It is a disjointed memory, attached to impressions. I was fourteen, traveling in France with my family. One day we planned to visit an eighteenth-century country house, I don’t know why. For the architecture, probably. I remember nothing of the tour apart from one detail: sitting on a small table in the entryway was a painted china bowl filled with dried hydrangeas. In my memory, over the years, that one detail came to stand in for an entire cosmology of meaning. Dried hydrangeas in a painted bowl became the poignant symbol of a life of beauty and grace, destroyed during the French Revolution.
As I grew into adulthood I learned more about the world that bowl had come from. The people that had sustained the world were the reason that life had been overthrown, its abandoned structures now the property of the government and open for teenagers like me to dream about what no longer existed. The dried hydrangeas in their china bowl became a kind of momento mori, a reminder of death.
There is also this: I remember that I found that country home beautiful. The proportions were graceful, the curved lines enticing, the colors soft and elegant. I wanted to live there. Once I learned about the economics of such houses, though, the idea of beauty itself became suspect. Even entertaining the idea of living the life that house represented began to feel like a betrayal of those whose labor had sustained it. More importantly, I began to see the unseen labor as woven into the creation. The beauty was still there, but no longer as an abstract quality. Which brings me to Nottoway Plantation, the largest antebellum mansion in the United States.
By the time it burned on May 15, 2025, this building had become a grotesque caricature of itself. “Nottoway Resort,” the website calls it, a venue of “fascinating history, enchanting luxury, and warm hospitality,” “completed in 1859 and now stunningly restored to her days of glory.” The History tab on the website mentions only that there are 16 oak trees on the 31 acre property, 11 of which were named for the children of John Hampden Randolph, the original owner. Only by researching separately can one learn that in the mid-19th century, Randolph owned 7,000 acres which he used for sugar cane production, and more than 150 slaves. “Cottages,” now renovated into “modern luxury hotel rooms with plush, welcoming beds, private deluxe baths, and full amenities” are former slave quarters, a fact the website also fails to mention.
Seeing Nottoway as beautiful because of its luxury or as a gathering place because it can be hired as a wedding venue is only possible if one is living in the romantic dream world of a teenager. Slaves built every inch of that building, every floor plank, every stair case, every door, every brick. That building was theirs. The sin of Nottoway Resort was to continue to profit from their labor and their suffering. Nottoway Resort turned Nottoway Plantation into a place where white people could play dress-up, a place where the trees are named but the graves are not.
Nottoway Plantation could have been a place of remembrance and reckoning. It could have chosen to participate in the complex, heartbroken, aching world of mature adults. Instead it tried to control a story that, like the fire, could not be contained.