FOREST, Va. (AP) - The clock has just struck midnight as we stand in Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest bedroom, staring at the space between the walls where his alcove bed would have rested almost 200 years ago.
Although the space is physically small, the presence of that missing piece of furniture feels enormous.
“I’m just imagining what it would be like to be here at midnight in those days,” says Crystal Rosson, a black woman from Amherst, looking at her two fair-skinned companions. “I wouldn’t be standing here with you in his bedchamber under these circumstances.”
At her words, a pressure fills my chest, squeezing like a vice grip.
I know exactly what she means when she says “under these circumstances.”
“I try to always remind myself I’m lucky,” Rosson says with a slight shrug. “We’re in a president’s bedroom and it’s a beautiful home, but it has a different meaning to me. The idea that I’m able to walk freely here and so many other people were not. This house was home. It was also a symbol of bondage. When was the last time a black woman was standing in this place at this time of night?”
13 visitors, including myself, spent the night at Poplar Forest as part of an event held in collaboration with the nonprofit organization the Slave Dwelling Project.
Founded in 2010 by South Carolina native Joseph McGill, the Slave Dwelling Project works to bring attention to and protect extant slave dwellings across the country, sites that often suffer neglect throughout history and in preservation efforts.
“We tend to preserve the more iconic, architecturally significant houses,” McGill says. “When we apply this concept to antebellum houses . then we tend to just focus on those houses that tell the stories of the enslavers, not the stories of those who were enslaved.”
One of the ways the organization does this is by holding overnight events in these spaces, offering visitors the opportunity to sleep - or, rather in my case, attempt to sleep- on the same ground as the enslaved once laid their heads.
“It’s connecting with the ancestors,” says Christine King Mitchell, who teaches about the buying and selling of slaves as part of the Slave Dwelling Project’s living history presentation, called “Inalienable Rights: Living History Through the Eyes of the Enslaved.”
“It’s being a part of and going through the same thing that they went through and feeling what they felt, and through that, understanding just a glimpse into that world.”
Crickets chirp and trees flicker with life as the group sits around a campfire. Jerome Bias, a cook with the living history program, stokes the flame in the center of the circle, the knees of his jeans sinking into the soft, pliable earth beneath him.
The visitors have come from all over, though a few work at the historic plantation. One has journeyed from Pennsylvania, another from Northern Virginia. There’s Liz Marshall, a tour guide at Monticello, and Rosson, who had previously joined the Slave Dwelling Project for a night in a slave cabin on Sweet Briar College’s campus in 2012.
“My family (was) the last to live in that slave cabin, and they left there in the 1920s. So I went into it knowing no one had slept in it since the time of my family’s leaving until we came there that night,” she says. “I felt like I had to be there.”
Rosson’s great-great-grandfather was likely a slave on the plantation, and her family continued to work on and live around the college even after emancipation.
This was common among enslaved communities; some families stayed in what today’s historians refer to as slave cabins until the early ’90s, says Mitchell.
When Rosson learned McGill was coming to Poplar Forest, she says she did not hesitate to sign up for a second Slave Dwelling Project experience.
“It’s a teaching tool, giving people knowledge we otherwise would not have,” she says. “So many people don’t want to talk about it. So many people would rather sugarcoat it. There’s nothing easy about the conversation, but there is something very necessary about the conversation.”
Near her sits McGill, the words on his shirt flickering in the dancing light: “I tried to keep quiet but my ancestors wouldn’t let me.”
Behind the group looms the wooden bones of a cabin long vanished from the landscape of Poplar Forest.
This ghost structure of the slave quarters site, comprised of just the building’s frame and a bit of the floor, was built 15 years ago, after archeological excavations on an acre of land approximately a quarter mile from the main house earlier in the decade.
While most of us would go on to sleep in the lower level of the house - the place where Jefferson’s joiner John Hemmings and manservant Burwell Colbert would have slept - Wayne Gannaway and his son rolled out their sleeping bags inside the ghost structure.
“The field hands would have in all likelihood slept in their quarter sites in cabins some distance from the fancy, octagonal retreat house,” says Gannaway, director of programs, marketing and grants at Poplar Forest. “I wanted to try and better connect with that space.”
Before we change and tuck ourselves in, we sit for hours around the campfire in what has evolved to become an essential part of the Slave Dwelling Project’s overnight experience, especially after McGill opened the events up to white attendees in 2011.
Conversations at the sleepovers have ranged from genealogy and the records kept by historical sites to the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement and why discussing slavery is important, McGill says.
That night in Poplar Forest is no different.
The chat around the fire starts hesitantly as the deep blue of the cloudy sky begins to fade into a darker, steely hue.
It begins with words about the slave cabin site and the decisions that went into recreating it, as well as what not having sites like those means to the conversation around slavery.
Jokes about Jefferson and his golf swing precede thoughts on the retreat home and its larger counterpart roughly 90 miles away in Charlottesville. Frequent participants of the sleepovers share escapades from the overnight experience, including cooking mishaps and fighting bugs in sweltering heat.
Shoulders slacken and opinions flow more easily as the hours pass. The conversation turns deeper, toward the current hot-button topic of Confederate monuments, one especially pertinent in a state like Virginia, and the pushback McGill and the Slave Dwelling Project have experienced when attempting to host events in Northern states and from the African-American community.
“I run into people who have trouble with our project because we’re talking about slavery,” says Bias, who cooks with the living history project. “These are African-American folks who have trouble with it and they don’t want to talk about it. They see persecution, victimhood, and pain and suffering and that’s it. I look at them and go, ’I’m sorry, I refuse to be embarrassed by my great-grandparents.’”
“There was joy, there was love, there was singing and this project has taught me a lot about that,” he continues. “They were real people and I just have trouble when people start ignoring that. I understand the desire to be angry at the stained glass window of the enslaved person picking cotton and then kneeling in front of the great white master, but at the same time, they did a lot to survive.”
The discussion winds down, while embers crackle in the fire. Flames lick toward the heavens, as our dialogue makes a final turn, toward the legacy of slavery in our country.
“It was bolstered by a lot,” says McGill, noting the religious leaders who praised the institution of slavery, as well as the scholars who wrote about it and the lawmakers who enacted legislation that would set a precedent for decades.
“It was propped up by quite a bit. To get over all that is a challenge. It’s very easily said, but the doing part is a lot harder.”
It now comes down to us, he says, to keep moving forward.
And it starts with conversations like these -“discussions that are not normally had in mixed company as we see here tonight,” McGill says. “And that’s a great thing.”
I find myself walking by the light of a cell phone at 2:30 in the morning, after vacating my temporary bed in the basement.
There are no working bathrooms in the main house of Poplar Forest, so I must walk either 100 yards to the visitor orientation building or 50 yards to the South Tenant House. I choose the latter.
As the swaying grass muffles my sneaker-clad steps, fear begins to creep up my spine. Glancing over my shoulder time and time again, I shine the light behind me, although there isn’t a soul around.
Rationally, I know this, but the silence feels thick and suffocating.
It reminds me of the feelings McGill described a few days earlier, when he spoke of his first overnight experience.
“I was all by myself . that very first time,” he says. “Boone Hall Plantation, Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, about 3 a.m. I woke up to dogs barking in the background and I thought at that very moment, that could have been the possibility of slave people trying to escape and being chased by dogs.”
My legs feel weighted down as if by lead as I take slow, measured steps back into the room, winding my way through the sleepers around me, wishing I was as blissfully unaware as they seem to be.
The 11 of us are more spread out across the basement floor than the enslaved families would have been in their cabins but the feeling, I expect, is much the same.
Every deep breath, snore or sigh that passes through another’s lips and every rustling of clothing echoes in the space with the force of a gunshot.
“You think a lot about the fact that people who had been staying in the house, they would have been on call 24 hours a day if somebody needed something upstairs,” says Eric Proebsting, the site’s senior research archeologist. “You can imagine hearing noises maybe from movement upstairs or having to tend to the fires. If there was some kind of need in the middle of the night, they would have to attend to it.”
Heat swells in the room as we lay in our sleeping bags.
It is not comfortable, nor is it a particularly restful night’s sleep on the bricks.
And that is exactly the point.
“A brick floor would have been plush. It would have been dirt or wood in most dwellings,” Mitchell, an educator with the living history project, tells me the next day.
“We were looking forward to, all of us, going to our warm . beds, but that was all they had to look forward to. There was no reprieve. There was no break. That was it for them from sun up ’til sundown, from birth to death. For generations, that was their way of life.”
Dawn breaks as soft, blue light filters through the windows in the basement. Although temperatures in the day would reach into the highs ’80s, the morning air feels too cool and crisp after a night in an overstuffed room.
“Slavery and freedom looked the same for black people for decades because they were still living in the same existence their ancestors had lived (in),” Mitchell says after we leave the basement.
Her family was one of them.
“We were still living in those houses, using outhouses, wells out in the yard,” says Mitchell, who lives in South Carolina. “They were still cooking the way their ancestors cooked on an open hearth, in the fireplace or on wood-burning stoves. . There are areas you can ride through the country now (in South Carolina) and still see people living in similar ways.”
Dew rests on the boards of the ghost structure as the group returns to the campfire for a breakfast cooked by Bias - one that he makes over a roaring fire in cast iron pots, pans and a Dutch oven that puts my own cooking in a fully-equipped kitchen to shame.
There’s a “sort of emotional response you get when you’re laying on the ground, literally inside the footprint of the ghost structure, looking up at the sky at the constellations,” says Gannaway, reflecting on his night. “Those are the same constellations and the same starlight that the enslaved people were looking at. And that was pretty poignant.”
Later in the day, those with the Slave Dwelling Project would continue their program, hosting living history cooking and blacksmithing demonstrations for visitors to the plantation.
They would then pack up and McGill would prepare for his next events, which will take them to Alabama, New York, and North and South Carolina in addition to several other spots in Virginia for both sleepovers and for the fourth annual Slave Dwelling Project conference, which will be held at the University of Virginia in October.
Although the campsite, lanterns and sleeping bags would leave the Forest plantation, the feelings evoked by this shared experience continue to linger on the property, along with the spirits of the enslaved.
“Just to be able to walk back in someone’s footsteps,” Rosson says as she looks over the group chatting during breakfast. “For me, sleeping on a brick floor was a no-brainer. I can give a night to bring awareness to those people who had to do it every day.”
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