Hello friends,
After a beautiful weekend, snow is hammering down on us in Boston. A welcome sight if you have somewhere safe and warm to stay put.
Tomorrow is the first day of Lent. How is that possible?? So today — since Valentines feels like a weird day to coincide with the vibes of Ash Wednesday — I’m sharing a newsletter to set up a Lenten series with a few posts I plan to do during this time of remembrance, repentance, and transformation. I hope you’ll join me on this journey.
(trigger warning: stories of convict labor and prisoner torture)
peace, joy, and justice,
Nathan
“It makes one wonder whether the wounding and the marking, as inscriptions of colonial (juridico-economic) power, remain in later juridico-economic formations and tools, such as subprime loans, coffee, cotton, sugar, and commodities that become money, but also in the soil, the waters, the forests, and the air—in transformed elementa (the most basic components) of mass energy of each and every drop of blood and each and every scream of pain.”
— Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt
For dust you are and to dust you shall return.
— Genesis 3:9
My father and I take a shortcut some days on the way to preschool. Off highway 59 north on a red dirt road, toward the Imperial Sugar Mill silos looming beyond fields of cotton spread across the Brazos river bottom. I can see men working the endless rows as we pass through this portion of the vast Central Unit. Black bodies in matching uniforms hoe the same dark clay as their ancestors.
Twenty-five years later, a backhoe operator—his salary paid by the thousands of mortgages flowing from houses in matching uniforms rising at his back—is preparing that same dark clay to hold a high school when he digs something up that slams production to a stop. The construction site becomes an archeological dig. Little orange flags marking off one human-sized plot after another flutter in the Gulf breeze. The bones of ninety-five convict labors are found where they were tossed in unmarked graves a hundred years before.
It’s been said that in America we’re a people still haunted by slavery. In the case of the place I grew up, that’s more literal than anyone wanted to remember.
Today Sugar Land is one of the wealthiest suburbs of Houston. That wealth began in the silos of the Imperial Sugar Company (from whom the city took its name) which at its height was a Fortune 500 company. That wealth was made possible by the free labor of men reduced to slavery, and worse, long after the institution was formally abolished. Before mortgages became the cash crop of today’s Sugar Land, and cotton the crop of choice on the Central Unit when I was a kid, those fields were sugar plantations. In the decades after the Civil War, Edward Cunningham bought up the depreciated plantations between the Brazos River and Oyster Creek and came to rule there over the largest, meanest prison plantation in America.1
Thousands of convict laborers would pass through those fields were dad and I took our shortcut. Convict labor was the largest act of (state-)organized violence in the early twentieth-century for maintaining white supremacy. At least 3,220 African American were lynched in the South between 1880 and 1930. In Texas alone, between 1866 and 1912, 3,558 prisoners lost their lives in captivity, mostly from “unnatural causes.” The death toll of convict leasing in the South as a whole is believed to exceed 30,000.2
On the prison plantations near where I grew up, the profitability and constant production that built the white wealth of Sugar Land were wrung out of Black prisoners through torture. On a prison plantation called Harlem contiguous to the Cunningham property, on a swath of land where eighty years later I played soccer tournaments as a kid, a typical technique was called dark celling: “a form of solitary where inmates were temporarily locked in a small, pitch-black box and sustained on bread and water.”3
On September 6, 1913, Black prisoners went on strike.4 White guards responded by stuffing twelve men stripped to their underwear into the dark cell.
Witnesses testified later that even a single occupant stumbled out of the ‘putrid vat of deadened air’ bathed in sweat and ‘half-asphyxiated.’ With twelve prisoners inside, the chamber, which measured seven by seven by nine feet, afforded each occupant less space than an individual coffin….No one reported hearing sounds of struggle, but when the guards returned and opened the door sixteen hours later, eight men were dead, their naked corpses piled on top of the other. Four survivors crouched in each corner, their mouths wrapped around the floor pipes, gasping for air.5
That is one of the most horrifying stories I have ever read. I hesitated to include it and felt in doing so, the trigger warning above was necessary—and though I included that warning with my Black readers in mind, frankly I feared that “sensitive” white readers would be the first to turn away: exactly those whose time has come to face this history that possesses our present.
We do not want to hear these stories. Still less do we want to admit that our lives today have anything to do with them. To claim that present social realities were in any way directly “caused” by the horrors of those plantations is considered offensive. Even more vehemently do we reject suggestions our present society could in any way be a continuation of that world.
The anthropologist Naomi Reed wrote about the Sugar Land’s self-understanding before and after the discovery of the 95:
Until recently, the only historical record the city had officially recognized before its 1959 incorporation is a swift tale of Stephen F. Austin securing land from Mexico, Kyle and Terry naming the city after the source of their economic success, and Cunningham eventually creating a sugar mill that would employ thousands of Black prison laborers—a detail the city website does not quite emphasize. These narratives of white settlers are celebrated in schools, students participate in the annual “Colonial Day” celebration, and sugar has come to be a proud symbol referencing what current residents of Sugar Land call living the “sweet life.”
The discovery in 2018 of the remains of 95 Black prisoners aged 14–70 who were leased as part of the Imperial State Prison Farm to work sugar plantations has rattled Sugar Land’s notion of self. A racial history left unmarked, uncelebrated, and unremembered, unearthed itself in the midst of the city’s attempt at further educational expansion.
If it’s common for people to fast from sweets during Lent—what does a place like Sugar Land need to give up?
When the violence on which our present is built and sustained breaks through the topsoil, how will we respond? What happens when your skeletons walk out of the closet right in the middle of your party? Can it keep going or must it turn into a funeral? How much violence did it take to put those skeletons in the ground in the first place? How much more violence will it take to put them back in the ground and keep dancing as though nothing has changed? Or, how much courageous love would it take to tear down the whole skeleton-hiding house and build something new?
The violence that sustained the world in which Jesus was born, lived, taught, and loved broke through the soil when it plotted against him, drug him before the Sanhedrin, made him a prisoner just as like men I saw in those fields 30 years ago, forced him to kneel before Caesar’s envoy, and condemned him to death on the cross. But the cross is exactly where the victory of violence ends and the victory of the nonviolent God begins.
Lent is the beginning of a journey toward a death when bones are said to have walked out of their graves.6 Lent leads us to face death, and through death, emerge into a resurrection where new ways of doing life together are born.
I have long been drawn to the opening words of a small discipleship pamphlet called the Didache written a hundred years or so after the death of Jesus. It begins: “There are two ways, one of life and one of death, and there is a great difference between the two ways.” Lent is an opportunity to face the way of death that haunts our lives, not just as individuals, but as communities, as societies, as cultures, and as political economies. We face the way of death in order to, like Jesus, put death to death and enter the way of life.
What is the way of death? It has many names. For now I will simply call it whiteness. It is the builder of plantations. Its food is violence. Its soul is emptiness, fear, and isolated. It depends on domination. It is the endless denial of culpability that keeps the violent world spinning.
And what is this way of life? The Didache—drawing directly from Jesus’ teaching—describes it as practices of care, community, economic redistribution, and nonviolent resistance.7 In the first place, the way of life is about love: “The way of life is this. First of all, you shall love the God who made you. Second, love your neighbor as yourself. And all things you would not want done to you, do not do to another person.”
This lent I invite you to a journey of dying to whiteness that we may come alive in the new life, the new creation, the new humanity embodied in the solidaristic way of life practiced by Jesus.
Let’s go on a journey of repentance and imagining life together otherwise than whiteness and its plantations. Lent is a pilgrimage of conversion through confessing and turning away from sin. In its place, we take up the way of loving communion: loving mercy, doing justice, and walking humbly with God. I want to invite my white readers into a collective prayer that begins in our lips and drips down over our bodies. I want us to kill the old man to come alive in Christ. I want us to die to whiteness to be born new creations. I want us to dream of worlds unlike the one we’ve inherited—worlds refashioned through love.
Let’s begin.
A Prayer of Repentance, by Howard Thurman
Leave me not to the tempest of all the meaningful superficialities of my life, O God.
Drive me, drive me, O God, to my inmost center where, stripped bear of all that cloys and clutters, I may know Thee even as I know me.
This is the heart of the cry of Thy children, O God, holy God, our Father.
Accept, our Father,
the offering of our faith
and our words and our lives.
We seek forgiveness for the inadequacy of mind and the slowness of heart
with which we seek to make articulate the meaning
of Thy spirit within us, O God, our Father.
Forgive us, O God, for all that is limiting and blind. Give the lift of Thy spirit to the desire of the heart as Thou dost know it…
Forgive us, our Father, for all that remains standing between Thee and us:
the fears and anxieties, the hatreds, the bitterness, the despair—forgive us for all these.
Tutor our spirits in the hope that is born of Thy love for us,
that we may learn in some way that speaks to our condition Thy love of Thee in us.8
For an in-depth history of the Cunningham prison plantation and the development of convict labor systems were innovated in post-bellum Texas, see Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire by Robert Perkinson.
Perkinson, 128.
There’s a disturbing quote included by Perkinson in this section on dark celling. It’s from Ben Cabell, a former sheriff and mayor of Dallas who was on the Texas Board of Prison Commissioners in the 1910s. He rejected the idea that the dark cell was “a place of torture or…physical punishment” and instead framed it as a time of spiritual disciplining. “It is a place of extreme isolation, giving the offending convict…a chance to meditate and think over his condition” (Perkinson, 173). Cabell twists torture into edifying meditation. What genealogies of spiritual theology and practice must be traced to find the path to this horrid place? What allow(ed)(s) white people to imagine they wield the sovereignty to subject dark bodies to such a twisted conception of the dark night (notably also experienced by St. John of the Cross in the solitary confinement of a prison cell)?
For more on the racial dynamics across the eras of slavery, reconstruction, and Jim Crow as racialized labor struggles, see W.E.B. du Bois’s Black Reconstruction.
Perkinson, 173-174.
Matthew 27:52
Howard Thurman, The Centering Moment, 15-16.