From a Place of Fear: Death, Slavery & Stonewall

Earlier this spring, I sat in Gettysburg at the "Future of the Civil War" conference and listened to an intern talk about how he had been scared to interpret. He was afraid of his visitors, afraid to tell them about a place.

It was the "Jackson Shrine" at the Chandler plantation "Fairfield." And the one crucial fact he didn't know how to share was that Thomas Jonathan Jackson died in an office on a plantation, an office used to manage human chattel labor on the 740-acre plantation. He was afraid, intimidated, to say the simple sentence: "Before Jackson came here, this building was used to manage the plantation's over 60 slaves."

Being intimidated by the idea of interpreting is fine for a college student. It's a tough, scary world when you first start out. Intimidation is one healthy reaction. Talking about what James Loewen called, "the tough stuff of history," is tough and rightly should be. We're talking about, at its heart, a 250-year societal sin. Those types of wounds should still hurt.

But talking about our sins is the way we overcome them, make amends for them and avoid them tomorrow. We find solace in confessing and doing penance, it is a balm to the soul.

So, this afternoon, while many are thinking about Stonewall Jackson's death in a small overseer's office adjacent to a farmhouse on a Virginia plantation, I'll be thinking about other folks too.

I'll be thinking of the 60 human beings who Thomas C. Chandler owned in 1860. I'll be wondering who the 56-year-old man was, what the name of that 40-year-old woman was. Did that 4-year-old girl grow up to be a mother? A wife? Did their wounds ever heal.

By 1863, most of them were gone from the Chandlers' farm, suddenly finding freedom when a blue army descended on Fredericksburg and a new life was only a stone's throw away. They left behind small tokens underground that remind us they were there. But their journey had taken another step forward, from a place of toil and chains toward a land of freedom.

And as Stonewall Jackson lay dying in the small wood-shingled office where the man who had whipped those men and women and overseen their toil had kept his records, freedom marched forward. Because of Jackson's death in that very room, the death of slavery was just a little bit closer to being realized. His last gasp was one more last gasp on the road to destroying the peculiar institution.

Jackson's death did mean freedom, just not the kind he or the men he led ever intended.

Don't Say Slave: Interpreting Slavery at NAI 2011

Back from the 2011 NAI workshop and back to our regularly scheduled programing! We both have plenty to share from sessions on interpretation, field trips to local history sites, and eating breakfast in a dining car on the national registry of historic places.

Slave, servant, fugitive, runaway, master, slave owner, and farm. What do all of these words have in common? Well, if you went to Angela Roberts-Burton's NAI session, "Overcoming the Obstacles of Interpreting Slavery," you would know that all of these are words that she urged interpreters not to use when interpreting slavery and slave life. Instead, you should use: enslaved, freedom seeker, fled bondage, slave holder, and slave plantation.

Although Roberts-Burton's presentation was overall, highly informative with some great discussion, I had several issues with her presentation, mainly her handout, "Words Have Power". In the handout, she urged the above mentioned restricted vocabulary when interpreting slavery. The reasoning behind not using words such as slave and fugitive is that they are demeaning. The handout argues, referring to the word slave, that:

No one asked to be a slave. This is not what or who they were. When people (especially African Americans) are referred to slaves, it is dehumanizing. they become ambiguous, without feelings, thoughts, or individual personalities.

 Roberts-Burton's handout continues on the words fugitive and runway:

These terms imply that wanting freedom was wrong.

I agree with Roberts-Burton on what these words mean. Words do in fact carry a lot of power and implied meaning - that's their nature as bits of language. And that's precisely why I don't think interpreters can or should restrict their vocabulary when dealing with such a controversial and important issue such as slavery.

I want to use the word slave, fugitive, and slave holder interpretively. I want to be able to point out the fact, or better yet, have a visitor realize how stilted the language we use today and those in the past used to talk about slavery. I want to use the word fugitive to illustrate the paradox of someone who is fighting for their freedom and yet simultaneously breaking the law. I want to use those above mentioned terms to illustrate multiple perspectives, those of the slave holder and the slave, those who benefited from slavery and those who are only know principally for their status as slaves. Using those terms is essential to confronting one of the worst facets of slavery: that although slaves were in fact human beings with emotions, feelings, needs, and wants, they were after all in many people's minds just slaves - pieces of property to be bought and sold by slave owners and masters. I want visitors to respond to the injustice and inherent wrong that is the word slave and all that it represents.

Courtesy Prints and Photographs, LOC.

By not using these words and confronting all the difficulties and layers of meaning represented by these words, we risk losing sight of the nature of slavery, and all of its intricacies. We risk painting it with broad strokes instead of rooting out all of the details that made slavery a degrading, morally corrupt, and overtly hypercritical human system that it was. Slavery is too important an interpretive subject for us to confine ourselves to certain  vocabulary words. Instead, we need to embrace the whole vocabulary of slavery for all its interpretive possibilities and worth.