A harbor can hold a truth that a town must hear

By Douglas Vandergraph

A harbor often tells a town what it wants to remember. There are boats, work, families, departures, homecomings, and the steady sight of water that has been there longer than any of us.

But a harbor can also hold a history that is painful to name.

On October 24, Georgetown marked that history with the unveiling of a Middle Passage port marker. The ceremony honored Africans who were forcibly carried across the Atlantic and remembered those who died, those who survived, and the descendants who preserved culture, family, and dignity through generations of hardship. The Gullah Geechee community has a particular and enduring place in that story.

I write as a Christian and as someone outside Georgetown, so I do not pretend to speak for the families whose history the marker honors. Their voices deserve to be heard on their own terms. But the occasion raises a question that belongs to Christians everywhere: What does faithful remembrance require of us?

The temptation when facing a disturbing chapter of history is to change the subject. We would rather speak about progress, goodwill, and the things that make us proud of where we live. Those things have a place. Yet pride becomes fragile when it can survive only by keeping part of the truth out of sight.

Jesus never taught that love requires us to look away from what is wrong.

In Luke 19, Jesus encounters Zacchaeus, a man whose wealth was bound up with a system of taking from others. The remarkable part of the story is not merely that Jesus welcomes him. It is that the encounter changes how Zacchaeus regards those he has harmed. He speaks of giving to the poor and making restitution where he has cheated people.

That passage is not a neat formula for the enormous and lasting wrong of slavery. A single person’s repayment cannot stand in for generations of suffering. But it does reveal a Christian principle: repentance involves more than feeling relieved that a difficult subject is over. It asks us to tell the truth and allow the truth to affect how we live.

A marker does not accomplish all of that. Nor should anyone expect a ceremony to settle how descendants remember the past. A public memorial can, however, refuse silence. It can give children a place to ask questions and adults a reason not to turn away. It can make room for the people whose stories were too often omitted from the official version of a town.

Christians should welcome that work, even when it asks us to listen more than we speak. We worship a Savior who knew what it meant to be humiliated by powerful people, who stood with those pushed to the margins, and who insisted that every neighbor has a claim on our concern.

None of this requires Georgetown residents to agree about every question of public history or contemporary policy. It asks something more basic: that human lives not be reduced to the background of a landscape we find beautiful.

The new marker stands near water that continues to move. Water can carry a vessel away from view. It cannot undo what happened aboard it.

What a community chooses to remember is part of what it teaches its children to honor. My prayer is that this marker will encourage not only solemn reflection, but patient listening to Gullah Geechee voices, a deeper regard for historical truth, and the kind of neighborly respect that makes reconciliation more than a comfortable word.

A harbor can hold a hard truth. A Christian community ought to have the courage to hear it.

About the Author 

Douglas Vandergraph is a Christian writer and speaker based in Fort Collins, Colorado, whose wife has family connections to the Georgetown area. His work explores biblical faith, perseverance, and how compassion and moral responsibility shape communities.