Performance as place preservation: The role of storytelling in the formation of Shankleville Community's Black counterpublics

ABSTRACT

From 1870 to 1920, previously enslaved Texans founded more than 540 ‘freedom colonies.’ Since then, descendants left behind seemingly intangible Black geographies where evidence of their placemaking has disappeared. However, in Shankleville, Texas, settlement founder descendants sustained attachments to, and stewardship of, their communities, even as the population decreased and physical manifestations of place dissipated. To understand how place attachments are sustained in Shankleville, I analyze descendants’ stories, storytelling practices, and the spaces in which these performances take place. In these counterpublic spaces, descendants reproduce an identity rooted in a foundational story about their freedom-seeking, fugitive slave founders. Their ritual performances of these stories at a sacred spring in Shankleville cement attachments and catalyze descendants’ involvement in heritage conservation and preservation projects. The meanings and values informing these commemorative practices disrupt commonly held assumptions about Black community formation, Black heritage, and what constitutes legitimate preservation practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Storytelling
• counterpublic
• Black geographies
• preservation
• heritage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Andrea Roberts is Assistant Professor in Urban Planning and Faculty Fellow of the Center for Heritage Conservation at Texas A & M University.

ORCID

Andrea R. Roberts http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9979-6026

Notes

1 Sitton and Conrad recorded 507 freedom colonies. I developed a continually updated list of place names while researching in a two county area.

2 The Project for Public Spaces (PPS 2009) cites Jane Jacobs and William Whyte as early placemaking scholars. Hunter et al. (2016) define Black placemaking as ‘the ways that urban Black Americans create sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance’ primarily in urban spaces with strong public planning contexts. I expand the Hunter placemaking definition to include processes by which communities persist despite urbanization.

3 Montgomery defines spatial agency as, ‘the ability to be in, act on or exert control over a desired part of the built-and-natural environment.’

4 Sharecropping was a system of wage labour and form of tenancy formerly enslaved Blacks and poor whites engaged in the South. After working on the landlord's farm, the sharecropper would rent a cabin and owe debt to the landlord's store.

5 By 1870, McBride and Shankle were well established farmers in Shankleville. Stephen McBride owned 1165 acres. Winnie died in 1883 and Jim in 1888, but their children and grandchildren continued to live in Shankleville. Joseph Odom, born in Jasper County around 1845, owned 14 improved acres by 1880 and married Jim and Winnie's daughter Harriet.

6 Historical significance is a criterion for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places list. Significant listings, however, may be deemed ineligible based on lack of integrity – the degree to which properties are physically intact and in their original context.

7 The Moynihan Report (Moynihan 1997) posited essentialist theories of African Americans pathology and failure to succeed.

8 Smith writes that, ‘ … authorized heritage and its discourse act as the law itself, especially in the context of historic preservation by determining who has the authority to speak for heritage and how people interact with and preserve heritage.’ National Park Service (NPS) regulations are one example.

9 Historian Jean Ann Ables-Flatt traced Lareatha's lineage to Harriet Shankle's husband, Joseph Odom, son of an enslaved woman and a white man.