Hits

It irritates me so much, too, that everyone is like “Oh, Ray Rice! He’s so terrible.” and yet they’ll pass along quotes from Bill Hobbs.

Also, I guess I’ve read some good arguments for why people shouldn’t view the video, but I’ll also say this–when “sources” inside the NFL, who all mysteriously seem not to have seen the video before yesterday, were saying this summer that the video in the elevator gave more context and made what happened outside the elevator more understandable, when they were saying that the events in the elevator were why they could still stand by Rice and why the Ravens felt comfortable having a tweet talking about how Mrs. Rice apologized for her role in the altercation. This video was supposed to explain things.

So, those sick fuck liars made the elevator video an issue by making it an excuse for their unwillingness to do what decent people who just saw how he treated her afterwards thought should be done. I watched the video not to see what happened to her–I knew what happened to her–but to see if the surrounding events matched up with what I’d been told was on the video.

Those surrounding events did not. To put it mildly. And that’s on those sick fuck liars, who watched that video and then lied about what was on it so that they could keep their meal ticket on the field.

The Thing about Franklin

I think the thing that bothers me most about Isaac Franklin, which is both why I want him in my book and why I’m finding it really unsettling to have to ponder him as a human being, is that, as far as I can tell, he was “one of the good ones.” By the standards of his time, he was a respected businessman who, while occasionally upsetting the people of Natchez by leaving dead enslaved people all around the outskirts of town, was a lot of people’s preferred trader to do business with.

The other successful slave traders who were at Franklin & Armfield’s level–or at least who could reasonably aspire to be–had some really shady business practices that people at the time found shadier than Franklin & Armfield’s, a fact Franklin & Armfield regularly used to their advantage to increase their own sales.

In their own context, these were good businessmen and good people (which is why the University of the South took Armfield’s money) who, yes, had the distasteful job of slave trading, but aside from that. In other words, they had reputations similar to how we view used car salesmen. People kind of thought the job was icky and involved a level of them trying to pull one over on you, but success spoke for itself.

When white people in the South say that their slave-owning ancestors were good people, here’s the rub–if they’re telling the truth (and let’s not doubt that they are), a good person in the early 1800s would have, if he needed to, bought his slaves from Franklin & Armfield. That would have been the “ethical” choice.

And they seemed to have raped a lot of the female slaves that passed through their business. If you bought a woman from them, you likely bought their victim from them. The scale of their rape cult is just mind-boggling (can you have a three-person cult? I don’t know what other word to use here.) Franklin & Armfield sold about 1200 people a year. If half of them were women and they “only” raped half of those women, that’s still almost a rape for every day of the year. The very least you can say is that, if you fell into the clutches of Franklin & Armfield, you were going to witness a rape.

One place I read said that Franklin & Armfield controlled about 5% of the U.S. economy. A nickle of every dollar passed through their hands.

I don’t know.. I don’t know what I want to say, exactly, except for that we, here in Nashville, talk about slavery like the worst of it happened someplace else. And yet, if you want to see those Franklin & Armfield nickles up-close and personal, you can stroll around Belmont or drive to Suwanee.