Origins of Repossessions
by Sarah Eisner

There is a closet in what was once my grandparents’ house on Head Island, South Carolina, that keeps boxes of family papers and other ephemera. I was born in California in 1971, and still live there now, but I began going to Hilton Head with my mother to visit my grandparents the year I was born, and have been there every year of my life since. My grandparents bought the house as a weekend escape from their public school teaching jobs, the Savannah heat, and their live-in care of my great grandmother, Bobbi, who was bipolar and unmedicated. Bobbi had spent time at the infamous Milledgeville asylum and received treatments of early electroshock treatment called the “Georgia Power cocktail.” My grandmother received her electroshock therapy a few years later, in Savannah.

The closet in this house has always been open to me, the things stored inside available for me to see. I am lucky. As far as I know, my family didn’t hide the truths of our history from me.

I have always known that my ancestors thought themselves to be good, God-fearing farmers and educators who also participated in the horrifying practice of enslaving African Americans. I have also heard still living relatives tell stories of their ignorance and complicity while living in the Jim Crow South. I am lucky in this aspect too: none of them perpetuate the myth of slavery as genteel, or segregation as anything but unthinkable in retrospect. They own up to their—to our—truth and history. This includes being up front about the mental illness that runs through the family, often called “the Keller curse.” I call it a resulting negative effect of living in a white supremacist society. 

I am in my 50s now, and I own the house on Hilton Head, but I did not inherit it. Thanks to tech work in Silicon Valley during the boom, I was able to purchase it at market value from my mother when rising taxes forced her to sell on a retired public school teacher’s pension. Suddenly, I became more aware of the land loss that was occurring on the other side of the island. Golf courses and resorts and large homes were driving up taxes everywhere. Gullah Geechee families were losing land that had been in their possession since emancipation to tax auction sale. While our story wasn’t the same, at all, it awakened me to the issue. It also made the house where I had so many memories feel instantly more precious and tenuous. It sent me deeper into the closets. I found that while they didn’t hold secrets that had been kept from me, they did hold undiscovered or overlooked documents that quickly became meaningful.

In my teens and early twenties, I’d enjoyed seeing the decrepit remains of my great great grandmother’s baby dresses, the monogrammed and tarnished silver combs, the ephemera of burgeoning girlhood and womanhood. 

In my thirties, I appreciated the handwriting on old documents and studied the photographs taken at Drakies Plantation, a mystical place in family history that, partially because it was purchased after emancipation and thus my ancestors had not enslaved humans there, felt easier to romanticize than the property upon which they had enslaved people. The other reason Drakies held an almost tender, yet still very complicated, place in my heart is that this was the home my mother had fond memories of being cared for by her grandparents. My mother went to stay there when her own mother, my grandmother, who was also bipolar, got sick and had to be hospitalized. The land near the river and the people who lived on it--white and Black--were comforts to her during traumatic times. I know, and my mother knows, the situation on Drakies in the 1950’s was still complicated by the indentured servitude and white supremacy of Jim Crow. Still, her memories of “happy” Black folks who lived in the same house with her grandparents and cared for her deeply ran deep. 

In my forties, I began to really look at the documents that the closet held. My mother and I found deeds of land given by our ancestors to formerly enslaved Black men and women. We also found deeds showing that some of that land had been lost by Black families within a single generation, sold back to another ancestor of mine in town for something like one dollar at tax auction sale. Some of that land, though, seemed to have been kept. These documents were one of the many forces that sent me down the path of trying to find descendants of those my family had enslaved, to try and offer documents to them that they may not have; to try and offer some sort of act of repair beyond that as well, though I did not know what that would look like.

I journeyed down that path and in 2019 I eventually connected with Randy Quarterman, the great-great-great-grandson of a man that my great-great-great-grandfather had enslaved and then deeded 10 acres of land to in 1890. I quickly found out that the Quarterman family still owned that land, but as complicated heirs property, and was losing two acres of it to a parkway by eminent domain. Randy and I began to work together to clear title on that land, established a close relationship, and expanded our work to co-found The Quarterman & Keller Foundation, or The Reparations Project, with the strong support of my mother and other living relatives. We established our work’s focus on Black education, Black land preservation, and Black art.

As we began to explore these three areas, I kept going back into that open closet. My mother and I rediscovered things we’d maybe passed over before or hadn’t seen; things that we began to consider what to do with and how to handle responsibly. She unfurled the water colored map of Savannah River rice plantations that usually leaned against the back wall rolled up in a tube and asked me again if I wanted it. It was something that had been bought sometime in the 1970s by my grandmother, not something the family had held for over a century. It was beautifully done, but to me, it was anything but beautiful. I could not look at the soft palette of pinks, yellows, and blues that identified Drakies and the other rice plantation plots without considering the brutality of enslavement, and its legacy. I could not appreciate the winding blue-gray brushed river without also knowing the ways in which Jim Crow laws continued to hold African Americans under the rising tide of white supremacy, and the ways in which it lingers today.

I did not want the map. But I did think I knew who to give it to. I had recently discovered Rodney Ewing’s artwork through the Headlands Center for the Arts, where Rodney had done a residency and created a powerful mixed media work centered on a silhouette of Trayvon Martin called “Rites” as a collaboration with two other Black artists. I loved the piece, and my husband and I bought it. We were very new to any type of art purchasing, and I was conflicted about whether it was appropriate for me, as a white woman, to hang a piece featuring an image of Trayvon Martin in my home. Honestly, I was conflicted about whether it was appropriate for me--or how it made me feel--to collect art at all. In many ways I did not believe I reached out to Rodney in order to arrange to pick up the art, and also to visit his studio. We connected quickly. I learned more about his process of creating mixed media art, and about the meanings behind his pieces, and he reassured me that the piece would be at home in mine, and he liked knowing it might make an impact on the people who saw it. After we had met and spoken a few times, I took the map out of the closet in South Carolina, brought it with me to California, and eventually into Rodney’s studio. I asked him if he might want the map, to contextualize however he saw fit. Or not. I told him if he wanted to burn it, that was okay too. He said he’d sit with it. I left it with him and around a year later, he told me he had worked with it. The result was beautiful and haunting.