Nat Turner's Bible finds the right home

Dealing with artifacts of the past can seem to be an easy matter for outsiders, but when it comes to singular events in American history doing the right thing can create a moral dilemma. Living in the south the specter of early American history abounds. The relationships between the people, the whole southern plantation way of life, which we like to think is far removed from the 21^st century, often isn’t that far removed.

Such is the case for an extended part of my family. Recently, a cousin, Maurice Person, and his stepdaughter, Wendy Porter, presented the National Museum of African American History and Culture, part of the Smithsonian, an iconic bit of Americana in Nat Turner’s bible. For those who don’t know, Nat Turner was a slave who led one of the deadliest rebellions in American history.  Back in 1831, Turner’s rebellion left about 55 white Virginians dead.

If not for the heroics of one of the Francis family’s house slaves, the revolt would have wiped out the Francis family, part of my extended family.  Instead, the house slaves hid Lavinia Francis, and the family continued on from that point.

Turner’s bible was one of the pieces of evidence from the 1831 trial. It was left in the Southampton County Courthouse until it was renovated in 1912. At that time, a court official asked the Person family whether it wanted Turner’s Bible. Person’s father, Walter, accepted the book and kept it on display at his home for years. The family later put it in a safe-deposit box.

What to do with the Bible? Certainly, it deserved to be on display somewhere. It is such an iconic piece of American history, it deserved to be on display where others could view it. But it’s not always easy to take those steps forward.  So, the Bible sat with Maurice for a few more years.

I don’t personally know what prompted the move to donate the Bible to the Smithsonian, but I do know that the Bible can go a long way to telling the story of slavery in the south. Handled properly, which I know the Smithsonian will do, it can tell a great many stories not only about Turner’s rebellion, but also about those who risked their lives to save Lavinia.

As historians are wont to do, they started to investigate the Bible’s authenticity.  No one really expected it to be anything other than the real deal, but artifacts need to be verified. Needless to say, the Bible was verified as authentic in short order.

In addition to verification of the type of paper and other trappings of early book construction, a 1900 photo of the book showed staining that matched stains in the donated book.  There’s little doubt that Nat Turner’s rebellion is among the most significant uprisings in American history. Nat Turner’s bible would be a crown jewel for any museum. But where better for it to reside than in the Smithsonian’s new African American museum?

The value of the gift wasn’t lost on the museum’s director, Lonnie Bunch. In a story that appeared in the Washington Post earlier this week, Bunch had a lot to say about the book.

“This is about as rare a gift as it gets,” said Bunch. “The Nat Turner rebellion is probably the most significant uprising in American history. To have something tied to the insurrection is unbelievable, and this one is important on so many levels. To have something from Turner is significant and iconic.”

Often history’s artifacts are lost forever. This one, tied so closely to early American history, could easily have disappeared. But it didn’t. It was kept safe in the Person family for nearly a hundred years. Giving it to the Smithsonian is absolutely the right decision of what to do with the Bible.

Turner, born in 1800, was taught to read and write, and spoke about his deep reading of the Bible, especially the Book of Revelations, a chapter from the Bible that is missing. In addition to the bible, the museum also collected two bricks from the chimney where the young Francis was hidden.  More than enough to tell the whole story.

“Our generation wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the house slaves,” Porter told the Post.

“The significance of the Bible has always been understood by the family,” she said. “We never saw it as something that belonged to one person. We didn’t feel we were the keepers. I think Nat Turner would have wanted his Bible to rest in Washington.”

If it looks like a tax, it's a TAX

A tax increase is a tax increase no matter how eloquently you put it, no matter how thick the frosting, no matter how it’s dressed. Adding four pennies to the City’s property tax rate is a four-cents-per-hundred tax increase from $1.05 per hundred to $1.09, regardless of whether the assessment goes down. In fact, the city’s supporting argument for the increase is all the more egregious since the housing assessment is a snapshot of how the economy is failing.

We, the public, are not doing well. What we do, when the going gets tough, is cut back on our expenses. We look at our own budgets and make decisions about where to spend money, where to save money, and what to do if the ends don’t meet. We make tough decisions.

But apparently tough decisions are something the city would rather not make. Looking at their budget might require reducing services, or cutting back on salaries, or maybe, dare we say, laying people off from their jobs. Well, we can’t have any of that. It’s easier just to stick more of the burden on the public than it is to look inwardly at its own budget to try to dig up the funds to pay for a courthouse that should have been taken care of a long time ago.

What funds? Well the funds needed to support the city’s new courthouse, of course. The city is proposing funding the court building through debt, which they probably have to do for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the total cost. The total cost could have been alleviated somewhat had City Council acted on the court request when it first came to the fore. They should have, at that time, taken seriously the Circuit Court’s threat of a law suit for a better, more secure court building.

Anyone who has been around the commonwealth for more than a week, and who pays attention to that sort of thing, knows that the Circuit Courts can force the local municipality to provide adequate court space. Look at the Taj Mah-Chesterfield or Hopewell courts for examples of the court’s power.  Both were built under threat of a law suit. But in Colonial Heights, we don’t take to threats very well, so instead of working at some solution 10 years ago, we opted to wait until we had no choice. The result of that short-sightedness is a mad-scramble to build the courthouse, and an equally mad scramble to scrape up funding. Who was in charge back then, I wonder?

Things cost more today than they did 10 years ago, that’s just common sense. Had the city leaders made a serious move to take care of the court business back then, we still would have been saddled with the bill, but it would have been at rates from 10 years ago, not today.

There is also no question that the court building will have to be paid for by debt service, or bonds. We know that as citizens of this fair city, but why is it that the City attempts to make us believe that not only will this four cent tax hike amount to no change in what we pay in taxes, it will in fact result in us citizens having an even smaller amount to pay, by about $39 annually?

The city is playing an old shell game. They are trying to make a tax increase not appear as a tax increase, by showing the result of a downswing in property values. ‘Well, looky here,’ the city says. ‘This increase isn’t really an increase at all. Sure, it’s up four cents more per hundred, but the assessments are going down by a percentage greater than what we expect to take in by the increase. That ends up being a net loss to the city, and a net gain to you, our constituency.’

They sent their campaign notices out last week in the form of a brochure, trying to explain how they expect to retire the debt. Not only are they going to hit us in the tax pocket book, but they are going to hit us at the lunch counters by knocking the meals tax up another percent, to 11 cents on the dollar. The highest meals tax rate in the area. How well do you think that’s going to go over?

A tax is a tax, no matter how much you dress it up. Paying an additional penny at the local eateries is going to have an effect on receipts; it’s just as easy to eat in Chesterfield, Prince George, Petersburg, or Dinwiddie, where they aren’t constantly trying to take cash from their citizens via the restaurant industry.  Likewise, I am not buying that idea that adding four cents to my tax bill will result in a $39 savings to me in the long run. There’s a not-so-subtle term for that sort of pretzel logic and it starts with a B.

And in its own way, the city just assumes that the restaurant receipts will remain the same, and their income from sales therefore will go up. But when the receipts don’t go up, and the workers make less because people opt to eat elsewhere, than their entire budget manipulation will go awry. At that point, they won’t see the revenue loss as a result of the increased tax, they will see it as yet another sign of the diminished economy. No doubt that will engender another round of meetings on how to satisfy this debt; and just as certainly they will come eyeing the $39 they ‘saved’ us from the previous tax increase.

Maybe the city needs to take a long hard look in the financial mirror. Living on the public dime is fine and dandy when things are going well and life is good. But take a serious look at the newspapers and the nightly news. Things are not going well and life is not so grand for a great many people. The huddled masses are without jobs, and unemployment rates don’t really tell the whole story. There are a great many more people out of work than the unemployment figures indicate. Just because people come off those rolls doesn’t mean they now, somehow mysteriously, have jobs.

So don’t try to shine me with some convoluted logic about paying less in taxes when the tax rate is higher. Housing values are dropping because the economy is dropping. So, what is the best thing to do? Aha, increase taxes, of course. Fiscal responsibility starts at home. Look after your own budget and let me take care of mine, thanks.