A Grand Old House

My first home was built in 1908 and was built on an uneven stone foundation.  When I bought this fixer-upper, the toilet on the first floor was in danger of falling through the rotting floor into the basement. The walls were lathe and plaster covered with several generations of wallpaper and several more coats of paint.  The wood was painted over in army surplus green. Seventeen years of sweat labor resulted in refinished wood trim and flooring, and stripped and repainted walls.  Yet the basement still leaked when it rained.

Pulitzer Prize winning Author Isabel Wilkerson tells us in her book Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents that “America is an old house.  We can never declare the work over.  Wind, flood, drought, and human upheavals batter a structure that is already fighting whatever flaws were left unattended in the original foundation.”  She goes on to say that “Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see…we are like the homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside, but whose soil is unstable loam and rock…”

We did not commit the sins of the past.  In all likelihood, most of our ancestors did not attack indigenous people or own slaves.  None of us was here when this house was built. We are not guilty.  Yet, we are heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. They are ours to deal with now.

If we don’t shore up the foundation and fix the cracks, they will continue to cause damage to the rest of the house.

When the Constitution of this country was written, its authors included slave owners who were not ready to count their property as citizens.  The land this country was built upon was inhabited by many other people, various groups with their own traditions and customs.  Pushed aside or killed, the land was taken over by many generations of new arrivals, and those arrivals included our ancestors.

We have inherited this grand old house.  We have some real work ahead to shore up its foundation. First, we need to know where the cracks are.  Then work to fix them.