Cw `Slaves' Found Role-play Difficult

March 11, 1989|By MARK DI VINCENZO Staff Writer

JAMES CITY (COUNTY) — The people chosen to interpret the 18th-century slave quarters at Carter's Grove tried an experiment in October that the public never saw: Tell the story of the slaves by dressing like them, talking like them, becoming them.

The experiment produced an emotional mess.

"We couldn't handle it," said Jerrold Roy, lead interpreter. "With the white people in costume in the Historic Area, the more they get into their characters, the better they feel. With us, it's just the opposite. The more we get into our characters, the worse we feel."

The opening of the slave quarters and its interpretation today represents an attempt by Colonial Williamsburg to tell a more complete story of life in 18th-century Virginia, for the first time explaining in detail the role of plantation slaves and the relationship they had with their masters.

However, the interpreters' experiment and its consequences show why CW plans to move slowly and carefully in the way it interprets this part of history.

"You have to realize this is not the easiest story in the world to tell," said Lawrence Henry, director of Carter's Grove, CW's outdoor museum, which attracted 230,000 people last year. "It's easier to talk about the story of Queen Anne's chairs rather than about what the slave quarters represent.

"But we're committed to telling that story and broadening the picture, and the slave quarters are the most visible part of it," he said. "We'd be foolish to think there isn't strong feelings and emotions connected with this. We're interested in communicating, not overwhelming. We don't want to make this too intense for everyone involved."

First-person interpretation, or slave portrayals, will be done in the future, Henry said, but most likely be only during special weekend and evening programs.

Considering about half of 18th-century Williamsburg was black, the opening of the slave quarters does not represent CW's final attempt to tell the story of 18th-century black Virginians. On the contrary, although it began to tell that story years ago, it has only recently begun to find space and make room for black life here.

In fact, the search for the slave quarters started by accident in the early 1970s, when CW archaeologists first explored the site but couldn't determine what was there. From the artifacts they found, they thought it might have been an area where hides were tanned, said archaeologist Patricia M. Stamford.

In the late 1970s, they first began to realize that storage pits dug into the ground there, which served as primitive closets and pantries, were common to slave quarters. They found 16 pits, and inside them were ceramic plates and bowls, buttons, utensils, wine bottles, parts of two clocks and an array of tools.

"For years, those pits were very much of a puzzle," said Vanessa Patrick, a CW architectural historian.

The realization that slave quarters were at that site was followed by years of architectural research to determine the buildings' sizes and appearances. Architects studied church and plantation records, travel accounts from visitors, anything that could provide clues.

"It was a painstaking process," Patrick said. "We feel reasonably certain that the structures that are there now are like the ones that housed the slaves. Someone walking by them from 1771 probably wouldn't bat an eye.

"The quality of the buildings were not that good then," she said. "People expected them to fall down in a few seasons. That was the mindset back then. One of my colleagues calls it disposable architecture."

The slave quarters include a 43-foot-long frame house with two small windows where eight or nine slaves lived; a single-story, duplex log house where eight others lived; and a 12-by-16-foot log house, which housed the foreman, a black man, and his family. In all, historians believe, about 25 slaves lived at Carter's Grove.

The frame house and the foreman's house have dirt floors, and most of the beds are piles of straw. The log houses have wooden chimneys, the insides of which are plastered with a mixture of clay and lime to keep them from burning. All the houses have storage pits, which are covered by boards. Mud and pieces of wood have been crammed into the cracks of the log houses to seal them.

There is also a corn crib, where corn that fed the slaves and the animals was stored, as well as an open courtyard, with an oyster-shell floor, that served as a meeting place and a dining area.

CW craftsmen constructed the buildings from scratch, felling trees with axes, hauling them out of the woods and cutting the timber.

"It was simpler to do it the same way it was done back then," said Garland Wood, the supervisor for the construction.

The original buildings are thought to have been built by a slave, a black carpenter the interpreters call Joe.

Of the slave quarters, Henry said, "This is just the next step in the process of telling our story."

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