If ever you entertain the thought of driving from Charleston, South Carolina to Princeton, NJ alone, I advise that you do not do so. I took on that task, I was successful, but that is something that I will not do again. That statement speaks highly of my quest to honor our enslaved Ancestors.

I was all set to catch a flight on Friday, October 12th to Philadelphia, PA. I would be picked up from there and taken to Morven in Princeton, New Jersey. On Wednesday, October 10, I got a notice from American Airlines that my flight was canceled due to the impending storm, Hurricane Michael. The airline rebooked my flight for Saturday, but that would do me no good because the events were scheduled to start on Friday. My host and I all went into panic mode, me because my opportunity to add the state of New Jersey to the portfolio was quickly slipping away. My host panicked because of all the time and effort that had gone into planning the event. All involved began to give input on other flights that could be booked. Even the Charleston airport said that they would be open on Friday. My thought process was that even if I booked another flight out of Charleston, SC, that flight also could be canceled due to the impending Hurricane.

With all that said, I convinced myself that I could rent a car and drive to my destination, which I did. The drive was harrowing. Wind gusts from Hurricane Michael occasionally rocked the vehicle. I drove in and out of bans of heavy rain. I stopped twice for power naps. After eleven hours of driving, I reached my hotel in Elkton, Maryland where I would bed down for the night. Elkton was less than an hour from the Philadelphia airport where I would turn in my one-way rental and be picked up by my host the next morning.

Yes, all that happened, but enough about me, so back to the business at hand.

It is always the intent of the Slave Dwelling Project to include a northern state and add new sites to its yearly schedule. Morven Museum and Gardens fit both of those categories. It is generally from the North that we get some form of pushback about slavery existing in their states. Their defaults are their state’s role in the Underground Railroad and the Union Army that helped rid this nation of slavery. Like me, they consumed a history that contained half-truths, because these states too participated in chattel slavery. Furthermore, after slavery, these states remained complicit by continuing to own the boats that transported the enslaved; the factories that added value to the cotton being picked in the south; the insurance companies and banks that financed the peculiar institution. Additionally, abolitionists supported ending slavery, but they were not about promoting equality.

A few years ago, I met a group of students from Florida Gulf Coast University at Old Alabama Town in Montgomery, Alabama for a sleepover. It was there that I met Jill Barry, the current Executive Director for Morven Museum and Garden. Jill made this sleepover happen. I was impressed by Morven’s new exhibit that is currently telling a more inclusive story.

Forty-one signers of the Declaration of Independence were slave owners, Richard Stockton, one of the inhabitants of Morven, was one of those slave owners, that portion of the narrative, jumped out at me. The exhibit is peppered with names of people who were enslaved on the property and for that powerful act alone, I give the exhibit an “A.” The real test is how are visitors reacting to the revelation of slavery being included in the narrative of a New Jersey hero? I could only assure Jill that she was not alone in changing the narrative and including the stories of the enslaved because more sites are now taking that bold step. The examples I gave were Monticello, Montpelier and Cliveden, all places where members of the Slave Dwelling Project have spent nights. Some of these sites are even taking the extra responsibility of interacting with the descendants of those who were enslaved on the property.

Morven’s staff planned a weekend of programs filled with exciting activities. One of the most interesting was the walking tour of Princeton’s Witherspoon-Jackson historic African-American neighborhood led by Mrs. Shirley Satterfield. It was interesting because the discrimination that she described made me think that she was talking about any city in a Jim Crow southern state. Isabel Wilkerson’s book “The Warmth of Other Suns” came to mind. Our people were trading overt racism in the South for covert racism in the North.

It was in the museum, that a selected few of us would spend the night. My way of selecting folks to spend the night in slave dwellings with me is somewhat haphazard, it’s pretty much, come one, come all. Jill Barry and her team introduced something new to the process. They required a written justification from the potential sleepers of why they would want to participate.

Conclusion

What I witnessed at Morven was a success. I admire all institutions that have the courage to interpret the lives of the people that they once enslaved. I especially, admire the Northern states that are interpreting the lives of the enslaved. Morven must stay the course as they endure the pushback that they may be getting now and will continue to get well into the future.

The events that were planned and implemented were well attended by diverse audiences. Morven is doing something right. I am happy to report that the return leg of the trip was maintained, therefore the flight home was less grueling than my drive there in Hurricane Michael.

Here are some of the responses that we got from some of the participants of the sleepover. First is their request to participate and then their report after the sleepover.

Nichelle Burns Before

I am interested in the Slave Dwelling sleep over because it is close to my heart. I have been researching my family for six years and have found one person who was a slave and four others who may have been potential slaves. I give them homage every day. I exist because they were strong enough to, despite the horrors they experienced. My great-great-grandfather, whose mother was a slave, had 17 children. To date, I have located 13, I have made contact with four families. Neither of my great-great grandparents nor their parents would believe that someone would come looking for them, searching out their lives more than 200 hundred years after they have left this earth. But someone is and she tells her nine-year-old daughter about them. She tells the families what she has located about them. She tells her co-workers about them. They are not a figment of anyone’s imagination and were here. Every plantation and slave quarters is a testament to their existence, as I am.

Those are the reasons why I should participate in this noteworthy program.

Nichelle Burns After

I would most definitely participate in another Slave Dwelling Project overnight stay. I enjoyed the pit-fire conversations and speaking about the intricacies of slavery and the impact it has had, and in some cases, is still having. It was a great experience that no one should miss.

Laura Herzog Before

I would love to participate in the Slave Dwelling Project overnight experience because I think it is imperative that Americans, especially those who are white, have a strong understanding of the intense oppression that African-American slaves were subjected to. I am a former journalist who went back to school to become a public special education elementary teacher. First as a journalist and now as a teacher, my primary purposes were/are 1) to encourage others to ask questions, and 2) to promote a desire to learn and have empathy for others, particularly for those in more challenging positions. I strongly believe in the mission of culturally responsive education and thus I make sure that I read many children’s books that represent a variety of diverse experiences and perspectives. I also like to read many adult nonfiction novels about American history, especially pertaining to its treatment of the black experience, including “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and “Complicity: How the North Promoted and Profited from Slavery.” Both book recommendations were given to me on a previous visit to the last standing slave market (now a museum) in the US and a to a tour of forced slave labor camp (or “plantation”). I know that having another sobering educational experience like those experiences will also lead me to further historical investigations – to more books, to more documentaries and to more physical experiences like this one. My boyfriend (Ted Siegel), a high school US History teacher, is also very passionate about this subject and found and suggested this experience would forever solidify in our minds the rich and serious educational experience that you are offering. We would both use this experience to educate our students and peers in addition to ourselves.

Laura Herzog After

I am so grateful for the opportunity I received to learn more about the history of slavery in the United States. I joined this experience because I care about how our understanding of history continues to impact our modern times. I also joined because I am an elementary school teacher. I believe that I need to be as informed as possible about the truth of American history, including the suffering that so many people experienced so that others could prosper. I want to teach my students to be kind above all else, with a strong understanding of right and wrong in matters like these. I am so glad I came. Mr. McGill’s lectures were stirring, his experience and knowledge were invaluable, and the bonding I experienced with people who came together for this event, eager to learn and exchange ideas, was truly something I will cherish. Sleeping over in the former slave dwelling added an even deeper sense of purpose to our conversations and heightened the feeling that the “past” that we were discussing was not really so long ago. In the North, I feel these events are especially important because so often we like to shift blame elsewhere. The campfire conversation really spotlighted how many abuses of power took place here, as well as down south, and led me to further question how accurately history is being portrayed today even in my own backyard. If you are wondering if you should attend a Slave Dwelling Project event, sign up. I guarantee that it will be a moving and unforgettable experience.

Ted Siegel Before

Although the duties of being a social studies teacher are myriad, three responsibilities are of the greatest societal importance. The first is to communicate to the students the only way to truly understand and improve the present is to look to the past. They must know that nothing happens in a vacuum; that the ills that plague society today did not just spring from the ether fully formed. Only by correctly diagnosing the root causes of historical injustices can you ever hope to craft remedies for them. The second is to make them aware of just how much mainstream history has been crafted by and in the interest of the powerful. The voices and experiences of the downtrodden and oppressed are rarely if ever present in a high school curriculum, and it is one’s duty to not only highlight this but also to explain why this is so. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is try one’s best to instill a sense of empathy in the students, especially for those people who are not typically given their due in a traditional high school history course. Consequently, given the nature of the job, my girlfriend (who is also an educator) and I would be thrilled and honored to participate in the sleepover portion of Joe McGill’s slave dwelling presentation. We believe that Mr. McGill’s organization and mission completely dovetail with our pedagogical and would greatly aid in our teaching practices as they relate to the aforementioned educational responsibilities.

Ted Siegel After

Participating in the Slave Dwelling Project’s visit to Morven Museum was an incredibly educational and moving experience. It felt good to participate in something that was actively reclaiming experiences that were not deemed worthy of historical remembrance in their time. In fact, these were experiences whose recording for posterity was seen as flat out dangerous by the powers that be at the time. It is important to remember that all history that exists only exists because someone took the time and had the inclination to preserve it. There is always intention behind historical remembrance, but there is often as much intention behind forgetting. Seeing something as not worth remembering says a lot about which people’s experiences are important in a society. Additionally, actively not remembering people and their experiences is often as much an intentional project as accurate recording. Thus, to sleep in a place where one knows that enslaved people slept, even after all of the work that was done to downplay and erase these peoples’ existences and their experiences, felt triumphant and transformational in some small way.

Christine Bucher Before

I’m writing to as to be entered in the lottery for the sleepover at Morvan with Joe McGill of the Slave Dwelling Project. I’m a graduate student at Villanova University in Communication, and I’m contemplating a thesis focused at thesis partly on the SDP’s work. (I was thrilled to find a sleepover so close.) I’m also currently taking a public history course, and I hope to contribute at least a little to the discussion of communicating a new narrative about history as told through experience and material objects.

Thank you very much and I hope that your planning is going well.

Families and Futures
Christine Bucher After

I drove away from the Morven Museum’s Slave Dwelling Project event October 12-13, 2018, thinking about families. During the packed 24 hours, I spent in Princeton I met many people, all of whom were spending time away from their own families to be part of the events and learn more about the history of Morven, Princeton, New Jersey, and the United States. The Morven Museum itself tells the stories of two extended families, the Stocktons and the Johnsons, and the Friday walking tour of Princeton’s segregated Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood featured stories of the Robeson family and (amazing) guide Shirley Satterfield’s, too.

Significant also were the families newly included in the Morven’s interpretation, the enslaved people who helped build and run the place, who through their labor financed the place—and who had, interpretively and historically, been left out, overlooked and unrecognized. Stories of families emerged around the campfire as everyone introduced themselves and shared reasons for attending. • Stories concerned the recording of births of enslaved people, which started only in 1804 as part of New Jersey’s “Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery.” These records helped Morven’s curators name people in the exhibit, but many names are lost to history.

• • Stories were told about enslaved mothers, who carried babies to term, then went through labor knowing that the child’s birth would be her last moment as the child’s mother; upon birth, the baby belonged, literally, to someone else.• Stories were told of families broken up or suspended because members were rented out, or sold on auction blocks. • A story was told that Annis Stockton might have nursed a black baby, Marcus Marsh, who was freed in 1798. • Stories were told of slaves were given as wedding presents, while the Stocktons took legal steps to preserve the home for their future generations, gaining wealth through the exploitation of others.

  • One woman at the campfire told the story of her family, which once owned slaves; now she is now trying to come to terms with her history.

  • One sleeper told stories of her years-long genealogical project, finding family members scattered across the country due to the migration north and uncovering long-hidden memories.

As a graduate student, I’m working on an academic paper about how people negotiate public space, and one article I read—which mentions Joe McGill and the Slave Dwelling Project!—discusses the cataloging of slave dwellings in Alabama’s Black Belt. This region, through the midsection of the state, was a big cotton producer, and that’s labor-intensive. That means there were a lot of enslaved people, and a lot of slave dwellings, which are either rapidly crumbling or converted to other uses. Author Ashley Dumas notes that “slave houses are artifacts” with data that can be recorded: dimensions, construction methods, technologies. This is true of any house, but in the case of slave dwellings, we have to look at little harder to see how the inhabitants managed to personalize the space, to find ways to “retain their own house styles, food preferences, and religious beliefs for generations….these houses can help us understand the very formation of African-American culture” (25).

In a site like Morven, where there are few records and many unknowns, it’s the hard work in the archives to discover information that helps us learn facts about the people of the past. As curator Beth Allan said at the campfire, the goal is accuracy, to find out what we can know. But there’s more to anyone’s life than facts; there are good times, bad times, and personal events that result in stories passed down from grandparent to grandchild. There are stories that go untold, conversations that never happen, and for all kinds of reasons. As Joe McGill says, “the sleeping part is easy. It’s the conversations that are hard.” Some things are hard to say; some things are hard to hear. But through dialogue like the ones I heard at Morven, and all the personal reasons visitors and sleepers bring to Morven, that communities come together. Over the weekend, I learned quite a bit about Princeton and Morven. But what will stick with me are the many voices I heard, both around the campfire and from the past, leading us to the future.

Source:

Ashley A. Dumas, Natalie Mooney, Valencia Moore, and Cory Sly. “Cabins as Far as the Eyes Can See: An Introduction to the Black Belt Slave Housing Survey.” Alabama Review 70, no. 1 (January 2017): 22-49.