by Elizabeth Avery Thomas
Speculation and extrapolation are necessary tools to excavate what’s been hidden.
"The loudest noise in the world is silence." —Thelonius Monk
I grew up with the ringing of bells. Three times a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, my family would sit down at the dining table, my mother would pick up the bell placed discreetly near her, and she would ring it once, just a single chime. Then the mouth of the bell would close over the wood of the table, its singing tongue stopped. After a few seconds, the kitchen door would open, and a servant would bring us our food. My father was a diplomat and I grew up in Southeast Asia. Looking back on it now, it seems surreal, alien, but then it was all I knew.
I’d never thought much about the bells. They were just part of the strange furniture of a life I once lived and that seemed to have very little to do with me. But I come from a long line of women who rang bells that called people with brown skin to serve them. My ancestors, the Averys, were the largest slave-owners in western North Carolina; the bell and the dining table I sit at were once at my family’s plantation, and this inanimate inheritance haunts me now. The small brass bell, with its dark wooden handle, smoothed and conditioned by generations or women’s hands, its etched decorative border of vining flowers, is easy to underestimate. Very simply, it took away the need for words. The bell did it all, and its chime made the unvoiced command sound sweet. At its call, unpaid brown hands brought—to the polished table they had set with bone china and engraved silver—platters piled with food grown by forced labor in the fields around the house.
The Southern belles who were my ancestors didn’t have to yell for their food (that would be crass). They didn’t have to open the door to the kitchen, feel the heat of it, see the sweat running down the face of the woman cooking at a fire in high summer. They didn’t have to look in her eyes, say her name, acknowledge that she had no choice but to obey their every word. Ringing the bell, the mistress wouldn’t have to hear the whip in her own voice. Words have power, even small ones. Which is why slaves weren’t allowed to learn to read or write, or even allowed to have legal names. To have a legal name was to be recognized as human; to have command of the written word was a physical manifestation of their humanity: the word made flesh, or the experience of their flesh made into words. A voice.
The white women and men I descend from used their words and stories to build the myth of the elegant, gracious plantation life—stories saying that slavery wasn’t that bad, that they, the enslaved people, were inferior and needed white guidance. The stories could only stand because they were built on the foundation of the silence of the enslaved. I know all too well the stories we white people tell. I remember once, going through family papers with my mother, and coming across one of the plantation’s slave ledgers. She leafed through it and finally said, “Well, they bought them shoes once a year, so they must have been good slave owners.” But the words “good” and “slave owner” are mutually exclusive. The simple act of “owning” another human being taints every other part of your life—in part because it is an absolute wrong, and in part because you must lie to yourself to make it acceptable. This Gone With the Wind version of life in the old South is the story we whites have told ourselves and the world repeatedly until we believe, against all common sense and human decency, that it’s true.
It’s important to remember that the myths we have spun cover up not only the truth about black lives, but also the truth about our own lives. Growing up, when one of us kids would mention some unsavory fact about a family member—their alcoholism or suicide—my grandmother would say, “We don’t talk about that.” So, we didn’t. And as in my family, in every shadowed corner of every “gracious” Southern plantation’s history, there are suppressed stories. In my own family there was the baby daughter of an enslaved woman, raped and impregnated by the son of the house, who was given at the age of two as a gift to her own white cousin. There were mistresses and illegitimate children on the other side of town that everyone knew about, whispered about. But we don’t talk about that. The stories my great grandmothers, those Southern belles, told, and the ones they didn’t tell, were part of the same wider lie of the gracious plantation South, which twisted and tainted everything it touched. There is a cost to those that lie, as well as to those lied about.
As I look at my mother’s bell now, it seems to glimmer between the simple thing it is and the history it was a part of. Small things have power. Its gold mouth rests silent now against the warm mahogany of the table that once stood at the heart of a plantation house, which stood surrounded by fields tilled by forced labor, which was surrounded by other forced labor camps, which were patrolled by armed, violent white men. The mouth of the bell, ringed with flowering vines, contains the silence of the enslaved, its brass shell like the monuments we once put up to retell the history of the Civil War and of slavery.
But, of course, dissenting voices can never be entirely silenced. Stories whisper down generations. Resistance can be camouflaged as worship; those who cannot speak can sing. “Tell ol’ Pharaoh to let my people go!” or “Wade in the water” as a way to escape the patroller’s dogs. Each voice that gets through, like a slow-creeping vine, makes a crack in the foundation. And for long slow years it seems that nothing is happening. Till one day monuments begin to fall and voices stopped and ignored cannot be stopped any longer. And a small bell, whose voice once had power over the lives of others, becomes only a curiosity. I keep it to remind myself of what it spoke and who its ringing silenced.
In my current work, exploring Southern history through the lens of my family, the accepted “facts” I’ve inherited are self-justifying fictions. Since the lives of the non-literate Native and enslaved people in my family’s world are not directly documented, the truth of those lives is all too easily erased. Speculation and extrapolation are necessary tools to excavate what’s been hidden. In this piece, I start with two objects – a bell and a table – that were once in my family’s plantation house. Using them as anchors, I imagine the lives of those who controlled them and those who were controlled by them. In doing so, I hope to undermine the fictional histories we’ve been given and reveal some truths about the lives lived in the orbit of those objects.
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Elizabeth Avery Thomas has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, and has published both fiction and nonfiction. She is currently at work on His Father’s Son: William Holland Thomas, Yonaguska, and the Forgotten History of Cherokee Resistance on the Appalachian Frontier, a social biography of her second great grandfather who was adopted by a band of Cherokees and helped them evade the Trail of Tears.