ELENA VALDEZ: MATERIALIZING SITES OF MEMORY: AN EXPLORATION INTO BLACK STORYTELLING

 

    Our trip to the Nearest Green distillery last Saturday was an invigorating and thought provoking experience for me. Standing on the hallowed grounds of the Tennessee countryside where Nearest Green began his remarkable whiskey legacy was quite impactful. This was not entirely unfamiliar territory for me– although I have never been to Shelbyville, I recognize Tennessee as the ancestral homelands of my maternal family, and I trace my roots in the state back five generations. Yet, I also recognized the unfamiliarity with both the territory and the visitors of the distillery.

    I recognized immediately that I was in a completely new environment, and had the opportunity to interact with people I might not often be in community with. One of Fawn Weaver’s central themes in her book Love and Whiskey is finding community in the most unexpected of places. She often denotes Nearest Green’s friendship with whiskey legend Jack Daniels as being revolutionary considering the time period. While I was sometimes puzzled by Weaver’s description of Lynchburg as a complete safe haven for black people–and wondered if there was an element of exaggeration– I was nonetheless intrigued by the idea of a town where black people could exist without the constant threat of racial violence that plagued the south during this time. I find that black people, along with other marginalized groups in the United States, have historically sought refuge within our own communities, and a kind of tribalism has emerged out of a shared intergenerational trauma. Even during the summers and holidays I would visit my grandparents in Tennessee, I found that I spent most of my time with other black people, regardless of whether or not they were family. It was an unspoken custom. What struck me about the Uncle Nearest Distillery was the breadth of kinds of people who visited– white and black people of different backgrounds and political views were placed in communion with one another. While I find this especially interesting because of the current levels of partisan animosity, more importantly I believe that this was exemplary of a generational tradition of cross-cultural alliance. Despite the overwhelming hate that exists in the world, I find that humanity is also protean, and any preconceived notions I may have had about the location of the distillery were very quickly dominated by hope for a future where people can remember that there is so much more than connects us to one another than what divides us. I remembered just how formidable fear is, and I made a mental note to always question my apprehension, even though I recognize that much of this fear originates from being a part of a community that was perennially beset by racial violence. What I found fascinating about walking the grounds of Tennessee whiskey country was experiencing the dichotomy between the points of contention I had with thinking about the enslaved people who worked the land and the optimism I felt for the future.

I recently read Toni Morrison’s essay “The Site of Memory", where I disentangled the importance of location for black storytelling. In times of slavery, white people sought to monopolize not just the lived experiences of black people, but also wanted complete jurisdiction over black storytelling. As a result, black people have had to adjust their summoning of language– sites of memory are often used to conceptualize the anguish of the black experience. When reading slave narratives, white audiences often wanted black subjugation to exist in the abstract, the theoretical. The use of location offered a tangible experience of black storytelling, which is why it was so feared, yet so powerful. As seen in Morrison's work, particularly her novel Beloved, her descriptions of the lives of characters within the spiteful 124 house are so powerful and exact that it evokes a kind of visceral reaction in the reader as they extricate the trauma that exists within location. Morrison's storytelling allows the reader to really feel the pain she conveys in her work. As I traversed the ground of the distillery, I experienced a similar kind of deep sensation and reckoning as I thought about the fact that Uncle Nearest worked these very grounds as a slave, yet was never quite financially compensated in the manner that Jack Daniels was despite being the creator of one of the most lucrative businesses in the South.

    As I worked through my ethical dispositions on this book, I often thought about the author's intentions behind her desires to share Nearest Green's story. Ultimately, it was clear to me that she was extraordinarily committed to researching and discovering more information regarding Nearest Green’s life. However, sometimes I thought about the kinds of possibilities that may have existed in her mind to take Nearest’s story to generate profit. While I understand the mindset of business people, I also understand that the capitalist framework in which we live often will separate us from being in touch with our truest humanity and ethical compass. I think that we as Black people have a unique disposition in which we can analyze capitalism both as members of a capitalist society, but also as people who have historically been used to generate profit. Marx often discusses the degeneration of morals, ethics, and above all our alienation from one another as human beings in pursuit of generating capital. Although I respect Weaver's commitment to this story, and I think it's quite remarkable that she shares a birthday with so many people involved in the story, there were instances in which I was curious about when she truly began to construct a narrative surrounding the story of Nearest Green in order to build a lucrative enterprise. I was particularly perplexed by the fact that Nearest Green is not even on the cover.

    In Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration, I find that a common theme is the question of whether or not the founding documents had black people in mind– after all, black people have influenced every aspect of this country's history. However, after visiting the distillery, I propose a new question: how can today’s society work to illuminate the legacy of black people's contributions to this country in a manner that grants them the civility and recognition that they deserve? I believe that the answer to this question lies within all black people with a curiosity for story telling

- Elena Valdez, CO' 2029

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