Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 21, 1994 TAG: 9412210019
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JONATHAN YARDLEY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Kind words about Williamsburg have rarely appeared from this writer. The Colonial capital, which annually attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors, is less a historic site than a theme park, distinguished from the various enterprises of Walt Disney's spiritual heirs by degrees more than kinds of fantasy and escapism. Yet Williamsburg has its serious side, one not given much attention by the theme park's publicists but one that has underwritten, among other things, important archaeological labors and the publication of first-rate works of history.
It was no doubt a mixture of Williamsburg's serious and commercial sides that led to the establishment a decade and a half ago of a ``living history program'' devoted to the lives of African-Americans in the Colonial period. Serious, that is, in the sense that Williamsburg sought to make its Colonial studies as fully rounded and inclusive as possible; commercial in the sense that it no doubt recognized that its portrayal of a lily-white Colonial capital was offensive and off-putting to black customers.
Whatever the reasons for it, the black studies program has by now been woven into Williamsburg's fabric, which is why one event at this year's commemoration of the anniversary of George III's enthronement was devoted to the lives of the colony's black residents. Specifically, it was a re-enactment of the auction of slaves, a piece of business regularly transacted during the royal celebration. However strange and repugnant that business may seem today, in the 18th century it was part of normal life in the slave colonies; in re-enacting it, Williamsburg merely sought to present a reasonably accurate re-creation of that life.
Word of Williamsburg's plans got out in advance. Leaders of the local NAACP expressed indignation, if not outrage, and said they would stage a protest at the re-enactment. Much to its credit, Williamsburg stuck to its plans. The director of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation's department of African-American interpretations and presentations, Christy Coleman, who is herself black, said: ``Racism is the child of slavery. If you don't understand what happened during the time of slavery, then you'll never understand what's happening now with race relations in this country.''
As it happens, the re-enactment went on without incident. A few protesters did show up, but they gave the presentation respectful attention and seemed, at its conclusion, to have been convinced that Coleman and the others onstage had been faithful to known historical fact and had not exploited the suffering of black slaves for the purposes of mere entertainment. One of them even said he had found it a moving experience.
That is fine, but it is unfortunate that the NAACP felt obliged to intervene in the first place. Without for a moment belittling the sensitivity of any black American to portrayals of the black place in American history, it should be said that protesting in advance about a re-enactment that had been seen by no one except those involved in staging it serves no interests save those of the falsification or self-interested revision of history.
Precisely what it is that the protesters actually wanted from Williamsburg is unclear. One of them said: ``We've been told the auction will portray history as it happened. Whether it will or not is for us to see.'' That sounds like a threat: Portray the auction in terms acceptable to us, or we'll man the picket lines. Another said, ``Whenever entertainment is used to teach history, there is the possibility for error or insensitivity and historical inaccuracy.'' Lord knows that is true, but the use of ``insensitivity'' suggests, again, that these words were another threat, however veiled.
The irony in all this is that the re-enactment was a far more decorous affair than any real slave auction. If it was the purpose of the Williamsburg NAACP to bring public attention to past injustices against blacks, it should have insisted that the inhumanity of a slave auction be portrayed in all its terrible detail. The Williamsburg protesters sounded as if, rather than show history accurately, they merely wanted to prettify it to suit 20th-century tastes, when nothing could have served their purposes better than the full, naked, unspeakably cruel truth.
One element of this truth is that slave auctions really were only partly about African-Americans. The black men and women and children who were bought and sold were instruments in the hands of the white men, mostly Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who ran the auctions and owned the plantations. They created, as Eugene Genovese notes in his monumental study of slavery, ``Roll, Jordan, Roll,'' ``a world in which black women regularly had to strip to the waist to be whipped and sometimes had to strip naked to be displayed at auction'' - a world in which black women were sold ``as house servants with special services required.''
That world is what the slave auctions really were about, and it is only when we can both understand and confront the realities of this world that Americans both black and white can begin to know the exact nature of their common heritage. Though terms such as ``the African-American Holocaust,'' used by one of the Williamsburg protesters, strike me as excessive, they do contain far more than a grain of truth; Until we understand the ugliness of the slave society in all its manifestations, we aren't going to be able to understand ourselves and the burden of the past under which we struggle.
Jonathan Yardley writes for The Washington Post.
The Washington Post
by CNB