“I’d Fly Back to de Ole Country if I Could”: Scale, Memory, and the Many Geographies of Elsie George

Abstract

“I’d fly back to de ole country if I could,” Elsie sighed, “…but all de ole folks is gone, I know.” As she ruminated, her white interviewer, a sometimes-vaudeville actress named Maude Wallace, dutifully transcribed, delivering her best performance of Black southern vernacular. By 1940, Elsie George had already “made ninety-four,” and now, nearing the end of her long life, she longed to return to the place of her birth. “(S. C.),” the interviewer inserted into the typescript — South Carolina, the “ole country” where Elsie had been born into slavery in the 1840s before she was sold to a Louisiana sugar planter just before the Civil War. The story of Elsie’s life spanned a vast territory of experience and an array of geographic spaces material, discursive, and imagined.

And yet, in recounting that experience, Elsie’s narration confronts “a visible spatial project” in the discursive and institutional structures of her white interviewer (McKittrick 2006, xiv). No small part of that project was a certain logic of scale. In this paper, I retrace the many geographies of Elsie George — the vast territory of her experience and her scalar narration of it — as they confronted the territorial and scalar logics of plantation space. In doing so, I argue, Elsie sketched a relational reordering of the spatial logics of the plantation order, including among them that of scale. This reordering of scale reconnected places of collective Black life that had been cleaved and separated from one another by enslavement and the plantation order.