by Ellen Morris Prewitt.
When my mother began to suffer from macular degeneration, her eye doctor told her she should no longer drive. She had a hole in her retina, but her brain would not let her see it as a hole. Her hard-working brain would use past data to predict what it thought should go in the hole and stitch it in. A pedestrian could be in the hole, but if the brain didn’t expect to see a pedestrian in the hole, Mother wouldn’t “see” her.
My mother did what we all do: she refused to believe her doctor. She knew what she saw, and no one, not even an expert, could tell her otherwise.
The unsettling, scary fact is we construct the reality we expect to see, and, Lord help us, we cling to it. The brain is afraid of anything that threatens its constructs (the brain is heavy into self-preservation). Plus, the brain believes in the “slippery slope:” give an inch, and it’s Humpty Dumpty all over again. The brain constantly mans the bulwark, afraid if it lets in one contradictory fact, the wall of beliefs it so earnestly built will crash, and our world will splat into a runny yellow mess. Better to refuse to see whatever doesn’t match our desire and, eventually, “forget” it.
*
Growing up, I didn’t know the man I came to call the Scoundrel existed. I thought Ellen Hebron, my double namesake, was the Hebron daughter, not daughter-in-law. Of course, she married into the Hebrons or my own grandmother would not have been born a Hebron. But the stories I heard about that late 1800s Mississippi generation were not of Dr. John Hebron but Ellen. Maybe I was told these stories because Ellen and I shared a name, but I heard plenty about the Scoundrel’s peach-farming dad and Big Poppa, the Scoundrel’s son and my great-grandfather. I share no name with either of those men.
So, first surprise: the Scoundrel existed.
Second surprise, he managed prisons.
Prison management was a typical Southern practice during the last quarter of the 19th century where private parties contracted to run state prisons. The private prison operators made their money by skimping on food, protection, and care (sound familiar?). The Scoundrel held the contract to manage the Mississippi State Prison for a couple of years. Then I read where he also managed the Arkansas State Prison. Hunh, I thought—how did he manage the Arkansas prison from Vicksburg?
And I moved on.
Truth was, the Scoundrel divorced Ellen and married an eighteen-year-old thirty years his junior, which might have been the final act that sawed his limb from my family tree. The couple moved to Hot Springs where—wait for it—he managed the Arkansas State Prison.
*
I’ve about decided the greater your brain’s unacknowledged agenda in understanding the past, the more the brain interferes with said understanding. And the brain can be incredibly stubborn. When I read a historical record that showed the Scoundrel lived in Washington County, Mississippi, I looked away. The Scoundrel and Ellen had lived in Warren County, Mississippi, and the Scoundrel was buried in Arkansas with his new family. Odd that records had him in Washington County. They must have confused him with Big Poppa, who bore the same name and lived in the little town of Leland, which is in Washington County.
I moved on.
Why?
Let me be clear: I couldn’t stand the Scoundrel (the name was a clue, right?) Once I learned of him and began to learn about him, I did not want him in my family. I willed him to have abandoned my family, and good riddance. In my imaginings, Big Poppa chose his mother in the divorce (who knows), cared for her in her old age (true), and buried her in the cemetery on the family place (also true.) I certainly did not want the Scoundrel associated with Big Poppa’s home. As a result, my brain snagged on facts I didn’t expect to see. But it quickly stitched over those facts and moved on.
Later, when I could gaze at the Scoundrel with less judging and agenda, I realized I had compressed time, a common error in looking backwards. It occurred to me that years passed between his divorce from Ellen and his remarriage. Where was he in the meantime?
Oh, Washington County.
*
The Scoundrel in 1877 marched convicts to Washington County. Convict leasing was a terrible practice. After the end of Reconstruction, with slavery abolished, White Mississippians were looking for a new source of free labor. Convict leasing was their answer. Under this system, local officers rounded up people minding their own business and charged them with made-up crimes (vagrancy, public drunkenness, disorderly conduct). Following summary conviction, the convicts, hardly any of them White, were put to work. Railroads, timber companies, and especially wealthy planters took advantage of convict leasing, often working prisoners to death. A man from Leland, Douglas A. Blackmon, described the practice in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Slavery by Another Name. Exploiting imprisoned labor runs through the veins of my family like green poison.
Once in Washington County, the Scoundrel used leased convicts to build a levee against flooding from the Mississippi River. Some of the men escaped. Notices with physical descriptions of the escapees ran exactly as adverts had run on enslaved people who escaped. Two years after the first notice, the Scoundrel had bought Cunningham Plantation (though there was also murmurs of a lawsuit) where he had moved to engage in growing cotton.
He continued to use leased convicts to work the place, as escapee notices ran in 1881 and 1882. By 1884, he owned 1300 acres, much of which was called “new land.” I believe that term means land newly leveed and cleared of timber, I can only imagine by leased convicts. By that time, the Scoundrel was referred to as one of Washington County’s most substantial citizens. In 1886, Big Poppa was noted as on his way to his father’s plantation in Leland. Not abandoned, not estranged. Visiting.
The Scoundrel’s plantation was the new situs of my family. In 1887, the Scoundrel left the plantation for Arkansas, and Big Poppa came to live there. Every morning, Big Poppa read the New York Times, and the beginning of every summer, my father Daddy Joe and his siblings arrived to spend their vacation. (“Mother would deposit us for the whole summer,” my ninety-three-year-old uncle says, his voice still full of incredulity.) The kids spent the hot days horseback riding through dry, stalky fields and at night slept on the screen porch in the heavy summer heat. Mythic pecan groves dropped their meaty treats, and cotton fields spread as far as the eye could see. The wealth of the plantation supported Big Poppa in his journey to become one of the most powerful politicians in the state of Mississippi. All of it created with the toil of exploited convicts.
My constructed reality of a Scoundrel severed from the family tree collapsed. And all the King’s horses and all the king’s men could not put it back together again.
*
Why did I spend so much time crab-walking away from the Scoundrel? What was my agenda? Simple: I wanted the man to have disinherited me and mine. No property could descend from to him to me. The connection had to be thoroughly severed—he had disowned me, and I could disown him. Thus self-blinded, I could avoid looking full-face at what, if anything, I had to do in response to his dreadful actions.
*
For centuries, we White folks worked overtime to create different realities from our Black neighbors. We did it with laws and customs and films and dress codes and myths and language and covenants and billboards and jokes and tone policing and real policing and intentional “forgetting” and everything we could get our hands on. We counted on never having to see Black reality because we were in charge—only our reality counted. In contrast, to survive in the dominant world, Black folk had to see both realities, the famous “double-consciousness” of W.E.B. Du Bois. As a result, in America, every day, day-by-day, we White folks experience life with tunnel-vision. Now that we want to understand Black folks’ reality, it could be too late.
In other words, we dug a hole, we fell in.
*
There’s another story about the Scoundrel.
This story has it that Dr. John Hebron “defied his father” and ran off with a woman enslaved on the plantation, which led to Hebron’s disinheritance. Hebron and his love left for California then returned to Mississippi to raise their children, after which the clan moved to Missouri, where the internet teller of this story lives today.
Undercurrents swirl in this story. The Scoundrel was not disinherited; he was named in his father’s will. He might have run off in defiance of his father if it happened before 1862 when his father died. He could have then run back home to marry Ellen, with whom he had children throughout the 1860s and where the 1870 Census had him and Ellen together. He absolutely could have left Ellen for a formerly enslaved woman. Perhaps this was the woman named Laura Amos with whom he had children in 1874 and 1875, a relationship so longterm that some sources identify her as his wife. A family inventoried in his dad’s will, once free, chose the surname Amos. When Laura died young, maybe the Scoundrel turned to creating a new family in Arkansas. I’m not a good enough genealogist for me to say anything with certainty.
What I do know: in this internet story, Hebron is not a scoundrel.
I cannot be responsible for someone else’s construction of reality. It’s hard enough to keep up with my own. I can only share the facts I’ve learned—I’m doing it here—and decide for myself how to respond to those facts. All I hope is that as I move toward repair, my poor, defensive, self-protecting brain does not convince me to blind myself to what I need to see.