Voices Past
Creeks
William Faulkner's voice
Before the white man’s boots scarred the red clay of the Southeast, the Muscogee Creek thrived, their villages rising along the rivers—Ocmulgee, Chattahoochee—each a heartbeat five miles from its kin, their lodges humming with corn and council fires under a sky unbroken by steel. They hunted deer and shaped pottery, a people of the land until the Europeans came, bringing plows and prayers, bending the Creeks to new ways by the early 1800s. But in 1830, the Indian Removal Act cast its shadow, driving them westward on the Trail of Tears, a sorrowful march to Oklahoma’s barren plains, their homes left to the wind. Yet the Muscogee endure, their spirit a moan in the oaks, and at Ocmulgee Mounds in Macon, where their ancestors’ earthworks stand sacred, they reach back across the years, their hearts stirring with the pulse of a homeland stolen but never forgotten.
Enslaved
Eudora Welty's voice
In the shadowed heart of the plantation, where the earth drank deep of toil, most of the enslaved were born under this American sky, their lives stilled by law in 1808 when the slave trade ceased. More than fifty souls, their numbers shifting with the years, moved through the ledgers as chattel, their hands shaping cotton fields, their names a faint echo in the cold arithmetic of profit. No descendants have yet stepped from the mist to claim their lineage, their stories held silent in the dust, waiting for the wind to carry them back to the land they shaped with quiet strength.
Bryans
Shelby Foote's voice
In eighteen hundred and twenty-eight, I, James A. Bryan, seized two hundred and two acres from Houston County’s wild, untamed green. With Katherine, my unyielding wife, we forged this house, its timbers wrought from forests felled by the sweat of our enslaved, their toil etched deep into Georgia’s unyielding soil. Our children’s laughter and quarrels echoed within these walls, their dreams a fragile thread in the tapestry of our days. On this plantation, crops stood tall in disciplined rows, nurtured by those bound to our will, while I, blind to fate, dwelt in a land where a merciless war, fourteen years off, loomed to rend our fields asunder and doom our labors. This house yet stands, its beams clutching our joys and sorrows, a solemn sentinel over lives carved from Georgia’s wounded heart.