A quick thanks to dear friends Autumn Fourkiller & Dana Fang for their care in reading this letter & discussing with me the project as a whole.
Dear reader,
The concept behind Colonial Girl is to engage with history in a manner that allows me to inhabit an old way — embodiment — while viewing it through a new, sharper lens. In childhood I embodied history as present-mixed-with-past, but in a childish way, at best an adolescent one, without critical thought. It was play-acting where the play was simple and fun. Now as an adult, I find that one difficulty of this type of grappling with troubled history is the simultaneity of grappling with the troubled present. That same mix of present and past exists but I no longer view myself as an island, as children do. I live in a vast present mixed with a vaster past.
Settler colonialism is destroying lives and the planet today, not just between the pages of books and in haunting old photos, but in our own lives and brains and nervous systems in ways that have never before been possible. The internet and widespread availability not only to consume but to share information, photos, and videos have made what’s happening in Gaza (not a new phenomenon but one very, very old) available to each and every one of us. We are all witnesses and therefore we are all involved.
And while play-acting war, and war-adjacent life, in childhood was fun, to see the real bodies of children — dead in the streets, dead in their parents’ arms — casts the “play” into a new light. What for me was “play” — in two senses of the word: a performance and a game — is embodied reality for others: inescapable.
I have been doing a lot of listening and trying to speak little. This is one thing I’ve learned — that my voice should only enter where necessary, where relevant, where not harmful — and figuring out how to do that in this newsletter and as a writer more generally has been an important consideration for me.
How to grapple with history in a way that I hope will prove fruitful while not centering my voice? And yet, how to demonstrate the importance of my voice and positionality within the history — and present — as it is unfurled? That is, my voice as one imbued with (unearned, undeserved) power by being a white voice. And that positionality, as a white body, as a safe body, as a stable body with a safety net. And the way that did not just come from one accident of birth but from a series of interconnected actions by individuals and collectives which led to me.
There is a call to white people to be quiet, to listen, to act without taking the stage; I hear that call and follow it and yet I also would like to issue my own call to my fellow white people, my fellow settlers on stolen land, and encourage them to spend their time of silence considering their own role. For me, that consideration must be pulled through time, and the pulling is not easy, as the rope is heavy. But I have never existed or lived wholly in the present, and to do so now feels an impossible task, not to mention a disingenuous one.
The question of audience for this newsletter is one I consider often, and while I am lucky to have any audience at all, I want to be clear that my intention is to speak to other people who claim similar privileges to mine. What I have to say is not, I think, radical or new to others — perhaps it isn’t radical or new to anyone. It’s not meant to be, not really; it’s meant to be a demonstration, an example, an effort done in public for the purpose of example. It’s thinking out loud and allowing myself to look bad, to look terrible, in order to encourage others not to shy away from that badness and terribleness in themselves. Many authors have done important and groundbreaking work to help white people unpack ourselves, our thought processes, our lives, and I don’t position myself with them. I’m just here, saying that I don’t think the work of untangling history should be done only by the ‘victims’ of that history; I don’t think the amnesia we (white people, descendants of colonizers and enslavers) allow ourselves should be tolerated. I think we should all be putting in the time to learn about our past, as individuals and as a group, and how it’s brought us to the present.
If others get something out of this newsletter, I am happy for it; but I want to be clear in who I’m speaking ‘to’ and why I’m speaking at all.
Now, to get on with the part where I make myself look terrible, and attempt to be honest on the internet of 2024, a terrifying thing to do.
History has always been important in my life, and yet, it continually amazes me how little my history classes taught me about their own subject. I was a good student, it wasn’t that I didn’t pay attention. And it wasn’t even that the book banners and the anti-CRT mob that are even now clawing at the foundations of my old school district had gotten to it yet. No, I think it was a lacking curriculum and a lack of context. Perhaps it was that the expansiveness of what’s happened in this country isn’t able to enter a classroom; the doors are too narrow, the fluorescents too bright to look clearly at what’s in front of you. I was taught about the murder and displacement of Indigenous people, about slavery, about Jim Crow. But none of it made a very strong impression on me in my youth — and maybe it’s a selfish attempt to blame something like the physical presence of the classroom or the narrow curriculum if I wasn’t able (willing?) to understand fully what was going on, what had gone on.
At any rate, all of it felt far removed from me, and I was desensitized to violence in any tense, past or present. The actual violence had been stripped away and replaced with the banal: the cleaning of a musket, the eggy smell of gunpowder, the hot wool on a battlefield in summer. I thought that I understood because I was smart and because I was present (in the past). In fact I understood, and understand, very little.
The first time a conflict moved me in the slightest was the Arab Spring, which I learned about through social media as it was happening. I don’t remember which moment it was, exactly, that I read about. I do remember going, at the age of 15, to my parents, distressed at the reality of the events halfway across the world, the understanding that people were dying, had already died. I was upset, wanted an explanation.
Looking back, this feels like an impossible event. An impossible moment. How could I have made it to 15 without yet having that crushing understanding? How could I have been so removed, despite having been a good student, despite having been taught about the structures of the world and the violence within them? It was not explained in such a way, but it was demonstrated. 9/11 was positioned at the very beginning of my memory; in elementary school I discussed with my friends at lunch that we were at war now, but I didn’t know where Iraq or Afghanistan were and I was sheltered from any footage on TV of the deaths. Still, I felt that nothing was connected to me, all through my childhood and adolescence, even after the shock of the uprisings in Tunisia, in Egypt. Even further disconnected from me, these things felt unattached to that which I had learned about in U.S. history books, or in my own playacting of that history. I had been lucky, I believed, in my birth: I was American, I lived in peace, I had nothing to do with any of this.
My great-great-great-great grandfather, James Wates Johnson, was born in August of 1811 in Accomack, Virginia, a county on the Delmarva Peninsula which is bordered on one side by the Chesapeake and on the other by the Atlantic. Accomack was one of the eight original ‘shires’ of Virginia, and was named for the people who lived there when Europeans arrived in 1603: the Accomac.
1Intermission one
2Intermission two
Early in life (how early? Unclear.) James relocated to Tennessee. By age 22, he’d met and fallen for Nancy Piper, who was from North Carolina. The two married on September 3, 1833 in Rhea County, Tennessee, and in 1834, James, Nancy, and her parents William and Delia (or Delila), moved to Polk County, Missouri.
The Johnsons were among the first settlers in Polk County, arriving a year before Polk was even established. When they arrived, the land was already occupied by the Osage, Cherokee, and Delaware.
Polk County is not a wide open prairie like the land that captures the imagination when one thinks of the pioneers, or when one grew up on the stories of the Ingalls family. Polk County is located in the heart of the Ozarks, with hills and valleys, rolling prairies and woods. Rather than being large plantations with one cash crop as in the southeast, where most of the settlers came from, farms in Polk County were diverse — corn and wheat were the leading production, but other cereals, grains, and vegetables were also grown, alongside tobacco, cotton, and fruit.
The land was also good for raising stock; the abundant wild grasses meant that cattle, sheep, and horses did well for themselves. When the settlers first arrived, buffalo, deer, and bear wandered the land. Wolves, muskrats, elk, panthers, beavers, wildcats, foxes, turkey, and ducks also called the wild land home. The settlers ate well of venison, bear meat, turkey, and fish, and they encouraged their family and friends to join them in this place of abundance.
The settlers worked to make clearings in the woods, establish farms and gardens, raise hogs and cattle, hunt, and trade with the Indigenous people. But relations didn’t remain peaceful for long. Soon the white settlers felt threatened by the people whose land they were now on (and using to hunt, cut into pieces and establish farms, chop down trees). They sent one of their own to appeal to the Governor, who assured them protection — and in 1838 President Andrew Jackson forced the Indigenous populations of the area to relocate to Oklahoma.
This is not a footnote. It’s not a quiet moment.
It’s a scream.
This is the important part. It isn’t my story to tell, and isn’t my project here to claim the telling — I can only claim that which belongs to me, and do with it what I can.
Shortly after the Johnsons’ arrival in 1834, William Piper died and was the second person to be buried in the Bolivar cemetery. They are listed among the important early settlers of the area, some of the first to purchase the land, turning it into something new — a concept within the boundaries of colonial economics.
James established himself in the county as a farmer and bought several large tracts of land over time in the southwest, ending up with several hundred acres of land by the 1850s. In 1840, James and Nancy’s first child was born: Delila (Dillie) Johnson, my great-great-great grandmother. That year, Marion, the township of Polk County that the family lived in, boasted 3,282 people.
The Johnsons went on to build wealth and purchase more land to farm. James gained positions of power and, despite enslaving up to 13 people, fought in the Union Army during the Civil War. That story comes next, and is worth examining and engaging with on its own — but I want to pause here, with the displacement of the Indigenous people of the land, and take a moment in the wind-swept wild grasses to think about the Johnsons’ and their fellow settlers’ new position on the land.
Across those decades, the forced removal of Indigenous people continued. For white people, especially those whose ancestors held the guns that drove the people out, it’s easier not to consider one’s own position on the land. We are here now, and we may or may not enjoy generational wealth, but we do enjoy generational and positional privilege. It’s not my story to tell what happened to the native people of southwest Missouri after they were driven out, but it is my job to place myself within the overall project of settler colonialism that’s gone on in different corners of the globe throughout time and is going on now in Palestine.
I can’t time travel, nor can I crawl back through my own blood to undo the wrongs of the past. But I am in the present, tethered whether I’d like to be or not to the events of the now, and I can refuse to be a neutral party. In fact, I’m suspicious of the idea that I could be a neutral party. For me, the line between my ancestors and myself is easily traced. I’m lucky in that regard and also handed a responsibility because of that tracing.
To know specifically the wrongs done by my people — not my people in a general sense, my people as Europeans, as settlers in America, but my people as individuals with names and plots of land that I can locate on a map, my people as individuals with bills of sale laying claim to other people — is to me a call from history to the present.
We can’t undo our bloodlines. We can’t shed our DNA and replace it with neutral DNA. We’re stuck in the bodies we were born in and the legacies those bodies are part of. But we are also stuck in the here and now, and in the here and now the death toll in Gaza has passed 26,000 as countless more are stuck beneath the rubble and still others have had limbs amputated without anesthesia and still others carry the body parts of family members in trash bags and still others suffer miscarriages due to a lack of medical facilities and still others and still others and still others are still—
My people drove the Indigenous population out of southwest Missouri so that they could farm the land and grow rich in ways that were important to them and which have passed down to be, still, somehow, important to me.
But I don’t have to do the same. Each of us is a link in a chain and while we are attached to both the past and the future, we exist in our present with a call to do for that present the best that we can. For me, that is reading and watching and learning. It’s emailing and calling my representatives to demand that they call for a ceasefire in Gaza. It’s participating in and sharing information about community efforts to hold my country (my country) accountable — to stop my country from doing what it’s been doing, what my people have been doing, for centuries. I am not somehow separate from the collective but I am part of it and I want to be (must be) a good member.
For me, that includes continuing my search for information and stories about James W Johnson, the Union Army officer who enslaved people on his farm in Missouri. If I am able to find records of the specific individuals who were enslaved by him, I will share that information in the hopes of giving answers to other, as is requested by organizations such as Coming to the Table. But for our purposes (and I’m speaking to my people, and to other white people) I think a pause here to listen would be good. Let’s stop our play, have everyone leave the stage. In the silence of shifting bodies: what can you hear?
In silence,
Helen
I pause here to tell you that the story of James W Johnson has been growing longer and longer in my notes; I have written the start of it many times, spent hours that stretch so easily into weeks digging through archives and documents to try to find the beginning. I have yet to find anything, but the press of time wants me to start without it. So I will.
I pause also to tell you that these stories have been lost to the generations immediately preceding me. My family members didn’t know about most of what I’ve uncovered, and I wonder how far back the amnesia goes; did my grandparents know? Did their parents? It is not so far away that the amnesia could be so old.