Picture Nottoway’s alabaster façade bubbling in the flames—columns cracking, chandeliers popping like cheap fireworks—while the spirits of 155 enslaved souls blow the ashes straight into America’s open wound. That mansion was never a “wedding venue.” It was a butcher shop for Black bodies, a sugar-mill death trap where machetes and boiling vats carved seven-year life spans into flesh. John H. Randolph whipped our people, sold our babies, and force-marched two hundred chained ancestors to Texas so his profit margins wouldn’t taste freedom. After emancipation, he shackled them with debts instead of iron. Fast-forward a century and white entrepreneurs called those same cabins “Acadian Cottages”—charging honeymooners to sleep where our grandmothers once prayed for dawn.
So no, the fire isn’t just a historic footnote; it’s a cosmic subpoena. The ancestors are testifying, and their testimony is hot, loud, and uncompromising: Nothing built on our broken backs can stand forever.
That truth is still rippling through every police siren, every red-lined zip code, every boardroom that clutches diversity reports like bulletproof vests. The plantation system morphed, but it never died—it just learned to code-switch. Which means we don’t get to clock out. We stay in FAFO mode—Fuck Around and Find Out—because the minute we get comfortable, another Nottoway rises, slick with marble and marketing copy.
FAFO mode looks like:
Funding our own freedom. Stack your coins in Black-owned banks, credit unions, and mutual-aid circles. Every dollar we redirect starves the descendants of Randolph’s mindset.
Story-keeping. Teach the babies the full syllabus, names and numbers intact, so no tour guide can whitewash their inheritance.
Spiritual armor. Pour libation at sunrise, burn cleansing herbs at dusk, and invoke the warriors who refused the lash. Our rituals are rebellion.
Relentless civic fire. Vote, organize, sue, divest, and amplify—whatever it takes to keep pressure on the systems that still profit from our pain.
Refusing the hush money of nostalgia. When they call plantations “elegant,” we call them what they were: crime scenes. Period.
Staying in FAFO mode is not about rage for rage’s sake—it’s about sacred maintenance. The same heat that melted Nottoway keeps our collective backbone tempered. Let their marble melt; let our mettle stand.
The ancestors lit the match. Our job is to keep the flame of truth roaring until every last façade built on our suffering crumbles—or learns, finally, to bow. And so it is.