![]() ![]() He came to warn the family that his cousin had stood up to a white plantation owner, and everyone understood what that meant. ![]() And my aunt described how her brother and her cousin just ran and ran and eventually jumped into those muddy rivers in order to escape, and how they came home dripping wet, their chests heaving.Īnd it reminded me of all the other stories I had heard about how when enslaved people tried to run away, they would sometimes jump into the river in hopes that they could hide their scent from the dogs that were chasing them.Īnd then she tells me about the time another brother had to come home, his chest heaving. So a car approaches behind them, and a group of white boys began to chase. And black people weren’t allowed in the white side of town if they weren’t there for work. It was a long time ago when they were kids, and her brother and her cousin were walking through the white side of town. And she tells me about another baptism of sorts that occurred there. And like my father, he had been sent for the summers to stay with his grandparents, and that’s how he died.Īnd for some reason, it’s at the river’s edge that Aunt Charlotte finally starts to talk. I know that Emmett Till was just four years older than my own father, and that like my father, his mother had also fled north. And after they killed him, they had sunk him in that river, tying a cotton gin fan around his neck. Because that river is a place where they found the body of Emmett Till, who was lynched by white men when he was 14 because they thought that he had done something untoward to a white woman. But as she’s saying that, I also know that something else happened in that river. And Aunt Charlotte said that when she was young, she was baptized in the Tallahatchie River. The Yazoo River is fed by the Tallahatchie River. It’s painted in brown, and it says, in white letters, “Greenwood: Cotton Capital of the World.” And for most of the ride, she was giving me the same gauzy version that she’d always given me, that life for them wasn’t really that hard, that it was a good place to grow up.Īs we finally approach Greenwood, I see a big sign. So we get in the car, and I try, as I had done several times through the years, to get my Great-Aunt Charlotte to open up about what it was like to live down there. It was very important for her at all times to appear respectable, and I understood that so much of that was because in her formative years, she was not treated with respect in the place that she was born. PROJECT MAY EPISODE 2 HOW TOShe’s the one who taught me how to make yeast rolls in her kitchen, and she was this woman who wore heels until she was in her 90s, who, when you would go in her house, everything was always very neat. I’d grown up with Aunt Charlotte my whole life. And it’s strange because I’m 38 years old, but I’m so relieved to have this elderly woman with me, because for some reason, I’m just a little afraid, which is kind of weird. It just so happened that my Great-Aunt Charlotte, my grandmother’s sister, was visiting nearby at the time that I went down. ![]() It wasn’t a place that he really wanted to take us to or a place that he wanted to return. But we would never go to the place of my dad’s birth. Every year, our family would go on family vacations, and we would go on family reunions. My dad was born on a cotton plantation in Greenwood, Mississippi, where his family were sharecroppers in the same field that enslaved people had picked cotton for generations and generations before. Seven years after my dad died, I went to the place he was born for the first time. Friday, August 30th, 2019 nikole hannah-jones Transcript Episode 2: The Economy That Slavery Built Hosted by Nikole Hannah-Jones, produced by Annie Brown, Adizah Eghan and Kelly Prime, with help from Jazmín Aguilera, and edited by Lisa Tobin and Lisa Chow In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation. ![]()
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