Excerpt: 'Buried in the Bitter Waters'
by Elliot Jaspin
NPR.org, March 8, 2007 · The story of how I found America's racial cleansings begins in an unlikely place: the small town of Berryville in northwest Arkansas. I was visiting there in 1998 and, with time on my hands, decided to tour a small history museum in the center of town. It was a quirky place — one room was devoted to antique embalming equipment — with all sorts of bric-a-brac piled on tables.
As I wandered from room to room, a picture on one wall caught my eye. In the top of the frame was a photograph of a farmer and his wife taken some time before the Civil War. Below the picture was the farmer's will. On separate lines he carefully recounted his earthly possessions, parceling each out to family and friends. It was what you would expect until this line: Wedged between livestock and land were five slaves to be given away.
A friend once described walking into a vault in the New Orleans courthouse and seeing stacks of old record books listing the slaves that each person owned. He stood there in horror. Before him was row after row of moldering books with their ghastly roll call. I understood the shock he tried to describe because it was what swept over me as I stared at that will. How do you describe an encounter with the artifacts of slavery? It is the corpse at the funeral. In it we see both our own loss and the loss of someone else.
I stared at the will and as the shock drained away, a question began to form. I had been in the area for several days. For the first time it occurred to me that, in all the time I had been there, I had not seen a single African-American. Yet here in front of me was proof that at one time blacks had lived here. Were they still here? If not, when had they left and why? I walked out of the museum with the questions nagging me.
