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"THE OTHER HALF": MAKING AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY at COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG Anna Logan Lawson Daleville, Virginia B.A

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"THE OTHER HALF": MAKING AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY AT COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG Anna Logan Lawson Daleville, Virginia B.A., Hollins College, 1965 M.A., Hollins College, 1970 A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Anthropology University of Virginia May, 1995 QCopyright Anna Logan Lawson All Rights Reserved May 1995 For Blair, Towles, and Tom iv Abstract Museums are institutions that have long had a prominent role in creating and maintaining ideologies central to 20th­ century culture. Nowhere has this been more clearly demonstrated among history museums than at Colonial Williamsburg, the museum/town in Tidewater Virginia reconstructed by industrialist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Now in its seventh decade, Colonial Williamsburg is seen by the public and by professionals in the museum field as a leader among traditional history museums, as the place which sets the standard in the preservation and interpretation of colonial America's physical buildings and its philosophical beliefs. This dissertation describes and analyzes black history at Colonial Williamsburg, looking at the programs, at the people involved in developing and presenting them, and at the responses to them by both visitors and museum staff. For fifty years, the history of the white founding fathers was not just the dominant story in the museum's presentations, it was the only story. By museum standards it was a rich story, one bolstered with stacks of historical documents and original artifacts. In 1979 that changed when six African-American actors were hired to present black history. This was an area about which most of the museum's historians had done little research, and for which its V curators and archaeologists had collected few museum objects. In a museum context, the black past struggled to compete with the past of those for whom documentation and collections met traditional museum standards. My project focuses on this scenario of primary and secondary--or dominant and subordinate--histories in the museum, and on the accompanying paradoxes and tensions. It is the study of a hegemonic situation involving people and departments, narratives about the past, and extending to the objects in the museum's collections. I show that this museum was a place where the values of America's dominant white culture were reinforced at nearly every turn, and I argue that, despite its best intentions and indeed imbedded in those intentions, Colonial Williamsburg not only reflected the hegemonic relationship which exists between blacks and whites in American culture, it often reproduced, unconsciously, the racism inherent in that hegemonic relationship. vi CONTENTS Page Preface . vii Introduction . 1 Chapter One The Ethnographic Field: the Site 62 Chapter Two The Ethnographic Field: People and Programs .... 90 Chapter Three Talking about Slavery: The Other Half Tour 123 Chapter Four Becoming Slaves: Judith's Tour 171 Chapter Five Interpreters as Slaves--The Kitchens 230 Chapter Six Acquiring Objects: Carter's Grove Slave Quarter . 271 Chapter seven Slave History in Slave Cabins 315 Chapter Eight Some Conclusions ...•.......• 355 Appendix . 362 References . 364 Acknowledgements 377 vii Preface I was midway through writing this dissertation when the Holocaust Museum opened in Washington, in April 1993. Reading article after article on that project, I was struck by how Colonial Williamsburg's efforts to present African­ American history, and specifically slavery, seemed to fall short of a complete picture. After all, over a period of three centuries Western Europeans and Americans killed 12, 25, or 60 million Africans, depending on whose estimates you accept of the numbers who were captured, shipped, or worked to death. Enough of those Africans had suffered and died by 1770, the date on which Williamsburg focused its attention, to require this museum committed to authenticity to show the pain, dehumanization, and hopelessness of slave life. Yet compared with the Holocaust Museum's presentation of life in Auschwitz or Buchenwald, slave life as depicted at Williamsburg was safe, clean, and unthreatening. And there was more to the problem. Colonial Williamsburg was a museum with an avowed intention to create an "authentic reproduction" of the 18th century. The museum's number one message about itself was its commitment to authenticity, a goal it saw itself achieving through researching and presenting to the visiting public the most "accurate" information possible about the past. Precisely because it appeared to succeed at this in many other areas, viii its sanitized version of slavery was the more unsettling. If a visitor was told that the Wythe House was the actual house, the very building, lived in by Mr. Wythe, and was told that the costume displayed as Mrs. Randolph's was made to the last button and ribbon exactly like the 18th-century version, then that visitor was likely to assume that a comparable level of accuracy pertained in a slave presentation. Where were the shackles and chains? In a museum committed to the story of the 18th-century town's enslaved population, a visitor encountered physical restraint at only two places, and at neither, ironically, was slavery the subject. One was the reconstructed mental hospital where chains and leg irons were shown in connection with lunatics, not slaves. The other was the courthouse with its replicas of 18th-century wooden stocks, a museum landmark where thousands of laughing visitors have had themselves photographed, and a trademark in Colonial Williamsburg advertising. There were, of course, presentations about slave life at Colonial Williamsburg that suggested some of the horror of slavery and were powerfully moving. Visitors had been known to leave slavery programs in tears, deeply pained by what they had experienced. More generally, however, the visitors reacted to the museum's information about slavery with surprise, followed by relief. The surprise seemed to ix stem from the numbers; they were amazed to find that fully half the population of the 2800 residents in 18th-century Williamsburg was black. A museum is a setting in which, theoretically, objects drive the narrative, yet visitors at Colonial Williamsburg did not see that population among the costumed guides in the town. And what they did see was more comforting than disconcerting. Peering into the doorway of a neat and cozy kitchen, glimpsing a tidily made bed in the corner of the adjoining laundry room, visitors could comment that slaves in Williamsburg lived pretty well. To them it was a surprise that there were so many slaves, but a relief that they were relatively comfortable. Colonial Williamsburg had introduced the topic of slavery, but it had backed away from an in-depth exploration of what it meant to be a slave, and of what slavery meant for the society as a whole. More than a decade after introducing black history into its historical narratives, there were still only a dozen full-time African-American guides or interpreters responsible for presenting black history, these out of a total corps of nearly four hundred guides. The museum management wanted to present black history, and particularly slavery, and it wanted African Americans to do it, but not too conspicuously. It was as if the black guides and their narratives were to serve as "icons of authenticity" (Gable and Handler 1993). X An icon, the physical but symbolic embodiment of idea, was acceptable. The few "slaves" were icons, like the museum's few neatly penned sheep and cattle, or the "road apples" in the streets (as some guides quaintly referred to the manure left by the carriage horses). But recreating the town with roaming chickens and rooting pigs, or mire in the streets, was to move from the symbolic to the real, from icons to pollution. To present a more realistic picture of slavery, in terms either of numbers or of the story, would be to pollute the pristine fantasy world which Colonial Williamsburg and its American public believed to be their "true" history. The members of the African-American staff were potential polluters, and not just of the 18th-century storybook community recreated by the museum. By tainting America's past, they threatened her present. What happens when a history museum endeavors to present versions of history which turn out to be uncomfortable for its constituents, both internal and public? What happens to the history, or histories, and what happens to the people involved in carrying out the project? These became the questions which guided this dissertation. My focus was the social historians and the African­ American interpreters, both groups with a sense of mission. The social historians--including historians, architectural historians, curators, and archaeologists, and allied with the museum "management"--were the researchers behind the xi scenes who tried to broaden the museum's message to include the poor and exploited along with the rich and powerful, while preserving the attractiveness of the museum to its public. However, I was most concerned with the African Americans, caught in the interpretive dilemma of trying to convey the evils of a system while struggling to present the people in the system as something more than victims. Many of these employees were engaged in personal struggles to keep from identifying too closely with the historical victims, and to keep from being identified by others--both the white middle-class public and the museum's overwhelmingly white middle-class staff--with the victims. They could not provide a complex depiction of slavery; at best, they could only round out the museum's traditionally all-white history. Derrick Bell argues that "racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society" (1992:iii). He believes that there is no way for blacks to be fully equal to whites in America, and he sets out the proposition that even apparent successes in black-white equality are "short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance" (Ibid.:12).
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