Learning that your family owned slaves
Stacie Marshall found out that her family once enslaved seven people, said Kim Severson in The New York Times. Now the Georgia farmer is trying to find a way to make things right.
JUST BEFORE PEOPLE started to take the pandemic seriously, Stacie Marshall slipped into the back of a conference room in Athens, Ga., and joined two dozen Black farmers in a marketing seminar called “Collards Aren’t the New Kale.” She stood out, and not just because she was one of only two white people in the room. Marshall, 41, still had the long blond hair and good looks that won her the Miss Chattooga County title in 1998. The win came with scholarship money that got her to a tiny Baptist college and a life away from Dirt Town Valley, Ga., the small Appalachian valley where her family has farmed for more than 200 years. Leading the seminar was Matthew Raiford, 53, a tall, magnetic Gullah Geechee chef and organic farmer who works the coastal Georgia land his forebears secured a decade after they were emancipated from slavery. He asked if there were questions. Marshall raised her hand, ignored the knot in her stomach, and told her story: She was in line to inherit 300 acres, which would make her the first woman in her family to own a farm. She had big plans for the fading commercial cattle operation and its overgrown fields. She would call it Mountain Mama Farms, and sell enough grass-fed beef and handmade products like goat’s milk soap to help support her husband and their three daughters.
But she had discovered a terrible thing.
“My family owned seven people,” Marshall said. She wanted to know how to make it right. Raiford was as surprised as anyone in the room. “Those older guys have probably never heard that from a white lady in their entire lives,” he recalled.
For almost three years now, with the fervor of the newly converted, Marshall has been on a quest that from the outside may seem quixotic and even naïve. She is diving into her family’s past and trying to chip away at racism in the Deep South, where every white family with roots here benefited from slavery and almost every Black family had enslaved ancestors.
“I don’t have a lot of money, but I have property,” she said during a walk on her farm last winter. “How am I going to use that for the greater good, and not in like a paying-penance sort of way but in an it’sjust-the-right-thing-to-do kind of way?”
It’s not easy finding anyone in this farming community of 26,000 she can talk to about white privilege, critical race theory, or renewed calls for federal reparations. She can’t even get her cousins to stop flying the Confederate flag. It’s about heritage, not hate, they tell her. Hers is the national soulsearching writ small: Should the descendants of people who kept others enslaved be held responsible for that wrong? What can they do to make things right? And what will it cost?
After the seminar, the farmers offered some ideas: She could set up an internship for young Black farmers, letting them work her land and keep the profit. Maybe her Black neighbors wanted preservation work done on their church cemetery. Or maybe— and this is where the discussion gets complicated—she should give some land or money from the sale of it to descendants of the Black people who had helped her family build wealth, either as enslaved people in the 1800s or, later, as sharecroppers who lived in two small shacks on her land. “She is deep in Confederate country trying to do this work,” Raiford said when he went to visit her farm this spring. As the only young woman running a farm in the valley, Marshall already feels like a curiosity. You can’t really hide from your neighbors here, which is the best and the worst thing about tight communities. Not long ago, she ended up in a CrossFit class with Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican this region elected to Congress in 2020. Marshall hasn’t told most of her extended family what she is doing. “I will get some hell,” she said. “There are people in this community that are totally going to turn when I start telling these things.” At the same time, she is protective of her corner of the South. “I don’t want my family to be painted out as a bunch of white, racist rednecks,” she said. “God, I am proud of every square inch of this place—except for this.”
VER THE YEARS, Marshall’s father and grandfather drove trucks or took shifts at the cotton mill to keep the farm running. At 68, her father, Steve Scoggins, still works 3 p.m. to midnight as a hospital maintenance man.
Her father, who lives down the road, is as proud of his farm daughter as a man could be. He unabashedly supports her work against racism, but at the Dirt Town Deli, he sometimes stays quiet when an offensive comment passes among his friends. Marshall’s childhood was steeped in conservative rural politics and the power of the evangelical church. She left home to attend Truett McConnell University, a Baptist school near the Tennessee border, on a scholarship for students with ambitions to become a minister or marry one. There she met Jeremy Marshall, a product of the Atlanta suburbs who was studying for the ministry. They married when both were 21, and went on to earn master’s degrees.
The couple lived and worked for a decade at Berry College, a liberal arts school in northwest Georgia where they helped care for 400 evangelical students in a program paid for by the conservative WinShape Foundation. But last year, as the coronavirus hit, they decided it was time to move to the family farmhouse she had inherited.
O
If anyone in the valley could help Marshall begin those conversations, it was Melvin Mosley. He had been the assistant principal at her high school. He is also her father’s best friend. The two men met as boys, when Mosley’s uncle lived in one of the shacks on the Scoggins farm and worked for Marshall’s grandfather.
Scoggins went to the white school, Mosley to the Black one. Every book at Mosley’s school was a hand-me-down from the white school, but the boys didn’t understand that their educations were different until they started comparing notes.
For decades, Mosley taught in public schools and prisons. At 67, he is a preacher and lives with his wife, Betty, on 50 acres near Marshall’s farm.
On a summer day in 2019, Marshall sat in their yard and told them she wanted to start sharing the whole, hard story of Dirt Town Valley and to make some kind of amends. She asked if she was on the right path. “In all of our families, Black or white, there are some generational things that are up to us to break,” he told her. “And when we break it, it is broken forever.”
He stood and took her hand. Mosley joined them in a prayer circle. “Father in heaven,” he prayed, “we ask you just to continue to give her the courage and the desire to break the chain of racism, Lord.”
ANCY AND GENE KIRBY, a couple in their late 70s, live right across the road from Marshall’s farm. When Nancy was young, she and her family were renters, living in one of the farm shacks before Marshall’s grandparents bought that
Ntract in the 1950s. No one knows exactly when the generations of people who lived in them started calling themselves renters instead of tenant farmers or sharecroppers. Gene Kirby sometimes worked for Marshall’s grandfather, and one of the first things Marshall did when she moved to the farm was to ask the Kirbys if her grandfather had left any debt to them unpaid. Gene asked her to untangle a small land dispute. Marshall promised to pay him for the land once they get it surveyed.
Marshall can’t imagine offering them anything that they might see as charity. They wouldn’t even accept the gift of her grandmother’s chair. But one afternoon last winter, Marshall walked across the road specifically to speak about racism. She brought a copy of the slave records, and arranged for Paulette Perry, 77, a cousin of Melvin Mosley’s who is something of a family historian, to join them.
At first, no one had much to say. They talked about Gene’s tractors and who called Marshall the last time her cows got out. Then they turned to issues of race.
“We never really had any problem with Black and white,” Perry said.
“You just kind of knew where you stood and knew everybody,” Nancy said.
The two laughed about how their brothers had to protect them from some white boys who threw stones as they walked home from school. How they hid under a bed in fear for a half-day after someone pulled a prank and said the Ku Klux Klan was on its way. The laughter faded. There were the hotel rooms Gene was refused when he was on the road driving 18-wheelers, and the times he had to put up a fight to get paid. And there was the death, at age 4, of the Kirbys’ son Gordon Eugene. A photo, with a lock of his hair, hangs in their den. On Sept. 10, 1967, a white teenage driver sped down the road not far from the Scoggins farm and struck him. Gene saw it happen. “I was across the road holding my other baby in my arms,” he said.
The teenager’s mother denied that her son was the driver. Gene said he called the sheriff and the state patrol, but they never showed up to take a report. Standing on the Kirbys’ porch, Marshall said her goodbyes and headed back across the road. The path to reconciliation still wasn’t clear. “These are people that I love dearly,” she said. “How do I put a number on what they have lived through?”
A version of this article first appeared in The New York Times. Used with permission.