On Juneteenth, I’ll Celebrate Black Music at Andrew Jackson’s Plantation

Ben Jealous
Ben Jealous

On Juneteenth, I’ll Celebrate Black Music at Andrew Jackson’s Plantation

The ground at the Hermitage is sacred and stained, and the music made by enslaved people and their progeny is what still feeds this country’s hope.


By Ben Jealous


This Juneteenth I will stand at the Hermitage and help celebrate Black music. The Hermitage was Andrew Jackson’s plantation, outside Nashville. I want to be honest about how strange that is.


I am descended from slaves and from the men who owned and abused them. The men who denied them their God-given right to freedom. My family was enslaved by the Blands of Virginia. Richard Bland was the famous one. He was a patriot before there was a country. He told the king and Parliament that a shackle chafes a man no matter how well you polish it. His young cousin Thomas Jefferson asked him to bring a bill to make it easier to free the enslaved. Bland did it. He was denounced as an enemy of his country. Then he went home and kept his thirty. He died still holding them.


That is my inheritance. My grandmother, Mamie Bland Todd, is the griot of our family. She carries two hundred years of it. Her great-grandfather Frederick was the only enslaved man named in his owner’s will, and the will was written to protect him. The man who owned Frederick was his own brother. That is how close the blood runs. Thomas Jefferson is my cousin. He wrote that all men are created equal. Robert E. Lee is my cousin too. He took up arms to keep my other ancestors in chains. I carry the blood of the man who argued for freedom and the blood of those he would not free. I resent his cruelty. I pray my children show his courage against the men who would be kings. That is the duality of this nation.


So I know something about awkward ground.

The Hermitage is beautiful. A thousand acres. A white mansion. Gardens. The tombs of the seventh president and his wife. It is also a graveyard. More than three hundred men, women, and children were enslaved there. Archaeologists are still finding their graves. The land was Native land first. He signed the Indian Removal Act. He set the Trail of Tears in motion. Settlers’ bones are in that ground. The bones of the enslaved. The ground is sacred for what is buried in it. It is stained for the same reason.

And we are going to sing on it.


Jackson owned the people there. He fathered no children, white or Black. Betty cooked for him, as her mother had before her. Her son Alfred was born on that land and lived there longer than any man. After freedom came he stayed. They put “Faithful Servant” on his stone. But once a white man told him slavery had its comforts, and Alfred asked him, “How would you like to be a slave?” The man had no answer.


For a while that felt like trespass. Who brings a celebration into a wound? Black music was not made in spite of that ground. It was made on it. The field holler. The spiritual. The work song that timed a hoe. People who were called property made them, and the songs said they were not. “Follow the Drinking Gourd” was a map to freedom. They sang it where the men who owned them could hear.


Juneteenth is the right day for it. Freedom came late, two and a half years after it was declared, to people who had been free in the eyes of God the whole time. The day does not pretend the delay away. It celebrates anyway.


So I will go. I will stand where Jackson stood, and where the people he enslaved stood. I will not soften either truth. I will say their names if they let me.


We are more curious now than ever about how we are joined. I have a cousin who descends from the people who owned mine. We are kin. The country is like that.

Nothing feeds the American need for unity and hope like the music made by enslaved people and their children. It is the truest thing this country has made. And we are still singing it.


So this Juneteenth, on sacred and stained ground, we will sing. And we will remember the oldest truth Mamie Bland Todd ever taught me: our people were always free.


And — oddly, ironically, and even somewhat poetically — it happens to be the same lesson her own slaveholding forebear, Richard, helped teach both his young cousin Thomas and King George.


Freedom is inherent. It belongs to us from the beginning.


Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.

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