MAKING AFRICAN-AMERICAN HISTORY AT COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG Anna Logan Lawson ...

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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
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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it was a rich story, one bolstered with stacks of historical
documents and original artifacts.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
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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.
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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
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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,
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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
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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).
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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