I grew up in a family who enjoyed the local history of the area where we lived: Nashville, Tennessee. Understandable, since, apart from settlements on the Atlantic seaboard, few areas of the United States have a richer historical past.
Families first settled there as the Revolutionary War was unfolding. Andrew Jackson, seventh president of the United States, lived on a slave plantation, the Hermitage, in the area. My elementary school classes often visited it on field trips.
However, in those days, we never really faced the sins of our ancestors in allowing the slave labor that was a part of that history, whose cabins at the Hermitage stood in stark contrast to the mansion of the president who owned them.
Recently, I’ve enjoyed books by Tamera Alexander featuring Nashville’s history as a background. One of her books, To Wager Her Heart, deals with a young woman beginning to understand what the Civil War freeing of slaves meant to the freed men and women. The setting for much of the novel is historic Fisk University, begun in 1866 to educate recently freed slaves. Included is the story of the university’s Jubilee Singers, still singing for us today.
Reading about those newly freed slaves and how they worked to take advantage of their precious freedom places in stark contrast the refusal of so many white southerners to repent of the evils of slavery and to work to build a redeemed society where all truly have equal opportunity.
We wasted so many years in mourning the mythical Tara of Gone With the Wind that we have need of mourning for how slow it has taken us to work out our repentance for our sin of slavery.