Bearing Witnessing

Perry Carter - Research Fellow

After the death of Nobel prize winning author Toni Morrison, National Public Radio’s Fresh Air re-broadcasted a series of interviews that its host, Terry Gross, performed with Morrison. In one interview the subject of lynching came up:

GROSS: I think it must've been hard for your father to hate white people and to live in a neighborhood in [Lorain, Ohio] which there's a lot of white people.

MORRISON: Well, you know, my father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, Georgia, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen, not vagrants, hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.
(broadcasted August 9, 2019)

Cartersville, Georgia is my hometown and one of the men that eight-year-old George Wofford, Morrison’s farther, witnessed hanging from a tree was Jesse McCorkle. Jesse McCorkle was my cousins’ (though they are more like my sisters) Andrea and Anita’s granduncle. Growing up I do not recall hearing conversations about lynchings. If I was told this story, it never registered until I visited The National Memorial for Peace and Justice with my father and he pointed this out to me:

Tourism, the word conjures light, easy, fun images of the beach, Disneyland, the Grand Canyon, the Eiffel Tower. It seems unserious which is why in some academic circles the study of it is disfavored. But where we choose to go, what we choose to see, and what we choose to experience during our free time reveals a great deal about us. We choose places and sometimes we choose hard places. We choose these difficult places because we want, and sometimes we need, to bear witness. We come to hard places to acknowledge that something bad happened there, something evil. While this something may not be directly linked to us, we feel the need to occupy these hard places as a physical statement: “I am here, I see, and I will not forget.” We bear witness.

“I am here, I see, and I will not forget ”

Whitney plantation museum is inaptly christened. It is not a plantation museum like so many of its sisters who fashion themselves as modern day Taras. They play the part so well that you expect to see Scarlett standing between their Greek revival columns. There is no Scarlett at Whitney. Whitney is a museum that narrates the stories of the people who toiled there.

The enslaved possessed few material objects and those they did possess most often were not regarded as worthy of preservation. Hence few of their possessions endure. This material absence begets a narrative absence. It is as if the enslaved never existed in the very places that they made possible. Whitneys solution to this nonexistence is to create Black objects upon which the narratives of the enslaved can be interlocked. Whitney gives presence to the enslaved. It tells their hard stories. Visitors come to Whitney to bear witness to a 246-year abomination. They come to acknowledge that yes, this evil occurred.

Manzanar, a National Park Service Historic Site, like Whitney re-creates material culture to tell its story of Japanese-American incarceration during World War II. But unlike Whitney it also uses absences, voids, and silences to convey loss. Lost time constitutes the fissures in the lives of the formerly incarcerated that can never be fully plastered. Life interrupted, stolen.

At the beginning of U.S. involvement in the war the government forced more than 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry to suspend their lives by placing them in detainment at ten remote concentration camps across the western states of the nation. Manzanar, the most famous of the camps, lies in the desolate yet stunningly beautiful Owens Valley. To visit Manzanar is to be overwhelmed by a vast sense of emptiness. It is as if we deposited our fellow citizens as far away from us as possible. To go to Manzanar is to witness the void into which we abandoned those who in a time of crisis we chose to other. It also represents the void into which we chose to abandon our decency.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice tells its story through material abstraction. The 4,300 known lynchings in the United States between 1877 and 1950 are represented by 805 hanging rusted metal rectangular boxes each representing a county in the United States where a documented lynching took place. On the faces of the boxes are engraved the names and death dates of those who had their lives taken from them by acts of White terrorism.

Why these hanging abstractions rather than figures of humans hanging? Like the 131 empty nooses hanging from the ceiling of South Africa’s Apartheid Museum there is a certain power in abstraction. To walk among and view this formation of rows of boxes ascending higher and higher the deeper one enters this space is affecting. It is this assemblage of blank uniformity which shatters viewers. We behold before us evil in its immensity.

America, despite what we might have been taught in grade school, is not a perfect place. There are vile and hideous episodes in our nation’s history. We cannot undo them. Bits and pieces and entireties of people’s lives have been lost due to fear and greed. Though lost they should not be forgotten.

We travel. We travel from our homes, maybe for a block or maybe across the world. We travel to escape the mundane. We travel to have fun. This is what tourism is. But sometimes we travel to hard places, places that are not relaxing and are anything but fun. Sometimes we travel to witness, to acknowledge, to be there. Sometimes being there is all we can do and sometimes this is enough.

I want to thank my research associates, Arthur L. Carter and Cynthia L. Sorrensen, for their invaluable contributions.

PERRY L. CARTER