually cross the gravel road and begin running up the Justice loop.  By the time I return to the parking lot I have covered over eleven miles in a little over two hours.  

***

At its peak just before the Civil War, there were 4.4 million African Americans in the United States, about ninety percent were enslaved.  Nearly all by this time had been born in the country since foreign slave trading had been outlawed early in the nineteenth century, although illegal slave trading in African countries did continue.  Slave trading within the United States became a lucrative business for many, especially as most of the world’s cotton was being cultivated in the Deep South, creating enormous wealth for white plantation owners.  The slaves created the wealth but didn’t receive a dime.  The more slaves the Deep South states had the more cotton they could grow, since the labor was free.  Many slaves in upper southern markets like North Carolina were sold on a daily basis in auctions, separating families.  Most of these slaves ended up in states like Alabama and Mississippi to work in cotton fields.  Many were chained together, sometimes as much as several hundred at one time, in what was called a “coffle” and forced to walk from eastern states like North Carolina and Maryland all the way to Mississippi or Louisiana, where they were sold in large auctions.  These “trips” could last as long as two to four months and were forced upon small children and women as well as men.  They would cover twenty miles a day.   

Although he had tried unsuccessfully before, when Frederick Douglass finally escaped he did so by train, not by foot through forests.  He disguised himself as a sailor.  He had in his possession papers from a free black man which gave ruse to his ability to travel freely for hire.  Fortunately he was coming from the upper regions of Maryland, so he didn’t have far to go.  When I stand in the grasslands of Horton Grove Preserve, I try and conjure up how someone might have escaped.  Unlike Ralph Ellison’s nameless protagonist, I’m sure the slaves of Stagville would have loved to be invisible, trotting through the gloom in open fields, vanishing into thickets and forests, while carrying their ungodly burdens.  Escape to freedom, which was often a monumentally long and enormously arduous journey, wouldn’t have even been possible without the cover of trees.  Forests provided cover during the day, when runaway slaves hid to gather strength following nighttime travel.  The Underground Railroad utilized routes that abolitionists—comprised of various white groups, other fugitive slaves, and free Blacks—who knew the surrounding forests well.  They marked the routes with nails, and runaway slaves would march through forests with the help of “conductors,” who guided their passage to the next “station.”  During the day, slaves hid in the forests, sometimes in manmade caves dugout in ravines or along river and creek beds.  Trees and other flora provided cover, sustenance, and, most importantly, a path to freedom.  They provided life.  

Bushwhacking, particularly at night, is no easy challenge: it is slow going, and if one wasn’t guided the certainty of northward movement and therefore escape for a fugitive slave would have been formidable.  While coming from a state like Maryland was strenuous, coming from the Deep South would have been Herculean without the aid of others.  James W. C. Pennington, an escaped slave from Maryland, described in detail his adventures to freedom and the task of traveling alone at night in the woods in his memoir The Fugitive Blacksmith:  “This incident had the effect to start me under great disadvantage to make a good night’s journey, as it threw me at once off the road, and compelled me to encounter at once the tedious and laborious task of beating my way across marshy fields, and to drag through woods and thickets where there were no paths.”  But of course, without forests, excursions to the North would have been impossible.

***

Starting from the parking lot I attempt to bushwhack my way down to the slave quarters.  It is daylight, so I have that advantage.  Also, the TLC land at Horton Grove isn’t particularly wide.  I really can’t get lost as I know where the dirt road is running through the middle of the property.  Still, as I meander my way through the forest off trail, I get a sense of the difficulty of this kind of movement.  Even fast hiking is almost impossible.  There is no straight line in bushwhacking; it’s veering around tree after tree, zigzagging to find the clearest line, avoiding obstacles such as boulders and fallen trees, low hanging limbs.  It is easier in November, when the forest floor has minimal flora, but there is also less cover.  After an hour, I eventually do find my way to the pond.  From there it is a short trek around the pond and then a few minutes of walking to reach the slave buildings.  I can’t imagine how anyone could travel by foot through forest, without the aid of light.  The only compass fugitives had was the night sky.  However, if the sky was cloudy, stars would have been hidden.  Additionally, fugitive slaves often had insufficient clothing and food would have been scarce.  Cold and hunger were constants.      

Before I head back to the parking lot and my car, I contemplate again the terrain surrounding Horton Grove.  I look at the slave quarters one more time, and I wonder, over a hundred and fifty years ago, while they slept at night, how much a slave might have contemplated escaping.  I imagine while her family slept, a young black woman opening her eyes and looking at her young son, or her snoring husband, and fantasizing what it would take to bushwhack their way through dense woods, hiding out during the day, running under the light of the moon like shadows in motion.  I imagine her lying there, her weary body wishing there were trees nearby, a swath of forest resplendent of maple, oak, and beech, and a corresponding canopy of limbs to conceal her family’s whereabouts, to elude their captors, flora to feed and protect them.  It is trees she thinks and dreams about, for without them there is no escape.  Perhaps, though she is certainly illiterate and knew not of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, she would have chosen to even turn into a tree, much like Daphne while escaping the clutches of Apollo.  In Ovid’s other books, characters transform into trees, too, such as Bauscis and Philemon, whom the gods make immortal because of genuine hospitality they have received from the old couple.  

I imagine, too, this weary woman looking at her tattered clothing, the smudge of dirt on her son’s nose.  The full moon shines through the lone window in the cold house, illuminating her husband’s bare back.  She gently touches some of the scars he has received from floggings with leather straps.  He stirs a moment but falls back to sleep.  She touches her belly and wonders if she is pregnant again.  She wonders how long she will be able to keep her son, before they take him away from her, like they did her daughter.  She quietly gets up from the floor and walks up to the window.  She looks at the moon and imagines she sees trees there, a large domain of virgin forest.  From where she stands, she can see the tobacco fields, the plants at knee height.  She can glimpse the sweet potato fields.  She looks at these crops and wishes for them to just disappear, replaced with mature trees.  Her son coughs, cries out, and she turns back to watch him roll over, reach for his father’s arm, and continue sleeping.  Before returning to the pallet, she looks beyond the tobacco fields, perhaps half a mile or more away, at the maples and oaks, and wonders if they could make it.  She wishes they were closer, and more of them.  For a moment she dreams about the myths that she carries within her heart about trees, and she wishes she could turn herself and her family into a lone majestic giant with limbs that could reach all the way to Pennsylvania.  She wishes they were trees deep in the forest, each leaning and touching each other.  She tells herself the world is out there, just a little farther out there—Pennsylvania, New York, Canada—and that she still has a chance to enter it.

This is the last thing you should know: I believe it is time for reparations.  It is past time.  It doesn’t matter that slavery occurred over a century and a half ago.  It doesn’t matter that there is no one living who actually owned slaves.  If Germany can collectively understand that their country condemned millions of Jews to death camps then America surely can conclude their crime.  Details of whom and how much reparations African-Americans should receive are trivial difficulties.  They can be worked out.  For now, the country needs to acknowledge its wrongs and offer apologies.  And then follow up its guilt with reparations.