Her family owned slaves. How can she make amends?

Just before people started to take the pandemic seriously, Stacie Marshall slipped into the back of a conference room in Athens, Georgia, and joined two dozen Black farmers in a marketing seminar called “Collards Aren’t the New Kale.”

>> Kim SeversonThe New York Times
Published : 5 July 2021, 11:06 AM
Updated : 5 July 2021, 12:17 PM

She stood out, and not just because she was one of only two white people in the room. Marshall, 41, still had the long blond hair and good looks that won her the Miss Chattooga County title in 1998. The win came with scholarship money that got her to a tiny Baptist college and a life away from the small Appalachian valley where her family has farmed for more than 200 years.

Leading the seminar was Matthew Raiford, 53, a tall, magnetic Gullah Geechee chef and organic farmer who works the coastal Georgia land his forebears secured a decade after they were emancipated from slavery.

He asked if there were questions. Marshall raised her hand, ignored the knot in her stomach and told her story: She was in line to inherit 300 acres, which would make her the first woman in her family to own a farm. She had big plans for the fading commercial cattle operation and its overgrown fields. She would call it Mountain Mama Farms, and sell enough grass-fed beef and handmade products like goat’s milk soap to help support her husband and their three daughters.

But she had discovered a terrible thing.

“My family owned seven people,” Marshall said. She wanted to know how to make it right.

Raiford was as surprised as anyone in the room. “Those older guys have probably never heard that from a white lady in their entire lives,” he recalled.

For almost three years now, with the fervour of the newly converted, Marshall has been on a quest. She is diving into her family’s past and trying to chip away at racism in the Deep South, where every white family with roots here benefited from slavery and almost every Black family had enslaved ancestors.

“I don’t have a lot of money, but I have property,” she said during a walk on her farm last winter. “How am I going to use that for the greater good, and not in like a paying-penance sort of way but in an it’s-just-the-right-thing-to-do kind of way?”

It’s not easy finding anyone in this farming community of 26,000 she can talk to about white privilege, critical race theory or renewed calls for federal reparations. She can’t even get her cousins to stop flying the Confederate flag. It’s about heritage, not hate, they tell her.

Farming, family and unspoken discrimination are braided together so tightly here that she can’t untwist them. She is aware that she sometimes stumbles across the line between doing anti-racism work and playing the white saviour, but she finds the history unavoidable.

“I can’t just go feed my cows and not be reminded of it,” she said.

Hers is the national soul-searching writ small: Should the descendants of people who kept others enslaved be held responsible for that wrong? What can they do to make things right? And what will it cost?

After the seminar, the farmers offered some ideas: She could set up an internship for young Black farmers, letting them work her land and keep the profit. Maybe her Black neighbors wanted preservation work done on their church cemetery.

Or maybe she should give some land or money from the sale of it to descendants of the Black people who had helped her family build wealth, either as enslaved people in the 1800s or, later, as sharecroppers who lived in two small shacks on her land.

“She is deep in Confederate country trying to do this work,” Raiford said when he went to visit her farm this spring. If she can figure it out, he said, Chattooga County could be a template for small communities all over the South.

Raised in the Faith

Over the years, her father and grandfather drove trucks or took shifts at the cotton mill to keep the farm running. At 68, her father, Steve Scoggins, still works 3 pm to midnight as a hospital maintenance man.

Only 10% of the population is Black, a number that historians estimate was probably five times higher before the Civil War, and began to drop after Emancipation and as African Americans moved north to escape the Jim Crow South.

Most residents are evangelical Christians. It’s such rich Trump country that the former president held one of his last campaign rallies 5 miles from Marshall’s farmhouse. “Some good friends were at those rallies,” she said.

Her father, who lives down the road, is as proud of his farm daughter as a man could be. He unabashedly supports her work against racism, but at the Dirt Town Deli, he sometimes stays quiet when an offensive comment passes among his friends.

Her childhood was steeped in conservative rural politics and the power of the evangelical church. She left home to attend Truett McConnell University, a Baptist school near the Tennessee border, on a scholarship for students with ambitions to become a minister or marry one.

There she met Jeremy Marshall, who was studying for the ministry. They married when both were 21, and went on to earn master’s degrees — hers in education, at the University of Georgia, and his in counseling.

They lived and worked for a decade at Berry College, a liberal arts school in northwest Georgia where they helped care for 400 evangelical students in a special program paid for by the conservative WinShape Foundation. But last year, as the coronavirus hit, they decided it was time to move to the family farmhouse she had inherited.

‘This Is Mine Now’

Growing up, Marshall heard that her family had once enslaved people, but the history hit her in a visceral way 12 years ago, just after her first daughter was born. The baby was struggling to nurse. Marshall was nearly in tears. Her grandfather, Fred Scoggins, tried to offer some comfort.

“You know,” she recalled his saying, “you get that from the Scoggins women. Your great-great-great grandmother couldn’t produce milk, either. So they had to buy a slave.”

They called her Mammy Hester, he said, and he spun the same false narrative that some white Southerners use to soften the harsh reality: The family had treated Hester so well that after the Civil War, she remained with them.

Marshall began thinking a lot about Hester. Then, about five years ago, her mother-in-law, an amateur genealogist, delivered the news. “Did you know your family owned slaves?” she asked, producing documents she had discovered.

“I felt like I needed a shot of whiskey,” Marshall said.

But it was easy to shove the family history aside. Her daughters were growing up. Her mother got sick with cancer and died. She lost her grandparents. “I picked out three coffins in five months,” she said.

Her father gave her the family farmhouse and three acres. When he dies, she will take control of the remaining few hundred acres.

Marshall started clearing out the house. She was sorting through her grandparents’ cast-iron pans and old furniture when she came across a dusty boot box filled with wedding announcements and newspaper clippings.

Inside was a copy of a county slave schedule from 1860 that her mother-in-law had discovered. This time, Marshall really studied it. Seven people were listed under the name WD Scoggins, her great-great-great-grandfather, identified only by their ages, genders and race. Her family had owned two men and one woman, all in their 30s, and four children. The youngest was 5 1/2 months old.

“It took on a different meaning because I was going through their jewelry and their clothes,” she said. “I was like, this is mine now. The family story is mine. Am I going to stick this in a drawer and forget about it?”

She thought about her daughters. “I knew I needed to reframe this story for them and for the farm and for this community,” she said.

WD Scoggins had another unsettling legacy. He acquired the family’s first tract of land, a mile or so from her farm, in an 1833 lottery that gave Creek and Cherokee land to white people. Key portions of the Trail of Tears start not far from her valley.

“So you figure out that you got stolen land that had the enslaved put on it, and your family benefited off that for a lot of years,” said Raiford, the Gullah Geechee farmer who has become her friend and adviser. “Now you have to have two different conversations. It gets complicated real fast.”

Asking the Preacher

If anyone in the valley could help Marshall begin her self-styled healing project, it was Melvin Mosley. He had been the assistant principal at her high school. He is also her father’s best friend.

The two men met as boys, when Mosley’s uncle lived in one of the shacks on the Scoggins farm and worked for Marshall’s grandfather. Scoggins went to the white school, Mosley the Black one. Every book at Mosley’s school was a hand-me-down from the white school, but the boys didn’t understand that their educations were different until they started comparing notes.

For decades, Mosley taught in public schools and prisons. At 67, he is a preacher, and lives with his wife, Betty, on 50 acres near Marshall’s farm.

On a summer day in 2019, Marshall sat in their yard and told them she wanted to make some kind of amends. She asked if she was on the right path.

“Let’s say that’s the water under the bridge,” he said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” All she needed to do was to pour as much love on their valley as she could.

“In all of our families, Black or white, there are some generational things that are up to us to break,” he told her. “And when we break it, it is broken forever.”

He stood and took her hand. Mosley joined them in a prayer circle. “Father in heaven,” he prayed, “we ask you just to continue to give her the courage and the desire to break the chain of racism, Lord.”

On another visit, just before Christmas, Marshall had brought a copy of the slave records, and was seeking their advice on whether she should compensate Hester’s descendants if she ever found them.

“People aren’t looking for a handout,” Betty Mosley told her. “We just want justice in all of the things that are going on. It’s hard to explain it to a white person, but if you’re a Black person you understand.”

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