| << Back 8/14/02 What the guidebooks refuse to tell you By Matthew Bradley On a recent Saturday my friend Lisa and I took the trip down U.S. 74 to visit the Chief Vann House in Chatsworth, Ga. The sight of the two-story plantation house sitting among magnolia trees is reminiscent of dozens of homes from the Old South. But the Vann House story is reminiscent of no other. We were traveling to watch the ceremonies inaugurating the property’s new interpretive center. It tells the story of James Vann, the son of a Scots trader father and a Cherokee mother. Vann amassed a fortune as a planter and the builder/owner/operator of taverns, ferries, mills, and tollbooths. At the turn of the 19th century, he commissioned an architect of German heritage to design a home to showcase his wealth. The new interpretive center contains artifacts from that home. I was especially impressed by James’ violin, partially fashioned from Bavarian spruce cut in the late 17th century. The center also tells the story of how Vann invited Moravian missionaries to take up residence on his property. This unusual step of actively seeking to be missionized brought both Christianity and a Western school to the Cherokee Nation. Almost in passing, visitors to the center will learn something else about Vann — he was a slave owner. About 100 slaves worked his 800 acres. This is one part of the Vann House story about which the interpretive center offers few details. A scale model of the Vann property does show the location of the slaves’ quarters. An employee of the center was unable to answer my further questions about these buildings. Q: Would I be able to see the slaves’ quarters and the overseer’s home? A: The only buildings belonging to the Historic Site are the actual house and the log cabin next to it. Q: Has the location of the slaves’ quarters been built over? A: The Chief Vann House property doesn’t include all of his former holdings. Q: Could she possibly give me directions to the area once occupied by the slave quarters? A: The log cabin was brought from elsewhere and is probably representative of the homes in which most early 19th century Cherokees lived. I didn’t sense that the woman was being evasive. I think she simply didn’t know the answers to my questions. Nor do the vast majority of visitors to the house know that Vann frequently tortured his slaves in the house’s cellar. Otherwise, I doubt the couple behind Lisa when she was visiting the cellar would have characterized it as “beautiful.” In his 1984 article, “Permission to Narrate,” Columbia University literary critic Edward Said makes an important point: the facts do not speak for themselves. If they did, we wouldn’t need interpretive centers. The story of people like James Vann and places like his house would be immediately apparent to our senses and to our intellects. But they aren’t. They need patrons willing to raise funds to buy and maintain structures and grounds, historians dedicated to sifting through old documents, publishers willing to put these historians’ findings into print, and descendants of the Vann experience who preserve their families and loved ones’ memories through generations. However true the facts and stories these people struggle to give voice to might be, they won’t make a serious dent in our society until they have the backing of enough authority to make them socially acceptable. Maybe the facts and stories in the life of James Vann are just too contradictory and complicated to enter everyday consciences. He was at once an entrepreneur in a culture that had never known one, a patron of Christianity and Western knowledge, a womanizer, a violent drunk, and both an agent in and a victim of racial oppression. But even the individual elements of Vann’s story have yet to become socially accepted narratives. Our image of the Old South is still that of the architectural beauty of plantation homes and the elegant dress and manners of their former occupants. Should someone mention the fact that these homes sit on stolen land and were built with the labor of stolen people, they will at best be labeled as “cynical.” Throwing in phrases like “American genocide” and “a legacy of sexual violence against African-American women” is out of the question. To get to the Vann House, take 74 and exit south on 411 (just outside of Cleveland, Tenn.) Plan on rafting buses in season. The drive from my residence in Ela took just under three hours. Call 706.695.2598 or go to http://www.alltel.net/~vannhouse/ for information on schedules and prices. A trip to the Vann House will be made more enlightening, though not necessarily more enjoyable, by doing some reading beforehand. Learn to speak for the facts by turning to Danielle F. Littlefield, Jr.’s The Cherokee Freedmen, Theda Perdue’s Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, and William G. McGloughlin’s Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789-1839.
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