My Past Can't Escape Me
As 2022 came to a close, I was filled with the unexplainable urge to go home.
From October to December of 2022, I found myself dreaming of home. My eyes would close, and I would see open fields of lush greens; trees taller than any other trees I’d ever seen before; mobile homes filled with love. On rare occasions, I would even smell fresh coffee being made on a percolator.
By December 2022, I knew I had to go home. Not home to New York, but home to where my ancestors have lived for at least 4 generations.
Last year at this time in January 2023, I was sitting in my family’s home in Ehrhardt, South Carolina.
My mother’s mother is from a small town in South Carolina called Ehrhardt (pronounced air-hart). My mother’s father is from the neighboring town of Bamberg. As of 2010, Bamberg had a population of 3,607 people, a huge city compared to Ehrhardt’s population of 545 people.
In Ehrhardt, you know everyone and everyone knows you. On the street where the majority of my grandmother’s siblings live, nearly everyone is family. When I visited my grandmother for the summer of 1999, everyone in the street was family. Back then the roads weren’t paved, and I spent so much of that summer riding up and down the dirt road on a borrowed bike with cousins with wild nicknames. Tootie. Bunky. NuNu (that one’s mine).
In January 2023, in search of spiritual guidance and pulled by a force beyond my control, I found myself flying from Connecticut to Columbia, South Carolina. Bumping SZA’s newly released SOS, I drove from the state’s Capital past cotton field after cotton field in search of Ehrhardt. Two hours later, I parked the rental car on the land where my grandmother spent her final decade of life.
My grandparents met and married in Ehrhardt. My grandfather, William Gregg, was born into sharecropping. Little else is known to me about his upbringing other than it was hard. I can’t imagine what his life was like - he was a Black man born into sharecropping in 1925 (when people tell you that slavery was a long time ago, it’s a lie; I barely escaped it by 3 generations). I look at photographs of my grandfather and think of the stories my mother has shared with me about his laugh, his sense of humor, his zeal. My grandmother, Flossie Mae, was not born into sharecropping, but she was born into a very different world than my grandfather. Her mother was Black, and her father was a mixed race man who was disowned by his own white father and family. From my knowledge, my grandmother grew up slightly more removed from slavery than my grandfather, but lived with the erasure of her Indigenous heritage in order to assimilate. My grandparents knew each other in adolescence, married in the 1940’s, and moved to New York City shortly after.
Together they had 11 children, my mother being the youngest. In turn, I’m one of the youngest of my cousins on my mother’s side. In 1990, three years after my grandfather passed away and a year before I was born, my mother and her siblings built a home for my grandmother in the town she grew up in. It was on this land that she spent her final years, and where I found myself last year in the middle of an existential crisis. I had to put my hand in the dirt where my family has lived for over a century in order to make sense of my life. As I was uncertain about my future, I felt like I had to really see my past in order to move forward.
Visiting the land of my ancestors was overwhelming.
I spent most of my time with my Aunt Roslin, my grandmother’s younger sister. Truthfully I resemble her more than my own grandmother. She was 91 last year, and together we rode all around the town in search of things past. We visited our family grave sites; I saw tombstones with the family name as far back as 1887. We visited her siblings; my oldest uncle in Ehrhardt is currently 98 years old. We looked at pictures that she hadn’t looked at in years; the family resemblance is out of this world.
With intention, I made it a point to learn more about my family, about where we come from, and about who we are as a people.
I also took time to learn more about South Carolina while I was there. During the 1800’s, South Carolina was one of the country’s largest producers of cotton. In Ehrhardt, where there are cotton fields surrounding the town at all angles, you feel the history of enslavement immensely. South Carolina has a rich history outside of slavery, there’s no mistaking that. And while I was in Ehrhardt, the impacts of enslavement were felt all around me.
The Broxton Bridge Plantation is one of the biggest attractions in Ehrhardt to this day. When I asked Aunt Roslin about whether she knew of any Black people who went there, her response was, “the only Black people I know who go to the Plantation are working.” To this day, in 2024 nearly a century after my grandfather was born, Black people are still working on plantations. On the plantation’s website, they even have a space for people to fill in how many enslaved people were on the property.
Do you know what it’s like to live with the impacts of enslavement all around you? To see a street sign bearing your family’s name, knowing that it was named after the slave owner who owned your family? To know that there are whole family grave sites with your family’s name that are owned by white people who wouldn’t even spit on you if you were on fire?
I do.
While I spent a lot of time thinking about enslavement, the harsh reality of Reconstruction, and my family’s difficult history in Ehrhardt, I also learned to laugh. In spite of everything, my time in Ehrhardt taught me to laugh and live even as the shit gets even harder.
As a family we watched Jeopardy! and played Wheel of Fortune together. I drank sweet tea and had a home cooked meal from the South that I so desperately wanted the minute I touched down in Columbia. My cousin and I drank wine straight from the bottle and talked about men and women for hours. I danced alone in the dark to Gryff’s New Religion, a song I first heard while in Ehrhardt. I met up with a good friend in Columbia, and we deepened our relationship over bagels and coffee (I stopped drinking coffee after I came back from Ehrhardt). I pulled tarot cards and wrote poetry for my eyes only. I went to a Family Dollar and found out that I was related by blood to at least 5 people there - the South is like that sometimes.
In Ehrhardt, I learned to be less hard on myself and learned that my people have always survived even in the harshest conditions.
It may not feel like it all the time, but I know I will survive too.
This entry is an ode to South Carolina. An ode to those who live there, whose families hail from there, and to those who work to build up our communities. We are a proud people with a rich history.
As SZA says, “my past can’t escape me.” I’m learning to embrace it, thorns and all.