On two
distinct yet equally suggestive and compelling recreations in the Museum’s most
successful exhibit.
I’ve
written before about my favorite American speech (and one of my favorite
texts period), Frederick Douglass’s sarcastic, angry, eloquent, irrefutable,
and so powerful “What
to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” What Douglass does with particular
clarity in that oration is to bring slavery—its realities and effects, but also
its broader meanings and significance—home to his audience, making them aware
of this defining American system in a way few authors had done prior or have
since. That complex, challenging, and crucial goal would also be at the heart
of any museum of American slavery (such as this
long-in-development but eventually unsuccessful Virginia project). And it
is also the purpose of the Jackson Homestead and Museum’s newest and most
compelling exhibition, the basement-housed “Confronting
Our Legacy: Slavery and Antislavery in the North.”
Two specific
elements within that exhibition do a particularly good job capturing key
aspects of their respective subjects. To capture the feel (literally) of the
Middle Passage, the exhibition features a vertical wooden box in which visitors
are invited to stand; the box’s dimensions parallel exactly how much space each
slave was given in the hold of a
standard Middle Passage vessel. Stepping into the box, feeling its sides
press against me (much as the slaves on either side would have), I was reminded
of the justifiably famous passage in Alex
Haley’s Roots when he descends
into the hold of a recreated Middle Passage ship, clad only in his underwear,
hoping to feel something of what his ancestor must have felt in that situation.
Just as Haley’s experiment could not possibly capture the
worst aspects of the Middle Passage—the diseases, the smells and sounds,
the fears and uncertainties, the death and torture and worse—so too does the
Museum’s space require us to imagine beyond our own moment and into all of
those elements. But so would any such memorial, of course; and this one was at
least, for me, a pretty evocative attempt.
Far
different, yet in its own way equally evocative, is the exhibition’s recreation
of the Underground
Railroad. There’s no question that William Jackson and his family took part
in that network of
antebellum resistance, aiding fugitive slaves on their journeys north; but
by its very nature the Railroad was secretive, and so most of the specifics of
how the Jackson Homestead was utilized for that purpose remain unclear. And the
Museum reflects that nature quite effectively, engaging with and yet also
questioning the potentially accurate yet possibly mythic story that the
Jacksons used their basement well as a hiding place for such fugitives. The
well has been left uncovered, so visitors can look down into it and imagine
hiding within it; but the wall panels surrounding it present both the reasons
why it may have been used that way and the arguments against the story, and thus
explicitly ask that visitor not only to imagine him or herself into the history
but also to try to decide whether to believe this particular Underground
Railroad story. Such questions seem quite parallel to, and so to capture very
effectively, the perspectives of potential fugitives, of other Underground
Railroad operatives, of slavecatchers and officers of the law, of anyone for
whom the status of the Jackson’s Railroad station would be of importance.
Next
Museum story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
7/4 Memory
Day nominee: Nathaniel Hawthorne!
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