‘Perhaps Conway just learned that the freedom of all humans was inextricably bound with his own.’ Photo: Moncure Conway / Black Lives Matter banner
‘Conway seemed ready to have his worldview deconstructed.’
Free agent: Dana Littlepage Smith takes a lesson in allyship from one of her ancestors
One night in 1862, Moncure Conway was walking along the Potomac River. He was looking for several dozen men, women and children who had been enslaved by his father. He knew they were hiding in Georgetown after fleeing Virginia.
He found the right door, and knocked.
Conway had come to accompany them west, to Ohio, and safety. But the families inside would have been more than aware of the potentially-dire consequences of the moment. Here was a white patrician, a Virginian from a family who had enslaved people, whose brothers had fought for the Confederacy. By some grace, the woman opening the door knew the man outside: she’d helped to raise him, as his nurse.
Conway’s moral journey had been a long one. He chose to study law after seeing a black man lynched – a man whose fate was not so different to Tom Robinson’s a century later in To Kill A Mockingbird, or more recently to George Floyd’s. But perhaps this journey began earlier. My mother, another Conway, tells me it was his mother who taught black Americans to read in her basement. Or maybe this moment of allyship had its genesis when Conway attended Quaker Meeting in Sandy Springs, with the abolitionist Roger Brooke. Conway had noticed the superior standards of the farming there, and wondered why that were so. ‘Has it ever occurred to thee that it may be because of our paying wages to all who work for us?’ said Brooke.
Perhaps, in the end, Conway just learned that the freedom of all humans was inextricably bound with his own. This was an uncomfortable process.In Baltimore, there was almost a riot when the party tried to board a train. They were allowed on only when Conway produced a military document providing safe passage for someone transporting people the family had enslaved. ‘I was thus, in the eyes of the law, a slaveholder!’ he later wrote. To become an ally Conway had first to acknowledge, experience and grapple with his own position in an unjust system.
For most of the train ride the men, women, and children in the group neither slept nor talked. Then, he wrote: ‘At last, when the name of a certain [train] station was called out, I observed that every eye danced, every tongue was loosened, and, after some singing, they all dropped off to sleep. It was not until the next day that I learned that the station which had wrought such a transformation was the dividing line between the slave and the free states. How they knew it I cannot divine; it was a small place, but there the shadow of slavery ended.’
Here in 2020 I ask myself what allowed Conway to get to this place – this small place, where the fragile seeds of a new consciousness could take root? His, like ours, were volatile times. How can I walk with him into a different world after the murder of George Floyd, whose final eight minutes and forty-six seconds, whose last words, now scar our conscience?
Conway eventually left the law and attended Harvard Divinity School. He became an iconoclastic minister, offending many along the way, yet always searching and transforming. Moncure Conway the abolitionist, pacifist and feminist seemed ready to unlearn and re-learn everything he could. He dropped in to chat with Ralph Waldo Emerson in his library; he walked with Henry David Thoreau; he tracked down a sweaty Walt Whitman in his workshop. A privileged life compared to many, though in April 1863 he travelled to London to convince the United Kingdom to not support the Confederacy. For years afterwards he felt unable to return – his childhood Virginia friends and neighbours considered him a traitor. My mother tells me he was allowed home to bury his own mother, after which he was told he’d leave town in a coffin. Thereafter he sought out other radical thinkers, including Charles Darwin.
In Exeter Meeting a Friend reads from Quaker faith & practice 23.05: ‘Evils which have struck their roots deep in the fabric of human society are often accepted, even by the best minds… They lurk unsuspected in the system of things until [those] of keen vision and heroic heart drag them into the light, or until their insolent power visibly threatens human welfare’ (William Charles Braithwaite, 1919).
Controversial, unabashed and sometimes caught on the wrong foot, Conway nevertheless seemed ready to have his worldview deconstructed. And reconstructed.
Quakers were part of that journey. In 1727 Yearly Meeting in London censured the slave trade. I wonder what are we willing to censure today? Will I censure my entitled world, which hoards opportunities for a privileged few? How active will I be in my own re-education?
Hearing other experiences helps. I return to Eula Biss to understand my white debt and its relation to guilt (‘White Debt’, The New York Times). Wendell Berry’s The Hidden Wound penetratingly describes the wounds many of us carry from our racist, gendered, capitalistic, ego-centric system.
Maybe I will find Conway’s book, published in 1864, Testimonies Concerning Slavery, in which he upholds the humanity of black people on every level (he recommended interracial marriage in order to end the epoch of separation). As I accept my ancestor’s clumsy, brilliant, lonely, seeking, biased self, maybe I will accept my own self. I will weep and I will laugh when I hear again the recording of a man, formerly enslaved, who gently rebukes his white interviewer: ‘O honey you still got the blindness. You can’t give me the right to be free… I was born with that.’
I will walk with the dead, our ancestors, be they genetically related or not. I will travel with John Woolman as he visits first-nation Americans. I will accept that incarnation may never have not been complicated. Cain spills the blood of his brother and is exiled into a life of wondering. Conway, the pacifist, accuses Roger Brooke of silence when Quakers are fighting on the side of the Union Army. I see my black student duck into a shadow at night on an Exeter street when a group of young whites pass him. I am implicated – part of the whole, like it or not. I am mantled into a system where might and money are allied to race and gender and oppression. Dismantling that system must become implicit in how I walk in this world. Will I walk in peace?
I come from a place of complexity: of ruthlessness and richness, of confusion and beauty. Of wholeheartedness and broken-heartedness. My brother and I raked leaves in our garden in Richmond, Virginia with Arthur Ashe’s father. Our parents taught us to recognise the wrongness of a world in which his son was not able to play on tennis courts where I could. There were no Black Lives Matter marches then.
Today there are, even on Monument Avenue in Richmond, where the statues of the confederate generals will come down. Only Arthur Ashe will remain, the humanitarian who won Wimbledon.
He is asking: ‘Are you there yet? Have you gotten to the stage in your life where going for it is more important than winning or losing?’
Will you enter this conversation, this radical re-education in love, however much it may cost you?
