On a former plantation off the coast of Georgia, Joseph McGill Jr. squeals his bedroom door for the night. Step into a narrow cell phone with an old fireplace and bare oyster shell mortar walls. There’s no furniture, no electrical power, no plumbing.
“I expect a dirt floor, so that’s good,” mcGill says as he lays down to spice up the hard pine boards. “I could get a good night’s sleep. “
Some travelers dream of five-star hotels, others on seven continents. McGill’s mission: to sleep in all the old slave houses that are still in position in the United States. Tonight, in a cabin on the Georgian island of Ossabaw, it will be your 41st accommodation. .
McGill is 52, has a family circle job and job, and doesn’t like sleeping on the street. A descendant of slaves, he also recognizes that rehabilitating bondage posts “seems and unsettling to some people. “discomfort, both physical and psychological, because it needs to save the slave houses and the history they keep before it’s too late.
“Americans have a tendency to focus on the ‘big house’, the mansion and the gardens, and forget about the buildings in the back,” he says. “If we lose the houses of the slaves, it is much less difficult for the slaves themselves. “
A century ago, the whitewashed huts of former slaves remained as ubiquitous in the southern landscape as Baptist churches or Confederate monuments. Many of these houses were still inhabited by the families of the 4 million African-Americans who had won freedom during the civil war. Blacks migrated en masse from the south in the 20th century, the old slave neighborhoods, most of which were built profitably with wood, temporarily deteriorated or demolished; others have become tool sheds, garages or guest houses. who remain, many are now threatened by the forgetfulness and progression of the suburbs and spas in spaces like Georgia and Baja Carolina, a lush region that once had the densest concentration of plantations and slavery in the South.
McGill witnessed this transformation as a South Carolina resident painting for the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Charleston, but it wasn’t his daily paintings that led him to sleep in endangered slave huts, but his weekends as a Civil War. restorer, dressed in the Massachusetts 54 uniform, the black unit featured in the film Glory. Wearing a uniform of the time and camping, in the pre-war places, “made history live for me,” he says. 54th also drew the public’s attention to the central role of black infantrymen in the Civil War. For example, in 2010, when Magnolia Plantation near Charleston tried to publicize the recovery of its ignored slave huts, McGill showed up to sleep in one of them.
“I got a little scared,” he says of his one-night stay. “I kept hearing noises. Only the wind blew the limbs opposite the cockpit. His undeniable quilt, placed on the hard floor, also did not allow a but the sleepover was controlled to draw media attention to slave huts, which have since been opened to the public. McGill began compiling a list of other similar structures and looking for their owners, asking if he could sleep there.
He also tried to recruit members of his recreation unit to enroll in their nights. One of them, Terry James, said that at first: “I think Joe had lost his mind. Why stay in a ruined slave hut with snakes and insects?But as James reflected on his ancestors, who not only survived slavery, but also controlled after the Civil War to buy and tame land that still belonged to his family, he said he “needed to know more about what they had endured”So he accompanied McGill on a depressing August afternoon to a cabin that had been on board for years and was infested with mold. “The air was so terrible that we slept with the door open,” James recalls. “It was hot and humid and developing like a demon. “
For their next night together, James decided to make the party even more unpleasant. He introduced himself to chains of dolls before the war that had been loaned to him through the owner of a museum of slave relics and put them before bedtime for the “I sought to honor the ancestors who came here to the middle passage,” James says, “and feel a little bit what it’s like to be related.
Now he knows. ” It’s very unlikely that you’ll feel really comfortable with chained dolls. “He awoke several times during the night and stayed awake thinking of enslaved Africans hunched over the bowels of the ships. His constant pushes and the curse of his chains. He kept McGill awake and tormented him, too. Still, James has repeated the ritual in more than a dozen slave houses ever since. of all having a better life,” he says. His evenings have also become a source of sweet taunts on the part of his wife, who tells him, “You’d rather sleep in a slave hut than sleep with me. “
James and his shackles were not part of McGill’s last weekend in Georgia, however, it remains a remarkable excursion. The destination of McGill, Ossabaw Island, can only be reached by boat from a pier 16 km south of Savannah. Ossabaw is Georgia’s third-largest barrier. islands and one of the least developed; in fact, its main population is 2,500 wild boars, as well as alligators, horseshoe crabs and armadillos; only 4 other people live there full-time, adding a 100-year-old Michigan heiress who enjoys reading the novels of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie at her family’s mansion.
“I don’t know if it’s the Old South, the New South or the South,” McGill says, as he lands on a pier and passes through palm trees and marshes to a shady Victorian hunting lodge. “All I know is that it is very different from other positions I’ve stayed in. “
The island’s century-old Eleanor Torrey West, whose parents bought Ossabaw in 1924 as a refuge in the south, retains the right to life in her family’s home and land. The state now manages the island according to the Ossabaw Foundation, which sponsors educational programs. One scheduled along with McGill’s visit. Among the dozen or more other people who did the was Hanif Haynes, whose ancestors were among the crowd of other people enslaved in 4 plantations that once dyed Ossabaw. Many former slaves remained after the Civil War as sharecropers before settling on the continent in the late 19th century, basically in the Pin Point network, the birthplace of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.
“We leave the island, but we cling to traditions and language,” says Haynes, who gently switches to geechee, the Creole language of the Islands of the Georgia Sea, where isolation and close ties to West Africa and the Caribbean have created a unique experience. and lasting character (his cousin in South Carolina is known as Gullah). One of the hallmarks of this still-coastal culture is “light blue,” a blue portrait that slaves and their descendants implemented in window windowsills to keep spirits away. This practice is an idea that arises from West African ideals that water bureaucracy is a hole between the brain and the human world.
The portrait of “Haint blue” is still visible in Ossabaw’s 3 surviving slave huts, which are located in an orderly row next to what was once a Sea Island cotton field. The cottage’s construction curtains are also distinctive. , and less commonly of brick, those of Ossabaw were desitrated: an aggregate of oyster shell concrete, lime, sand and water, a reasonable and convenient resource along the coast, and also sustainable, so Ossabaw’s huts survived while many others did not.
Another explanation for why the cabins suffered is that they were occupied long after the Civil War and as recently as in the 1980s by guards and chefs running on the island. The cabins have now returned to their original appearance. Each measures 30 to 16 feet, divided into two living spaces through a giant central home with an open home on each side. Eight to ten more people would have occupied the house. This left little or no room for furniture, only pallets that can be placed on the floor at night.
“Cabins like this were necessarily used for sleeping and cooking inside in bad weather,” McGill says. Otherwise, slaves working in the fields lived almost entirely outside, running from dawn to dusk, cooking and fulfilling other responsibilities (such as collecting to eat and socialize) in the courtyard in front of their adjacent cabins.
There were originally nine cabins on this “street” or row of slave dwellings. Of the 3 that survived, only one had glass in the window frames and wood covering the clay floor. This would possibly imply that its original occupant was the “driver” of the plantation, a slave foreman with little privilege to watch over other slaves. The cabin was also restored at the last minute in time for McGill’s visit, adding the installation of yellow pine flooring from the mid-19th century.
“When other people know I’m going, they beautify the place,” McGill says, deploying his quilt. He agrees, because “it means they are making the preservation paintings that are needed now, rather than postponing them. “
Ossabaw, a low island surrounded by marshes, has swarms of mosquitoes and mosquitoes, as well as niguas. But that early summer afternoon is unusually insect-free, apart from flashing fireflies. McGill is also quite comfortable, as he has brought a pillow and cotton to put under his quilt, while observing that slaves would only have had undeniable bedding full of straw, corn leaves or Spanish moss. In the dark, his mind also focuses on practical matters, than on mystical communion with slaves who once slept here. He speculates, for example, about the convenience and challenge of slaves seeking to escape an island like Ossabaw than from a continental plantation. “I’m going to have to study this,” he said, before falling asleep, letting me turn and appease the floor with the sound of his snoring.
In the morning, we wake up with the birdsong and the sun running through the open window of the cabin. “It’s almost 7 a. m. We slept,” McGill said, looking at his watch. “The slaves who lived here would have been in the countryside for more than an hour.
McGill stores its reports with school equipment and other visitors to early-war sites such as Ossabaw. In doing so, he obviously talks about the cruelties of slavery. But he strives to control pain and outrage. “I’m not looking to galvanize other people’s anger,” he says. His missions are preservation and education, and he wants the cooperation of the owners and administrators of former slave dwellings who can be discouraged by a more strident approach. He also believes that blacks and whites want to communicate brazenly about this story, rather than taking refuge in a centuries-old, distrust department. “I want others to respect and repair these things together, without being afraid to tell their stories. “
This has happened in a rewarding way during many of his stays, tells the story of two sisters who had avoided contact with the Virginia plantation where their ancestors were enslaved, despite invitations to visit him, after spending the evening with him. in a slave hut on site and knowing there was a genuine interest in her family’s hitale, one of the women became a volunteer consultant on the plantation. Local students, black and white, joined McGill and wrote essays on how his vision of race and slavery replaced her. “Suddenly, what I read in textbooks has become anything I can see in my mind,” a South Carolina teenager wrote.
McGill also found that older white Southerners who own or operate houses with slave dwellings are much more receptive to their assignment than they were ten or two years ago. In just a few cases, their requests to stay were rejected. Most of the time, he greeted, enthusiastically, dined with his visitors and even won the keys to the large space while the owners went to work. “Sometimes I feel that guilt is a component of what motivates people, but anyway, I show up and realize that they have kept those gives them the feeling that they are doing the right thing,” he says. It’s not a panacea for what happened in the past, but it’s a start. “
McGill’s to Georgia is a good example. On his way to Ossabaw, he offers a lecture at a museum in Pin Point, the coastal network where the descendants of the island’s slaves now reside. As soon as he’s done, he’s approached through Craig. Barrow, a 71-year-old stockbroker whose circle of relatives has owned a nearby plantation called Wormsloe for nine generations, and Sarah Ross, who runs an on-site study institute, invited McGill to stay the next night in a slave hut on the 1238-acre property, which has a moss-covered oak driveway more than a mile long and a mansion with columns so giant that the circle of relatives got rid of 18 rooms in the twentieth century to make it more livable.
Barrow, who lives there with his wife, says he grew up thinking little about the surviving slave hut and cemetery on the property, or the generations of African-Americans who lived and worked there. But over time, he said, “I got here. The others sat down to organize big dinners, they weren’t doing the work, the others who lived in those huts would come up in the fields and build everything, they did everything. his younger opposition to the integration of the University of Georgia. “I was wrong, that’s why I’m doing this,” he says of his invitation to McGill and his invitation to the Wormsloe Institute’s studies on the life of slaves on the plantation.
Work on Ossabaw Island and Wormsloe reflects a trend throughout the south. On Edisto Island in South Carolina, the Smithsonian Institution recently dismantled an old slave hut that will be rebuilt for a demonstration at the Museum of African American History and Culture, which is scheduled to open at the National Mall in 2015. Nancy Bercaw, curator of the project, says that the Edisto cabin is a must because it speaks to the daily delight of many African-Americans, before and after slavery, to be a relic related to a prominent user like Harriet Tubman. As he watched staff thoroughly dismantle the dangerously rotten cabin, made of wooden planks and toscaly insulated with newspaper, he was also surprised by the ease with which these rare structures can be lost.
This danger has influenced McGill in a different way: it applauds the Smithsonian’s thorough reconstruction of the undeniable cabin, but keeps an open mind about houses that have been stored in a less pristine way. “man’s cave,” with a lounge chair, a fuel home and a refrigerator full of beer. Its neighborhoods in Wormsloe, Georgia are also comfortable, as the surviving cabin is now a guest space with beds, a bathroom, a coffee device and other amenities.
“It’s the luxury of the slave world,” he says, settling on a couch in the cabin after visiting the plantation in a golf cart. “Sometimes these positions have to evolve to continue to exist. “
McGill’s project has also evolved over 3 years. He originally nicknamed his nights the Slave Hut Project, but soon learned that these stereotypical wooden huts were conjured along the cotton fields. Now that he has remained in brick, stone and tablet structures, in villages and small farms, as well as on plantations, he emphasizes the diversity of slave dwellings and the delight of slaves. Slaves. In lectures and blog posts, he now talks about his slave housing project. It has also launched its network far beyond its base in South Carolina, at least as far as its budget allows. So far McGill has stayed in 12 states, as far west as Texas and as far north as Connecticut. “We don’t give the North a pass to slavery,” he said, because blacks were also enslaved there, and northerners were key players in the slave trade, buying cotton grown through slaves, promoting products like “Black Cloth” for slave owners and other businesses.
The Northerners were also political accomplices, contributing to the drafting of a letter protecting the rights of slave owners and slave owners elected in 12 of the country’s first 16 presidential elections. This leads McGill to think about what is perhaps the biggest “big house” of all. It was built with slaves and maintained for decades through slaves who cooked and cleaned, among other tasks. Slaves also lived in the mansion, usually in the basement, a “servant body” that shared President Andrew Jackson’s room.
“Staying in the White House would be the jewel in the crown,” McGill says, dreamily, before falling asleep at the country house in Georgia. “I’m going to have to paint for this to happen. “
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Tony Horwitz was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who worked as an overseas correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and wrote for the New Yorker. It’s Baghdad without a map, Midnight Rising and the virtual bestseller BOOM. His most recent work, Spying on the South, was released in May 2019, Tony Horwitz died in May 2019 at the age of 60.