Best assured Mr. Bundy, on your best day, you could never be a “Negro” like Grandpa Will.

[kpete]

Hey Clive Bundy, Freedom Beats Picking Cotton
Posted on April 24, 2014 by michaelwtwitty


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I just turned 37. I learned to pick cotton. I pick cotton every year if possible to remind me that my father and grandfather picked cotton, so did at least four generations before him. I’ve written extensively about the experience of picking cotton on this blog. It has a lot to do with food and how people were nutritionally, intellectually, spiritually and politically malnourished all in service to the King. I’m not nearsighted enough to claim that it was only African Americans who suffered from their service to his Majesty. Poor whites knew the life as well–especially after 1870–but certainly Black history was irrevocably changed when the American economy was kept in boom thanks to its exports of enslaved grown(free labor) cotton. The whip and the lash help subsidize further industrialization of the North, mass European immigration, and from these consequences and others–came the push West as the East burst with mass population growth.

What Mr. Bundy fails to understand is basic history. Without a moral imagination, immoral fantasies of humans managed like animals bloom. Cotton fever was responsible for the long term destabilization of the Black families of which Mr. Bundy feigns mused interest. During the antebellum period–an enslaved Black person–especially a male–could expect to be sold at least once or twice in a lifetime. Although we haven’t verified it yet–we found a bill of sale for a “Negro” named Wash and his brother William on the steps of the Lancaster County, SC courthouse just before the Civil War. The Wash described may have been my own great-great-great grandfather and his brother. Washington was the great-great or great-great-great grandson of a man brought from central Ghana in the 1700?s–stripped of his name at Charleston harbor.

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I will never forget the day I laid eyes upon my great-grandfather’s “x” mark. You see Mr. Bundy, unlike you, Great Grandpa Will couldn’t read and write–he was purposely under-educated. Great Grandpa Will was threatened with the lynch mob’s noose many a time, because he dared to dream beyond the Cotton Jail that you suggested might be better for us. Grandpa Will in 1912 went from being a sharecropper–a slave by another name–to being a landowning farmer–100 acres…Much like you he knew that the one who has land has power over their own destiny. That’s why my initial impulse was to feel sympathy or feel connection. However I can see now that Mr. Bundy doesn’t need that from me.

Grandpa Will couldn’t write his own name on the deed, but damned if he didn’t write an “x” mark signifying that the Twitty family now had some of the very land that they were forced to work for generations. When I see comments like Mr. Bundy’s I am not angry nor bitter. I am emboldened to continue my work to see that food becomes a message of cultural and social justice for all–and to let every American and every other human know that my Ancestor’s story is a beacon of hope for all who as the Passover Haggadah says–”hunger for freedom.” Getting out of the Cotton Jail inspired Grandpa Will’s son, and that inspired my Father, and it inspires me. In fact, without Grandpa Will I probably wouldn’t be writing this blog post right now.

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Best assured Mr. Bundy, on your best day, you could never be a “Negro” like Grandpa Will.

http://afroculinaria.com/2014/04/24/hey-clive-bundy-freedom-beats-picking-cotton/

[Wellstone ruled]

1. Was not Bundy's

ancestors Plantation owners? Didn't their Prophet send them to Southern Utah to plant cotton? Things are getting more and more interesting as to the Bundy clan ignorance. Oh well.

[Cha]

2. Cliven Bundy knows Nothing of the "Negro".. thank you for

this poignant story from Michael W Twitty, who does know.

[enough]

3. Thanks for the link, a very interesting site. (nt)