Martha S. Jones’s memoir research, in which she traces her roots along the East Coast to answer questions about race, skin color and identity, took her to the site of Bandon, a North Carolina plantation where she believed an ancestor had been enslaved.

“There was mild disappointment in not being able to visit the site and further inform my own thinking,” said Jones, the author of “The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir,” and a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “But painted in broad strokes of poetic justice, it seemed right that Bandon was gone.”

She had similar feelings about the fire last week that destroyed Louisiana’s Nottoway Resort, which was the largest remaining antebellum plantation in the South. Unlike other such sites of brutality that are clear about the realities of enslavement — like Louisiana’s Whitney Plantation or St. Mary’s County’s Historic Sotterley — Nottoway papered over slavery in favor of weddings, corporate events and murder mystery dinner theaters. Their website touts the “majestic” oak trees on the property, 11 of which were named after the owner’s children, but doesn’t name any of the more than 150 human prisoners once enslaved there.

The erasure of the ugliness among the prettiness is an “egregious form of forgetting,” Jones said. It’s why so many Americans, particularly those like me who descended from victims of places like Nottoway, have posted nonstop memes celebrating the place’s burning.

Sure, there’s something to be said for preserving history, but when that history’s been thrown away in favor of engagement photos, what are we really losing?

“There is a conversation about history versus ‘#thisispretty,’” said historian Elise Petersen-Deitrick, the museum education coordinator with the University of Maryland at Baltimore’s Dr. Samuel D. Harris National Museum of Dentistry.

The reason it’s so easy to have a wedding at a plantation rather than, say, a Nazi concentration camp, is that Americans have not reconciled with “the true, full history of African Americans’ journey to and in this country,” Terri Lee Freeman, president of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture, wrote in a statement.

“Unlike the history of the Holocaust where we can point to the barbaric actions of others, slavery in America requires us to look in the mirror,” Freeman wrote. “Recognition and admission of past atrocities is how you move toward reconciliation. My fear is that the prevailing narrative wants to create a new and false reality.”

That certainly is part of the disconnect. Petersen-Deitrick was raised in Atlanta, the setting of the Lost Cause propaganda classic “Gone With The Wind,” which she called “the fictitious remembering of the antebellum south that minimizes the suffering of Black and Indigenous people with the image of ‘Our slaves are happy and they love us.’”

It also attempts, she said, to establish the blatant lie that the Confederacy was about protecting some vague and noble standard of states’ rights, when those rights, as detailed in many of the Articles of Secession of those states, were about owning slaves. (That University of Maryland history minor with a Civil War concentration paid off, Mommy!)

The connection with weddings is about the Scarlett O’Hara model of “Southern white feminity” or “plantation chic,” Petersen-Dietrick said, which is tiered dresses and elaborate hairdos. “In that way, it becomes an ornament. Getting married on a plantation is part of that impulse.”

Nottoway is a “particularly glaring and exceptional example” of how this history has been reduced to dollars and cents, Jones said, especially in comparison to how some other countries treat their own sites of brutal history. “I never visited a site [in Germany] that invited weddings and sparkling wine,” she said.

I think there is, for some of us, a judgment that we would never have a wedding at a plantation, that we are too aware of the atrocities at such places to participate in celebrating in the shadow of monstrosities. But as with most issues of race and history, this one is complicated, and we here in Baltimore might not pass the purity test, Jones reminded me.

“Many of us live in homes and structures that at one time were the site of slave holdings,” Jones said, citing the Walters Art Museum’s Hackerman House and the Clifton Mansion, once owned by her institution, Johns Hopkins.

“Some of them are grand, some of them are ordinary. But an important reflection that grows out of this is that we are all participants to some degree,” she said. ”Nottoway deserves all of the mockery that comes its way, but we live in a country where these crimes against humanity were practiced not just on plantations."

The echoes of slavery are everywhere here. Every day that I go to work in the Baltimore Banner newsroom, I pass a placard at the Pier 4 footbridge that tells the story of how fierce abolitionist Harriet Tubman helped an enslaved woman named Tilly board a ship that would take her to freedom. It’s on us to be honest and not smug about our proximity to these sites and this history, and to wrestle with how those echoes of the past affect our present.

“I appreciate the way in which the fire has grabbed attention about how these heritage sites should and should not be used,” Jones said. ”Maybe it’s an opportunity for Baltimoreans and Marylanders to reflect. We have our own challenges right here at home.”