Some years ago, I had the good fortune to be brought into an intergenerational community based around a land project in Mississippi. Founded in the late ‘70s, it was one of many at that time to experiment with alternatives to the systemized greed and militarism polluting the American mainstream, and create, at least in microcosm, a world governed by deeper values. I consider the vast improvements to my mental health since I started going to be an indicator of its success. When my mind gets cluttered by city things, and my spirits dragged down by thankless work and unrelenting struggle, I go there, breathe in the pine woods, slip into the rainwater pond, and look up at the stars. Pulled into the ecosystem’s web, I abandon my worries to a less eternal section of the time-space continuum. “Think of it, land is past and present at the same time,” says Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe, referring to an ancestral homeland which includes this very place. A rush of joy accompanies my encounter with eternity, and all at once my spirit recalls the feeling of freedom.
In the mid-‘80s, the community started a Fourth of July tradition that celebrates “Interdependence Day.” The ongoing celebration forgoes patriotic red, white, and blue in favor of the green of growing things, evidenced by the piles of basil on every available surface. Thus the true purpose of the gathering is revealed: pesto. Originally chosen to honor bumper crops of basil and garlic, the dish is an expression of reverence for the gifts of the land. The crowd that gathers to prepare it abides by a single rule: no food processors. The mounds of basil must be chopped by hand, an activity that defines the celebration more than the resulting feast. Everyone works together, chatting and laughing, exchanging techniques, inhaling the scent of basil and sneaking little handfuls of cheese. It’s proof that collective labor, unlike its extractive modern counterpart, is a convivial affair and connects us with an older relationship to the land than the one officially commemorated on the 4th of July. As Howe puts it, “the national narrative begins in 1776. But for Indigenous people that’s not even yesterday.”
None can deny, however, that it’s been a long 250 years, and as daily headlines tally the results of the American experiment, I find myself thinking about the tension between independence and interdependence. In his 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Frederick Douglass reveals the fundamental contradiction of the word independence in the context of our national political discourse. “The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common,” Douglass says, reminding his countrymen of the three-and-a-half million people who were enslaved at the time he made the speech. “Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.”
When I was growing up, the explanation I was given for our national adulation of George Washington was that, after winning the war against Britain, he could have declared himself king. Instead, he chose to put his republican values before his hunger for power, and became president. But the story quickly falls apart after you take into consideration that before, during, and after his presidency, George Washington was in possession of more absolute power than any monarch. Kings operating within the framework of absolute monarchy might have far more power than is safe or healthy, but as the newly minted citizens of France proved in 1789, it has its limits. By contrast, in the 18th century, the rulers of the numerous and vast plantations of the Americas had few to no checks on their power. In the United States, this state of affairs was secured by the sanctity of private property enshrined in the Constitution. There is no ambiguity as to whether this included human beings—Washington frequently referred to enslaved people as a “Species of Property.”
Enslaved people under the control of George Washington could expect a life of constant labor. As historian Philip Morgan writes, “After buying a black woman, Cleo, in 1755, he told his manager to employ her ‘leizure hour’s’ in making clothes.” At Mount Vernon, the enslaved were expected to work from sunup to sundown, and all throughout the winter months, as he expected “to reap the benefit of their labour myself.” Nor did Washington shy away from punishment. Mount Vernon’s enslaved carpenters were whipped severely whenever his overseer observed mistakes.
“Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth,” Washington wrote to fellow Virginia plantation owner James Madison. At Mount Vernon, he took every measure to eradicate the plant. Between 1760 and his death in 1799, at least 47 people fled his plantation, and he hunted down as many as he could. His punishment of last resort to fugitives from slavery was to sell them to the sugar fields of Saint-Domingue (today’s Haiti), where the extreme brutality of working conditions would afford no “opportunity of playing such pranks.” The effects of his commitment to hunting down fugitives went well beyond his own plantation. In 1793, Washington signed the Fugitive Slave Act, enabling slave owners to cross state lines to recapture those escaping to freedom.
To declare independence from a colonial government while remaining completely economically and personally dependent on a population of people held violently against their will is an inconsistency that made many founding fathers uncomfortable, (eventually) including Washington. But the plantation kings of Virginia that ruled the United States for its formative first decades (aside from the terms of John Adams and his son John Quincy) didn’t let that funny feeling get in the way of protecting their interests, and their dubious definitions of liberty, equality, and independence remain embedded in the nation’s DNA.
So, on this Interdependence Day, let’s face what they were too afraid to. Let’s acknowledge our ugliest global entanglements, the insidious legacy of Atlantic slave societies: the children sewing our clothes, the migrant laborers harvesting our crops, the workers risking life and limb to mine the minerals required to maintain our most pernicious technological addictions. Let’s remember what we’re fighting against. Then grab some friends, cook from a recipe that requires group effort, and toast to the better world we’re fighting for. Otro mundo es posible. —Holly Devon
illustration by Sadie Wiese
About the Cover – I chose to highlight two of my favorite things: summer snowballs and vintage rubber hose animation (I’ve always loved the strange subversive quality of its boneless characters). Those ancient cartoons were often layered on top of watercolor backgrounds, and having been trained in traditional art in the late ‘90s, on the cusp of the world drastically changing, I’m always experimenting with ways to combine those learned techniques with the newfangled digital illustration. In this case, I painted the background on an ARCHES Aquarelle watercolor block, scanned it into my tablet, and drew the characters in ibisPaint with my favorite brush, the love pen. —Jeffrey Roche
