Orts #966
When I look back at the past and think how much time was spent in vain, how much of it was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in the inability to live; how I failed to value it, how many times I sinned against my heart and spirit — then my heart contracts in pain. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each moment could have been an eternity of happiness. Si jeunesse savait! [If youth knew!]
— Dostoevsky, in a letter to his brother written hours after his death sentence was revoked at the last minute
and replaced by a years-long sentence to hard labour in Siberia
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a story from Lapham’s Quarterly, December 15, 2019
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/personal-act-reparation
Five years after the abolition of slavery and in the midst of a violent campaign to reimpose white supremacy fueled by the Ku Klux Klan across the ex-Confederate South, a Methodist minister in the remote mountain town of Waynesville, North Carolina, carried out an act of reparation apparently unprecedented in U.S. history. Asa Fitzgerald signed an extraordinary land deed in August 1870, conveying most of his remaining property to nine “colored persons” he and his wife’s relations had formerly enslaved. He transferred the land explicitly as restitution for the many years of unpaid labor “performed by them and their ancestors while in slavery.”
“Believing it to be the will of God,” Fitzgerald made his deed function as a kind of back payment, to restore “the proceeds of their labor which has come into our hands and pay them what is right and just for the labor performed by them for us.” The document estimated that the proceeds of their labor over time benefited his family by the sum of $3,400—a small fortune in that time and place—and declared publicly, for all to see, that this was a personal act of reparation.
After the Civil War, some former slaveholders did sell or gift land to people who had once been in their possession. Sometimes the recipients were their own biological children. In other cases, former slaveholders arranged land transfers to freedmen to maintain labor peace. Whatever the reason, these cases were not only rare but distinct in purpose from Asa’s radical action. Fitzgerald’s transaction was unique in its appeal to reparations. He carefully avoided the language of paternalism, justifying the deed not as a bonus for “faithful” or “meritorious” “service”—none of these terms appears anywhere in the document—but rather as a morally necessary restoration of the income and accumulated wealth that he and his wife had unjustly taken from them. The $3,400 figure he came up with was more than enough to warrant the transfer of about 330 acres of land. To the eldest of the nine, he even gave possession of part of his family’s own house.
For eight years Fitzgerald and his family lived with this remarkable arrangement in apparent peace. The Fitzgerald patriarch died in 1878 with little remaining property aside from his house, a small plot of land, and his library. It did not take long for his wife and children to take legal action undoing his novel transaction. They sued the nine owners and their spouses on the grounds that Fitzgerald had been suffering from “religious delusion” when he drew up the deed. This lawsuit, Fitzgerald v. Allman, set off a three-year legal battle that ended in a total victory for Fitzgerald’s widow and children. The case went all the way to the North Carolina Supreme Court and injured a much larger population than the nine people forced to relinquish the land they had earned; it also did significant collateral damage to civil rights protections in the state. The local court’s decree charged the black landowners with the costs of the suit, a sum high enough to strip them of the little wealth they had acquired. The end result of the minister’s reparation deed may well have left them more impoverished than they had been before their temporary ownership of the land.
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Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
-- James Baldwin (1924-1987)