A short road trip Carson Thomas
A short road trip The houses of Belle Meade, the wealthiest Nashville neighborhood, are dark as I drive. In the daylight, heavy houses and verdant lawns are visible, and floating wraparound porches are barely sustained by Grecian columns. Antebellum era plantation-style, though gutted and refurbished. Rust-red brick skinned with thick white paint. In the darkness, trees appear wet with clotted pollen, thick dark ooze. My headlights detect a flash of something white hanging. I look over. White cloaked figures, strung up by their necks; there must be a hundred. The ghosts float on burnt October breeze, weightless on makeshift nooses. A voice pops into my head: they never got to rest. But the road is abandoned. No one there but me and the ghosts. Leisure My first grade class took a field trip to a preserved plantation at the end of this street. The slave quarters were still there, huts of thin wood planks with dirt floors. A docent led us to the weaving room, full of wooden wheels and wicker baskets of cloud-like cotton. The cotton seeds looked like pinpricks of blood. It was women’s job to work here the docent said (though she didn’t mention which women).
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Three white female volunteers in lacey white bonnets sat on wooden chairs, pretending to spin cotton. The docent sat us each at a wheel. I punched the pedal aggressively. The wheel spun to life so quickly I was scared it would come off its hinge. The docent tried to stop it with her hand. She got a splinter. We were not allowed in the weaving room anymore. Gone with the wind The volunteer room: black metal chairs and styrofoam cups of coffee. It was lined with clothing racks. The docent lined us up by gender; boys were given britches and blouses, girls, the pink burlap dresses and bonnets, even the only black girl in my class, with whom adults avoided eye contact . We were assigned different locations to stand in and cards to read to visitors. Two other girls and I had to stand in the same place the whole afternoon. After the adults left, we took off our bonnets and sat on the floor. Our dresses were itchy and horrible. I colored in the Nike swoosh on my sneakers with a pen I found on the ground. All the visitors were old, with powdery white skin and hair. They made me nervous and I messed up reading the words on my flashcard. I stood by a mural of the plantation when it was active. The foreground was the building,
