Song of the Deep South

Over the past five years, the DNA analysis business has exploded. Prices for ancestry estimations made from analyzing someone’s autosomal DNA have dropped considerably (no doubt do to selling that information to third parties), allowing most of the public to get a better idea of where there ancestors came from. Once someone’s analysis is complete, most of the major testing companies will not only provide them with an ancestry estimate, but often times provide a list of new, unknown relatives.

From there, you can find numerous groups on social media, where you can discuss your results with others of like ancestry, talk about what makes you what you are and how that’s different than the rest of the world, and potentially form life-long friendships. That is, unless you discover that your ancestors were mostly English, or even worse, English settlers of the British colonial plantations in the Caribbean and coastal America. If that’s where you find yourself, then don’t expect much freedom of association.

It’s the word “plantation” that sends most people into a panic. Especially, in the United States, people tend to have short political memories and that’s mostly because the majority of American citizens have short histories here. To them, the word fits well into their post-war, cultural Marxist framework of reference. In this world, the plantation is construed to be a literal “death camp,” one used to annihilate entire races of people in order to further the nonsensical cause of “global white supremacy.”

It’s a lie, of course, but it’s a lie that, when given to people who are high in impulsive behavior and low in intelligence, can be a very lethal political weapon. As a father, it’s the most terrifying thing you will ever face, knowing that that weapon is pointed directly at the head of your children and people, who are aiming it, have the same ideology that made the last century the most bloody century in world history.

Genetically speaking, nothing really stands out as being obviously sinister about our make up. We are an admixture of people from northern Germanic and native British tribes that mixed after the withdrawal of the Roman Empire. Our DNA very rarely matches the DNA of those who have ruled over us. Culturally, we are mostly people who are religious and rural. We’re an honor society. We value clean, honest living and would prefer to be left alone, but being left alone is something we rarely achieve. A history of border and frontier life has made us a people tough and resourceful, but also a people ripe for use in wars and far flung colonies. We are clannish and sceptical of utopian ideologies. Our fight for survival has often been brutal and narrowly won.

When Hollywood or academia tells you the story of the Deep South, they only tell you the story of two kinds of people, the planters and the African slaves. This is, of course, because it fits the narrative of the political and social order that they are trying to obtain and maintain. I, for one, coukd care less about either one of these people. I have my own people that God gave me and I don’t let secular institutions tell me who I’m going to concern myself with. This is a story of my people, my ancestors, my tribe. In this moment, on this little corner of the giant internet that has yet to be spotted by the imperial censors, I’m going to tell that story.

On a cold December in the British Isles in 1671, a vessel, recently unloaded of its incoming agricultural cargo, was now being reloaded with its outgoing human cargo. As she was hurried into the ship’s packed hull, with the rest of her shipmates, her nose caught the sweet, sickly smell of sugar, rum, and the byproducts that rum has on the human body. This would now be her new home for months. Her old home were the British plantations in Ireland; this is where she was born, but her ancestral homeland was northern England. For ages, the environment in this thin strip of land located on an island between the North Sea and the North Atlantic, has left its inhabitants with fair, pale skin. Pale skin which would be completely un-acclimated and unprepared for the high-angle sun of the sweltering, mosquito infested, tropical climate of the British colonial plantations of Barbados, her destination.

Her name was Jane Pellingham. She was my 8th great grandmother. I found her name on a bondage list while doing genealogical research. I don’t know what she was in bondage for, but what I do know is that her story matches almost all of her generation in my family tree. And, those same stories are shared by so many of my kinfolk who currently make up the Deep South. Some were sent into the fields against their will to pay off a debt or as a punitive sentence. Some volunteered themselves as chance to start over in a new world away from a place recovering from civil war. Not all our ancestors were bonded laborers, some were captains, crew members etc. But, anyone of them could quickly find themselves in the hull, in the fields, or worse. This was an unstable culture, after all, that had just decapitated their King.

Unlike the other English colonies in the American continent, the colonies in the West Indies and in Carolina were not founded with any preconceived religious objectives. These colonies were agricultural boomtowns, for lack of a better word, and what happened there, as long as didn’t start an international war, was permitted as long as the money kept rolling in. You can think of it as 17th century’s version of the “Wild West.” It was a red-hot economy fueled on sugar, smoke, booze and bodies. It was a time of pirates and privateers, lawlessness and lynchings. It was a place of rape, murder and disease. Life was cheap and bodies continued to flow from the overpopulated, war-ravaged British Isles. God and religion were scarcely found. These were the colonies that would become the economic model for, and give the majority of the population to, the Deep South region of the United States.

If you were to ask someone like Jane Pellingham what her thoughts on white supremacy were in 1671, she wouldn’t know what you were talking about. Her position in life had nothing to do with her race. Like many in her time, the conditions under which they lived, were governed more by powers greater than themselves or by the choices that they made in life. It was a time of religious fanaticism and witch burning. A time of accusations and torture. At any given time the political winds of the era could take you places that you didn’t choose to go and leave you in the hands of violent men. There were no “safe spaces” and no one cared about your feelings.

The Deep South is an inhospitable place to live without air conditioning. Its humid swampland is filled with biting insects, venomous vipers and vegetation, and thorn bushes that will leave your skin in tatters. It’s an environment where sheer survival takes top priority and everything else comes second. Disease, heat stroke and a high infant mortality were commonplace. Our bodies were not well adapted to performing hard, manual labor in this climate. We died often. However, international demand for Southern agricultural products was skyrocketing, so we were replaced. It wouldn’t be the last time that we were replaced for the sake of global financial interest.

History shows us that it’s always a very small group of people that are the cause for the social changes that direct the lives of the common folk. This effect can be seen greatest when those changes bring war with them. After the planter class changed their model of production, we found ourselves off of the plantations for good and in the backwoods of the Southern colonies. Soon, the breeze of discontent became winds of war. It would be war that would describe the history of this “new world.” Practically every generation of my ancestors on this continent had “their” war.

I don’t know how much pull a poor farmer, in the 18th and 19th century, had over whether a war is declared or not. Given my “ability” today, in 2019, to “participate” in the government that rules over me, I would imagine that it was equally a joke. I do know that selfish elites, who are involved in international monetary squabbles, have a history of using words like “honor” and “duty” as a means of getting truly honorable, if not slightly naive, men to fight in their place.

For a man to voluntarily leave his wife and eight children alone on their 20 acre farm, in the swamps of Georgia too, in order to go fight for the cause and benift of another man’s riches, is not honorable in itself. However, when godless men, with torch in hand, are marching toward your family, the honorable man stands between them and the ones that God gave to him to protect. And, to be aware of such brave acts and yet still condemn your ancestors in exchange for political favor in the present, is the true sign of a coward and a dishonorable man. You can insert many of your Southern, “conservative” politicians right here if you wish.

Southerners are not a monolithic group. Although we share a unique history, and I pray for a bright future, the stories differ from region to region, tribe to tribe. The food taste in the hills of Tennessee might differ from that of coastal Carolina. And, the way that our Christian religion is practiced, may have a different appearance in the deep woods of northern Louisiana than it does in the Virginia Tidewater. We mostly came to this continent from the same nation, during the same era, but different conditions. All of this determined how we got here and our experience soon afterwards, it makes the “Southern Story” a story written in many volumes. The “Tale of the Deep South” is not a cheerful one. It is gritty and bloody, but it’s not one told truthfully without references to honor and self-sacrifice.

As I pass the cemetery, as I do almost every morning on my way to take out the trash, I pass the grave of Henry. Henry is my third great grandfather, in the line of Jane Pellingham. Like most of his generation, he left his small farm on the bayou, the same one where I live today, to go fight against the invading Yankee army. Did he choose to go fight for the cause of “plantation culture”? I doubt it. But even if I was handed a piece paper signed with his name saying, “I fought for the cause of plantation culture and everything that goes with it,” I would still honor him because he is my elder, from my tribe.

That is my cause and some guy on the internet calling me a traitor for honoring my Confederate ancestors isn’t going to change that. It may not be fashionable in today’s culture to be a Southerner, but it’s okay to be “old fashioned.” A Southern man would like to remind you that change isn’t progress anyhow. I’ll raise my children in the same Christian faith and with the same King James Bible that my ancestors brought with them from the old country. I’ll plant my seeds in the same soil that they did. These fields are just as hot and thorny as they’ve ever been, but this is where I’ll take my stand even if it be my last.

-By Charles