Blood, Bones & Black Folk
the slave trade in Bordeaux as well as racism in the life of th Dinkinish O'Connor
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It was in 2019 when I started to track the writing of Dinkinish O’Connor. A talent. A poet. Someone you need to read. And every chance I get, when she has time, I get her to write for The Feiring Line. This essay about her confronting the history of the slave trade in Bordeaux as well as how racism has touched her in her professional life, was originally published on The Feiring Line (the newsletter), and now on The Feiring Line substack.
“The humiliation did more than rankle; it threatened to crack open their bones.” –Toni Morrison, Paradise
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“That’s where we kept our slaves.” That was his icebreaker. There I sat in the car next to the French white winemaker as we drove through Sauternes’ stagnant night, watching as he pointed at the darkness that to me, became a sepulcher.
Thirteen years later, glass and bones were breaking as George Floyd’s murder flowed through the virtual catacombs. A global community high on coronavirus anxiety, played, shared and posted, and there I was watching as my Instagram followers grew, white wine professionals suddenly sharing my music and wine videos, DMing me about what they could do to help.
“Why don’t we know each other?” a D.C. sommelier DMed me.
The white gaze. Morrison dismissed it—this idea that black people’s relevance is tied into white folks’ willingness to acknowledge them in a kind of permission to exist. But in the wine industry, you need the white gaze to progress, and what and who white folks choose to know dictates your visibility.
Racism, despite its old newness, was now suddenly visible to white folk. Somehow in this unfathomable season, breath became the mise en scène for a new American drama—videos of sick loved ones taking their last, coronavirus-breaths intertwined with George Floyd begging for breath under a knee, calling for his mama. Breath on breath, we paused. The call for change was ferocious. The timing was perfect. And the world was watching.
To “not know” was an effigy burning in pre-coronavirus America, and this idea of knowing what white folks dare not know (what they should know) was becoming another virus, books about social justice and other topics written by black authors (old and new, living and dead) floated across social media screens—white folks DMing, posting and sharing in a gesture that said they wanted to know where they kept the slaves—not just the noose-on-neck and knee-on-neck kind but also the unshackled kind, the ones who navigate food and wine spaces.
On June 2, 2020, wine journalist, Julia Coney, held a kind of Instagram church revival:
“Hey Good People. Hey Ya’ll… For someone who’s considered as a person as a leader in this space on race and wine…. The wine industry, shame on you—shame, shame, shame on what you could have done today…Don’t talk to me about what we can do for diversity ‘cuz you don’t want diversity… You guys want our swagger as black culture, but you don’t want our struggle…To my importers, distributors, sales people, I see how when you come into the store, when the world opens back up, you don’t want to taste for me ‘cuz I’m black. You don’t want to give me a time of day that my palate may not be as good as yours, I know who you are, I see you, and I’m going to start publicly calling you out…”
I was in Coney’s virtual congregation—mouth wide open, sharing in the virtual amen’s as she cried and spoke viscerally of the trauma many black wine professionals quietly carried.
The moment was unprecedented, liberating, scary. As Coney held wine-church, I recalled my first trip to France—a press trip to Cognac that coincided with VinExpo in Bordeaux. The airline lost my luggage for most of my Cognac stay, but I was happy to wear the same outfit over and over again in what was my dream come true—going to France, land of ambrosial, storybook wines and foods I read about.
In my mind, this trip legitimized my presence as a food and wine writer, or to be clear, a black writer who constantly felt the pressure to prove myself. It didn’t matter that I wrote for Wine Spectator, Time Out New York, and was one of The Miami Herald’s food and wine columnists. This time-of-day Coney spoke of was the bone I chewed on, and with each byline in each fancy publication, I hoped for the opportunities for real advancement that I believe would have come if I was white.
One evening, I strolled behind a Cognac chateau with a fellow freelance writer—a native Georgian, tall and blonde, maybe in her late 40s, early 50s, her specialty being nature and travel. On the magnificent grounds, the dreamlike deer—the kind you find in a Hayden Carruth poem—stopped frozen and then moved away from us.
“They aren’t used to seeing black people.”
Pause.
She—the nature and travel writer assured me she wasn’t being racist but just stating a fact. I was startled, confused, but I said nothing. I was on a trip with Robb Report and Washingtonian editors, public relations executives and one other black journalist. I didn’t want to be perceived as the angry, black woman as no matter how gently/calmly/professionally I explained how racist the comment was, a black woman’s assertiveness is usually read as angry.
When the Cognac trip ended, I went to Bordeaux to meet up with a woman I first met at a tasting in my hometown. I admired her passion and knowledge and was looking forward to learning from her. Her name was Delphine Dariol Kolasa, and she told me she was Bordeaux’s first female enologist.
I arrived very late to the dinner Delphine was hosting in Sauternes, and to my surprise, I was not staying with her, but with the winemaker whom, later that night, in the screaming darkness, wanted to make sure I knew where they kept their slaves.
The next day, as we attended meals and tasted gorgeous wines, Delphine repeatedly calling me her “exotic friend,” I felt slightly separated from what should have been a magical moment in my career and in some ways still was. There I was tasting beautiful Bordeaux bottles in Bordeaux, golden Sauternes, 2006 vintage, but now the sepulcher opened, and the eerie shadow—that’s where we kept our slaves—followed close.
I experienced an internal shift. I felt tired, exhausted. Racism is exhausting. In Bordeaux, I was unequivocally black, a descendant of their slaves. I remember telling a friend—an American ex-pat and music journalist that I wasn’t sure if I still wanted to write about wine. Would I ever be able to really flourish in the white gaze? I wasn’t sure if I wanted to assume the responsibility of confronting racism in the wine world.
It wasn’t the last time I had this internal joust in the wine industry. There was the time when that Paso Robles winemaker compared his dogs to Ethiopian children. There was the time when a Miami editor told me that she didn’t know I was (awkward pause) black even though I worked with the media group for 14 years. After her discovery, she ignored email correspondences she prompted and lunch and dinner dates she set up. Then there was the Miami editor who lamented her struggle convincing her New York publisher to work with me because I was black.
There’s never a logical pathway to address what it is inherently illogical, irrational and yet so intrinsically and, almost cannibalistically, part of the racial space. A racist remark—whether micro-aggressive or macro, whether it’s seemingly innocuous or deliberately venomous, eats dignity raw. But when it occupies the wine space, it ravages what should be a beautiful human experience, decanting that moment into the sepulcher of secrets where one learns that slave bones dwell among unopened bottles. So the inner-joust—whether or not to address the racist moment—becomes a cruel, imposed exercise that depletes the spirit.
So as the days went on, I drank Bordeaux and ate rabbit stew with the slave-toting-winemaker and his guests and as usual, like some well-trained, racism-absorbent cyborg, I enjoyed the evening despite myself. But that’s-where-we-kept-our-slaves marked a B.C./A.D. (Before Cognac/After Dark)-shift in my wine journey.
After the trip, I mentioned the incident in a palatable wine blog I wrote for The Miami Herald’s miami.com site, but it wasn’t the indictment it should have been. It was me still being careful, afraid.
I wasn’t holding wine-church, but that’s-where-we-kept-our-slaves hovered over me like a bone-rattling ghost. It was ten years later while doing research for my graduate thesis that I finally began investigating racism in Bordeaux and other wine regions.
I learned that black bodies bellied the Garonne River, and I imagined these slave ships entering the Gironde—the name I committed to what seems like fleeting memory—cabernet-based wines on the estuary’s left, merlot-based wines on its right, and now I imagined black bodies—chained, mangled, dying—black blood seeping through the gruesomely-packed, burdened ship bottoms into the Gironde as they headed off to the Americas.
From 1672 to 1837, Bordeaux shipowners reportedly led anywhere between 480 to 500 voyages that transported an estimated 150,000 Africans to France’s Caribbean colonies. This idea of knowing what I dare not know (what I should know) was becoming an inner-pandemic as I read and researched my way to Karfa Diallo, a Senegalese-born activist and founder of Mémoires et Partages, an establishment that advocated for the acknowledgement of the African slaves that contributed significantly to Bordeaux’s wealth.
“When I arrived in Bordeaux for my political science studies in the 1990s, there was an amnesia about the role of Bordeaux in the slave trade and slavery of black people,” writes Diallo in an email.
Bordeaux is France’s second largest slave port, Nantes being the first. According to Diallo, Bordeaux is the first French colonial port, slavery making it the richest.
Diallo lobbied the city to honor its jagged history and leads Bordeaux Nègre—a slave tour of Bordeaux where guests and students visit places like the Fort du Ha which Diallo writes was also called the “black depot”—the former prison where undeclared or “unruly” slaves were arrested and kept until a ship brought them back to America.
While looking through online articles about Diallo and his tireless work, I noticed a sign on one of Bordeaux’s walls: “Impasse Toussaint-Louverture.”
As a Miami native born to Jamaican immigrants, raised in a largely, diverse Caribbean city that has one of the largest Haitian populations outside of the country, someone who has dear friends and colleagues of Haitian descent, I wanted to know why the name of the first black republic’s Haitian revolutionary—Toussaint-Louverture was on a wall in Bordeaux.
“In the 18th century, the richest colony in America, Haiti, was owned by colonists from Bordeaux. This island made Bordeaux prosper,” writes Diallo. “The Toussaint-Louverture impasse is all Bordeaux has found to honor the initiator of the Haitian revolution. It’s a small street that is closed. It’s as if the freedom of blacks led to a dead-end.”
Haiti’s has been at this dead-end, metamorphosing from a vibrant and lush country to a politically and economically emaciated region after being forced to pay France an estimated $21 billion for its independence. I wonder how my colleagues and friends—Haitian-American sommeliers, wine vloggers and passionate wine lovers feel about this part of wine history? Do they know? In this unabashed truth-seeking, truth-speaking season, what does this mean moving forward?
After George Floyd’s murder, Bordeaux was among many European cities under pressure to not just acknowledge its racist history but create systems that socially and economically empower their Arab, West Indian and African communities. It’s not enough to show folks where they kept the slaves but to remove the systems that keep these groups enslaved to poverty and injustice.
Looking backward to move forward is a painstaking, lifelong effort that will require conscious P.O.C. and white wine professionals to do more than post well-meaning, provocative messages. It’s more than offering a P.O.C. fellowship and a trip to Burgundy. It’s accountability and enforceability. The process is gutting not glamorous. Then we begin to create wine spaces that are organically human (I believe we’re starting to). And when we meet eye-to-eye, no comfortable, pandemic screens between us—bottles up, barriers down, then maybe, just maybe, the bones will stop rattling.
