The Fire This Time

Pentecost and Ghostly Mischief

Firefighters called to Nottoway Plantation Forced Labor Camp on Thursday, May 15, 2025 initially put out a fire in the historic mansion there. The building was constructed in 1859 using money from the enslavement of human beings, and with the intention of making more money the same way. The mansion had 64 rooms and more than 53,000 square feet of floor space. That’s a lot of fuel. It was a tinder box. Surely the fire crews in Iberville Parish, Louisiana deserve great credit for doing their job against tall odds.

But not every fire can be quenched. Brittle conscience and dried cypress beams had prepared the site for ignition for more than 165 years. The flames returned. The result was the total destruction of the enslavement center’s main house, and unforgettable images like this one:

Nottoway Plantation engulfed in flame on May 15, 2025.

Investigators say the cause of the fire remains unknown. Those who are paying attention in a rapidly combusting society have a good idea what happened. The first fire made space for some rushing wind to fuel a spark in a place built expressly for snuffing them out. Ghost-breathed, the blaze was. The next chapter in a history unresolved, unresolvable, incomplete. Some places are haunted, alive or half-so, with those still dragging their chains, never offered a “hospitable memory,” or an attempt at justice.¹ Of course some spectral rowdiness would eventually ensue.

In their essay “A Glossary of Hauntings,” Eve Tuck and C. Ree say it this way:

“Haunting is the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation…. Haunting aims to wrong the wrongs, a confrontation that settler horror hopes to evade.”²

To wrong the wrongs.

Nottoway is one of the many institutions that seek to preserve the politics and the social ordering of a certain kind of American South not only in memory but in practice. Like most of those institutions, they craft a genteel image: good manners, gracious people, fine furnishings, but not tacky ones. Current owner Dan Dyess first saw the place when he attended a wedding there.³ Weddings on former labor camps and torture sites still happen across the South, including at Nottoway. They produce the ongoing iconography of a terrible innocence: pure white dress, broad lawn, opulence without visible labor, comatose nostalgia. An entire industry choreographs weddings for carefully curated memories with suffering redacted. The photographer arrives early to scrub the blood from the walls. At sundown, the band turns up the volume to drown out the screams.

Nottoway invited other visitors. You could pay $25 for a guided tour of the mansion. The big house and other structures were open for overnight stays. Torture camp to tourist site is a journey that requires a fantastic number of lies.

A combusting society. One where–as the Pentecost story indicates–there are “portents in the heaven above and signs on the earth below: blood and fire and smoky mist” (Acts 2:19, quoting Joel 2:30). The ghosts, innumerable revenants, keep returning. The fires stay stoked, get dampened, and rage once more. Rebuilding proceeds on the same foundations; Reconstruction is always frustrated.

The leadership of the United States is currently attempting a return to an imagined innocence. The powers are themselves nostalgic for segregation and its hierarchy of persons, for fantasies of race science, eager for brutality thinly veiled by platitudes. Little wonder, then, that the specters engage in hot mischief. The hauntings will not go away. The disappeared never just disappear. A society should expect that those “made killable” will eventually become unmanageable, will one day wrong the wrongs that we refuse to right.⁴

We live now in a moment–really in a long series of moments–when “entire societies become haunted by terrible deeds that are systematically occurring and are simultaneously denied by every public organ of governance and communication; ...when the whole situation cries out for clearly distinguishing between truth and lies, between what is known and what is unknown, between the real and the unthinkable and yet that is precisely what is impossible; when people you know or love are there one minute and gone the next….”⁵

The fires this time are the cost of making justice impossible.

This Sunday, many churches around the world will celebrate Pentecost. The story is one of a ghost, and of fire, and of violent winds. It is a testament that fire not only destroys. It generates. It purifies. With it arrives new dreams in the ruins of old, pathetic ones.⁶

In Memoriam, Walter Brueggemann (1933-2025): Walter Brueggemann, noted Bible scholar and theologian, died June 5. Brueggemann was unique in his ability to weave together superior Biblical scholarship and practical theology for congregational leaders. You might think those tasks are one and the same, but they are not. There are many remembrances floating across the internet now. I recommend Ken Sehested’s, available by email and likely at his site Prayer & Politiks soon. Ken includes the image below.

My personal story:

In 2015, Helms and I were looking for some energy and inspiration. The first iteration of our community/ministry was complete and the second one was being born. By the kindness of our friends at National Benevolent Association, we attended the first Neighborhood Economics conference (organized in part by Trespasses of the Holy readers Rosa Lee Harden and Kevin Jones) in Louisville. Several of the main plenary sessions featured conversations between Walter Brueggemann and Peter Block. They drew on their budding friendship, the book they were writing, and Walter’s work in several other books, including the essential Sabbath as Resistance. They were the voices that helped us get disoriented and re-oriented. Our vocational questions weren’t resolved, but we knew how to move.

That experienced birth multiple things, including Common Good Collective. My fellowship with them, as with all times with Peter, was a training in how to organize a room for transformation. Walter and Peter, plus legendary organizer John McKnight, shared powerful conversations together with one another and with us fellows. Walter’s careful listening and vigorous teaching during that time still shapes my work now, as does my occasional return to his writings. Walter Brueggemann, ¡Presente!

Our Trespasses: Join my “Charlotte’s Haunted Future” walk on Saturday, June 21. 10AM at Trade and Tryon. $20 suggested fee, contact me for more details.

One More Note: From John Coltrane, music for Pentecostal fire and wind.

1. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 64.

2. Eve Tuck and C. Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting” in Handbook of Autoethnography, edited by Stacey Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis, 639-658. Philadelphia: Routledge, 2018. 642.

3. Thanks to my colleague Starlette Thomas for grabbing photos and material about Nottoway from their website in the aftermath of the fire. She saved some material while the company was busy scrubbing the site. Much of it is posted on Starlette’s social media, including a television interview with Dan Dyess.

4. Tuck and Ree, “Glossary,” 642.

5. Damn, Avery Gordon! Ghostly Matters (the quote is from p. 64) was first published in 1997 and sounds like it was written this week.

6. I’ve written here about fire. I’m aware that an antisemitic attack using firebombs occurred last week in Boulder, CO and it deserves to be condemned in the strongest terms.