Ghosts on the Move

Midway Plantation in its new setting

Last night your Head Trucker watched Moving Midway, which he recommends to all you fellas if you have any interest in Southern history and culture. It's a really well-made documentary about the moving of an old plantation house near Raleigh, done by a filmmaker who happens to be part of the family. And it shows very nicely how the ghosts of our Southern past linger in the present. As Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Your Head Trucker can relate to all this in a way. Having traced all my grandparents' ancestral lines back to at least the year 1800, and a few of them back to the late 1600's, in Old Virginia and Maryland - ten generations - I can imagine the sense of history and connectedness felt by the family at the center of this film. Although it appears that most of my ancestors were small farmers who lived and died in obscurity, there were a couple of branches that were in the planter class, with fine old homes like you see in this documentary. One well-to-do branch lived in Fairfax County, Virginia, where Martha Washington recorded having a certain Mrs. ____ to tea one afternoon at Mount Vernon - my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother. Descendants of those families followed the western movement of the cotton lands first to Georgia, and then on to Alabama and Mississippi. In addition to being planters, they were also army officers, lawyers, and judges.  One of my great-great-grandfathers, who was killed in the War, was first cousin to a Confederate general whose plantation house in East Texas still stands, and who by marriage was very well-connected indeed.

And of course, my planter ancestors owned dozens of slaves - duly recorded in 19th-century census schedules - who worked the fields and may have helped build them large, roomy houses like Midway - though in most cases not as imposing as you may think from watching the movies. (At the premiere of Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell laughed out loud at the grand appearance of Tara - in the book, true to history, she describes it as merely a large, rambling farmhouse, "upcountry functional" as she later said - it was the Yankee David O. Selznick who transformed Mitchell's carefully accurate descriptions into the exquisite but preposterous visions you see on screen.)

My mama, however, swore that she remembered visiting the cousins in Mississippi as a girl and seeing the ruins of the big house, with the white columns still standing. Alas, my male forebears tended to be younger sons of younger sons, or in the female line, so they wouldn't have ended up with those places anyway; and then too, the War swept all the wealth and plantations away. But the memory lingered a long time in the familial memory, brightened and embellished in certain interesting ways.

According to my mother and my uncle, who both told the same story, there was one great-grandmother who, when the Yankees came, absolutely refused to leave her home, and neither guns nor bayonets could drive her out. So they set fire to it and burned it down over her head; but someone, friend or foe, must have dragged her out at the last moment because, as the story goes, her mind was so stricken by the terrifying experience that never thereafter would she sleep in a regular house again. The family had to build her a tree house in the yard, where she made her abode, perched in the branches like a bird, unconquered and defiant to the end of her days.

You have to admit, it does make an awfully good story, don't it? We Southerners have a talent for that sort of thing, or used to. Unfortunately, there is no actual record of such an event to be found, and from my genealogical researches, it does not appear that there was any great-grandmother who would have been the right age and in the right place for such a thing to happen to. But sometimes the myth is much more important than the history.

Continued after the jump . . .



A lovely old home that one fortunate Virginia branch of my ancestors, remote cousins your Head Trucker has never met, ended up with.

Which is why, as Moving Midway correctly points out, millions of Southern men leapt into battle to defend slavery and the "Southern way of life" - even though most of them owned no slaves, and the planter class who primarily benefited from the slave economy constituted only a minute percentage of the Confederate population. And so they fought and bled and died to defend an economic institution that did little for them, and in fact kept the region in a backwards state, economically and politically.

Likewise, their descendants vote en masse for Republicans and Teabaggers, even though both espouse policies that grind the working people into the dust. It's the myth they vote for, not the money, you have to understand: a fatal blind spot in the Southern psyche - the worm in the heart of the apple.  The South is not so much a place as a state of mind:  a land of dreams, where we love our mythology so much, we can almost taste it.  We'd fry it up and eat it for breakfast if we could, like green tomatoes.  With ketchup.

Which is why Emma Lazarus's magnificent poem about "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" just doesn't have the same resonance down here as it does among you newcomers up yonder.  We have been right here for the better part of the last four hundred years, and we're not going anywhere.  We endure, even if we are poor - the universal feeling is, poor but proud.  Though naturally it would be better to be rich and proud, if you can swing it.

Pride, however, goeth before a fall, as the Good Book says; a fact that my countrymen have historically overlooked until much too late, time and again.  Only now, under the overwhelming weight of mass media and Yankee immigration, is the culture beginning to change - slowly, very slowly.  Still, when I look back to the legally segregated days of my childhood, I can see a lot of changes for the good; we just need more of them.

(My favorite line from the film: "I'm sure there are nice Yankees. But they all have SUV's and cell phones, and now the roads are all clogged up around here." Pure tribalism, of course. But priceless.

My least favorite line: "I can't believe our ancestors would have mistreated their slaves, because everyone in our family is so kind." A classic Southern attitude. But totally clueless.)

The family in this film exemplifies those changes, especially when compared with the previous generations they talk about.  The boys - i.e., the owner and his brothers - are of my generation, and their mama is the age of my own late mother.  I have to tell you, boys, at this late date in life I don't miss the bigoted, backwards Southern-plantation idea anymore; but I do wish it could have been my darling mama who lived a life of ease and wealth in a lovely old home like that, instead of the harsher necessities that so often pinched and cramped her life.

Well I could ramble on for days about this topic, but here's the trailer for the documentary, which you can see the whole of on Netflix. Check it out, you will learn some interesting things about the South, even if you don't catch all the nuances as I do. And the most interesting thing is the discovery by the family of their black relatives - the Big Secret that many white Southerners even now don't admit or won't talk about - and their reactions coming from the other side of the myth. A good show, well-balanced and worth watching.




You can see more photos at the film site and the plantation site as well.