So hard to believe

It's just hard to believe, really. 

The Vann Mansion stands out there in the middle of the country, up high on a hill so the view all around is, well, comprehensive. People say James Vann wanted to be able to look all around to see if his help was doing what needed to be done on the plantation. He was that kind of guy.

James Vann was not to be toyed with. He was, in the early years of the 19th century, one of the wealthiest men in northwest Georgia, in the whole state for that matter. His plantations stretched out endlessly. But his business ventures were multi-faceted and included a series of trading posts and saloons. He lived, like his parents before him, in a region largely populated by the Cherokee Nation. 

The Vann Mansion--it's a Georgia State Historic Site--suggests that James--and his son Joseph, who inherited the place--were men of means, and they were. President James Madison stayed over once upon a time, a friendly visit. The Vanns cut a significant swath in Georgia politics. In the early years of the 19th century, they were among the most wealthy--and thus, most powerful--in the state. 

There's so much about the Vann Mansion that's just hard to believe. Try this: by the late 1830s, the Vanns lost control of the mansion and its lands, even though son Joseph was every bit the businessman his father was. James oversaw business ventures that kept family coffers overflowing until one day he committed a crime that led to the destruction of his family's legacy: he hired a white man. 

The Vanns had slaves; Georgia was a slave state, and the Vann's had money and work. But hiring a white man was clear violation of the law, according to recently passed Georgia legislation.

James Vann, who built the mansion, and his son Joseph, who lived in it for some years, were mixed-blood people. Their father and grandfather, James Clement, a Scotts-Irish immigrant, came to the region in the mid-1700s, before the War of Independence, when the whole mountainous area was Cherokee country. His wife, Native Cherokee, went by the anglicized name of Ruth Gamn. 

Joseph Vann owned slaves all right, about a hundred in fact. He was as rich as anyone in the state. A President stopped by for a visit. His land stretched out for miles in every direction. They'd built a Christian mission for Native people, a Moravian mission whose German-born carpenters built the doors for the Vann Mansion and whose dedicated staff brought Jesus to the neighborhood.

But in the late 1830s, the most salient fact about son Joseph Vann was the fact that he was  mixed-blood Cherokee. On May 28, 1930, President Andrew Jackson signed into law the Indian Removal Act, which instituted a land grab: Georgia land for a plot in Indian Territory, which would become Oklahoma. 

States were given the go-ahead, but had to create their own ways of grabbing land from the Indigenous, the truly "Native" Americans. In Georgia one new law was simple: a person guilty of a crime--any "criminal"-- was subject to lose his or her property. The law made it illegal for a white man to work "under" a person of color. 

Now piece things together. Joseph Vann had hired a white overseer, making that white man an employee of an Indian. Case closed. Land for sale. Cheap. 

See that deep scar, a burn, in the floor just up the stairs in the Vann Mansion? Almost 200 years ago now, some madman, brandishing a torch and a despicable, drudged-up law, came right up the stairs after Joseph Vann and everything he had, and he could do it because Joseph was an Indian. 

It's just hard to believe, the whole mess, not to mention the horror of  the Trail of  Tears--3000 Native people dead as the First Nations were pushed out west. It's enough to make you sick.

I don't know how that story can be told in a way that allows white kids comfort, that doesn't challenge an understanding of justice and injustice, that doesn't make white kids look away, even just a little. 

Maybe the Vann Mansion story is what the MAGA folks call CRT--"critical race theory." It must be because it's impossible for me, a white man, to tell that story without wincing.

Impossible.

So much about it is so hard to believe.