About Rebecca
Rebecca Hollingsworth was raised in rural Florida, which she says was every bit as backward as any place in the Deep South. With a degree in graphic design from the University of Florida, she moved to New York City in 1968 to work in advertising. After several years, she turned south again, this time to Atlanta, her home for the next 35 years. Growing restless after 15 years in advertising and design, she started a service business in Atlanta, which she ran successfully for 20 years until a nationwide company purchased it, allowing her to retire at age 50.
She moved to Charleston, South Carolina, a history town that offered endless avenues of exploration into the past. Her philanthropic work assembling a collection of slave artifacts for the Ryan Slave Mart Museum in Charleston grew out of her interest in the institution of slavery. From there she started trying to understand influences on modern day Black/White conflicts. In the year 2000, flack over the Confederate flag flying from the dome of the State House in Columbia forced Southerners to face the complications of race as they never had.
Born in 1945, the author vividly remembers seeing “White” and “Colored” drinking fountains as a child. The Catbird Seat offers rich personal observations and historical research that bring to the reader a deeply thoughtful and honest perspective on race not likely to be found elsewhere.
A Conversation with the Author
Where did the title, The Catbird Seat, come from?
As I considered the underlying theme of the book, I concluded it is all about control and power. From the seventeenth century the powerful Whites were heavily dependent on Negro chattel slave labor to clear fields and cultivate the land, among many other things. There is an old Southern saying that the catbird, similar to the mockingbird, likes to sing from its vantage point at the top of a tree. Like the catbird, Whites enjoyed a superior position at the top. Whites have been powerful and controlling and have sat at the top of the tree.
Writing a book is such a big undertaking! How is it you decided to take that leap, make that commitment?
In 2000, there was a big to-do about the Confederate flag flying from the top of the State House in Columbia, the state capital of South Carolina, my adopted home. It ignited not only a significant demonstration but also led Southerners like myself to consider their perspective on racism after years of apathy and the comfort of complacency. I started thinking about how it was that growing up in rural Florida, with a community of Blacks living just on “the other side of the tracks,” I hadn’t a clue about their lives. Born in 1945, I had experienced the two separate public drinking fountains and all White schools, and here it was over fifty years later and my familiarity with a large portion of society had not changed much. I took a deep dive into research regarding the history of Blacks in America. Eventually I began to connect the dots and to see how the past had created the present national social divide between the White and Black populations. The Catbird Seat is a result of my own personal journey to understanding. I enjoyed the long hours of historical research as well as remembering so much from my childhood in the South.
Since the beginning of putting your thoughts together, have you changed any of your original beliefs on racism?
Most definitely. Honestly, at the beginning of the demonstration, led by the NAACP in 2000, I questioned their passion over removing the Confederate flag that had been raised above the State House daily since 1962. My response at first was to ask: What is their problem over such an innocuous thing as that flag? History showed me not only enslavement but also over 400 years of sustained efforts to try to prove Blacks inferior. Then I really started to understand that the primary symbol of Dixie picked at the festering wound of racism, and why the Confederate flag on the State House created such an uproar.
Why did you write Catbird in two stories, one in 2000 against the backdrop of the Confederate flag controversy and the other set in 1857, pre-Civil War, about an enslaved man and his master on their way to a slave auction in Mobile, Alabama?
The contemporary story is the platform for questions about current consciousness regarding racism. But I didn’t think the story of race would be complete without attention to the issue of slavery and the relationship between slave and master. I thought the story of Medlin and Hutto would add humanness to what seems too often a one-dimensional catalog of unrelenting brutal crimes against enslaved people—as though they were not individual human beings and as though enslavers were not individual human beings. I do not see enslaved people as all poor wretches only to be pitied, although certainly they were caught in a dreadful and deplorable situation. There is plenty of documentation showing a wide variety of relationships and experiences between enslaved and enslavers. So many slaves were survivors with guile, wit, and cunning — using whatever means they could to live through the severe limitations of enslavement. That’s the story I wanted to tell.