I was traveling in Georgia, the state where my father was born, to research an article that combined my family’s story and the current national debate on how to teach about slavery and other hard history. Among my stops was the special collections library at the University of Georgia.
There, sitting in the reading room by a window with an expansive view of winter-bare trees and cloudy skies, I paged through original documents from an examination of Georgia history compiled by experts employed by the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal program to fight unemployment during the Great Depression.
Most of the documents were typewritten – with the uneven shading that comes from fingers striking a manual machine with uneven force. Some were penciled in graceful script. All the paper was brown with age. I knew that many of the Works Progress Administration writers were journalists. One of their handwritten accounts included lyrics the writer had heard being sung. I got a little teary as I read:
“One morning soon death come creepin’ in the rooms.
“Oh my lord, oh my lord,
“What shall I do?”
I had heard Hugh Masekela sing that song at Miriam Makeba’s funeral, which I covered in Johannesburg in 2008. Then as when I read those notes in Georgia, I marveled at how art born of a peculiarly American experience has resonated around the world.
Among the typewritten accounts was a story about the generosity of Robert Augustus Toombs, a Confederate general from a town in rural Georgia called Washington.
“It is said that it was seldom a midday meal was served in the Toombs home to just the family, there were nearly always guests present,” the Works Progress Administration researcher wrote, adding that “the Toombs home in Washington still stands, a wonderful old home, big, roomy and hospitable.”
Two days before, I had visited Washington, where my father’s first cousin Patricia lives. Patricia had driven me past the Toombs home, now a museum on Georgia’s “Civil War Heartland Leaders Trail” Toombs had served as Jefferson Davis’s secretary of state. Patricia had told me that Toombs had many slaves. Some served his guests, making it easy for him to be magnanimous. One of Toombs’s slaves, Wesley John Gaines, may be my great-great-great uncle, according to Patricia. After emancipation Gaines became a prominent African Methodist Episcopal minister.
The possible Gaines connection made me want to see the Toombs house. But it was closed the day I visited Patricia and I had reporting elsewhere the next day. I kept an eye on the time as I worked in the university library on the last of my three days in Georgia. As the hours passed, I realized that if I was going to see the Toombs house I would not have time to see the AME Church in Athens where my great-grandfather once pastored.
I decided to skip the church because I was eager to see the home of a Confederate general. Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.
I’m not in the habit of visiting the homes of enslavers. The only one I’d seen before was the big house near New Orleans on the Whitney Plantation, which opened in 2014 as a museum focusing on the people who were exploited, not the exploiters. The home where the slave-owning Heidel family lived is not the centerpiece of the Whitney’s 90-minute walking tour. I remember the house as dimly lit and unimpressive.
I had been moved at the Whitney by a beautiful 19th century wooden church built by former slaves and transported there from elsewhere in Louisiana to be used as an art gallery. In the church are displayed compelling sculptures of enslaved African-American children by artist Woodrow Nash. The Whitney also has a memorial wall bearing the names of 2,200 children who died as slaves in St. John the Baptist Parish between the 1820s and the 1860s. Their deaths were documented in the Sacramental Records of the Archdiocese of New Orleans.
I did not quite find that atmosphere of introspection at the Toombs home, which I reached after an hour’s drive from Athens. I called cousin Patricia as I pulled into a grassy parking space behind the house about 3:20 p.m.., 40 minutes before tours ended for the day. Patricia advised me to drop Gaines’s name, which I did after apologizing to the volunteer museum attendant for arriving so late. The woman led me to a glass case against one wall of an otherwise empty room just off the ground floor entrance. She said the case held an exhibition on which work had begun during the COVID lockdowns about the slaves Toombs owned. The museum, she said, had consulted with an expert from the Magnolia Plantation, a South Carolina site that, like the Whitney, is known for squarely facing slavery.
The items in the Toombs slavery display case included a photo of a woman named Johanna Johnson who had been enslaved by Toombs, and a card reading: “Giving Honor Where Honor is Due.” The attendant pulled a white binder from a wooden cabinet next to the case and handed it to me, saying it contained the result of curators’ research into Gaines’s life. I pulled out my cell phone to use its camera to copy the documents in the binder, realizing I would not have time to make notes. The attendant offered to move a folding table across the room to a better-lit spot so I could place the documents there and take my pictures without shadows. She mentioned several groups used the room for meetings. I was pleased to think that that increased the eyes on the exhibit.
I took a few moments to climb the stairs and tour the rest of the grand home. And it was grand, much more so than the Whitney’s big house. Part of that may be the difference between a country and a city mansion. Also, Toombs was much more successful than the Whitney’s Heidels. Toombs was a public figure who inspired efforts to preserve his fine, heavy furnishings that included a piano, numerous books, family portraits and china set on the dining table as if ready for guests. An excerpt from a loving letter he’d written his wife was displayed on a cabinet outside a bedroom
As I headed out just before 4 p.m., I thanked the attendant for her help. She mentioned as we said goodbye that Gaines had been “the only one who left.” I realized it was the first moment the volunteer, who was white, had looked me in the eyes. She must have seen confusion there, because she went on to explain that all the other people enslaved by Toombs had kept working for him after the Civil War.
I was still wondering why she thought that was significant as I left the house and headed to my car. I paused to read a placard set up outside, at a spot where slave cabins that had not been preserved had once stood. The placard appeared to be part of a previous attempt to reckon with slavery. It was titled “In the Shadow of the Big House” and included a brief description of Gaines in a corner. Front and center was an enlarged clipping from a newspaper that recounted the burial of “Uncle Billy Toombs.” After the Civil War, according to the article, Robert Toombs told Billy Toombs he was free. The article said Billie Toombs replied:
“’I’ll never be free from the old master,’ said he, ‘but I will follow you all my life.’ To this General Toombs replied, ‘Very well, then, I’ll take care of you.’”
“The only one who left,” then, is a line from a single story that presents a paternalistic fiction of slavery. In that fiction, as sugary sweet as a mint julep, slaves are as nostalgic for the peculiar institution as its white apologists.
The more recent attempt by curators at the Toombs home to reckon with slavery may eventually offer visitors a summation of the scant options open to newly emancipated citizens who had been denied education and opportunities to store other kinds of wealth; the violence they faced; the extraordinary courage it took to seek other futures. Curators struggle to find newspaper articles or documents to tell those stories.
At the Toombs home, I made photographed the material in one other binder from the nascent attempt to tell the stories of the Black Americans who had toiled there. It is titled simply “Aunt Betty” and is just three pages long, much of it about other slaves, including Billy Toombs. The unnamed researcher who had compiled the information writes that Aunt Betty had a trusted position as Toombs’s housekeeper.
“My research is only a couple of years old and I sometimes can go months without finding anything new,” the researcher wrote. “Unfortunately I do not know what surname she might have used and I do not know if she was ever freed. Perhaps one day I will figure these things out.”
Near the Toombs mansion stands another impressive example of ante bellum architecture, home to the Washington Historical Museum. The home built in 1835 by a lawyer and politician named Albert Gallatin Semmes has one room dedicated to the lives of families such as my own. A typewritten sign on the wall in the African American Room has this quote from the late James Horton, who was a George Washington University historian and director of the Smithsonian's African American Communities Project:
"The problem of race in America at the end of the twentieth century is not the problem of slavery. If it had been the problem of slavery, it'd have been over in 1865. But as a nation that saw itself as a Christian nation, as a nation that saw itself built on the principles of freedom, we had to tell ourselves that there was something about the slave that justified slavery. It is that justification of slavery that we are still trying to deal with, more than 100 years after the abolition of slavery."