Brigette Jones - Standing as 10,000

 

 

In 2015, my then boyfriend, now fiancé. [laughs] [audience cheers and applause]

 

Sean and I were living in Nashville. And one day on the way home, we passed a sign for the Belle Meade Plantation. And clearly, my excitement was written all over my face, because [chuckles] before I could get the words out of my mouth, Sean was like, “Hell no. [audience laughter] I am a black man. It is 2015. What I'm not going to do is go to a plantation for fun.” [audience laughter] 

 

I said, “Why? It's our history.” And he said, “Because slavery is over, so I'm not going to a plantation for fun.” So, I very audibly pouted for the rest of the ride home. Later that day, about an hour into my attitude induced nap, Sean comes to wake me up and he's like, “Get up. Get dressed. We have somewhere to go.” 

 

So, I get up, I get dressed and I silently ride to our unknown destination with an attitude. And lo and behold, we pull up to the Belle Meade Plantation. Now, halfway through my tour, I'm feeling real confident, because I have this brand new unused degree from the historically black Tennessee State University. And my degree is in African-American history with a focus in Southern race relations. So, I'm in my element. 

 

So, I get all my Leo attitude together [audience laughter] and I'm thinking to myself, “I can do this job and I can do it better.” So, I go walk up to my tour guide, who mind you, has on full antebellum attire, and I go say to her, “I can do this job.” Well,10 cold emails and an interview later, I landed the job. Yeah.. 

 

Now, I immediately wanted to tell two people once I got the job. I wanted to tell my mama and my fiancé, Sean. Sean was the easy one. He was just happy that I wasn't going to be calling him crying from the car no more, because I got another rejection letter. But my mama was a different story, because my mama was born in 1952 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Yeah. So, to my mama, her baby girl going to work on a plantation in 2015, she thought I was going to set all black people back 400 years. [audience laughter]

 

But I'm the direct descendant of enslaved Tennesseans, and I have always been passionate about honoring their sacrifice, respecting their work and acknowledging their tribulations. My very Southern grandmother, May Roy Jones, was born in 1925 in Grand Junction, Tennessee on the Ames Plantation. That very same plantation had enslaved her ancestors prior to emancipation. 

 

Now, I don't know about y'all grandmama, but my grandmama loves pictures. I can vividly remember being a kid staring up at what seemed to be hundreds of photos from the 1940s and 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, all these pictures that lined the walls of my grandmother's South Memphis home. I can vividly remember eavesdropping on the grown folks’ conversations as they talked about who was doing what with who and what folks used to do back in the country. But what really piqued my interest were the conversations about a particular period in time, where black people specifically couldn't do this or that. 

 

I honestly think that it was these conversations and those photographs that peaked and sparked my initial love and interest in black history and culture. I think it was growing up knowing that I was only roughly an hour away from the very same plantation that had legally enslaved my ancestors that made me look at the Antebellum South and antebellum history in a way that fascinated me. 

 

Now, I can remember my very first day of work at Belle Meade. We did typical work stuff, paperwork. I got an in-depth tour of the grounds. But what I was really excited to do was meet my new coworkers. When I walked into that office, I noticed two things. One, everybody had on antebellum attire too. But the other thing I noticed was that I had just become Belle Meade's only black tour guide. I remember clocking out that day, and I had a binder, legit, y'all, the size of a Harry Potter book. [audience laughter] And tons of other supplementary material that I was going to need to learn and memorize before I was cleared to give my own tour. 

 

And eventually, I was cleared. I had my own antebellum dress and everything. And honestly, I wish y'all could have been a fly on the wall the day that I, a then 23-year-old black woman with an afro, opened the front door to a plantation mansion in antebellum dress for 30 white people. [audience laughter] [audience cheers and applause] 

 

Shocked was an understatement. But I relished in that discomfort, because I knew that their discomfort was rooted in their wondering about what side of history I was going to be interpreting. You see, in the early days of my work at Belle Meade, the interpretation of slavery was limited to two people. There was Bob Green, the head hostler, and there was Susanna Carter, the head of domestic staff. I absolutely wanted to tell their stories, but I also wanted to tell what the institution of slavery had done to individuals like them, to a race of people like theirs, to a culture like theirs and ultimately, to a generation of their descendants. 

 

But everybody didn't like my interpretation of history. I can remember this one time in particular, there was this lady on my tour as I dug into the pain of slavery, she would fly to [unintelligible [00:39:41], I ain't going to lie. [audience laughter] As I was getting deep, she stood up in the middle of my tour and interrupted me by saying, “I don't need this. I have a master's degree.” And she left. 

 

I remember looking over at her daughter. Her daughter's face was beet red with embarrassment. But honestly, her embarrassment didn't have a thing on the anger that I felt in that moment. But I used that anger to push me deeper into the history. Well, three years and God Almighty, a discontinuation of costume towards later, I was named Belle Meade's very first black director. [audience cheers and applause]

 

My title was Director of African-American Studies. I spearheaded the creation of the Journey to Jubilee Tour. And this tour sought to stretch beyond the narratives of two people and tell a larger story of all 136 who had been enslaved on the property. This tour was not just important, it was personal. 

 

Now, my mama is a preacher, and we Pentecostal. And in the Pentecostal Church, we speak in proverbs and quotes. There's this one Maya Angelou quote that always stood out to me. Maya Angelou said that, “I come as one, but I stand as 10,000.” 

 

I remember my very first day giving the Journey to Jubilee Tour. When I got to work that day, I had this yearning desire to sit with spirit, as I call it. So, I remember walking over to the clearing where the slave cabins once stood, and I just sat down and I began to talk to the ancestors. I told them that although my ancestors likely faced similar situations, the stories of the enslaved at Belle Meade was not mine. I was going to need their help to tell this story. Essentially, I was going to need them to speak to me and through me. I sat in that space for about 30 minutes and I meditated in that presence. I wiped the tears from my eyes, and I got up and I went back to my office to begin my day. 

 

About an hour later, I was standing back in front of the slave cabins. This time, I was in front of roughly 25 middle aged white people, and I was nervous. I had all these thoughts and feelings, and I didn't know how they were going to come out. But the tour started smoothly. Eventually, I told my guests that we were going to make our way from the slave cabin to the kitchen house. And on our short walk, I answered all of my usual questions, “When was the house built? Did the Civil War happen here?” My personal favorite. “Were they good slave owners?” 

 

I can remember walking into the kitchen house, and letting them look around for a moment and told them to have a seat, so that we could begin our discussion. The weight in the room started to get a little heavier as I began to break down the myth of the lost cause, and the supposed difference between enslaved field workers and house workers. But what really broke the camel's back was when I told them that 11% of Belle Meade's population, 11% of 136 people were mulatto, half black and half white. 

 

Now, I was clear. We don't know where the mulatto slaves came from. But what we do know is that mulatto people don't just fall out the sky. [audience laughter] I pushed on and explained that there is this supposed idea that slavery only affected black people. I wanted to take my guests on a journey, and explore everybody who could have possibly had a role in this type of situation. The first person I introduced them to was master's wife. 

 

I began circling the room as I asked a question, “How does it feel to have to look into the face of your husband's mistress every single day?” Now, what happens when that enslaved woman becomes pregnant, and now she has to look into the face of her husband's indiscretions, indiscretion every single day. As I'm asking these questions, I make sure to look each and every white woman on my tour directly in her eye, “How does it feel?” 

 

I made sure to acknowledge the lack of control that white woman of that time period had over her husband and his actions outside of her, but I also made sure to detail the nature of revenge that many white women took out on this enslaved woman and her illegitimate children. You know, the threat of sale to alleviate her own emotional turmoil. 

 

I pushed further. I shifted my focus, “How does the enslaved woman feel? How does it feel to have to bear the brunt of someone's anger, and aggression and resentment for a situation that you did not ask for nor can you control? How does it feel to have a baby by a man, a man who only views that baby as pure property to be bought and sold at will? In actuality, that's not even really your baby, how does it feel?” 

 

I saw a tear slide down the eye of a beet red brunette in the group. I shifted my focus one last time, “How does it feel?” Because what if that slave had a husband too? This time, I'm looking at all the men in the group. I ask, “How does it feel to have to go work six days a week from sun up to sundown and then come home to an 08:00 by 10:00 shack that you share with 8 to 10 people, and lay down on a cot next to your wife and know that she has been and she is being raped, but there's nothing that you can do about it?” There were audible sobs in the room at this point. 

 

I asked, “How does it feel to watch a baby come out of your wife, a baby whose shade of brown is going to be a whole lot lighter than your shade of brown? And even though you know who it belongs to, there's nothing that you can do about it. You can't help her. Hell, you can't even help you, so you love it and you love her as best as you know how. But in the midst of loving, then what did it do to you, mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually?” 

 

In that moment, there were tears streaming down my own face. My hands were shaking. I broke. It was like I was there, but I wasn't there. It was like I had emotionally transcended from my present location and into my own family history of biracial babies on the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s since its record listed as mulatto. Time had merged, and I could feel the weight of 136 formerly enslaved men, women and children hovering over my tourists and I in that kitchen house. As I came to out of my history induced trance, I noticed that there was not one dry eye in the room. 

 

You see, I looked around and noticed the flood of emotions over fully grown white men and women. And I said to myself right then that this is it. This is my Journey to Jubilee. The feeling that had shifted the room that day, it was like alchemy. I had asked my visitors to come face to face with the ethos of black people's plight. I asked them to feel it. And by God, they felt it. I showed them the pain that most black people don't show white people. I showed them just how deeply the legacy of slavery still hurt on a personal level. I took off my mask. I had no use for it. I let them see me. 

 

There's an African proverb that says, “That until the lion learns to write, the hunter will be glorified in every story.” And in that moment, I had become the lion that could write. And although I was just one little black girl from Memphis, I was standing in that room as 10,000. I now take the ancestors with me into every room I enter. I

 

t's like, I walk with them instead of being led by them. I have cried for them. I have cried with them. I have laughed at their ability to slight their oppressor without them ever even knowing. I have seen them through the history books perform the alchemy of turning nothing into something for the last 400 and some odd years. You see, I used to just know I was black in color and culture. But now, now, I stand in that blackness, bold and proud of each and every person that has come before me. Thank you.