When Nottoway Plantation burned to the bottom final week, I felt one thing unusual however acquainted: reduction — a form of exhale I didn’t know I used to be holding. Black folks throughout the web appeared to really feel it, too, fanning the flames with memes, one-liners, and side-eyed reverence. The sensation wasn’t merciless or careless. It was cathartic. When a plantation burns, it’s not only a constructing lowered to ash. It’s a monument to American mythology collapsing underneath the burden of its personal lies.
The biggest remaining antebellum mansion within the South — marketed as a resort, marriage ceremony venue, and architectural “treasure” — is gone. And for many people, it couldn’t have occurred at a extra symbolic time. There’s one thing nearly religious about the best way it fell, one thing cosmically corrective. A guide of propaganda made out of brick and stone, lastly catching fireplace.
Plantations like Nottoway aren’t simply remnants of historical past. They’re scripts. Tales written in sugar and cotton and enforced by means of spectacle. The home’s grandeur — its white columns, limitless rooms, and curated excursions — was designed to inform a model of the previous that privileged grace over grief, aesthetics over atrocity. The enslaved individuals who constructed the property had been footnotes, talked about shortly and framed delicately, in order to not disturb the fantasy. That fantasy, after all, was at all times meant for another person.
There’s an identical choreography at work elsewhere I’ve written about. The artwork honest that prioritizes spectacle over story. The educational establishment that calls for our presence however punishes our refusal to assimilate. The gallery that places us on the wall however not on the desk. These aren’t remoted websites of rigidity — they’re iterations of the identical logic: Bundle the ache, scrub the context, promote the picture. And when the picture threatens to talk again, reframe it or burn it out of the archive.
That’s what makes the timing of the hearth really feel so potent. We’re in a cultural second the place the erasure of Black historical past is each figurative and literal. Books banned. Classes censored. Crucial race principle changed into a political scarecrow. What’s occurring in colleges and libraries mirrors what’s lengthy been occurring in structure: the lively, strategic development of silence. The plantation is simply an older model of the identical trick. For those who management the narrative, you management the reminiscence. For those who management the reminiscence, you management the long run.
This isn’t simply theoretical. The aesthetics of oppression are extremely efficient at disarming critique. Nottoway didn’t must defend itself; it simply wanted to face there. Its magnificence was the alibi. That’s why its destruction feels so deeply satisfying. Not as a result of it’s destruction, however as a result of it’s disruption. A system of myth-making collapsed in actual time.
Nottoday, child. (by way of Instagram, screenshot Hyperallergic)
And that collapse jogged my memory of Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety” (2014) on the Domino Sugar Manufacturing unit in Brooklyn, New York. A towering sugar sphinx with exaggerated African options, put in in an area saturated with the ghosts of labor and extraction. I keep in mind being awestruck by the dimensions of it, the brilliance of it — however greater than that, I keep in mind what occurred round it. Guests are taking selfies, groping the sculpture, and joking about it on-line. The best way White audiences felt entitled not simply to witness, however to own. The best way Black viewers discovered themselves having to defend the dignity of the work in actual time. What Walker created wasn’t only a sculpture — it was a lure. A efficiency of the efficiency.
In a method, the plantation does the inverse. It invitations you in with softness, with grace, with magnolia-scented romance. However it’s performing too. It’s staging a model of the previous that intentionally omits the phobia. And similar to “A Subtlety,” the behaviors it attracts out from viewers reveal one thing profound. That historical past isn’t behind us. It’s ambient. It’s scripted into our gestures, our habits, our sense of what’s lovely and what’s not. And sometimes, it’s acted out with out even considering.
Kara Walker, “A Subtlety” (2014) on the Domino Sugar Manufacturing unit in Brooklyn, New York (picture Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)
What haunted me most at Walker’s set up — and what nonetheless haunts me now — was not simply the groping or the photographs, however the ease with which they occurred. No hesitation. No consciousness. Simply the seamless reenactment of a script. That’s what terrifies me: not the spectacle of racism, however its reflex. The best way it animates our bodies with out pause. As if historical past is not only remembered, however bodily inherited. Handed down like choreography. We frequently discuss systemic violence as one thing summary, institutional. However what if it’s nearer to muscle reminiscence?
And so it is sensible that so many of those areas — plantations, sugar factories, galleries, colleges — are sure by structure. Structure makes it simpler to overlook. Its scale impresses. Its magnificence distracts. It permits violence to harden into type, after which calls for our reverence. These constructions usually are not simply websites — they’re scripts. And when folks step into them, they play their roles. The truth that they don’t even notice it — that’s the horror. That’s the purpose.
Which is why the hearth at Nottoway struck such a deep chord. For Black folks, it wasn’t simply the autumn of a constructing. It was a launch. The knot loosened. The silence damaged. The spell interrupted. Watching it burn felt like witnessing a lie collapse underneath the burden of reality.
There’s something scrumptious about that feeling. Not petty. Not vindictive. One thing rooted. One thing ancestral. We’re so used to seeing the symbols of our oppression protected, restored, even monetized. So when one falls — particularly this one — it feels just like the previous acknowledging itself. Just like the ancestors lastly flipping the change.
I don’t assume it’s incorrect to really feel pleasure in that second. I feel it’s trustworthy. I feel it’s vital. That pleasure isn’t about fireplace — it’s about what the hearth frees.
And it does beg the query: What now? If the plantation is gone, what can we construct as an alternative? Not simply actually, however symbolically. What occurs when the parable is not accessible to cover behind? Who will get to jot down the subsequent chapter?
As a result of the true work begins there. The clearing should be adopted by the planting. The collapse by the reimagining. We are able to’t construct a future value residing in if we’re nonetheless residing in another person’s lie. So sure, let it burn. But additionally — let’s construct the factor that tells the reality. Let’s write the curriculum, fund the archives, assist the artists and students, and organizers who’re laying down blueprints for what comes subsequent.
As a result of that fireside? That wasn’t the tip of something. That was the start. The plantation was a fiction. A stage set. And now that the curtain has come down, we’re left with one thing uncommon: a cleared basis. An area the place one thing more true may lastly be constructed — not regardless of the burn, however due to it.
