Feeling conflicted about our history comes with the territory in South Carolina | Opinion
My wife and I recently spent a week on Fripp Island in Beaufort County. We were celebrating our 27th wedding anniversary. The place was gorgeous, quiet, green, lush.
We stayed in a loft, an expansive marsh beginning virtually in the backyard, the oceanfront a short walk from the front door. The sky was beautifully dark every night, stars easy to spot. Lightning storms in the distance for a few days enhanced the area’s majestic feel.
During a 90-minute cruise and a two-hour kayak tour, our guides regaled us with tales of the island’s history, including a story about a swashbuckling pirate who may have left a still-undiscovered treasure. A family of dolphins swam next to our kayak as we paddled ever so softly. And we got to see a massive bald eagle nest.
We were told a scene from “Forrest Gump” was filmed in the area, as were portions of the popular Netflix series “Outer Banks.”
Though we have lived in Myrtle Beach for the past three decades, this was the first time we rode around in a golf cart — topping out at 15 miles per hour — but we still didn’t pick up clubs to check out the golf course.
We had to learn for ourselves that the Fripps had been among the largest enslavers in South Carolina history, “owning” nearly 1,000 Black people. That fact wasn’t included in the online brochures we came across while researching the place.
Our very pleasant, very professional guides didn’t mention it, and they seemed to not know that part of the history of the area, which includes St. Helena Island.
While we were among a handful of Black people visiting Fripp, we were the only Black people on the cruise and just about everywhere we went. That and learning about how enslaved Black people toiled on plantations for the Fripp family complicated our stay.
But we don’t mind feeling conflicted about our country’s racial history. We are Black South Carolina natives. Feeling conflicted isn’t a burden. It comes with the territory.
Knowing our complex history doesn’t anger me. It humbles me and makes me proud even, because I know I come from tough stock. I can thrive because I know the enslaved could survive.
But there’s a growing movement to smooth out this country’s rough edges, to avoid “divisive” concepts and push forward a supposedly unifying narrative about this “great” and “exceptional” place. “Unifying” means approved by white people and dictated to Black people.
It’s a movement to spread lies because Americans apparently can’t handle the truth of how we’ve come to be.
The directives are coming from the highest seats of power, with the White House at President Donald Trump’s direction spreading its Lost Cause 2.0 propaganda by instructing eight Smithsonian museums to whitewash our history in the lead-up to the nation’s 250th anniversary next year. That follows new laws in several states, including South Carolina, demanding school teachers avoid saying anything that might make white students feel bad, facts be damned.
This all comes from a place of weakness, not strength.
This posits that white people are too fragile to hear the full truth, which includes knowing that white people enslaved people such as Ruth Graham Jackson and Orange Bruorton (or Brewington), my direct ancestors who were enslaved on or around the Rhems Plantation in Williamsburg County. I refuse to dishonor their memory by following Trump’s directives or taking a cue from South Carolina resorts seemingly afraid of telling the full truth about this place.
About a week after we left Fripp, I took my daughter to Williamsburg to walk on ground where Orange helped establish the first Black church in the Bloomingvale community just two years after the Civil War, and to see the stump on which “Grandma Rose” stood preaching to family and friends even while enslaved, as family historian Jackie Whitmore has found.
It didn’t have a Fripp Island kind of beauty. There was no golf course, no waves crashing onto an oceanfront. But it was beautiful nonetheless.
It felt like an honor, standing on that sacred ground. I’m never going to pretend otherwise just because those with fragile sensibilities want to avoid a momentary discomfort.
Issac J. Bailey is a McClatchy opinion writer in North Carolina and South Carolina.