In the Guilford College woods the wind blows with the past. We sit beneath the witness tree, full of nails that pointed enslaved people to places north, to the hope of freedom and the future. The woods glisten in the early green of June leaves and light. The woods are so old and the trees so full, the sky is but a sliver of color here and there.
I first came to this place as an ignorant and hopeful 18-year-old. Now I am nearly 60–and all that I do not know and all that I hope overwhelms me as I listen to James Shields, a Black man, tell me a history I have never heard.
How in the early 1800s a little white boy, a Quaker, saw a group of enslaved men chained together and walking down the road, and how his father learned that the men had been separated from their families and sold to slaveholders in Georgia. That little boy, Levi Coffin, would become an abolitionist and work with freemen—and women—to carry other enslaved people to freedom for the entirety of his life.
The man who tells me this story tells me so much I cannot remember it all—but as he speaks, I realize how ignorant I remain for not knowing the full and true history of this time. He tells me that enslaved people were brought to America with an intentionality—they knew how to farm and irrigate the lowlands of South Carolina, they had a culture and a heritage, they had a wealth of knowledge and a wealth of being. We used it to build our country. He began to sing an old spiritual, “Wade in the Water.”
I asked if he knew a song of the African diaspora, “Step It Down.” Of course, he did. The Williamsburg brickmakers sang it as they made bricks for houses they knew they would never enter and streets they would never walk. They sang of their hope that their children would walk as free people on those bricks and live as free people in the houses that they built.
The wind blew in the trees and caught in my throat. I thought of all I have yet to learn—not naïve, but not informed. Hopeful as ever, but weary of what remains to be done. Like the brickmakers I hope my hands build something for a better future. The wind rushes over me—voices of the past in the present moment. I listen —and hope that in listening I move as all those souls before and with me have, with intention and purpose for a world where everyone is at home everywhere.
