IMAGE: CNS photo/Peter Finney Jr., Clarion Herald
By Peter Finney Jr.
NEW
ORLEANS (CNS) — Inside the parish hall of St. Gabriel the Archangel Church in
New Orleans, the personal stories flowed as freely as the tears.
One
by one, descendants of the 272 enslaved men, women and children sold as a group
in 1838 to a Louisiana plantation by the Jesuits who ran Georgetown University
in Washington partially to relieve the school’s debts, described what it was
like upon learning — through the meticulous records kept and maintained for
nearly 200 years by the Society of Jesus — their hidden and bitter family story.
The
sale of the 272 — known as the GU272 – placed them on a plantation in
Iberville Parish in the town of Maringouin, located between Baton Rouge and
Lafayette. Others were placed on plantations in Ascension and Terrebonne
parishes, which are like counties.
The
first name on the slave manifest was Isaac Hawkins, who was 65 when he was sold
from the Jesuits’ plantation in southern Maryland.
On
Dec. 9 at St. Gabriel, Myrtle Hawkins Pace, Isaac Hawkins’ great-granddaughter,
and her husband, Johnny Pace, described how their world was turned upside down
when they received a telephone call in April from a cousin, who told her
Georgetown University was renaming a building “Isaac Hawkins Hall” in honor of
her ancestor.
They
were living near San Francisco and had never had an inkling of Myrtle’s ties to
the 1838 sale.
“I
was absolutely astonished,” said Johnny Pace, “because here I am, married to
Myrtle Hawkins, Isaac Hawkins’ (III) first born, and when I met her, I met her
father and met her grandfather and they both were Isaac Hawkins. I said, ‘Wait
a minute, this is astounding.’ It’s like having the sky drop in on you.”
The
gathering at St. Gabriel was one of two listening sessions organized by the
GU272 Descendants Association and the Society of Jesus, which was represented
by Jesuit Father Tim Kesicki, president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and
the United States, and Jesuit Father Bob Hussey, provincial of the Maryland
Province.
Father
Kesicki said the listening sessions with the Louisiana descendants of those who
were enslaved were just the beginning of a lengthy dialogue process, “one of
many visits moving forward.”
He
reiterated what he told a large group at Georgetown April 18, when several
campus buildings were renamed to honor the memory of those who were sold south.
Referring
to the penitential rite at Mass, Father Kesicki said: “As Jesuits, we have
greatly sinned, in what we have done and in what we have failed to do. Father
Hussey and I are here today because we are profoundly sorry.”
“We
share a history — a history that is the history of slavery,” Father Hussey
added. “Jesuits in my province almost 200 years ago owned and sold enslaved
people, and they were your ancestors, your family. It is hard for me to say
that, but it is the truth, and we need to continue to face that truth.”
Father
Hussey said one of the purposes of the Jesuits’ visit was to “extend the
meaning and the grace and the conversation of those events” to a wider audience
of descendants.
After
meeting in New Orleans, they traveled to Maringouin, about 105 miles northwest
of New Orleans. They also toured the Whitney Plantation, which gives an
unvarnished account of the slaveholding economy in Louisiana in the 1800s.
“The
history we share is painful,” Father Hussey said. “It is painful to remember
the denial of human dignity and the suffering of slavery, imagining what your
ancestors must have known. It is painful for us as Jesuits to recognize that
our brothers, in blindness, would treat people in a way so contrary to the
values we profess. We are all deeply ashamed by that.”
When
the descendants took the floor, they described a variety of feelings and
emotions. Linda H. Elwood said she found out about the slave sale only last
year and wondered why it had not been made known more prominently.
“My
mother is 92 years old and she just found out at 91,” Elwood said. “I’m 76 and
I was 75 when I found out, and we were terribly hurt by this. I think there
should be a way made that our children could be taught more about black history
so they can know what’s going on in their lives, then and now.”
Sandra
Green Thomas, president of the GU272 Descendants Association, said the Jesuits
must seek reconciliation through concrete acts beyond renaming buildings on the
Georgetown campus or giving descendants the regular benefits that the children
of any Georgetown alumni or professors would receive.
“You
have a tremendous amount of resources that you could use to uplift and support,”
she said. “In Maringouin, they don’t even have a high school. People live in
poverty. There are things you could do to ameliorate this.”
Walter
Bonam, an associate with the New Orleans archdiocesan Office of Religious
Education who moderated the discussion, said one of the sad ironies of the
history of the GU272 is that the story is so well known now “because so many
(of the descendants) have remained loyal to the Catholic Church that has not
always been loyal to them, and it’s through baptismal records, marriage records
and things like that that many of their names have become known.”
V.P.
Franklin, editor of the Journal of African American History, said any eventual
reconciliation has to include the idea of concrete reparations to descendants,
particularly in educational benefits.
“So
far it appears that the issue of reparations has been avoided by the people of
Georgetown,” Franklin said. “(The Jesuits) need to be thinking in terms of how
they can be making restitution, monetary restitution, for what they gained,
what they stole from these enslaved people, and make restitution to those
people.”
He
said one idea would be to guarantee education for descendants — at schools
beyond Georgetown — so that those students don’t “graduate in debt.”
Father
Kesicki and Father Hussey said the Jesuits and the GU272 are working on a
process for future dialogue and consensus.
“This
is a long time coming, and it’s a long road ahead,” Father Kesicki said. “I
hope that we don’t wait until we’ve agreed on everything before we do
anything.”
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Finney is executive editor/general manager of the Clarion Herald, newspaper of the Archdiocese of New Orleans.
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