Hear From the Residents
August 20, 2023
Summer Writer-In-Residence Victoria Newton Ford: Questioning Narrative
Victoria Newton Ford is a poet from Memphis, Tennessee. She is a MacDowell and Lambda Literary Fellow, and her work has been supported by TORCH Literary Arts, Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center, and The Hurston/Wright Writers Workshop. She earned her B.A. in English with a concentration in creative writing from the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently working on her first manuscript about Black mothers and their daughters, captivity, and haunting. She resides in Washington, D.C.
Victoria Newton Ford is our fourth writer of the Summer 2023 cohort to spend a week onsite participating in our local residency program at Northern Virginia’s Woodlawn & Pope-Leighey House and Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food and Agriculture. Our summer writers-in-residence focus their weeks on-site exploring ways to rediscover and re-purpose place and place histories, and use writing as a means to build community, to bring awareness to critical social and environmental issues, and as a creative force of empowerment.
Plantations are not places that can be escaped. I don’t mean this metaphorically. For example, a quick search of “Woodlawn plantation” results in at least four different plantations—including the National Historic Trust preservation here in Virgina—and also land in Louisiana and Tennessee and Georgia To search for one plantation results in a litany of others. The plantation is expansive, and even one name contains an echo of other histories. The plantation is here, there, and everywhere. One does not need a map.
It is a common and peculiar practice to use certain language to speak about plantations. Language such as “historical,” “remarkable,” “compelling,” “beautiful.” These are just some words I’ve seen associated with slavery and its architecture.
It’s peculiar but very common to find beauty in terror. If I was really surprised by this, though, I’d be ignoring the extreme violence that was necessary to make such places possible.
The truth is that most everyone wants to be comforted by slavery, even while many claim to abhor it. We may look at an image of what a slave was made to eat for the week, for instance. We may find the thought of the rationed cornmeal and fatback harrowing. But at the end of the day, we are imagining degradations that are not ours as if they are memories we can claim. Some of us eventually leave the plantation. Others can’t. If and when we feel moved to write about all this, we are faced with an impossible task.
In an Interview in November magazine, Frank B. Wilderson III asks Aria Dean, “Since there is no temporal progression for the slave, how does one, to paraphrase [Saidiya] Hartman, emplot the slave in a narrative?” He goes on to say, “This is the problem of writing. Narrative is, generically, anti-Black. It assumes a subject of loss. Narrative cannot accommodate an object of absence.”
In the parlor of the main house, near the west elevation, there is a display of bricks baked by Woodlawn slaves, circa 1800. These 200-year-old bricks made me think about the process of building the foundation of a place one cannot escape. How much pain was required, how exhausting and voluminous and arduous on the back and muscles and knees and fingernails was it to build this kind of deathbed? To ensure that these pieces of brick are strong enough to outlast even your children’s children’s children?
What I am trying to attend to is the horrible fact that the past is not past. The bricks reveal this. As a poet and artist, I’m faced with a serious problem that demands my attention.
So what good is a story for those who have been sentenced to die? What good can come from researching these slaves—finding their names and then what? Slaves whose stories and lives were obliterated by the very same history being preserved? Narratives often fail the slave because most answer to the market. Perhaps some of these narratives generate funding. Maybe they entice groups to visit for a tour. Or the project of preservation provides cover for the many weddings and celebrations that occur on lands of unspeakable wickedness.
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