ONE LIFE, NO SECOND CHANCE THAT WE KNOW OF
by Jan Carlsson-Bull
March 16, 2003
"….take a right turn just past that marker onto Beale’s Mill Road, take another right at the stop sign, go about a mile, then look for a modest wooden gate in the vicinity of a less modest cattle guard. Once you are standing at that gate, … there is no mistaking that you are at the threshold of something that was once epic." (Levy, p. 204)
The place is Virginia. The time is the late 18th century. It’s the antebellum South, and the ink is barely dry on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Washington, Jefferson, and Lee were among the luminaries of the day. Each of them enjoyed influence and wealth and played a premier role in shaping the profile of this country as we know it.
Then there was Robert Carter III. Carter is described by scholar Andrew Levy as "probably the richest, most powerful, most literate man in the rich, powerful, enlightened colony of Virginia." His land holdings exceeded that of Jefferson or Washington, and he owned more slaves than either. Nomini Hall, the Carter plantation, stood assuredly tall and white-pillared as was the style of homes designed to impress. But something stirred within the soul of Carter that led him to commit a radical act. In 1791 he wrote what was termed a "Deed of Gift." It ran on in a string of detail that would glaze the eyes of any attorney, but at its core was Carter’s intent to free over five hundred slaves. No one, but no one had freed that many slaves. No one in the newly American South had undertaken that scale of manumission. But Carter did.
Why did he do it? Why did this southern gentleman move against his cultural grain? Why did this father give up what his children surely thought was their inheritance? And more importantly for us, why has history almost succeeded in burying this act and all possible residue of Robert Carter III? These are the questions that lured Andrew Levy into his scholarly quest for details.
In his worldly accumulation of wealth, Carter was quintessentially Southern white antebellum American. In his eccentricities, he was quintessentially himself. Early on he strayed from the norm. Rather than choosing a wife from the ranks of his neighbors’ daughters, he found a mate in Baltimore society, "a well-read ironworks heiress with a lacerating wit." While his peers attended staid Anglican churches, Carter was drawn to a small Baptist church where he took Communion with his slaves. While his illustrious friends sent their sons to the College of William and Mary, Carter sent his to the abolitionist leaning schools in the north. Yet Carter was still a slaveholder. He joined his peers in acknowledging that slavery was wrong but emancipation was impractical. It is a familiar argument, commonly offered to redeem the slaveholding practice of the rhetorically progressive Thomas Jefferson. Their culture rendered emancipation impractical. They simply inhabited their culture.
It wasn’t until the 1780s that Carter’s correspondence and journals reveal an increasingly overt intolerance for slavery. In 1782, the state of Virginia opened a window for his impulses, unexpectedly legislating a means whereby a private slaveholder might free his slaves under certain conditions. It was a political quirk serving emancipation. Several small slaveholders, Quakers and Baptists especially, used that loophole. Even Martha Washington chose to counter her husband’s will and freed his slaves two years after his death rather than after hers, as the will had stipulated. Carter’s act of manumission, eight full years before Washington’s death, stood out because he had the most to lose in the circles that already looked askance at him.
What makes his act even more compelling is that, in Levy’s words, Carter didn’t "look, act, or write like a man who possessed a single egalitarian impulse." All the while his writings reveal a white man becoming ever more trusting of the blacks he knew and ever more suspicious of the impulses of his peers whose reality of practice belied their rhetoric of liberty. Who knew his depth of disappointment when he failed to achieve political stature? Who knew what comfort he received from whom when he lost his wife and his most beloved children? He continued as an anomaly among his neighbors, eschewing status gained by the conventions of his time and place yet lacking an eloquent pen that could have incited a groundswell for his views.
Levy refers to Robert Carter III as the "anti-Jefferson."
"If Carter is the anti-Jefferson, the man who did not lack the will to free his own slaves but who did lack the eloquence to make his love of freedom memorable, then the Deed of Gift is the anti-Declaration of Independence. [It is] a document that makes liberty look dull but that is so devoid of loopholes and contradictions that no result but liberty could prevail." (p. 198)
"Ultimately," contends Levy, "the reasons that Robert Carter disappeared–and remains disappeared–have less to do with what he did than with what others failed to do, less to do with the narrative of American history within which his story would fit than with the narratives of American history that his story contradicts." (p. 208)
Robert Carter makes us squirm, so we ignore him. History hurts, so we bend it. Or worse, we deny it. We do so, because, as Levy concludes, to do otherwise "forces us to consider whether there now exist similar men and women, whose plain solutions to our national problems we find similarly boring, and whom we gladly ignore in exchange for the livelier fantasy of our heroic ambivalence." (p. 212)
And so to our own time, standing at the gate of our own Nomini Hall, on the threshold of something that promises to be epic. We find ourselves starkly occupying our own slice of history, with rhetoric waged on all sides, with the consequences–intended and unintended–waiting around the bend in the arc on which we’re travelling.
Here and now we stand at the gate of something ominous. For some, the path that we presciently glimpse is hideous. For others, it is liberating. Some give voice to principles that we’re convinced mesh with our practice. I’m not so comfortable with this. The principles I am forever grateful for. It’s the dissonance between principles and practice that gnaw at me, so the questions tug at me. What are we allowing to slip through the cracks of whatever notions we have about democracy, liberty, fair play, and the preciousness of life? What can we learn from the perplexing and unselfconsciously bold act of Robert Carter? What can we learn from the abject refusal of historians to acknowledge his deed?
So many voices echo in the ears of my heart these days.
From "A Poem with No Name," penned by a young soldier, a casualty of war, 1968:
In an age of golden dreams,
Are gilded fleece
The only object of our living?
Are there not softer, gentler fabrics
For our lives,
Made of justice,
Dreams
And hopes of subtler glory?From the poem of C.K. Williams, entitled simply, "War," and published in The New Yorker, November 5, 2001:
Like bomber pilots in our day, one might think, with their radar
and their infallible infrared, who soar, unheard, unseen, over generalized,
digital targets that mystically ignite, billowing out from vaporized cores.
Or like the Greek and Trojan gods, when they'd tire of their creatures,
"flesh ripped by the ruthless bronze," and wander off, or like the god
we think of as ours, who found mouths for him to speak, then left.
They fought until nothing remained but rock and dust and shattered bone,
Troy's walls a waste, the stupendous Meso-American cities abandoned
to devouring jungle, tumbling on themselves like children's blocks.
And we, alone again under an oblivious sky, were quick to learn
how our best construals of divinity, our "Do unto, Love, Don't kill,"
could easily be garbled to canticles of vengeance and battle prayers.Once again, the dissonance rises from the ashes. The dissonance that keeps us from our own best selves, the dissonance that threatens to silence the better angels of our national nature. "If he backs down now, he’ll lose face," some say. "If we back down now, we’ll lose face," nod others. Face? Whose face? The face of the child incinerated by the first smart bomb? The face of the pilot, mangled in the aftermath of capture? The face of the ground soldier/casualty of war, whose hometown is Baghdad or Cincinnati–does it matter? The stone face of disbelief when Al-Jazeerah catches the clips of what our imaginations are terrified even to consider? The face of the young Kurd caught in the not-so-diplomatic crossfire between Baghdad, Ankara, and Washington? The face of public opinion, that dances to the pattern of the questions? Whose face will be lost?
These are potentially devastating questions. Asking them is not instinctive--at least not according to the findings of psychologist Lawrence LeShan. "Why are we as humans so profoundly attracted to war?" he asked.
War promises to fulfill a basic human need to balance the tension between being an individual and belonging to a larger community. War beckons with a promise to resolve "this tension between our conflicting needs for singularity and group identification."
"War sharpens experience, heightens perception, and makes one more and more aware of one’s own existence. At the same time, war allows us to become part of something larger and more intense."
So great is this need, that we invest whatever war we are on the threshold of or are indeed waging with the mythic dimensions of a crusade against evil. In fact, LeShan describes the mainstream perception of reality in a period preceding the outbreak of war as the "mythic" mode of perception, distinct from the "sensory" mode. We become more than individuals. We become engaged in a cause larger than ourselves to wipe out evil. To question why is heretical and undermines the seduction of being involved in this greater effort that we convince ourselves is not just good, but just. In a mythic war, God is clearly on our side. The rhetoric of democracy and freedom and liberty ring loudly. Those sensory realities–the face of the Iraqi child, the face of the captured pilot, the face of the ground soldier, the face of the young Kurd–simply vanish from our radar.
In the aftermath of where our collective spirit can lead us, we are left with contradictions that are commonly just too painful to digest. It would hurt too much to know the truth, to entertain, even in our dreams, that there were alternatives, that it didn’t have to be this way. So we grasp for those principles of democracy and liberty and freedom that we knew, we just knew we were fighting for.
Once again I hear those words read earlier by Cathy and Paul, the words of Lee Griffith as he recalled the complete disconnect that wrenched him as a child, trying on shoes while the nearby radio spluttered those words signaling the Cuban Missile Crisis: "The President is meeting in emergency session with the National Security Council….highest alert….in the event of war," and the shoe salesman asked him to wiggle his toes. Why were the adults using words that sounded so right for something that felt so wrong to this child who was simply paying attention?
"Our globe will only be incinerated out of principle," he wrote four decades later. "Life on our planet will only be ended for the best of reasons–for freedom, for justice, for love of humanity. But when that happens, what honor, exactly, will have been preserved?"
And we’re back. We’re back to those bone-chilling, spirit-sapping contradictions raised by the radical act of Robert Carter III, a cultural anomaly, who simply didn’t make a big deal out of doing what he knew was right, but was relegated to history’s attic because he didn’t lean in the memorably principled direction of his neighbors. He just did what they said they really wanted to do.
Imagine. It’s 1782, that year of legislative loopholes, and there’s still time to use whatever windows our religious and political imaginations might have left open, to advance alternatives to the oppression that is a lie when called by any other name. It’s 1962 and we’re struck by the horror of what can happen, not knowing how it will turn out but sensing how it could. It’s 1968 and our spirits and oh so many bodies are already torn to shreds by a war whose principles have long been in shards. It’s 2001 and the shards of our spirits are ashen while so many bodies are ash right here in our own city.
It’s 2003, and there’s time. There’s still time.
If only we will digest the dissonance. If only we will face the contradictions in our history and the deceptions in the daily news. If only we will affirm, as people of faith who pride ourselves on our ceaseless questions, that the resurrection of historical truth is worth it, because falsehood has a way of catching up with us, and taking a hard look at what’s going on has a way of preventing us from immense folly in our own time. And because each of us, everywhere, has one life, with no second chance that we know of. Oh yes, we’ll leave the door ajar, just in case there’s something on the other side. But we don’t know, we really don’t know. So we’re called to make the best of it here and now.
Now it’s worth it for me this morning to say what I’ve said, because even though there may be many of you who find yourselves in strong disagreement, I am acutely aware that I have one life, with no second chance that I know of. So why, why would I possibly want to hold back at a time such as this? Why would I possibly want to hold back while there’s still time for all of us?
Among us there may be men and women, whose plain and forthright solutions to our national and international problems we find boring or naïve and whom we are quick to write off in exchange for the myth of having our war and our principles too. But there’s still time to hear the dissonance. There’s still time to pay attention.
May Robert Carter III and all five hundred of those free women and men, whose names we have yet to discover, rest in peace. And may all of us, as free and faithful spirits, live for it. Amen.
Sources:
Russell Ray Flesher, "A Poem with No Name," ca. 1967, included posthumously by permission of the poet’s widow.
Lee Griffith, "The Work of Choosing Peace," The Other Side, March and April 2003, 17-19, 43.
Lawrence LeShan, "Why We Love War," Adapted from The Psychology of War: Comprehending its Mystique and Madness, The Utne Reader, January/February 2003.
Andrew Levy, "The Anti-Jefferson," from The American Scholar, reprinted in The Best American Essays 2002," edited by Stephen Jay Gould, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002.
C.K. Williams, "War," The New Yorker, November 5, 2001. Published currently on-line at
http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/
http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/chi-0202090167feb10.story?coll=chi-travel-hed
Back To Jan Carlsson-Bull Sermons