“We don’t build monuments, but we do have memories,” the Hebrew Elders of Goshen explain to Pharaoh. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, Pharaoh holds a meeting in Goshen, the province where Hebrews lived under the “New Egypt,” to tell them about his new plan for a public works project. Tensions rise as he questions the Hebrews’ ability to be fit citizens of Egypt. He asks, “Why should I trust people without monuments and memories?” To Pharaoh, Hebrews were unremarkable, a past-less people who deserved to be controlled and exploited. Under Egyptian law and social order, Pharaoh used Hebrew men for their physical labor while criminalizing women for their reproductive labor. The Elders try to get Pharaoh to “look at it another way,” explaining their epistemologies. They continued, “Perhaps we do not need stones to remind us. It could be that some folks need stones to remind them. It could be that memorial stones are signs of bad memories. We just don’t trust memories to stones.” Pharaoh scoffs at the Elders’ sage assertion. He condemns Hebrews to more work to build the new city that would further dispossess and displace them. Exasperated and desponded, Amram, Moses’ father, gasps, “No rest, no property, no babies, no gods. Why would anybody want to live?”

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For months, I meditated on the conflict between the Elders and Pharaoh after reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain. In this scene, Hurston had precisely illustrated similar dynamics that I attempted to articulate in my research.[1] The Santee-Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project, a New Deal dam-building project administered by the South Carolina Public Service Authority, took place between 1938 and 1942 in the low-country plains of South Carolina. Although one of the largest earth-moving projects of its time, what brought me to the topic was not just an interest in a modern infrastructural project but its spiritual, epistemic, and ecological consequences. The Authority’s project required the inundation and removal of over 9,000 graves, most of which belonged to enslaved Africans and their descendants. Though not as explicit as Hurston’s Pharaoh, the Authority disregarded and condemned black southern epistemologies to build a monument of New Deal progress in the South. Amram’s words took a new meaning for black residents in the project area. They would have no rest as they worked on public works projects, no property as black landowning farmers lost their land to the Authority, and no gods as their cemeteries would be submerged under two new reservoirs.