By Someone Who’s Ancestors Didn’t Have a Choice

We don’t usually celebrate fires. Fire destroys, displaces, devours. But occasionally on rare, poetic, divine justice occasions a fire knows exactly what it’s doing.

Take, for instance, the recent blaze that brought a chunk of the Nottoway Plantation down to cinders. Oh, sorry, “The White Castle,” as it was rebranded in one of the most Caucasian plot twists of the century. Yes, Nottoway, the largest antebellum plantation home still standing in the South, a place where they held onto whitewashed history tighter than they held onto proper ventilation, apparently caught fire. And I, for one, felt a small breeze of ancestral vindication.

Now before anyone clutches their pearls or their souvenir mint julep glasses, let me be clear: no injuries were reported. The only casualties were smug nostalgia and the kind of romanticized Southern heritage that forgets to mention forced labor, whipping posts, and human trafficking. If that makes me sound callous, well, maybe the flames just illuminated what America has been trying to keep dim for too long.

Nottoway, like many plantations turned tourist attractions, loved to whisper about “grandeur” and “hospitality,” while barely mumbling the word “slavery.” Their tours gave more attention to the Corinthian columns than the Black bodies that built them. A whole gift shop and wedding venue built on the blood-soaked soil where my ancestors were worked to death. Charming!

So no, I didn’t shed a tear. Unless you count tears of laughter. A historic fire at a historic site of historic wrongs? That’s not just arson. That’s performance art. That’s karma with a matchstick.

And oh, the irony of calling it the “White Castle.” Did no one stop to think that naming a plantation after a fast-food chain where the meat is questionably thin might make it easier to digest the horror? Well, the castle’s melting now. No more bridal photos under the Spanish moss. No more curated, chirpy tours where Black suffering is a mere footnote.

If you’re feeling upset about the loss of a “piece of history,” I invite you to visit literally any of the still-standing slave quarters left abandoned and crumbling across the South. Spoiler alert: most aren’t being rented out for corporate retreats.

To be Black in America is to carry generations of silenced grief. So, when something symbolic finally burns, it feels like someone heard the scream – even if it was the fire itself. No one had to light it for us. But we’ll always know why it burned.

So here’s to the flames. To the smoke signals sent to the heavens. To the ancestors who never had the chance to say, “Burn it all down.”

This one was for them.