Strawberry Plains Audubon Center

June 6, 2014- Driving down a red dirt road engulfed by hardwoods, slicing through the humid Mississippi day, we approached a small building clad in wood siding. The visitor’s center of the Strawberry Plains Audubon Center held more than appeared with a back porch surrounded by bird feeders. After a few minutes exploring the vacant building, a man with a dark beard and shorts approached us, introducing himself as Mitch Robinson the gentlemen I’d conversed via e-mail with. “The Audubon Center,” he told us, “was once a cotton plantation. At one time the Davis Family had over 100 slaves working the fields that are now growing back to an original Mississippi forest.” 

With only a slight bit of encouragement and direction from Mitch, we hiked some of the trails on the property. Red Buckeye and American Ginger lined the walkway between the visitor’s center and the old plantation house at the head of the trails, a massive brick house with tall white columns that seemed to appear out of the foliage. Once the home of the plantation owner, the house loomed over the land reminding visitors of the money and power of the family that once lived there and a small cabin indicative of the oppression and exploitation of a people. The further we walked the more I couldn’t help but think of the history of the land. Daniel and Alex wanted to know more about life as a slave on a plantation so Nick and I shared what we had learned over the years.      

 Plantations, as I and many other people have learned of them, were not fun places to live if you were among the slaves.  History has painted the plantation as a grand place to live, but only if you were among the whites. Most of the time, slaves were forced to live in shacks and made to work from sunup to sundown in the fields. The treatment of the slaves was horrible. There may have been some slave owners and slave masters who were not as terrible as the ones many of us heard of, but those were few. The stories any of us have heard regarding slavery are stories of torture, pain, suffering, and heartbreak. Families torn apart and sold to the highest bidder. Tales that we could never imagine without having actually living it. We made the connection to the kids that the founder of Berea, John G Fee, was against slavery.

Walking through the woods, seeing the many trees, hearing the birds singing in the trees, feeling the heat and humidity as it wrapped itself around us, I couldn’t help but wonder about the people who worked the land. I wondered often if any of those who lost their lives on that land were still there, watching as we walked across the land they were forced to give their lives to. A single headstone stands in the woods, the only sign of the many people buried in the area—the slaves’ graveyard. My heart went out to the souls of the people buried there. Though the day was hot and humid, we could not complain about it knowing of the people who worked this land and the fact they could not complain about it.

The work being done at the Strawberry Plains Audubon Center is amazing work, but all that great work can not erase what history tells us happened on that land. Their preservation of both nature and history is necessary if we are to avoid a bitter future.