Mississippi Free Press and Me
Yesterday, on the day of Thanksgiving in America, the Mississippi Free Press Voices published my essay, “Nearing Vicksburg: Examine What You Think is True.” I’m not going to tell y’all a lot about it, because I want you to experience it for yourself. Just know this: I’m a little Piglet when it comes to publishing anything, full of fear and quaking. Talking about something like this in a statewide press amplifies it by one hundred.
Please follow the link below to see what exactly I’m talking about.
Thank you!
Emma
Ellen, my brief comment in my text to you did not represent my entire arc of thoughts and feelings that emerged from reading your words. As a Southerner, I felt your pain viscerally. We try to hold our heads up when we know most of our ancestors probably held beliefs that were shockingly contrary to our own. My own father was one of them. Misguided as he and others like him were, they were passionate about what they believed to be true, just as we are. One thing that i know in my heart, if he were alive today, I fully believe there would be a paradigm shift in his heart. Perhaps that is my hope for all of us. We cannot undo what our ancestors did – that is the pain we carry. That our prayers and better angels of our natures will redeem them just as we are redeemed is our only hope. I live in that hope, that we can shout “never again”.
Ellen Morris Prewitt
Thank you for this, Emma. Yes, shifts in the heart. We have to leave room for it-—from us, from those around us, from those no longer with us. It’s hard for me to separate admitting someone made the wrong choice without hopping on my high horse to judge them for that choice. But I feel that’s what I’m called to do, for my own sake as well as theirs.
Jean Ewing
Piglet, I am grateful that you took this leap to spread the news. It is a Wonderful article with many new facts and feelings for me to absorb. You have set a lot of balls in motion with your brave question. Congratulations!
Jean
Ellen Morris Prewitt
Thank you, Jean. My husband remembered that Piglet comment too. It is so true. 🙂
Mary Margaret
Thanks Ellen for the reminder to continue to re-examine our lives and our family history. Along with that to remember to move forward in to a better and more honest future. You are amazing. Love to Tom.
MM
Ellen Morris Prewitt
So good to hear from you, MM. Hope you are doing well. My self-examination training from the School for Servant Leadership has stayed with me. 🙏 Tom said your love is certainly appreciated. ❤️
Luanne
Ellen, what a fascinating article. Reading it, I was thinking about all the blog posts I read when I was very involved in genealogy and reading other genealogy blogs. Every time someone discovered they had slaveholder ancestors, the poster would write about the horror of the discovery. My ancestors almost all arrived post-Civil War (there was one couple who arrived in the 50s, but went straight to Michigan). It’s hard for me to respond because I have to admit that my first overwhelming emotion when I read something like this is relief that my relatives went to Michigan and Illinois instead of a slave state. But at the same time I know this is a very unproductive emotion. Didn’t people in the north know what was going when tragedies like the Vicksburg Massacre and the Tulsa Massacre occurred? Were they in the northern papers? I’ve read some newspapers of the time period and don’t remember seeing stories like this at all. Were they all ignorant? In denial or kept in the dark? My mother read Snow Falling on Cedars and we talked about the Japanese internment camps. She insists that if my grandparents had known they would have been incensed because they were such good people. I agree that my grandparents were the salt of the earth, but after seeing what’s going on with the sudden rise of anti-Semitism I now understand how the Holocaust could have happened when many Germans (and let’s face it Americans and others) would be considered to be good people. I taught Holocaust memoirs for years without really understanding that the people of WWII were identical to the people of today and no doubt the people of 1874. Sorry for rambling . . . .
Ellen Morris Prewitt
It is so complicated, isn’t it? A group I’m in recently read a book that argued the true beneficiary of slavery was not the South but the extracting North. The financial centers in New York City, in particular. And the wealth has never dissipated—-it can be traced back to its origins, which the book did a lot of. I did find a NYT article on the Congressional investigation into the Vicksburg Massacres, but who knows how clued-in the ordinary folks were? As you say, my dad was as good a man as you could find, compassionate towards others. Yet, as a WWII vet, he argued the Japanese internment camps were necessary during a time of war. You just never know how you’ll react. I wish I had more genealogy skills, I stumble around. Thank you for rambling!
Joanne Corey
Congratulations on this informative, frank, and moving piece and kudos to the Mississippi Free Press for publishing guest columns of this length and breadth. Thank you for your courage and persistence in bringing this history back into public consciousness.
On a personal, spiritual note, I was struck by the passage in which you recalled praying for the departed and having the revelation that those souls could continue to grow in love. It reminded me of hearing a Catholic priest peach at a church mission years ago. As you may know, some Catholic theologians centuries ago developed the concept of pugatory, where souls would spend time being “purged” of their sins before entering heaven. Granted, this is problematic on a number of levels, but this priest presented it in a way that made much more sense. He posited that, at the moment of death, when the soul enconters the fullness of boundless Divine Love, they would immediately repent of their sins and be ready to enter into heaven with the saints. I thought of that when reading about your feeling the prayers for and of your ancestors.
Ellen Morris Prewitt
I, too, was impressed with what the MFP did with the essay. They went to a lot of work to add the illustrations, which they found, not me. It made it a true article, while I had only written an essay.
I hadn’t thought of purgatory, thank you for that. We do, after all, have all the time in the world.