Can Plantation Museums Do Full Justice to the Story of the Enslaved? A Discussion of Problems, Possibilities, and the Place of Memory

Abstract

This article, structured as a prompt-and-response work, is authored by members of a research team investigating how slavery is absent and present at tourism plantation museums in the U.S. South. The prompt for the discussion grew out of E. Arnold Modlin’s concern that, even at museums where narratives and landscapes center on enslaved people, the presence of the master and enslaver within the same space ensures that once-enslaved people are always commemorated as less than fully human subjects. In response to Modlin’s prompt, Perry L. Carter, Amy E. Potter, Candace Forbes Bright, and Stephen P. Hanna deploy their field experiences as well as various literature to envision ways Southern plantation museums can and must more fully and justly commemorate enslaved persons. Derek H. Alderman, as discussant, situates this exchange within the rapidly developing literature on black geographies and emphasizes the entire research team’s call for geographers to engage, or even intervene, with ongoing memory work.

本文以提醒与回应来结构作品，是探讨奴隶制度如何在美国南方的观光庄园博物馆中缺席与现身的一组研究团队成员的共同着作。探讨的提醒源自阿多诺．莫德林的考量：即便在叙事与地景聚焦受奴役者的博物馆中，只要主人与奴隶在同一空间中出现，便确认了曾被奴役的人们，将永远以非完整的人类主体被纪念。为了回应默德林的提醒，佩里．L．卡特、艾美．E．波特、坎迪斯．富比士．布莱特与史蒂芬．Ｐ．汉那运用其田野经验和各种文献，想像南方庄园博物馆能够且必须更完整且公正地纪念受奴役者的愿景。身为评论人，德瑞克．H．埃德蒙将此一意见交换置于快速发展的黑色地理学文献之中，并强调整体研究团队对于地理学者需涉入、甚至是介入正在进行的记忆工作之呼吁。

Este artículo, estructurado como un trabajo de aviso y respuesta, fue elaborado por los miembros de un equipo de investigación interesado en como la esclavitud está ausente o presente en el turismo de los museos de las plantaciones del Sur de los EE.UU. El aviso para la discusión surgió de la preocupación de E. Arnold Modlin por el hecho de que, incluso en los museos donde las narrativas y los paisajes se centran en la gente esclavizada, la presencia del amo y del esclavista en el mismo espacio asegura que la gente que alguna vez estuvo esclavizada siempre se conmemora como sujetos no completamente humanos. En respuesta al aviso de Modlin, Perry L. Carter, Amy E. Potter, Candace Forbes Bright y Stephen P. Hanna despliegan sus experiencias de campo lo mismo que alguna literatura para ilustrar modos como los museos de las plantaciones del Sur pueden y deben conmemorar con mayor justicia y plenitud a las personas esclavizadas. Como discutidor, Derek H. Alderman sitúa este diálogo dentro de la literatura en rápido crecimiento sobre las geografías negras y hace énfasis en el clamor de todo el equipo de investigación para que los geógrafos se comprometan, o que incluso intervengan, en el trabajo de recordación que se encuentra en marcha.

Key Words:

• absent presences
• black geographies
• haunting
• identity
• Whitney Plantation

• 缺席的在场，黑色地理学，难以忘怀，认同，惠尼庄园

• presencias ausentes
• geografías negras
• evocador
• identidad
• Plantación Whitney

In September 2016, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture opened amidst great anticipation on the National Mall in Washington, DC (Kelley 2016; Ryzik 2016). This event offered a moment to reflect on the tensions and challenges that undergird the project of using museums—as places of commemoration, education, and even entertainment—to offer holistic interpretations of African-American identities and histories. Important to this project is the concept of place and the use of museums as places that can contribute toward or hamper such holistic interpretations. It is an issue that geographers are increasingly addressing as they grow the literatures on museum geographies, landscapes of memorialization, and the spatial narration of memory.

Although the new Smithsonian Museum is a revolutionary and progressive step in elevating public memory of the African-American struggle, it is worth noting that there are a wide array of places where that struggle has been told with varying degrees of success. For instance, over the past few years, the group of scholars contributing to this piece have worked together on a National Science Foundation (NSF)–funded project documenting and analyzing the politics of retelling the history of black enslavement at plantation museums in the southeastern United States. As has been well documented, these museums tended to trivialize and romanticize the brutality of slavery, ignoring the contributions of the enslaved community and valorizing the status of enslaver family (Eichstedt and Small 2002). Although these are ways of categorizing the marginalization of black people in social memory, our research points to how these practices have impact today by causing many African Americans to feel unwelcomed at, or unimportant to, plantation museums today. This long tradition of symbolically annihilating African-American heritage partly explains the need for opening Washington, DC’s new museum on the National Mall.

It could be easy to dismiss tourism plantations as sites for seriously discussing and understanding race, slavery, and white supremacy, but we should not do this. Yet, our team believes, as McKittrick (2011) does, that popular and academic thought should recognize that plantations “fostered complex black and non-black geographies in the Americas and provided the blueprint for future sites of racial encounter” (949). We also believe that heritage tourism—when developed in socially responsible ways—can be a vehicle for addressing rather than denying social justice. It is within this intellectual and political context that the NSF team has conducted extensive research at fifteen plantation-museum sites in three major Southern subregions. At each plantation, we interviewed tourists, guides, and managers while interrogating the content and configuration of guided tours for the commemorative messages that either silence or give voice to the enslaved.

The team practices a model of publicly engaged scholarship in which we work with and provide valuable data and analysis to heritage tourism entrepreneurs at the same time that we critique and encourage them to improve their treatment of slavery at their museum sites. This essay, structured as a series of reflective commentaries by NSF team members, represents a moment of focused reflection after our recently completed field work at plantations in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Virginia. The reflections come out of our sense of frustration, but also from our sense of tempered hope about the potential to reform southern plantation tourism.

Modlin’s prompt—which developed in part after he spent time exploring the Memorial ACTe: A Caribbean Centre on the Expression and Memory of Slavery and the Slave Trade museum in Point-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe—inspired this dialogue with questions that have been on the minds of many team members. Can plantation museums—even those engaged in rehabilitating their treatment of slavery—ever do full justice to the story of slavery? What challenges inherent to plantations and the ways they represent the relationship between master and enslaved make this memory work difficult, if not impossible? Does the full recovery of enslaved identities demand a different geography of museum making, both within tourism plantations and independent of them (e.g., the National Museum of African American History)? The collective discussion carried out in this piece, although important to the members of our NSF grant team, has even wider resonance to geographers engaged in growing “black geographies” as a subfield and political praxis (Bledsoe, Eaves, and Williams 2017).

E. ARNOLD MODLIN, JR.: CAN PLANTATION MUSEUMS DO FULL JUSTICE TO THE STORY OF SLAVERY?

Approximately 375 plantation museums exist in the United States (Figure 1). Most of these museums are located in the U.S. South, feature a house once owned by a prominent (usually) white slave-owner, and share a common silence or minimization of information about slavery and the enslaved people who once lived, worked, and died in these spaces—spaces that became meaningful places because of the efforts of enslaved people. Over the past two decades, a few plantation museums have begun to share additional information about slavery.¹ For this improvement in practice, these sites are to be commended. In those few cases, the changes made to their narratives reflect a bold recognition that, as memory sites, it is insufficient to use excuses to not talk about the enslaved individuals who once were there. Instead, managers and guides understand that a concerted effort must be made to include this information about the past.

FIGURE 1. Map of Southern plantations. Map by Stephen P. Hanna.

At scales ranging from the body to the global, the memory of race-based slavery is intensely geographic. When we remember and discuss slavery, we place it. Scholars writing about this form of slavery contextualize it in specific places. Examples of this include Klein and Vinson’s (2007) African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, Davis’s (2006) Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, and Baptist’s (2014) The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. As considered in a set of organized sessions on themes of remembering slavery held at the annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers in New York in February 2012, all too often, particularly in parts of the Anglophone West, the geography of remembering slavery is a distancing of the person who is remembering slavery from the historical acts of enslavement.

That slavery is so geographically remembered is even indicated when one museum in a region augments its representation of once-enslaved people² and thereby influences the amount and quality of remembering slavery at nearby heritage sites. For example, after Somerset Plantation in northeastern North Carolina transformed its tours and landscapes to more fully represent the experiences of once-enslaved individuals, nearby Hope Plantation began to include more information about slavery on their tours (Modlin 2011). A similar process seems to be at work along Louisiana’s River Road. Laura Plantation’s discussion of slavery during its tour of the big house and grounds seems to have influenced nearby Oak Alley to build six replica slave cabins to house the “Slavery at Oak Alley Exhibit,” a commemorative effort that, although prominently located, segregated once-enslaved persons from the romanticized narratives of their enslavers offered on the tour of the big house (Hanna 2016). Similarly, our interviews with staff suggest the recently opened Whitney Plantation, located near Laura Plantation, might be driving the inclusion of additional information about slavery on Laura’s docent-led tours.

The New York Times and other media outlets have extensively celebrated Whitney Plantation since its opening in 2014. The Times’s story notes that the site’s owner, John Cummings, spent millions of dollars of his own money to make sure that the site includes not only narrative information about slavery in Louisiana and at the plantation site itself, but artistic and memorial information also (Amsden 2015). When tourists pay for a tour at Whitney, they receive a card with a picture of one of the terra-cotta statues personifying enslaved children and information about the person the statue depicts. Many of these statues are located in the Antioch Baptist Church, which was relocated to the Whitney museum site. In this space, tour guides encourage tourists to find their card’s subject, potentially helping tourists make a connection to a formerly enslaved child. After leaving the church, visitors are guided past a series of massive granite memorials that list names, dates, and places of birth—when known—of approximately 350 women and men enslaved at Whitney and 107,000 individuals who were listed as slaves in the Gwendolyn Midlo Hall project, the Louisiana Slave Database (Figure 2). A third tool of memory is the “Field of Angels,” a memorial that lists—when known—the names, dates, and causes of death for 2,200 enslaved children who died in Louisiana. These memorials are supplemented with slave cabins, a kitchen, and a metal prison. The interior of the mansion, once the home and business center of the master and enslaver, is included as a brief set of stops at the end of the tour.

FIGURE 2. Whitney’s memorial dedicated to 107,000 enslaved people in Louisiana documented in the Louisiana Slave Database by Gwendolyn Midlo-Hall. Photograph by Raymond Glasow; reproduced with permission.

As many have acknowledged, the focus of the tour is slavery and once-enslaved people. To accomplish this, Cummings engaged scholars and artists who study and represent slavery in their works. Reporter David Amsden described the site as the first real slavery-centric site in the United States—a description that owner Mr. Cummings seems to embrace (Amsden 2015). Make no mistake, the statements remembering once-enslaved individuals that are made vocally by guides as well as textually in wood, cloth, terra-cotta, concrete, and metal at Whitney Plantation are powerful. We can only hope that it will further push other plantation museums to more fully and justly present information about slavery and once-enslaved people.

Even at a site such as Whitney, however, the plantation as a historical-tourism place presents difficult geographical problems when it comes to remembering people who were once enslaved. To me, a core issue is that slave identities are always presented spatially as subject to enslavers, whereas the enslavers themselves can be, and often are, presented with identities that are not rooted, or at least not-so-rooted, in the existence of the enslaved they once claimed to own. Part of the baggage of remembering someone as a “slave” or “enslaved person” is that the very word slave always indicates a linkage between the person defined as slave and someone who holds power over them. Even the terms slaveholder, enslaver, and slave owner—although correctly accusatory toward the individuals who kept others in bondage—are problematic, as the implication of power over another person makes these accusatory labels slippery, especially in societies where individuals are valued by the power and wealth they have.

Yet, the spatially subjected nature of remembering the enslaved–enslaver relationship is founded in geography. If we reflect on some of the most common motifs of slavery as remembered in the U.S. South, we see geographically grounded ways of remembering individuals who were once-enslaved people. For example, in posters, artwork, and other images representing an enslaved person running away, the individual is often portrayed as facing forward—not looking back to his or her “master.” Yet, because of the imperiled nature of acts of escaping, the viewer can easily imagine slave catchers, just off of the page, catching up using the geographically advantageous horse. Another common theme is of the enslaved mother being separated from her children by enslavers. The imagery of her positioned below enslavers who are breaking up her family, although accurate, is powerful in its emotional impact on readers while it also subtlety places the enslaved mother closer to Earth, and spatially less than, the enslaving classes (see, e.g., Ball 1860, 9–11).

As powerful as these images are in places where slavery is remembered, the geography of memory at physical places is subject to a sociogeographic problem of remembering once-enslaved people as incomplete, lesser, and defined against the enslaving master. Some of this is due to our social tendency to link memories to material things, but in the context of plantation houses, we need to resist this. In the spatialized presentation of plantations, slaves’ identities are inherently identities of property and less-than-humanness, which are always attached to the identity of a master and “his property”—the plantation itself. Thus, adding information about slavery on plantation tours leads to a more fair way of presenting once-enslaved people, but will never lead to an equal, lived existence, even in memory, because of the deep ideological hierarchy of our culture’s socio-geolinguistics. Effectively, in this hegemonic way of remembering, the former slave still is chained to either her master personally (where the master is named, or through using the master’s property as the plantation-based site of memory of the enslaved person) or to her master in theory, just by calling her a slave or the terms used to challenge this dominating narrative, enslaved and even once-enslaved.

So what I come to—and I have struggled with this since the start of my plantation research—is the problem that remembering slavery is not just an issue of language and memory, but it is also an intensely geographic issue. After years of researching, challenging, and even working with plantation museums, I have come to the conclusion that remembering slavery at plantation museums will always be insufficient for those of us who identify as critical geographers; we will always be pushing for great inclusion of the once-enslaved. Yet, more information itself does not necessarily mean a greater emotional and affective engagement with the enslaved who once lived, worked, and died at these sites (Modlin, Alderman, and Gentry 2011). I grapple with this question: Because remembering slavery at plantation museums will always be unsatisfactory, should our focus be on other ways to effect change instead of trying to help reform site-specific plantation museums that by the presentation of their locations continue to valorize ownership over activity? Our work should focus on challenging the tendency of tourism plantations to forget formerly enslaved people, while distancing enslavers to a few localized places. We must displace the enslaver from the idealized plantation and push people to remember slavery more completely as a national affliction, which should not just be left to places rooted in the past, but is still deeply seated in the meaning and being of the United States.

PERRY L. CARTER’S RESPONSE: REEMBODYING THE GHOSTS OF THE ENSLAVED

Arnold, I have read what you wrote and I must say it recalled for me Derridan traces and absent presences (Derrida 2016). It also evoked a passage from Bressey et al.’s (2013) chapter of Dresser and Hann’s edited volume:

How do we represent those who cannot be written about but whom we know were present? How is their absence to be included, not only as an acknowledgement of their presence, but to ensure that their absence in space is not assumed to be a non-existence in place? There should be space to represent those who never learned to read but who delivered the letters that make up treasured archives, the men and women who never had their own portraits painted but polished many others’ gold frames, those who never had their actions recorded but whose labour maintained these houses through centuries. Although we may never know them, we should find room for them. (131)

Arnold, essentially I think that what we are talking about are ghosts (McCormack 2010). Plantation museums are haunted sites, places where visitors are unavoidably cognizant of the enslaved traversing these grounds in their unending coerced labors. Some visitors to these sites apprehend, the iniquities and the brutalities that took place there, yet they choose to disremember. Others apprehend yet they choose to misremember, and some truly apprehend, yet will not allow themselves to turn away from a very ugly American story.

They know. They all know. How could they not? No matter the level of acknowledgment or obscuration of enslavement at plantation museums, visitors know at some level of consciousness that the enslaved habited these spaces and that their traces still exist in these rooms and across these landscapes. To see them, all they need to do is be willing to look. Visitors understand, at some level, that unnamed black men, women, and children haunt these spaces. They know this because slavery haunts the Americas and, more broadly, the transatlantic world. It is a past that Americans willfully seek to forget, to move past, in their attempts to escape past and present culpability.

I assert that the reason why these enslaved men, women, and children are absent presences at most plantation museums (which would seem an odd joke were it not so appalling) is that there is little left of their material lives to affix them to these spaces. We know few of their names and the ones that we do know exist largely as lines in ledgers. Often, very little of what they possessed and inhabited remains—that is, human objects, as chattel, leaving behind few objects of their own. What largely remains at these sites are their master’s things, and to quote Lorde (2007), from her essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable (110–11). This is to say that a Southern antebellum master narrative (pardon the pun) is limited in its ability to transmit an enslaved counternarrative. Simply, you cannot in any meaningful way tell the story of the enslaved via their masters and their masters’ things.

This, I believe, is why the Whitney Plantation museum, in its endeavor to remember the enslaved, goes to great lengths to reembody the absent present—terra-cotta statues, ceramic severed heads on poles, lists of names engraved in granite, images of tortured bodies (Gordon’s “scarred back” being the most notable). The presentation at Whitney is radically different in that you seldom see reembodiments at other plantation museums. At these sites the home (“the big house”) embodies the master and the white family, a home that would not have been possible without enslaved black labor.

Maybe Whitney should not be considered a plantation museum. Perhaps it should be thought of as a memoryscape of the enslaved. Its project is making the unseen visible by reembodying the traces of the men, women, and children who inhabited and lived these spaces.

On my most recent visit to Whitney, our tour guide recommended that after the tour we visit an area of the plantation that was not part of the official tour (Figure 3). In this area were ninety ceramic heads of enslaved men who took part in the 1811 German Coast Rebellion (Rasmussen 2011). After the rebellion, the rebels were executed—their heads cut off and placed on pikes along the river road to New Orleans as a macabre and disproportionate spectacle of white power (or was it white fear?). The guide noted that just a few months before, John Cummings placed three of the heads into the official tour. Afterward, Whitney received a rash of negative comments on TripAdvisor, Yelp, Twitter, Facebook, and various other social media platforms. I was at the museum all day and I appeared to be the only person who visited the area where the severed heads were placed.

FIGURE 3. Whitney’s commemoration of the German Coast Rebellion. Photograph by Perry L. Carter.

The week after my trip to Whitney, I went to see Raoul Peck’s James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro and the following quotes from Baldwin resonated with what I saw the week before:

The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story. (Baldwin 1963)

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. (Baldwin 1962)

The unease incited by the sight of material representations of severed heads of recalcitrant black men exemplifies the power of affective materiality. The heads more than moved their viewers. They shook them, they frightened them, and they offended them. They touched them in a way that reading about the insurgents’ fates or being told of them never could.

The heads, or rather the facsimiles of heads, suggest the bodies from whence they were detached. In this sense, the heads are a form of reembodying the enslaved. Hardened clay representations of long-dead black bodies have the power to affect, to touch. Bodies are highly affecting objects. We relate to bodies because we are embodied. Whitney, I think, gets it right: The way to rememory the enslaved is to reembody, to rematerialize the enslaved.

AMY E. POTTER’S RESPONSE: TRACING THE PRACTICES OF THE ENSLAVED

In thinking through the questions raised by Arnold concerning the often problematic commemoration of enslaved persons at plantation sites as well as their identity resting on their relationship to an owner, I would like to respond by first considering an interpretation of the site through the lens of the enslaved rather than the enslaver. Then, I will offer a reminder of the power of place and finally issue a general caution to my response.

Historical geographers have long grappled with the problem of finding the actual voice of marginalized persons as they sift through colonialist practices of power and knowledge particularly when working with archival materials dominated by white Europeans (Duncan 1999). This is also a frequent complaint among plantation management when discussing their struggle to interpret slavery. How do you capture the voice of enslaved persons and their unique identities in letters and records not written by them? Duncan (2002), in his work on everyday resistance centered on plantation workers in Ceylon, criticized the overemphasis on voice and turned attention instead to practice: “The planter’s strategies of power and their desire to record in minute detail all of their observations and theories, their rationalization of space and time, have provided me with my data; perhaps not the voices, but at least the practices of the workers” (332). Duncan concluded by writing, “It is out of the margins of the discourse of domination that an historical geography of the voiceless will probably have to be written” (332). In terms of the Southern plantation, we can continue to interpret these sites as the space of the master or we can reread these sites in a new way through the lens of practice.

The influence and transformation of place by enslaved persons is keenly felt in Charleston, South Carolina (see also Wood 1974; Carney 2002). A drive through Magnolia Plantation or a walk along the property of Middleton Place forces me to confront a landscape that bears their legacy (see Figure 4). The landscape does not lie in South Carolina. It simply cannot. As one manager of a plantation site said about Charleston, “I think that it’s really difficult here to look. Here, there’s such a visible and stark—I mean it’s just—you can’t go into one of these former plantations where these rice fields are and deny the fact that this is done by slavery” (interviewed February 20, 2016).

FIGURE 4. Canal constructed by enslaved persons at Magnolia Plantation in Charleston, South Carolina. Photograph by Amy E. Potter. (Color figure available online.)

When I gaze on the canals or the flooded fields carefully orchestrated for rice cultivation, I see the work of not just enslaved persons, but rather people who were engineers and agricultural specialists, the bearers of a rice culture from West Africa to a new continent (Carney 2002). When properly contextualized through practice, the enslaved person is also a master architect, bricklayer, storyteller, seamstress, and even resistor. We reread the space of the master and turn a rather simplistic narrative on its head. After a thorough rereading of the site, the power of place—even a person’s complex identity—can now be more fully realized.

As geographers, we have staked our careers on place (Tuan 1977; Cresswell 2004). Yes, certainly places through the mechanism of people can lie and deceive concerning our past(s). Yet, plantations and other material sites connected to slavery in the Atlantic world (the docks along the River Thames, slave castles in West Africa, slave cabins in Charleston) allow us to remember and connect (maybe even touch their fingerprints) in a way that a constructed museum filled with material artifacts divorced from their contextual landscape simply cannot (see Figure 5). An interview at Whitney Plantation³ captures the power of place:

I would describe the tour as magnanimously powerful. It’s powerful and it’s important to develop a strong relationship with your ancestors … so you know that is something that is at the core of my being. And so, this tour actually being able to be in a physical space wherein at the center of the narrative lies in the stories and the experiences of my ancestors it’s a beautiful thing.

There was a feeling of respect for the sacred here with the inclusion of the church, with … the fresh water spaces open and accessible so that you can actually commune with the land and commune with the land here as a sacred space. (interviewed March 7, 2015)

FIGURE 5. Amy E. Potter’s hand next to the fingerprints of enslaved persons left behind in the bricks of slave cabins at Boone Hall Plantation in Charleston, SC. (Color figure available online.).

Another example of the power of place is illustrated by the Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston, South Carolina (Yuhl 2013).⁴ One member of the museum’s management described the site in this way:

Interviewee: For us, the importance of the space and of the site and telling the story of both—what occurred between the walls and then also how it played into the larger narrative of slavery within the country, as well as within the world—is incredibly important to us. We do have the site. Most of the other slave museums that you’ll see throughout the country are manufactured sites. They built a building and said “We’re going to fill it with slave things.” Whereas we have the building, and now we fill it with information. We fill it with people. We fill it with as many artifacts as we can.

Researcher: Why is having the site itself as an artifact so important?

Interviewee: Because you can touch the wall that they bought and sold slaves against. It’s the actual wall. It still physically exists. … We can show them fingerprints in bricks that slaves put there. So the ability to kind of ground them in the understanding of “This is what built the city that you walk around in.” (interviewed February 19, 2016)

Interviews from two different sites connected to slavery in the South reveal the potential of being “in place” for a tourist. These are two sites that allow visitors to commune with people from the past, to connect to slavery in reverent and tangible ways.

I am, however, not naive, and I recognize that these places, these sites, these sacred spaces can also paralyze us by preventing us from making larger scale connections (local, regional, and global) concerning the breadth of slavery and its impacts in the United States in a way that a museum of slavery that is not site specific perhaps would not. Focusing on the impacts of slavery at a specific site or in a specific region can hinder us from connecting slavery to our present-day racial problems (Baptist 2014; Coates 2015), especially when many of these sites have historically refused to discuss slavery (Eichstedt and Small 2002). These “fixed” plantation places in the minds of tourists are actually fluid, highly interconnected, and were part of larger processes taking place at a variety of scales as the manager of the Old Slave Mart carefully articulated. A Louisiana plantation’s perfectly fenced property butting up against the levy that holds back the Mississippi often masks the networks of connection to the north, south, east, and west. Often slavery in the mind of a tourist happened there and is key to that region’s history. This common mindset is articulated by one interview at Laura Plantation in Louisiana:⁵

Interviewee: [Laughter] A major form of commerce, based on slavery with its own cultural rules and regulations that was in large part responsible for the economic strength of the South. And ultimately a lot of the South’s present weaknesses. That’s what I think about. (interviewed March 6, 2015, italics added)

Gallas and Perry (2015) reminded us, “The institution of slavery wasn’t merely the responsibility of the South or of a wealthy elite. It was a cornerstone of the nation’s economy and society—and an engine of upward mobility for millions of American families” (4). The average tourist is too often free to return home at the conclusion of his or her vacation and leave the complex intersections of slavery behind. As a result, scholars and plantation sites have their work cut out for them.⁶ In theory, there should be the same amount of reverence when one enters the halls of Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as for the Old Slave Mart in Charleston, South Carolina.⁷ Although a slavery museum that does not inhabit the space of a plantation or former slave market might be able to more adequately contextualize and address the larger connections of slavery as well as the individual identities of an enslaved person apart from the master, I am optimistic when it comes to these plantation sites. Through the power of place we can make these connections while honoring the practice of enslaved persons that were engineers and seamstresses who lived, loved, and worked at these sites and more importantly “had full, intellectual lives” (Duncan 1999, 120).

CANDACE FORBES BRIGHT’S RESPONSE: EMPHASIZING EMPATHY FOR THE ENSLAVED

Arnold’s concerns focus on the ability of plantations to remember people who were once enslaved. At the heart of this concern is that “slave identities are always presented spatially as subject to enslavers, whereas enslavers can be, and often are, presented with identities that are not rooted, or at least not-so-rooted, in the existence of the enslaved they once claimed to own.” On the surface, I agree. Plantations rarely focus on the once-enslaved and instead feature a utopian master narrative. I do not fully agree, however, that plantations are not the most suitable venue for slavery museums. As I formulated my response, my first step was to wrap my head around questions such as these: Can vestiges of enslavement educe empathy at plantation museums? Should this even be the goal?

There is a rich discussion on empathy running across a number of disciplines. Some researchers argue that our basic understanding of others can be “assumed, distorted, or performed” to induce empathy (Jamison 2014). There is, however, a considerable amount of controversy around whether empathy truly exists and, if it does exist, whether it is socially beneficial. Bloom (2017), for instance, defined empathy as “the act of coming to experience the world as you think someone else does” (16). Like many others, he continued to critique this definition, focusing on its “innumeracy” in that empathy is so consuming that we can only have it for limited people at a time or risk emotional depletion. Because of this spotlight effect, empathy directs our focus to someone’s suffering and gives us the desire to do something about it, even at the expense of more worthy causes.

We view empathy as essential to humanity. Derived from the German Einfühlung or what Adam Smith referred to as “fellow feeling,” empathy is presented in many ways within literature as well as in practice. Much of the controversy presented by Bloom and others, however, comes down to nuances in their respective definitions. For instance, in Bloom’s argument, empathy is not based in reason, but rather is an emotional reaction. As such, decisions made based on empathy are likely irrational. Empathy, however, cannot be reduced to rational or irrational outcomes; it must be understood in its purpose and how it connects people to others and to issues.

Tourist plantations have the capability to produce place attachment and evoke within tourists an empathetic tie to the enslaved people and the intricately woven landscapes that were supported by these people. At sites like Whitney Plantation, the grounds that were once worked by the enslaved are not merely interpretive objects—they tell stories of the enslaved, thus providing visitors with the opportunity to identify with the enslaved. Although visitors cannot experience the world as the enslaved, the possibility of empathetic place attachment is the closest they can come to interacting directly with these past voices. As part of this experience, plantation tourists are invited to see what it would be like to experience it themselves. All too often, though, plantation tour guides and the narratives they present pay little to no attention to the enslaved and instead encourage visitors to empathize with the white owners. Although this aspect of the plantation experiences might speak to the innumeracy of empathy discussed by Bloom (2017), I see it as more an issue of the curation and presentation of the plantation experience than it is with the ability of the sites to evoke empathy. Moreover, in response to Bloom’s innumeracy critique, perhaps the plantations should be seeking empathy toward the phenomenon of slavery, rather than individual members of the enslaved population.

Thus, I argue that tourist plantations have the capability to educe empathy toward the enslaved as a whole—that is, as a phenomenon and a part of U.S. history rather than to individuals subjected to enslavement. Focusing on whether empathy challenges rationality distracts from the larger, more consequential issue of for whom tourist plantations are educing empathy. It follows that my response to this exercise is that disagreeing or agreeing with the efficacy of plantation museums is a matter of epistemology. As we know, there are multiple social interpretations of the plantation (Bright and Carter 2018). In seeking to understand a visitor’s perspective of the plantation museum, we are investigating their interaction with historical and cultural contexts, beginning with the once-enslaved and ending with current racial discourse. As we do so, we know that the plantation experience is inherently value laden as people’s plantation experience is filtered through their experiences and beliefs as socialized individuals. Thus, the challenge to me is not if plantations are capable of encouraging empathy, but rather, if they can educe empathy to the enslaved as a whole instead of white plantation owners, or even individual slaves.

Arnold’s argument focuses on the idea that the plantation itself distracts from the existence of the once-enslaved as humans and focuses on them as property. Slaves were, by definition, property. The plantation was owned by the master’s family, or more commonly the male head of the family, and so were the slaves. I wonder if dedicated slavery museums would deemphasize their suffering by separating commemorations of the enslaved from the places where they experienced this brutal reality. The problem, to me, is not that today’s plantation museums are not able to present or incorporate a “fair” history of the once-enslaved, but that, for the most part, they have chosen not to. At many plantations, the once-enslaved are presented in the narrative as property and then, without giving any power of observation or empathy to the “gaze,” the narrative moves on (Urry 1990). Docents direct the attention of visitors to a sofa, to a painting, to a piece of silver, to an inventory of slaves, and then continue on with the tour. Unapologetically, the purpose of this attention shows the wealth of the master, rather than to evoke empathy for the once-enslaved whose labor made the plantation, and wider economy, function. Because this is a common practice, I agree that the enslaved are not treated as humans at many plantation museums, but I do not agree that this renders plantation museums as irreparably flawed venues for providing historical presentations of both the brutality of slavery as well as presentations of the once-enslaved as humans, not property.

Instead, I argue that the plantation museum is not a fixed construct. As it is value laden, both in curation and interpretation, I do think it can and should be the venue for a slavery museum and also that, by encouraging place attachment among visitors, it plays a role in educing empathy for the enslaved. The goal is to present once-enslaved persons as having an “equal, lived, existence, even in memory,” to use Arnold’s words. To capture the hardship that the once-enslaved endured, they can never be fully separated from the plantations and owners who inflicted their suffering. Although it is socially negligent to present the once-enslaved as mere property, it would also be negligent to discard the place of the plantation and relocate their story outside of the plantation. In fact, if the plantation museum is not held to the standard of serving as the appropriate venue, then managers and operators might feel that incorporating the once-enslaved into a socially responsible presentation of history is not urgently important—that it is something that will happen in another place or at another time. As it is now, some plantation museum owners and operators do not see their sites as the appropriate place to talk about enslavement. Although the few plantations presenting a heavy emphasis on the once-enslaved, such as Whitney, are pushing others to provide more equitable emphasis, this is due, in part, to geographical proximity. I am not sure that Whitney would have influenced plantations such as Laura and Oak Alley if it had not been located within a few miles of these sites. A National Slavery Museum, therefore, could actually accomplish less than a plantation-focused museum if it was unable to influence existing plantation museums to emphasize the enslaved.

President Obama (2006) referred to our country’s “empathy deficit—the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes; to see the world through the eyes of those who are different from us.” It would be more effective for plantations to address the empathy deficit toward the once-enslaved by highlighting the vestiges of enslavement at plantation museums than it would be to re-create it elsewhere. Currently, most plantation museums do not see fostering empathy toward the once-enslaved as a priority, nor does the civic dialogue in our country or schools. Plantation museums, as the sites of enslavement, however, are uniquely positioned to emphasize the vestiges of slavery. In conclusion, I contend that plantation museums are important because they place enslaved-centric narratives in ways that sites not historically associated with slavery do not.

STEPHEN P. HANNA’S RESPONSE: REMEMBERING THE ENSLAVED–ENSLAVER RELATIONSHIP

Arnold makes some excellent points and it is clear that the presence of the master chains our memory of once-enslaved women and men to their place as plantation slaves. Indeed, this presence can limit our ability to identify with these individuals as fully human rather than as property and laborers. Yet, I chafe against ways of understanding our worlds and remembering our pasts that neglect the relational nature of all identities.

Our research strongly indicates that visitors expect to hear about the enslaved at plantation museums and many express disappointment when narratives of the enslaved are absent or marginalizing. As one visitor to Oak Alley plantation said, “We would like to hear a little bit more of the slaves. The cabins were good, we could read, but we would have liked to hear a little bit more about it [on the house tour].” It would seem that at least some tourists recognize the limits of segregating the stories of the enslaved from those of their enslavers.

The relationship of enslaved and enslaver is at the heart of what we should remember through the landscapes and narratives of plantation museums. That relationship was violent and oppressive. It fettered the bodies of black women and men to produce political, economic, and cultural benefits for white men and women. It is foundational to our understanding of the history of the Atlantic world—a history spun from relationships between Europe, Africa, and the Americas as well as a history spun from relationships between North and South. As Baptist (2014) reminded us, slavery was not a dead-end political-economic system isolated in the backwaters of the emerging industrial global economy. Rather, it was the vital heart of that system, producing the financial resources—as well as the sugar, cotton, and other commodities—needed to create a self-sustaining industrial capitalist economy.

Each enslaved–enslaver relationship in the United States, the majority of which were located on plantations, was a focal point in this global web of slave-based capitalist interactions. Thus, a plantation was never just a bounded piece of property, but a node produced through social relations stretched across the globe.⁸ Each plantation was shaped by legal definitions of property codified by local, state, and national governments; the trans-Atlantic and domestic slave trades; the promulgation of fashions—in architecture, clothing, and furniture—from the capitals of Europe; and the global demand for tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton. Therefore, the plantation museum is the place we should go to witness those relations and understand how they haunt us, how they produced and defined the racist constructions of black and white that require us to chant “Black Lives Matter” today.

Do those people Arnold refers to as the once-enslaved exceed the enslaved–enslaver relationship? Of course. A closer-to-ideal memorial space would encourage us to remember that these women and men were family members and friends. We would learn that they created social networks that enabled “stolen” moments and places of limited freedom and pathways to emancipation (Ginsberg 2007). These relations intersected with the enslaved–enslaver relation to create resilient identities that have enabled African Americans to survive the disappointments of Reconstruction, the violence of Jim Crow, the constant theft of wealth and property, and the ever-present threat of lynching so eloquently explicated by journalist and antilynching activist Ida B. Wells (1892), James Baldwin (1963) in his works describing the black experience in 20th Century America, and, most recently, Ta-Nehesi Coates (2014) in his argument for reparations. At the same time, such a memorial space would encourage us to use physical artifacts and the landscape to make connections beyond the plantation, to understand the global ramifications of race-based slavery and its role in intertwining industrial capitalism with white supremacy.

Creating a just remembering of the enslaved—and, yes, the enslaved–enslaver relationship that destructively produced both identities and continues to benefit white Americans—at a plantation requires two spatial interventions. The first is to place the enslaved at the center of the narrative space of the museum ensuring that visitors hear and see that the enslaver is as defined by the enslaved as the enslaved is by the enslaver. The second is to draw attention to the relations that exceed both the thoroughly unequal, violent, and exploitative yet mutually constitutive enslaved–enslaver relationship and the bounded territory of the plantation. Here are two vignettes of my own touristic experiences that show the promise of such interventions.

In 2009, I toured the National Bank Building in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Prior to the Civil War, the enslavers who managed the bank lived in a spacious apartment on its second floor. John Washington, one of the children enslaved by the family, lived with them. As we reached the space where John slept as an enslaved child, the guide read from Washington’s memoir describing how, in the place our tour group stood, he learned his mother and sisters would be hired out to a distant plantation. “[H]er tears mingled with mine amid kisses and heart felt sorrow,” John wrote as he remembered that night.⁹ Considering that he had already witnessed the coffles of slaves sold to the Deep South, the eleven-year-old Washington knew that his little room in his enslaver’s house could have been the last place he saw his mother. When the guide finished his narration, there was not a dry eye in the room.

What provoked our tears? I would argue they were induced by the combination of Washington’s own words and our knowledge that the scene was a transformational moment in a man’s life. That moment was produced through the tragic intersection of two relationships, son–mother and enslaved–enslaver, that helped constitute John Washington. Even though my guide, fellow visitors, and I knew that John’s enslaver reaped the financial benefits from hiring his mother out to a distant plantation, our focus was on John, who also wrote of that night, “Then and there my hatred was kindled secretly against my oppressors, and I promised myself if ever I got an opportunity I would run away from these devilish slave holders” (Figure 6).

FIGURE 6. John Washington’s memories of his enslaved childhood comprise his portrait currently hanging in the National Bank Building, Fredericksburg, Virginia. Photograph by Stephen P. Hanna.

Of course, the thoughts, feelings, and aspirations of the overwhelming majority of women and men enslaved on plantations were never recorded. To tell their stories at plantation museums, researchers and guides have to rebuild lives from the inventories, tax records, and journals written by enslavers. At Whitney Plantation, my guide directed our tour group’s attention to a single name, Anna, etched into the Wall of Honor, a memorial to 350 women and men enslaved at that site (Figure 7). Using the very records intended to reduce her to a commodity as well as oral histories from her descendants, the guide described how Anna’s life began in an unknown place near the Chesapeake Bay, how her mother died aboard the ship that carried her to the New Orleans slave market, and how, raped by her owner’s brother, she bore a son named Victor. Although the memory of Anna shared by my guide did not exceed her identity as an enslaved woman, her story transcends the spatial and temporal boundaries of the plantation. Her 1,000-mile journey represents the domestic slave trade, whereas her descendants, including two mayors of New Orleans, connect Whitney’s past to our present.

FIGURE 7. Anna commemorated on Whitney’s Wall of Honor. Photograph by Stephen P. Hanna.

Should we limit our commemoration of the once-enslaved to the plantation? Absolutely not. There are other nodes in the complex webs of social relations where we can remember enslaved women and men both within and beyond their bondage. Such sites include the Savannah waterfront, African-American churches, the home of Frederick Douglass, the paths of Harriet Tubman, and African-American history museums in Cincinnati, Richmond, and Washington, DC. Yet these black-centric sites also are not sufficient if the end result is a segregated heritage tourism that hides the very relationships that constitute systems of racial injustice.

DISCUSSANT DEREK H. ALDERMAN’S CONCLUDING REMARKS

The preceding set of commentaries hinge on what McKittrick (2011) called a “black sense of place,” a term meant to capture a contested state of being and belonging for African Americans. A black sense of place, according to her, does not deny black suffering, racism, and resistance to racial violence, but it seeks to place these aspects of life within a richer, more fluid and relationally based conception of the role of struggle and humanity within the black world. A black sense of place, as an analytical framework, is meant to disrupt conventional academic studies that—although identifying and challenging injustice—nevertheless continue to “re-isolate the dispossessed” and perpetuate a placelessness for people of color (McKittrick 2011, 958). It is this yearning to hear a more complex and humane representation of enslaved life that motivates Arnold and the rest of our team, and that prompted his question of whether even reformed Southern plantation museums are capable of communicating McKittrick’s black sense of place to the public. In particular, Arnold is bothered by how closely the senses of place of the enslaved are linked—spatially and socially—to the identity and sense of place of the master to the exclusion of all their other daily practices, feelings, and struggles.

Arnold is justified in expressing this concern given that plantations—from the antebellum days of slavery to the current age of tourism—have profited from destroying a black sense of place. This explains, in large part, why many African Americans are loathe to visit these estates, a pattern of dispossession the NSF research team has witnessed at almost all of the plantations studied over the past few years. The way plantation museums decidedly limit stories of the social-spatial agency, identity, and dignity of the enslaved is not a new development. It is not by accident that contemporary owners and operators of Southern plantations tend to shy away from saying all that they could and should about slaves and appear to center everyone’s existence around the white male master and enslaver. It is a practice that dates back to the pre–Civil War period when masters actively sought to defend the institution of slavery from abolitionists’ criticism and aggrandize their own benevolence by characterizing the enslaved as an inferior community with little humanity independent of bondage. Thus, they justified the need for a close, controlling connection with the plantation patriarch. It is truly amazing and disturbing how this limited articulation of a black sense of place has such staying power at plantation museums and many other social settings, perhaps demonstrating the capacity of the plantation, in the words of McKittrick (2011), to continue framing the “logic” of racial encounters and violence against black personhood.

Clearly there is much at stake. Arnold senses a futility in whether it is possible to acknowledge the full humanity of the enslaved while not denying their subjugation and exploitation within the place, narrative, and performative confines of the contemporary plantation museum. He suggests that energy might better be directed elsewhere. In responding to Arnold, his colleagues generally suggest that the efficacy of the plantation in recovering and remembering a black sense of place is salvageable. They use their research experiences at plantation museums to identify some points of intervention through which the public’s understanding of enslaved identities and histories can be made richer and politically transformative. In reviewing their responses, there are some major take-home points. If doing full justice to the histories of the enslaved at plantation museums is indeed possible, then it requires change—not only further change in how plantations talk about slavery, but also a change in how we, as scholars who study and engage the tourism industry, see the plantation as a place of memory and identity formation.

Perry points us to the unavoidability of the ghostly traces of the enslaved at plantations and that the reconstitution of a black sense of place might very well require a fundamental transformation of plantation museums into landscapes that give form to these ghosts. He emphasizes the plantation as a place of materiality and embodiment and stresses the importance of rematerializing and reembodying traces of the enslaved. These reembodiments should not fix or freeze the identities of the enslaved; rather, they must capture a dynamic black sense of place and the slave’s complex and even violent racial encounters with and beyond the master.

Like Perry, Amy recognizes the difficulty of recovering an equitable material and archival legacy of the enslaved, precisely because of past and ongoing efforts to erase the black sense of place. For her, there is value in revisioning the plantation as a place of practice requiring new interpretative practices that appropriate the spaces of the master as spaces of the enslaved. She emphasizes finding places to engage—in a tactile way—the creative work and legacies of the slave community. Her focus on practices is also meant to break the plantation out of an interpretive approach that confines the black sense of place only to the master’s interests by connecting enslaved and enslaver identities to practices operating at different geographic scales and in the present day.

Stephen shares Amy’s concern for bringing the master and the enslaved into the same narrative space and pushes back against the already strong tendency at historical sites to segregate and confine African-American memory—something he sees as problem even on plantations that have significantly reformed their interpretation of slave life. He sees the plantation as a network of relational identities and spaces and argues that the unequal power balance of the enslaved–enslaver identity nexus can be mitigated somewhat by using museum spaces to witness and understand the complexity of this relationship. This relational approach would then connect enslaved–enslaver relations at specific plantations to a network of slave-based, capitalist social relations between enslaver and enslaved across many landscapes, regions, and nations.

Candace shares Arnold’s concern with ensuring that plantation museums not deny the full humanity of the enslaved and she, perhaps more than other contributors, fears that a move away from plantation reform would release managers and employees from the responsibility of narrating a more just account of slavery. She is interested in the plantation as a place of empathy and wonders if we are better served addressing the “empathy deficit” at work in plantation museums as they reduce the enslaved to the mere property of the master and enslaver. For her, recovering a black sense of place at plantation museums must include, but cannot be limited to, the brutal and dehumanizing historical realities that people were owned, controlled, and disposed of as possessions. Although she does not explicitly state it in these terms, Candace argues for a wider, more fluid, but no less sober reconceptualization of black personhood and affect relative to the master and enslaver and in this respect she joins other scholars who question how black bodies have been narrowly valued within the “conceptual and ontological regime of labor” (King 2016, 1).

So, is it possible to achieve a fully just commemoration of the once-enslaved at Southern plantation museums? Can the efficacy with which these estates once reproduced the mythic, white supremacist message of the supposed Lost Cause to the U.S. Civic War, which denies the role of race-based slavery in the Civil War, be transformed to fulfill the promise of McKittrick’s black sense of place? Given the racialized reality that these museums helped create and how they cater uncritically to tourism markets seeking nostalgia, architectural beauty, and allusions to romance, Arnold’s concerns are more than justified. Yet, as other team members assert, our publicly engaged academic project has identified and introduced interventions that build onto trends in public history scholarship and practice while also being informed by ongoing work in black geographies. Such interventions must be both affective and material. We work with museum management to find narratives that encourage visitors to emotionally identify with the once-enslaved and to help visitors from across the nation, and even the globe, understand that slavery’s legacy undergirds the political and economic systems that help them prosper today. We advise their historians and curators to use landscapes, artifacts, and art to reembody and revision once-enslaved women and men by recognizing their practices and moments of resistance.

Yet, it is possible that such interventions, although necessary, might never be sufficient and thus require other spaces where once-enslaved people can be remembered outside the presence of their enslavers. Indeed, working toward socially just interpretations of the enslaved necessitates a broad geographic strategy in remembrance and reconciliation. Because of the deep and pervasive traces of enslavement in almost every facet of modern development, these geographies of memory—while certainly including plantations—can and should include other places where the enslaved have an “absent presence,” such as colleges and universities that relied on slave labor, corporations that profited from the slave trade, and even the very cities and towns inhabited and created by enslaved and freed African Americans. The memory work of recognizing and recovering a black sense of place is a project for everyone virtually everywhere.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The authors appreciate the students (graduate and undergraduate) who helped with the NSF-funded research project on plantations. We also wish to give a special thank you to David L. Butler who was Principal Investigator for the NFS grant entitled “Transformation of American Southern Commemorative Landscapes.”

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (Award #1359780).

Notes on contributors

E. Arnold Modlin

E. ARNOLD MODLIN, JR., is an Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department of History and Interdisciplinary Studies and Director of Global Learning and Civic Engagement at Norfolk State University, Norfolk, VA 23504. E-mail: [email protected]. He studies the multiple ways—sensory, emotional, and affective—that people connect to the past at heritage and historic sites where slavery occurred or is remembered.

Stephen P. Hanna

STEPHEN P. HANNA is a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, VA 22401. E-mail: [email protected]. His research investigates the roles of commemorative practices and representations in the reproduction of racialized landscapes.

Perry L. Carter

PERRY L. CARTER is an Associate Professor in the Geography Program in the Department of Geosciences at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409. E-mail: [email protected]. His areas of research include an interest in the materiality of memory, the varied constructions of race, black geographies, sociogeographic data science, and narrative analysis.

Amy E. Potter

AMY E. POTTER is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geology and Geography at Georgia Southern University, Savannah, GA 31419. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests primarily center on cultural justice and the African diaspora.

Candace Forbes Bright

CANDACE FORBES BRIGHT is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN 37614. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include racialized geographies, disaster resilience and recovery, social networks, and health disparities.

Derek H. Alderman

DEREK H. ALDERMAN is a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN 37996. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include race, social justice, public memory, heritage tourism, and the American South. He is co-coordinator of the RESET (Race, Ethnicity, and Social Equity in Tourism) Initiative.

Notes

1. Even many tourism plantation museums that have included slavery in the discussion of the site should still be considered as “beginning” because the employees and volunteers at many of these places are still moving toward a more complete story about the enslaved (compare Modlin, Alderman, and Gentry 2011).

2. I am intentionally using the adjective once-enslaved. Much as enslaved was meant to call attention to the fact that enslaved people are more than a social condition—“slaves”—this use of once-enslaved person is meant to drive attention to the idea that these individuals should not remain in the enslaved state in perpetuity. At the latest, in death they should be considered free of their former enslaver.

3. We were able to work with Whitney Plantation, which bills itself as a Museum of Slavery, in southern Louisiana shortly after it opened in March 2015.

4. The Old Slave Mart was an auction house of enslaved persons in the 1860s. The site was acquired by the City of Charleston and is now open to the public.

5. We asked interviewees what came to mind when they heard the word plantation.

6. See, for example, recent news on the connections to slavery to Jack Daniel’s whiskey, Georgetown, and Harvard.

7. The sale of Antiguan enslaved persons endowed Harvard Law School. One manager told us that the site (the Old Slave Mart) can overwhelm visitors. “We get people that leave napkins with notes on them that they can’t go in the building.”

8. Like so many other geographers, I owe a great debt to Doreen Massey (1944–2016) for her retheorization of place.

9. Washington’s memoir, Memorys of the Past, can be found in its entirety in Blight’s (2007) book, A Slave No More.