Looking for Historys Huts

Barbara Burlison Mooney

A number of extant slave habitations survive throughout the American South, and these buildings have much to tell about the past and the present. Based on research undertaken in 2003, this essay examines interpretive practices employed at both rural and urban slave sites, and it reveals patterns that either illuminate or obscure our understanding of the histories and architectural histories of African Americans. While freestanding extant houses do not represent the kind of shelter that most bondspeople occupied, important lessons can still be drawn from the way architectural design features, such as materials, construction techniques, and site planning, facilitated exploitation.

ITNESS THE FOLLOWING scene. The action occurs inside one of two brick slave dwellings that in 1934 Henry Ford moved to Greeneld Village, his open-air museum in Dearborn, Michigan, from the Hermitage Plantation outside Savannah, Georgia (gs. 1, 2).1 A white mother with a child about ten years old listens politely to a black interpreter discuss the drinking gourd, basket, and furniture that enliven the interior. The interpreter explains that the house was built of brick because it was manufactured on the Hermitage Plantation under the task system and that most slave quarters were not built of brick. The white mother absorbs the information, carefully surveys the interior of the house, and responds by saying that the Hermitage slaves habitation was not all that bad, pretty nice. Barely containing her rage within crisply articulated syllables, the interpreter launches into a litany of the personal injustices of slavery, including relating that children were taken from their mothers and sold. Thus chastised, the visitor becomes silent and the dialogue ends abruptly.
Barbara Burlison Mooney is assistant professor at the School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa. Support for this essay was provided by the University of Iowas Old Gold Fellowship and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. The author is indebted to Sally Mills and Ellen Weiss for their wise suggestions and corrections. 1 Southern Romanticism, House and Garden 77 (March 1940): 1617, 67; Hermitage, Savannah River Vicinity, Historic American Buildings Survey, GA-225, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. n 2004 by The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. All rights reserved. 0084-0416/04/3901-0003 $3.00

This miscommunication and the resulting tension between guide and visitor epitomize the misdirection too often present in current preservation and interpretive practices at extant slave dwellings. As the episode demonstrates, the architecture of slavery bears a heavy weight by serving as the most physical sign of American slavery. Because of their size, materiality, and survival beyond the earthly lives of their inhabitants, extant slave quarters, as well as other buildings that accommodated bondage, are the most visible relics of a historical period with which America has yet to come to terms. Those who visit historic architecture and those who teach it as material culture may expect buildings to yield truths absent from the written record; moreover, they expect a relatively straightforward relationship between the object and message. But continuing racism and the lingering shadow of slavery permeate our comprehension of architecture, so that features can connote memories and feelings far more complex than merely denoting objective information about building practices. What exactly is signied by extant slave dwellings might depend on the viewers race. James Oliver Horton notes that, for African Americans, these buildings may evoke memories of painful exploitation but may also engender pride in having survived the ordeal. For European Americans, they should produce sobering shame, but for some they may summon nostalgia for the myth of the Old South. As the physical representations of bondage, extant slave dwellings serve as critical forensic evidence of what Maya Angelou has more eloquently described as the huts of

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Fig. 1. Slave quarters from Hermitage Plantation, now at Greeneld Village, The Henry Ford, Dearborn, Mich., relocated after 1934. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

historys shame.2 Confronting or avoiding the shame of historys huts constitutes the central preservation issue that must be addressed at public exhibits of slave habitation. This review of exhibits of extant slave dwelling summarizes what can be learned from current interpretive practice. In the summer of 2003, I undertook a multistate tour of surviving slave sites. I examined these places of bondageand a surprising number of them surviveas if they were an exhibition devoted to the theme of the domestic architecture of the American slave. The exhibition included only those places that an average, educated amateur interested in history might view rather than sites open only to more privileged professionals in the eld. This conceptual exhibition posed the question: What would a tourist learn
2 James Oliver Horton, Presenting Slavery: The Perils of Telling Americas Racial Story, Public Historian 21, no. 4 (Fall 1999): 1938. The phrase is found in her poem Still I Rise; Maya Angelou, The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (New York: Random House, 1994), pp. 16364.

from and experience by looking at buildings that are the literal embodiments of historys huts? I am not the only one asking these questions. Adam Goodhearts 2001 article in Historic Preservation exposed the problems of inappropriate preservation practices, specically the adaptive reuse of former slave quarters as bed-and-breakfast tourist accommodations. A larger sociological study can be found in Jennifer L. Eichstedt and Stephen Smalls 2002 book, Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums. The authors demonstrate how white dominance is perpetuated through the commemoration of history. This essay, which focuses more narrowly on architecture, also builds on the scholarship that addresses power relations reproduced in art museums, history museums, and house museums.3 The imaginary exhibition reviewed in this essay recounts objective
Adam Goodheart, The Bonds of History, Historic Preservation 53, no. 5 (SeptemberOctober 2001): 3643, 94. Jennifer L. Eichstedt and Stephen Small, Representations of Slaver y: Race and Ideolog y in Southern Plantation Museums (Washington, D.C.:
3

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Fig. 2. Slave quarters at Hermitage Plantation, Chatham County, Ga., built after 1820. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS, GA, 26-SAV. V, 19.) (Photo, Charles E. Peterson, 1934.)

information and offers subjective impressions drawn from more than thirty sites of slave habitation. I focus on the preservation and interpretation of extant slave dwellingswhat seems to work well, what clearly does not, and what begs further discussion among architectural historians, preservation professionals, and, most important, nonprofessionals who seek enlightenment by attending to the visual messages at these sites. A visitor searching for examples of the architecture of bondage will need to prepare and research an itinerary carefully. Among print sources, African American Historic Places, which is based on the records of the National Register of Historic Places, provides solid guidance. This book should be kept close at hand because it contains historical information that is often not available when one arrives at a site. For example, the Boyette house, near Kenly, North Carolina, is only identied at
Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002). Only a few examples of scholarship on power relations need mentioning here: Kevin Lynch, What Time Is This Place? (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972); Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New Histor y in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). Interpretation practices in a former Dutch colony are examined in Julie Hochstrasser, Legacies of Slavery? The Stakes of Not Seeing (paper delivered at the conference Globalisation, Diaspora, and Identity Formation: The Legacy of Slavery and Indentured Labour in the Caribbean, University of Suriname, Paramaribo, February 2629, 2004).

its site with a simple sign, but it is described in the handbook as preserving a rare example of an extant stick and mud chimney (g. 3). Individual state guides to African American historical sites are also available, including Virginia Landmarks of Black History and A Travel Guide to Black Historical Sites and Landmarks in North Carolina. All these guides comprise mostly post-Emancipation sites, and they emphasize, quite understandably, places of agency, such as schools and churches, rather than places of victimization and survival, such as slave quarters. In creating an itinerary, visitors should recognize that a number of important assemblages of slave housing, such as Howards Neck, Green Hill, and Bremo plantations in Virginia, are all privately owned and inaccessible to the casual visitor. Berry Hill plantation, near South Boston, Virginia, has been transformed into a gated and perhaps intimidating business conference center, and its most important slave quarter was recently destroyed by re.4
4 Beth L. Savage, ed., African American Historic Places (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1994), p. 379. Calder Loth, ed., Virginia Landmarks of Black History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995); and Lenwood G. Davis, A Travel Guide to Black Historical Sites and Landmarks in North Carolina (WinstonSalem, N.C.: Bandit Books, 1991). Clifton Ellis, e-mail message to author, October 5, 2004. On Berry Hill, see Loth, Virginia Landmarks, pp. 3538. An analysis of the slave dwellings at Berry Hill will appear in Clifton Ellis, Building Berry Hill: The Plantation Landscape of Antebellum Virginia, forthcoming.

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Fig. 3. Boyette slave house, near Kenly, N.C., n.d. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

The Internet also proves useful in nding slave quarters. Not only can it provide up-to-date information including hours of operation and admission charges, but some sites, such as the stone slave quarters in Arcola, Virginia, are mentioned only on the Internet (g. 4). However, researching on the Internet can be frustrating too. For example, numerous Web sites are devoted to the Crenshaw House near Equality, Illinois. The two-and-a-halfstory Greek revival mansion, built perhaps in the 1830s, may have functioned as a stop in the reverse Underground Railroad, in which free blacks were kidnapped in free states, transported to slaveholding states, and sold into slavery. The building may also have quartered bondspeople hired from slave states to work in the regions salt mines. Unfortunately, some of the Web sites do not make clear that the Crenshaw House is closed to the public pending funding from the State of Illinois, its owner, for a historic structures report. Similarly, the site for the ruins of the slave quarters on Cumberland Island, Georgia, did not indicate that visiting the site entails a ferryboat ride and a ten-mile-round-trip hike. Less intrepid scholars

will need to garner information about the site from a data-rich National Park Service Web site or from Robert Ascher and Charles H. Fairbankss 1971 report in Historical Archaeology, one of the early articles in the eld of African American archaeology.5 Although slavery was not limited to the South, nding extant slave quarters in the North is more difcult. In Medford, Massachusetts, for instance, the eighteenth-century frame and brick kitchen in which some of Isaac Royall Jr.s slaves lived presently functions as an ofce and meeting hall and is not open to the public (g. 5). The recently discovered site in the attic of the Lott House in Brooklyn, New York, is undergoing
5 See, for example, Phillip Troutmans Web site, http://www. stratalum.org/quarters.html (accessed December 2004). The stone slave quarters near Arcola are currently threatened by development, and local preservationists are attempting to save the building; Ned Douglass, telephone conversation with author, August 17, 2004. Robert Ascher and Charles H. Fairbanks, Excavation of a Slave Cabin, U.S.A., Historical Archaeolog y 5 (1971): 317. The Cumberland Island Web site can be found at http://www.cr.nps. gov/seac/arch79.htm (accessed November 2004).

Looking for Historys Huts

47 persistence of committed activists to make that history visible in the Northeast. Moreover, the rst historical archaeology project focusing on African American history occurred in the 1940s at a site known as Black Lucys Garden in Andover, Massachusetts.7 The difculty in pointing to distinct, surviving quarters in the North does, however, suggest that our denition of slave habitation must be more expansive and exible. Yet even in the South, identifying and locating extant slave habitations take time, and the effort could be greatly facilitated by the publication of a focused guidebook. In the process of searching for these slave sites and selecting which ones to examine, a visitor must make major theoretical decisions. The rst choice is whether to avoid modern reconstructions, such as the pristine quarters at James Monroes plantation, Highland, outside Charlottesville, Virginia, which were built in the 1980s (g. 6), or the multifamily unit at Melrose Plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. House museums have increasingly turned to reconstructing slave quarters as a way of displaying a more complete plantation landscape, but as the 1939 stone quarters at Stratford Hall in Westmoreland County, Virginia, prove, this is not a new solution. If the visitor wants to see only original buildings, the next question is: What constitutes a slave habitation? Most guidebooks and Web sites dene slave space as freestanding slave quarters. A small number of sites, including Historic Stagville near Durham, North Carolina, incorporate work spaces such as barns into their interpretation of the African American historical experience. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century documentary records reveal that slaves not only labored in the big house but also occasionally slept there. With this more elastic denition of slave space in mind, I constructed a tour that imagined
7 Cheryl J. La Roche and Michael L. Blakey, Seizing Intellectual Power: The Dialogue at the New York African Burial Ground, Historical Archaeology 31, no. 3 (Fall 1997): 84106; Mark E. Mack and Michael L. Blakey, The New York African Burial Ground Project: Past Biases, Current Dilemmas, and Future Research Opportunities, Historical Archaeology 38, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 1017; Robert C. Hayden, The African Meeting House in Boston: A Celebration of History (Boston: Museum of AfroAmerican History, 1987); Joan Maynard, Black Urban Culture, Historic Preservation 25 ( JanuaryMarch 1973): 2830; and Knolly Moses, Four Houses Capture a Brooklyn Past, American Visions 1, no. 6 (1986): 1823. Adelaide K. Bullen and Ripley P. Bullen, Black Lucys Garden, Bulletin of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society 6, no. 2 (1945): 1728; Vernon G. Baker, Historical Archaeology at Black Lucys Garden, Andover, Massachusetts: Ceramics from the Site of a Nineteenth-Century Afro-American, Papers of the Robert S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology 8 (1978).

Fig. 4. Stone slave quarters, Arcola, Va., n.d. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

restoration, and it too is closed pending further investigation.6 The lack of purpose-built slave quarters should not imply that scholars and the public in the North ignore the built environment of early African Americans. The African Burial Ground in Manhattan, the 1806 African Meeting House in Boston, the 1827 African Meeting House on Nantucket Island, and the nineteenth-century free black community of Weeksville in Brooklyn all attest to the
6 For the location of slave beds in the main house at the Royall site, see Arthur L. Finney, The Royall House in Medford: A Re-Evaluation of the Structural and Documentary Evidence, in Abbott Lowell Cummings, ed., Architecture in Colonial Massachusetts (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1979), pp. 3637; the kitchen is discussed in Edward A. Chappell, Notes on the Isaac Royall Kitchen House, and the Presence of Slaves, Medford, Massachusetts (unpublished report, Architectural Research Department, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Va., 1998). Current archaeology is being directed by Alexandra Chan; see Alexandra Chan, The Slaves of Colonial New England: Discourses of Colonialism and Identity at the Isaac Royall House, Medford, Massachusetts, 17321775 (Ph.D. diss., Boston College, 2003). Brent Staples, To Be a Slave in Brooklyn, New York Times Magazine, June 24, 2001, pp. 3437; H. Arthur Bankoff, Christopher Ricciardi, and Alyssa Loorya, Remembering Africa Under the Eaves, Archaeology 54, no. 3 (MayJune 2001): 3640.

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Fig. 5. Kitchen and slave quarters, Isaac Royall House, Medford, Mass., brick west end dates to after 1739, frame east end ca. 176070. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 1997.)

the mansion as comprising the black built environment. In other words, if a slave worked or lived in a space, it can be claimed as slave space.8 The alternative is too problematic. Limiting slave sites to discreet black architectural space set apart from what is dened as distinct white architectural space too easily erases the presence of enslaved human beings from the sites altogether. I found this pattern of erasure at exhibits where only the big house survives, or at sites where only a small number of slaves were owned and they worked as domestics within the house. Sites in
8 Richard Guy Wilson, ed., Buildings of Virginia: Tidewater and Piedmont (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 168. John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). For slaves sleeping in colonial mansions, see Philip Vickers Fithian, Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian: A Plantation Tutor of the Old Dominion, 17731774 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1968), pp. 18485; and Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, in Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed., The Classic Slave Narratives (New York: Mentor, 1987), p. 193. I am drawing my analysis of space from Dell Upton, Black and White Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia, Places 2, no. 2 (1985): 5972; Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial Virginia (New York: Architectural History Foundation, 1986), pp. 21618.

the midwest region of the Upper South have the most difculty acknowledging the presence of slavery because of this mental segregation of architectural space. Grouseland, built about 1803 by William Henry Harrison in Vincennes, Indiana only about fty-four miles north of Kentucky is an example. With its polygonal-end parlor and attenuated, curved stairway, the house measures up to the academic design standards of Harrisons birthplace at Berkeley Plantation in Charles City County, Virginia, and could be compared as well with the most up-to-date federal-style Philadelphia residences. Owned and administered by the Daughters of the American Revolution, Grouseland offers tours in which docents, didactic panels, and guidebooks make only vague references to servants. Avoiding the issue of slavery at Grouseland cannot be accidental. Well-known Indiana state histories from 1888 to the present include ample information about the efforts of Harrison and his cohorts to circumvent Article VI of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance prohibiting slavery by legalizing extended indentured servitude. Admittedly, little is known about the lives of George, Peggy, and Molly, some of Harrisons de facto

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Fig. 6. Douglas Gilpin Jr., architect, reconstructed slave quarters, Highland Plantation, Albemarle County, Va., built 198588. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

domestic slaves, but their presence at Grouseland demands recognition.9 Similarly, interpretive practices eliminate the presence of black people and their labor from the discussion of architecture at the 1803 Nathan Boone House in St. Charles County, Missouri. Presently administered by Lindenwood University as part of their National Center for the Study of American Culture and Values, the symmetrical facade of the two-story stone house demonstrates how Nathan Boone imposed eastern, formal de9 For Grouselands contemporaries in Philadelphia, see Damie Stillman, City Living, Federal Style, in Catherine E. Hutchins, ed., Everyday Life in the Early Republic (Winterthur, Del.: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1994), pp. 13774. On Harrison and slavery, see Jacob Piatt Dunn, Indiana: A Redemption from Slavery, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifin, 1905), pp. 30214; Emma Lou Thornbrough, The Negro in Indiana before 1900, Indiana Historical Collections 37 (1957): 7 15; Andrew R. L. Cayton, Frontier Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 18793, 24647; Paul Finkelman, Evading the Ordinance: The Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois, Journal of the Early Republic 9, no. 1 (1989): 2151; Robert M. Owens, William Henry Harrisons Indiana: Paternalism and Patriotism on the Frontier, 17951812 (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003), pp. 13880.

sign values on what was still the frontier. Tour narratives, however, concentrate on the life of Daniel Boone, Nathans famous father, who is the reason why most tourists visit the site. The basement kitchen serves as a place to discuss the role of Boone family women, and the tour guide emphasizes the heroic efforts of Nathans wife, Olive, to survive the rigors of the frontier with only the help of a servant when her husband was absent. But it does not take an extraordinary research effort into published records to discover that these achievements, including the construction of a stone replace with a stick and mud chimney, were accomplished by Olive and her Negro girl. Olives father-in-law, Daniel Boone, is known to have also owned slaves, but that uncomfortable fact is never mentioned on the tour or in the introductory video.10 It is difcult to understand why an academic institution such as Lindenwood University chooses to obfuscate slavery.
Neal O. Hammon, ed., My Father, Daniel Boone: The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), p. 125. John Bakeless, Daniel Boone (1939; repr., Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1965), p. 329.
10

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Fig. 7. Slave quarters, Cottage Plantation, near St. Francisville, La., n.d. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

By comparison, at Whitehaven, now known as the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, in St. Louis County, Missouri, the National Park Service has chosen to highlight the economic role of slaves. Although the original slave quarters appear to have been demolished by Grant in 1867, archaeological and archival information about slaves owned by his father-in-law, Frederick Dent, is made available in printed yers that also provide readers with references to additional bibliographic materials. Within the house, guides encourage visitors to imagine the various ways that nineteenth-century white inhabitants and black domestic slaves would have moved through and experienced interior space.11 While nothing compares to ignoring slavery itself, there are other ways that preservation practices obstruct a visitors education. At the Butler-Greenwood Plantation, just outside of
11 Alan W. OBright and Kristen R. Marolf, The Farm on the Gravois: Historic Structures Report (St. Louis: Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, 1999), p. 7.17. Karen Miller and Pamela K. Sanlippo, From Personal Experiences to Public Actions: Using a Historic Home to Interpret Ulysses S. Grant During the Civil War, CRM Bulletin, no. 4 (2002): 4648.

St. Francisville, Louisiana, the nineteenth-century kitchen quarter serves as a bed-and-breakfast cottage. Visitors are given a detailed and wellorganized tour of the main house and its decorative art, but the kitchen quarter is only barely acknowledged. One of the quarters behind Arlington House in Arlington, Virginia, is now a gift shop, but this commercial intrusion will, ideally, be eliminated in the planned restoration. At the Nathaniel Russell House in Charleston, South Carolina, completed in 1808, visitors waiting for a tour of the mansion can read wall panels exhorting them to recognize how enslaved people created the material renement enjoyed by the Russells, but the kitchen quarter itself, where slaves worked, is also used as a gift shop. For some reason, a clearly well-prepared tour guide elected neither to describe the working of the kitchen wing nor to explain the other structures that once constituted the workaday world of the eighteen bondspeople owned by the Russell family.12
12 Jonathan H. Poston, The Buildings of Charleston: A Guide to the Citys Architecture (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), p. 262.

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Fig. 8. James Hamilton Couper, designer, slave quarter, Hamilton Plantation, St. Simons Island, Ga., built before 1833. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

In some cases effacement is simply a matter of neglect. The Cottage Plantation (begun in 1795), located outside St. Francisville, Louisiana, is an example of blindness to the value of historical resources. The nineteenth-century, unidentied, double-pen, saddlebag frame quarters, which are located some distance behind the main house, apparently function as storage sheds. They are neither part of the ofcial tour nor are they identied to a visitor walking the site (g. 7).13 Other buildings on the property are rented to overnight tourists, however; so neglect stands as a far better alternative than repackaging and desecrating the quarters as bed-and-breakfast cottages. Subtle but troubling messages are conveyed through slave architecture that has been prettied. The Hamilton Plantation quarter on St. Simons Island, Georgia, exemplies this phenomenon (g. 8). Two of the original four double-pen dwellings built before 1833 are now preserved as humble yet neat and tidy cottages.14 Walls are
13 Karen Kingsley, Buildings of Louisiana (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 42829. 14 Savage, African American Historic Places, p. 186.

freshly whitewashed, roofs have no holes, and window glass is intact. A small sign indicates that the building will undergo restoration, and a small section of stucco has been removed to reveal the walls beneath. The average visitor might easily believe, however, that slave housing was, in general, architecturally charming. Even more misleading is the anomalous intrusion of a formal colonial revival garden in front of the dwellingsthe kind of landscape associated with white garden-club ladies. Similarly insulting imagery is found at the quarter that stands behind St. Ignatius Catholic Church at Port Tobacco, Maryland (g. 9). The freshly painted, cheery cabin with its ornamental rosebush has a commemorative plaque implying that slavery was a reciprocal economic arrangement between two independent partners. It reads: To the grateful memory of our fellow servants and workers. The most troubling example of desecration is found at the Cyrus McCormick Farm, located south of Staunton, Virginia, and presently owned by Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University as part of an agricultural research and extension

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Fig. 9. Slave quarter, St. Ignatius Catholic Church, Port Tobacco, Md., n.d. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

center (g. 10). An audio recording in the blacksmith shop acknowledges briey the role of slave labor in McCormicks development of mechanized farm machinery in 1831. The log quarter, in which some of McCormicks black associates may have lived, was moved from behind the mansion and now functions as a public toilet. A sign attempts to duck responsibility for this outrage by explaining that the conversion occurred in the 1950s. Few sites are as disrespectful as the McCormick Farm; far more undermine African American history by failing to explain or connect the aesthetics of black and white habitation. As if existing in parallel universes, black architecture is discussed separately from white architecture at most sites. This interpretive division what Eichstedt and Small refer to as segregated knowledgetakes various forms but most often occurs when black dwellings are construed as a lesser, ancillary appendage to white dwellings; by extension, black architecture is rendered less historically signicant than white architecture. Hampton Plantation in Towson, Maryland, typies this practice. The site is operated by the National

Park Service and, in my tour of the 1783 mansion, the guide painstakingly catalogued the stylistic features of the decorative arts in each room. An optional tour of the adjacent quarter site, also given by a National Park Service guide, is offered less frequently throughout the day and lacked the same level of detailed interpretation. The guidebook also reects this emphasis on white architecture and material culture. The author mentions slaves and their quarters only a few times in the seventy-four-page booklet but claims that the white Ridgely family represents a fairy tale success story.15 The National Park Service, which by and large stands in the vanguard of progressive preservation ideas related to slave dwelling, also engages in racially divisive interpretive practices at Melrose Plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. After a very thorough and well-informed tour of the mansion, visitors are merely encouraged to walk to a
15 Lynne Dakin Hastings, A Guidebook to Hampton National Historic Site, ed. Margaret Worrall (Towson, Md.: Historic Hampton, 1986), p. 71.

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Fig. 10. Slave quarter, Cyrus McCormick Farm, Augusta County, Va., n.d. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

Fig. 11. Slave quarter, Sotterley Plantation, Hollywood, Md., built ca. 1830. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

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Fig. 12. Interior of slave quarter at Boone Hall, Mount Pleasant, S.C., built after 1843. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

multifamily, reconstructed frame quarter site, listen to an audiotape explanation of slavery, and examine historical photographs; they are not taken there by a guide as part of a standard tour. In a similar vein, after giving an extensive explanation of the complex building history of the big house at Sotterley Plantation in Hollywood, Maryland, the guide only waves guests in the direction of the quarter site. Once there, visitors read a brief didactic panel explaining the dwellings rare horizontal wall planking and earthfast posts (g. 11). Structurally signicant construction features can be found in both big house and slave quarter, but in slighting the importance of the black domicile on the tour, docents nurture the impression of the superiority of the white domicile. Tour guides rarely address the relationship between slavery and high-style building at these sites, and the essential foundation of economic exploitation behind architectural renement goes unacknowledged. It is very difcult, even for architectural historians versed in social history, not to be seduced by the beautiful architecture, gardens, and objects that are encountered on most

house tours, and that seduction often translates into admiration for the owner. Perhaps those in charge are reluctant to soil the aesthetic appeal of marble mantles; elegantly carved stair rails; and smooth, regular brick course work by referring to the slave labor that produced the wealth that made these luxuries possible. The most successful attempt to demystify the economic roots of genteel material culture can be found at Farmington, the 1815 house of John Speed outside Louisville, Kentucky. As guests walk from the visitor center toward the mansion, docents stop at a stone-paved enclosure with a bronze memorial to the African Americans who labored at Farmington. There, guides inform visitors that everything they are about to see and enjoy at the Speed house was made possible by the unfree labor of African Americans. A brochure provides a more detailed and specic description of the ways in which slaves, including a man named Morocco, created Speeds attractive lifestyle. Owning up to the economic prerequisite of elegant architecture is not the only area of interpretation that has proved difcult to convey to

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Fig. 13. Slave quarters relocated to Oakley Plantation, Audubon State Commemorative Area, near St. Francisville, La., n.d. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

visitors. Creating a credible black human presence at places of slave habitation has also proved tricky. Within the big house, for example, guides employ a number of different strategies in their attempts to make architecture come alive for visitors. Docents encourage guests to note and admire the polished furniture, patterned wallpaper, and delicate china that are usually displayed. With all good intentions, curators similarly attempt to bring material culture into play in order to breathe life into slave dwellings. They often suggest human habitation and excite the historical imagination by displaying objects distinctly associated with African American material culture. For example, one of the brick quarters at Boone Hall is furnished not only with humble furniture and hanging laundry but also with baskets that allude to the African American craft tradition of the Sea Island region (g. 12). At Oakley Plantation near St. Francisville, Louisiana, known also as the Audubon State Commemorative Area, administrators have moved two slave houses from other plantations to a location behind the main house. A wattle fence, hanging laundry, and stacked wood have been

added to these single-pen frame dwellings to create an impression of habitation (g. 13). This theater continues on the interior where a life-size stuffed brown velveteen doll occupies a chair near a work basket and drying herbs (g. 14). The staff of the John Carlyle House in Alexandria, Virginia, has set up mannequins like those used in department stores in a basement servants room. A recorded dialogue between the mannequins teaches viewers about the strategies for survival and resistance used by Carlyles slaves, who are mentioned by name. A video introduction to the mansion claries the role of slave labor. Schoolchildren constitute a signicant part of the Carlyle Houses audience, and the mannequins impress upon young visitors the important lesson that slavery was not an abstraction but a condition of real people. The sand-lled bucket near the secondary service stairway that children can carry in order to feel the drudgery of household labor evinces the importance curators place on demonstrating the physical and spatial phenomenological reality of slavery. Such an experiential approach no doubt proves effective in impressing children. But in an attempt to

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Winterthur Portfolio 39:1 cult to re-create misery without upsetting the paying guests. The problem of establishing a credible human simulacrum points to more theoretical questions about accurately depicting privation or comfort in slave dwellings. As we saw in the Greeneld Village episode at the outset of this essay, architectural features serve as conduits into the nature of slavery itself, and choices about building nishes have consequences that extend beyond the historical accuracy of any one site. As Edward Chappell has shown, the re-creation of tidy or messy interiors carries messages about the moral character of its inhabitants. In this respect, restored slave dwellings may potentially serve to perpetuate or undermine the identication of African Americans with substandard housing in real estate practices today. In some ways, debates about cleanliness, furniture, and surface maintenance at slave quarters parallel debates about the social utility of the victimization model versus agency model in African American historiography. They reprise the rhetoric of antebellum slavery apologists versus abolitionists and also recall the more recent scholarly controversy generated by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engermans Time on the Cross (1974).17 The Fogel and Engerman version of slavery seems to be one depicted at Frogmore Plantation, outside of Ferriday, Louisiana (g. 15). In additional to running a large cotton operation, the owners have added value to their property by rescuing a number of slave dwellings and assembling them as an open-air museum. Convincing architectural details, such as the substantial mortise-and-tenon joinery, are pointed out to visitors, and interiors are kept sparse but clean (g. 16). The houses are arranged in a rectangle on a mown lawn planted with young trees; they look like garden ornaments in a park. Surely, a visitor might conclude that slavery was a humble, quaint experience in a green and pleasant village.
17 Edward A. Chappell, Museums and American Slavery, in Theresa A. Singleton, ed., I, Too, Am America: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), pp. 24058. For an analysis of African Americans and the standards of middle-class housing, see Barbara Burlison Mooney, The Comfortable Tasty Framed Cottage: An African American Architectural Iconography, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61, no. 1 (March 2002): 4867. Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974); Richard Sutch, The Treatment Received by American Slaves: A Critical Review of the Evidence Presented in Time on the Cross, Explorations in Economic History 12, no. 4 (1975): 335438. Sutchs refutation of Fogel and Engermans picture of slave housing is on pp. 35357.

Fig. 14. Interior of slave quarter relocated to Oakley Plantation, Audubon State Commemorative Area, near St. Francisville, La., n.d. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

create verisimilitude, some of these practices risk trivializing slavery for the edication of an audienceor worse, for its entertainment. Diversion may contribute to didactic efcacy when teaching science or less painful episodes of history, but it is doubtful that anything fun should ever be drawn from slavery. Museum administrators may want to think long and hard about the possibility and desirability of verisimilitude. A brutally honest re-creation of slaverys sensory products, such as foul smells, the cries of hungry children, and images of lice-covered worminfested bodies, may be more than viewers can emotionally identify with or intellectually comprehend.16 The lesson learned is that it is relatively easy for historic house museums to produce gentility but dif16 Images of the mannequins can be found in Eichstedt and Small, Representations of Slavery, p. 220; and Pamela G. Hardin, Carlyle House (Lawrenceburg, Ind.: Creative Co., 1998). In choosing an image-rich quotation from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to open their article about the slave quarters on Cumberland Island, Ascher and Fairbanks also emphasize the importance of empirical, sensory information in conveying historical truth; Ascher and Fairbanks, Excavation of a Slave Cabin, p. 3; James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (Boston: Houghton Mifin, 1941), p. 13.

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Fig. 15. Slave quarters relocated to Frogmore Plantation open-air museum, outside Ferriday, La., n.d. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

The quarter site at the Aiken-Rhett House in Charleston, South Carolina, conveys quite different architectural symbolism (g. 17). The quarters are part of a formal hierarchical sequence of house, then kitchen and coach house, both with slave quarters above and an open work yard between them. Cow houses and, nally, privies are located at the far end of the lot. The ensemble represented the peak of rened urban slave accommodation when it was constructed in the 1830s.18 Like the main mansion, the Aiken-Rhett slave quarters reect the current conservation policy of its owner, Historic Charleston: buildings are preserved in their present state but not restored. Age and neglect have seeped through every brick of the big house, slave quarters, and service spaces, and this preservation policy conveys some sense of the unpleasantness that accompanied those spaces in which slaves lived. It is the
18 The most thorough analysis of the Aiken-Rhett House is in John Michael Vlach, The Plantation Tradition in an Urban Setting: The Case of the Aiken-Rhett House in Charleston, South Carolina, Southern Culture 5, no. 4 (1999): 5269. Poston, Buildings of Charleston, p. 605.

misery of the sensesnamely the smells, noises, pain, hunger, and uglinessthat is missing at most sites. And yet the sweet-smelling, moldy decay permeates both quarter and big house at the Charleston site. The peeling wallpaper and wornout furniture in the big house as well as the dirt and broken plaster scattered on the oors of the slave rooms above the kitchen and laundry all serve as effective metaphors for the corrupting slave system. Because the main house is decrepit, it dissuades visitors from identifying with the white owners, thereby avoiding a racialized identication with either clean or messy space. But perhaps as a northern liberal, I read the exhibit incorrectly. Undoubtedly, some visitors construe the Aiken-Rhett House as a romantic evocation of the lost glamour of the Old South. Historians and preservation architects associated with Preservation North Carolina, the organization that owns the 1859 Bellamy Mansion in Wilmington, North Carolina, will have to grapple with similar questions when they restore the urban quarter behind the big house (g. 18). Unlike the mansions architect, the quarters designer and

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Fig. 16. Mortise-and-tenon sill construction at one of the slave quarters at Frogmore Plantation open-air museum, outside Ferriday, La., n.d. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

builder remain unknown. It currently awaits preservation, and visitors may glimpse its interior through windows and doors to a stairway and two privies, the latter located at the lower right of the facade. The quarter amply demonstrates how nineteenth-century planning conventions combined functions that architecturally associated the living space of slaves with the elimination of human waste (g. 19). Those in charge of preservation will have to decide if some of the gentility of the mansion will be reected in the quarter, as is suggested by its high-quality brick walls and plaster nish, or if spatial separation from the main house combined with the Bellamys perception of slaves as less than fully human will be mirrored in a decidedly more impoverished interior. The overall design of the quarter, with its rear-wall chimneys and windowless back wall, bears comparison with urban quarter architectural practices on the narrow lots of Charleston, South Carolina. According to Bernard L. Hermans study of Charlestons ancillary living spaces, some quarters were constructed with a marked difference between the high-quality exterior brick bonding and a poor-

quality interior nish.19 Another issue requiring careful reection at the Bellamy Mansion relates to the later history of the big house and quarter. Will restoration or tour narratives recognize the post Civil War inhabitants of the quarter? Answers to seemingly nonpolitical questions about paint and furnishings carry more emotional weight if the descendants of Wilmington slaves, like those of famous white politicians, claim jurisdiction over the interpretation of their family history. The legacy of racism makes these touchy issues. Through the fog of race in America, it is
19 The Bellamy Mansion was designed by James F. Post and constructed under the supervision of Rufus Bunnel. Both enslaved and free black skilled craftsmen erected the building, including William B. Gould, who left his initials in the plasterwork; see William B. Gould Jr., Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 86, 341. Her book was not available in 2003, but Catherine Bishir has claried the African American contribution to the architecture of this mansion in The Bellamy Mansion, Wilmington, North Carolina: An Antebellum Architectural Treasure and Its People (Raleigh: Historic Preservation Foundation of North Carolina, 2004). Bernard L. Herman, Slave and Servant Housing in Charleston, 17701820, Historical Archaeology 33, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 88101.

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Fig. 17. Rear of Aiken-Rhett House, Charleston, S.C., service wings built in 1830s. Building at left contains kitchen with slave quarters above. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

reasonable to wonder whether any information can be learned from a multistate exhibition of surviving slave architecture. With rigorous inattention to some interpretive practices, the answer might be yes. Yet visitors are easily deceived by what remains and what has disappeared and would do well to read in advance several of the essays and books by key historians John Michael Vlach and Bernard L. Herman and archaeologists such as Leland Ferguson, William M. Kelso, and Theresa A. Singleton.20 Several rules of thumb will help a
20 An introductory reading list might include: Bernard L. Herman, Slave Quarters in Virginia: The Persona Behind Historic Artifacts, in David G. Orr and Daniel G. Crosier, eds., The Scope of Historical Archaeology: Essays in Honor of John L. Cotter (Philadelphia: Department of Anthropology, Temple University, 1984), pp. 25383; Upton, Black and White Landscapes; Vlach, Back of the Big House; John Michael Vlach, Not Mansions . . . But Good Enough: Slave Quarters as Bi-Cultural Expression, in Ted Ownby, ed., Black and White Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South ( Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), pp. 89123; Leland Ferguson, Uncommon Ground: Archaeology and Early African America, 16501800 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 1995); William M. Kelso, Archaeology at Monticello (Charlottesville: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 1997); Theresa A. Singleton, An Introduction to African American Archaeology, in Singleton, I, Too, Am America, pp. 117;

visitor put extant buildings in historical perspective. First, what remains above ground does so because it was built better with better materials. The buildings visitors see are exceptional and do not represent the average slave dwelling. Second, substantial slave dwellings made of permanent materials seem to have been constructed only in the nineteenth century. Third, when we nd substantial slave dwellings, they are adjacent to the big house and seem to have been designed to complement the orderly, aesthetic appeal of the masters house. Although brick or stone slave houses independent of the mansions context certainly may have existed, I did not discover any
Barbara J. Heath, Hidden Lives: The Archaeology of Slave Life at Thomas Jeffersons Poplar Forest (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999); Edward D. C. Campbell Jr. and Kim S. Rice, eds., Before Freedom Came: African American Life in the Antebellum South (Richmond: Museum of the Confederacy, 1991). The Cultural Landscape of the Plantation (http://www.gwu.edu/~folklife/ bighouse/panel1.html) is a good place to start because Vlach places slave habitation within the context of an economic system, a critical factor in understanding the built environment of bondage. A more complete bibliography can be found at Ivory J. Cainions site http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/Grad_Sch/McNair/Summer00/ icainion.htm (accessed December 2004).

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Fig. 18. Slave quarters at Bellamy Mansion, Wilmington, N.C., built ca. 1859. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

among the sites I visited. Fourth, eld quarters were imsy wooden buildings in the eighteenth century and remained imsy and wooden in the antebellum nineteenth century. A postbellum economy based on tenant farming ensured that many African Americans would continue to live in similar imsy wooden houses well into the twentieth century. Fifth, far more people of African descent labored in the eld than worked as domestics in the big house, and they lived in structures that have since disappeared. Sixth (and this is a very important point to keep in mind), many slaves struggled through life in buildings that do not conform to the iconic image of a single- or double-pen domicile. Some bondspeople slept in dormitories or bunkhouses in which nuclear families lacked spatial differentiation. The frame slave house at Mount Vernon that George Washington demolished in the winter of 179293 represents perhaps the most famous and studied example of dormitory-style housing, but this arrangement may have been typical of industrial slavery. Furthermore, large numbers of enslaved human beings lived in buildings with other primary purposes:

freestanding or attached kitchens, barns, stables, and the slaveholders house itself. In her analysis of tax records based on an inventory of buildings from late-eighteenth-century Berkeley Parish, Virginia, Ashli White discovered a dramatic discrepancy between the number of slaves owned and the number of buildings that were designated specically as slave quarters. Similarly, Clifton Elliss study of the 1785 property tax records for Halifax County also discovered evidence of white and black domestic proximity. Ephemera sold at gift shops sustain our erroneous impression that most slaves occupied purpose-built houses. Childrens books and toys depict large, formally planned plantations with a full complement of outbuildings and slave quarters.21 Although such items are
21 Dennis J. Pogue, The Domestic Architecture of Slavery at George Washingtons Mount Vernon, Winterthur Portfolio 37, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 78. Ashli White, The Character of a Landscape: Domestic Architecture and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Berkeley Parish, Virginia, Winterthur Portfolio 34, nos. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 1999): 120, 129. Clifton Ellis, Dissenting Faith and Domestic Landscape in EighteenthCentury Virginia, in Annmarie Adams and Sally McMurry, eds., Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 7 (Knoxville: University of

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61 of his human chattel. Far more representative dwellings made of logs have mostly disappeared, but a reconstructed quarter site built with logs was erected by Colonial Williamsburg scholars in the late 1980s at Carters Grove. Unfortunately, the entire site has been temporarily closed, leaving a gaping hole in the litany of physical settings of eighteenth-century bondage. This closing is made all the more unfortunate because when it was open, effective black interpreters had been able to bring to the scene extensive site-specic data compiled by Lorena S. Walsh.22 Instead, as an alternative, The Other Half tour in Colonial Williamsburg offers an informative overview of early urban slavery, but the tours lecture format did not tie historical abstractions to specic features of the built environment. It was, however, certainly more respectful of history than Boone Hall. At Boone Hall, in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, the quarters are constructed of highquality and precisely laid brick manufactured by slaves on the plantation (g. 21). Brickmaking was one of the enterprises that made Boone Halls owners rich, and I would have liked to learn more about how slave labor was organized there. I also would have appreciated some reference to the interpretation of the quarters by the African American photographer and folkorist, Carrie Mae Weems, in her Sea Islands series of 1992. Weemss well-known photography reminds us that important truths about the character of slave architecture may be made more effectively from a subjective, artistic point of view than from merely a recital of data.23 Instead, the tour of Boone Hall is a schizophrenic interpretation of the 1930s colonial revival mansion as if it were built in the eighteenth century. Guides try to impress visitors by telling them that the mansion served as the setting for the 1985 television miniseries North and South, and a car radio introduction at the entrance proclaims that the plantation takes you back to an
22 Jean Bradley Anderson, Piedmont Plantation: The BennehanCameron Family and Lands in North Carolina (Durham: Historic Preservation Society of Durham, 1985), pp. 30, 57, 1078; Catherine W. Bishir and Michael T. Southern, A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Piedmont North Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), p. 215. Lorena S. Walsh, From Calabar to Carters Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), pp. 171203. 23 Kate Linker, Went Looking for Africa: Carrie Mae Weems, Artforum International 31, no. 6 (February 1993): 79 82; bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (New York: New Press, 1995), pp. 6573.

Fig. 19. Interior of the privy in the slave quarters at Bellamy Mansion, Wilmington, N.C., built ca. 1859. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

sold with the best of intentionsnamely teaching young people about Americas historical architecturetheir very visual attractiveness comes dangerously close to normalizing slavery. With those caveats in mind and armed with the knowledge that what they see constitutes the exceptional and not the average, visitors may still learn valuable lessons about materials, site planning, and spatial relationships by experiencing extant slave habitation rsthand. For example, some slave houses are surprisingly substantial, which accounts for their survival. The four multifamily tenements at the Horton Grove Plantation, near Durham, North Carolina, are built of sturdy frame construction with brick nogging and are sheathed in board and batten siding (g. 20). Erected about 1860, the tenements reect the scientic interest of the owner, Paul Cameron, in creating living space that would increase the working potential
Tennessee Press, 1997), p. 32. For ephemera, see, for example, Bobbie Kalman, Life on a Plantation, Historic Communities Series (New York: Crabtree Publishing, 1997); and Edmund V. Gillon Jr., Cut and Assemble: A Southern Plantation: An H-O Scale Model in Full Color (New York: Dover, 1989).

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Fig. 20. Interior of one unit of the multifamily slave quarters at Horton Grove Plantation, Historic Stagville, near Durham, N.C., built ca. 1860. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

Fig. 21. Slave quarters at Boone Hall, Mount Pleasant, S.C., built after 1843. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

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Fig. 22. Slave quarters at Kingsley Plantation, Jacksonville, Fla., built 1820s. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

Fig. 23. Slave quarters at Magnolia Plantation, Cane River Creole National Historical Park, near Natchitoches, La., built in 1840s. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

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Fig. 24. Slave quarter at Hermitage Plantation, outside Nashville, Tenn., built in 1850s and later removed from another site on the plantation. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

era of quiet elegance and gracious living. Boone Hall would be laughable if it were not so painful. Kingsley Plantation, located on Fort George Island in Jacksonville, Florida, and operated by the National Park Service, provides a more appropriate and specic interpretation that weaves together architecture and personal history. Charles H. Fairbanks initiated excavations there in 1968, making it and Black Lucys Garden and the ruins on Cumberland Island among the key sites in the early development of African American archaeology. The National Park Service avoids generalization at Kingsley Plantation and grounds interpretive narratives around the famous inhabitant of the plantation, Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley, a Senegalese woman who was sold into slavery and later became the free mistress of the plantation. The quarters are built of tabby (cement made of lime, sand or gravel, and oyster shells), and didactic panels carefully explain the groundshell mortar and pouring procedures used in this construction technique. The semicircular arrangement of the thirty-two dwellings demonstrates to visitors how site planning facilitated surveillance

by the overseers, whose larger dwellings were situated in the middle of the arc (g. 22). A recent biographer of Kingsley has suggested that the plan might also reect a defensive practice employed by Wolof villagers in eighteenth-century Senegal.24 Magnolia Plantation, part of the Cane River Creole National Historical Park, near Natchitoches, Louisiana, is also operated by the National Park Service (g. 23). Eight brick saddlebag-plan duplexes survive from an original assemblage of twenty-four dwellings, and visitors can view a slave hospital and numerous other structures that supported the plantations large, almost industrial, scale of cotton production. Built in the 1840s, the brick dwellings were converted into single-family housing for tenants after the Civil War.25 As the
24 Charles H. Fairbanks, The Kingsley Slave Cabins in Duval County Florida, 1969, The Conference on Historic Site Archaeology 7 (1972): 6293; Charles H. Fairbanks, The Plantation Archaeology of the Southeastern Coast, Historical Archaeology 18, no. 1 (1984): 114. Daniel L. Schafer, Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley: African Princess, Florida Slave, and Plantation Slaveowner (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), p. 55. 25 Kingsley, Buildings of Louisiana, p. 331.

Looking for Historys Huts thorough and detailed tour unfolds, visitors learn about the preservation dilemma caused by an incompatible and destructive layer of mortar that was later applied to the exterior brick walls of the slave houses. Laid out along four parallel unpaved streets, all the extant slave dwellings at Magnolia Plantation faced the same direction, as if to deny an interaction among neighbors. The pattern represents one site planning solution slaveholders devised. By comparison, the log and stone multifamily quarters at Hampton Plantation in Towson, Maryland, were arranged around a communal square. This central work yard was located behind an early dwelling house that was built for the original owners but later sheltered the overseer. Such assemblages of rural slave quarters are impressive for their size and materials and for the way that urban practices inuenced their arrangement; but, again, they are not representative of standard slave habitation. Far more bondspeople lived in dwellings similar to the log saddlebag-plan dwelling at the Hermitage, the house of Andrew Jackson outside Nashville, Tennessee (g. 24). Extensive archaeological and documentary research done at the Hermitage has begun to appear at the site or online over the past four years. When reconstruction of Jacksons original log farmhouse at the Hermitage is complete, visitors may notice how both master and slave lived in buildings employing similar construction techniques. The opportunity to view black dwellings in the context of humble white dwellings will make an important pointblack Americans were exploited not only by the rich and famous but also by more average, hardworking white Americans, even when they did not live in mansions.26 In the same way, more modest and common examples of urban slave housing are needed to balance the grand displays at sites such as the AikenRhett House and the Bellamy Mansion. The 2004 opening of the house of a free black slaveowner, William Johnson, in Natchez, Mississippi, will begin to address this void. However, the freestanding slave quarter behind Johnsons house, now owned by the National Park Service, cannot demonstrate how many urban slaves lived in basements, attics, and back rooms, as documentary sources tell us
26 Jillian E. Galle, Slave Housing at Andrew Jacksons Hermitage (paper delivered at the annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Providence, R.I., April 2004). See http://www.thehermitage.com (accessed January 2005). Federal Writers Project interviews with former Missouri slaves, for instance, indicate that some of the log houses of masters and slaves in that state were indistinguishable.

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Fig. 25. James F. Post, designer, back stairway in the Bellamy Mansion, Wilmington, N.C., begun 1859. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

they did. Interpreting sites of industrial slavery would also give witness to the use of unfree labor in early American capitalism.27 By ignoring the nooks and crannies of slave habitation, we erase the African American presence in historical architecture and in history. Any visitor to a slave site will confront another of the disturbing features of the architecture of bondage, namely its aesthetic appeal. For instance, construction of a secondary stairway was a frequent way of denying white and black physical equality by isolating and segregating physical movement up and down steps. The sensuously curved simplicity
27 Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 18201860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 5579; Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 18001850: The Shadow of the Dream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 49 80; John Michael Vlach, Evidence of Slave Housing in Washington, Washington History 5 (FallWinter 1993/94): 64 74; Barbara Burlison Mooney, Racial Boundaries in a Frontier Town: St. Louis on the Eve of the American Civil War, in Simon Gunn and Robert J. Morris, eds., Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City Since 1850 (Aldershot, Eng., and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 8299. Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 3574; Charles B. Dew, Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994).

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Fig. 26. Design attributed to George Hadeld, slave quarter at Arlington House, Arlington, Va., 181720. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

of the back stair at the Bellamy Mansion, built by skilled black carpenters, forces the viewer to reconsider comfortable modes of mental compartmentalization that allow for condemnation of slavery on one hand and appreciation of pure design on the other (g. 25). One of the most potent messages conveyed by slave architecture is how aesthetic principles, along with the banal manipulation of neutral, nonpolitical building materials and construction methods, were employed to facilitate exploitation. More than fteen years after Theresa A. Singletons 1988 summary of a growing body of archaeological knowledge concerning the lives of slaves and Edward A. Chappells 1989 call for more socially responsible history museums, it is difcult not to be discouraged by the current intellectual shabbiness at some extant slave habitation sites. Admittedly, many questions about slave housing await scholarly attention, especially documentary and archaeological investigation into specic sites. But much in the way of new evidence has already been discovered, and very little of that knowledge has been brought to bear on public exhibits. The

problem may lie with what Chappell has dened as museum inertia; it may also lie in the unintended consequences of scholarly conventions. Look, for instance, at the descriptive paragraphs in Buildings of Louisiana, a recent addition to the Buildings of the United States series. The author, Karen Kingsley, should be commended for addressing slave housing at seventeen Louisiana sites; however, for the sake of consistency, when the planters dwelling survives, it is usually discussed rst and slave habitation second.28 It would be unfair to accuse the author of disrespect for African Americans, yet it is not unfair to point to
28 Theresa A. Singleton, An Archaeological Framework for Slavery and Emancipation, 17401880, in Mark P. Leone and Parker B. Potter Jr., eds., The Recovery of Meaning: Historical Archaeology in the Eastern United States (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), pp. 34570; Edward A. Chappell, Social Responsibility and the American History Museum, Winterthur Portfolio 24, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 24765; Chappell, Museums and American Slavery, pp. 24058. New scholarship will appear in Rebecca Ginsburg and Clifton Ellis, eds., Slave Space: The Physical Environments of North American Slavery, forthcoming. The one exception is found in the entry for St. Emma Plantation; see Kingsley, Buildings of Louisiana, p. 225.

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Fig. 27. Interior of a slave quarter at Oakland Plantation (originally Bermuda Plantation), near Natchitoches, La., n.d. (Photo, Barbara Burlison Mooney, 2003.)

the general discursive practices within our profession that make one kind of architectural history appear more important than others. Displacing inertia may also require some experimentation with varied museological methods. One exhibition practice that I found effective was the recognition of change over time, as can be seen, for instance, at Arlington House, outside Washington, D.C. (g. 26). There, an exhibit in the south slave quarter not only documents the history of slaves at the Custis-Lee estate but also highlights the role of Selina Gray in preserving historic Washington artifacts. It also recounts the later history of the black community in Arlington, Virginia.29 A more poignant and more symbolically effective example exists inside the slave house at the Oakland Plantation outside Natchitoches, a structure the National Park Service is trying to preserve. Visitors
29 Michael Ames makes a number of useful suggestions for experimentation in his 1992 essay Cannibal Tours, Glass Boxes and the Politics of Interpretation, reprinted in Susan M. Pearce, ed., Interpreting Objects and Collections (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 98106. Karen Byrne, The Remarkable Legacy of Selina Gray, CRM Bulletin, no. 4 (1998): 2022.

can still see remnants of weeping layers of wallpaper and newspaper that were glued by successive generations of black farmhands and tenants who worked and lived on the plantation after Emancipation (g. 27). These sad layers serve as potent reminders that economic exploitation and the strength necessary to withstand it are not restricted to the distant antebellum period. Irony, on the other hand, may not work well as an interpretive strategy. Situated within the connes of a white cultural venue, Fred Wilsons powerful 1992 installation, Mining the Museum, destabilized pious attitudes toward high-quality objects, such as silver goblets and tankards, by juxtaposing them with objects that facilitated slavery, such as shackles. A jarring combination may require the framing environment of a highvisibility urban museum to make its pointthe combination of real big house with real slave quarters on plantations offers a similar striking contrast but often fails to create a similar revelatory reaction. As the conicting reception to Kara Walkers silhouettes of plantation slavery shows, creating an ironic challenge to racism produces

68 controversy even within the relatively protective artistic shell of the museum institution.30 For many African Americans, racial exploitation has not ended, only evolved, and the distance required for irony has yet to materialize. As an alternative, I conclude by proposing three strategies for improving interpretation at sites of slave habitation, all suggested or inspired by three African American interpreters encountered at exhibits. The rst of these proposals is sure to make some sophisticated academics very uneasy. Places of slave habitation and labor should be acknowledged, treated, and interpreted for the sacred sites they are. The slave experience needs to stand more effectively in opposition to the aura of gentility that has been so masterfully conveyed at historical places of whiteness. This can be accomplished by investing slave space with the lial piety that has so long been attached to historically white space. A National Park Ranger at Hampton Plantation, for instance, explained that she would like to honor the memory of African Americans who labored there by discussing the spiritual qualities that helped slaves survive their ordeal. Her comment reminds us that for many African Americans, slave quarters are not simply places to learn about history; they also constitute sites imbued with a sacred quality similar to Early Christian martyria. No doubt some cynics may scoff and condemn this idea as naive or romantic, yet places where slaves slept and were beaten, raped, exploited, and yet survived must be marked as extraordinary memorials, not as adjuncts to white
30 On irony, see, for example, the essays in Susan A. Crane, ed., Museums and Memory (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000). Lisa G. Corrin, ed., Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson (Baltimore: The Contemporary in cooperation with New Press, 1994). Juliette Harris, Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroes, and Karen Dalton, Michael Harris, and Lowery Sims, The Past Is Prologue but Is Parody and Pastiche Progress? International Review of African American Art 14, no. 3 (1997): 216, 1729; and Kelefa Sanneh et al., Stereotypes Subverted, International Review of African American Art 15, no. 2 (1998): 4452.

Winterthur Portfolio 39:1 gentility. If they are recognized not as everyday, vernacular spaces but as wondrous places of survival, more informed interpretation may follow. The second proposal, inspired by the assured discourse of a young and enthusiastic African American female interpreter at the Arlington House, begs that more people of color be actively recruited as interpreters in both the big house and at the quarter. The sight and sound of a black voice not only lend credibility to the historical narrative but also have the potential to undermine white control of the dominant narrative. As the episode at Greeneld Village revealed, an African American interpreter can powerfully confront white ignorance. No doubt this proposal would require a reorientation of thinking at some sites. Risk taking is also a component of the nal proposal, which calls for a more vocal, even aggressive, visitor. It has become a commonplace to assume the general ignorance of the public in regard to American history, but on a number of occasions I witnessed visitors interjecting questions about slavery and slave space. It was the African American interpreter at Colonial Williamsburg who called for a reversal of the usual patterns of instruction. Realizing that he was preaching to the choir when it came to interest in African American history, he nished by exhorting his audience to challenge guides by asking bold questions about the role of people of color in the history, economy, and architecture of Williamsburg and elsewhere. This is already happening at some sites. When a visitor at Boone Hall asked a question about domestic slaves, the hoop-skirted guide promptly abandoned her ludicrous, scripted narrative and launched into a well-informed discussion of slavery in the Charleston area. The moral of the story is that responsibility lies not only with complaisant museum professionals but also with passive visitors who know better but fail to speak up. In order to maintain scholarly anonymity and objectivity, I kept a low prole in my 2003 investigation of slave habitation. I will be braver next time.