French connections: In his four years as the United States minister to France, Thomas Jefferson came to love all things French, especially the cuisine—and the sophisticated culinary palate he developed is still serving us today. In The Art of French Brasserie Cooking at Monticello, the newly appointed Chef David Bastide teaches us about the fine dining of Jefferson’s time, and its influence on American cuisine.
Friday 3/12, $35, 6pm. Registration required. monticello.org.
Wine diplomacy: If you’re interested in celebrating presidents, pairing them with wine may be the way to go. In a nod to Presidents’ Day, the second installment of Monticello’s History in a Glass series explores Thomas Jefferson’s passion for wine and the influence it had on diplomatic relations and social entertaining at the White House. Author Fred Ryan will discuss his book, Wine and the White House, in a virtual presentation that includes special guests. Participants will also receive a curated selection of Jefferson-era recipes from Monticello’s Farm Table Chef David Bastide.
Wednesday 2/17, $25, 6:30pm. monticello.org.
Urine for a treat: More than 40 contributors dug into the dark recesses of their art closets to assemble the “deep-dive into the most peculiar parts of our community’s collective wonder” that is the Gallery of Curiosities. In other words, you’ll be offered a peek behind the curtain, past the sensical and the visually accessible, where your comfort level will be challenged with a display of weird collections. If you want to see a sample of Thomas Jefferson’s urine up close, this is your chance.
Thomas Jefferson never wrote about the food at Monticello.
His kitchens were stocked with ingredients from around the world—cinnamon from Asia, lemons from the Caribbean, brandies and fine cheeses from Richmond. But in his writing, Jefferson didn’t remark on the fine food that his enslaved chefs prepared for his table. He simply expected its consistent excellence.
More than 200 years later, food historian Leni Sorensen is working in the Monticello kitchen to make sure viewers of her livestream cooking series know, unlike Jefferson, not to take the efforts of those cooks for granted.
“It’s exhausting,” Sorensen says. “You’re in the smoke, constantly in the smoke. Your clothes smell of smoke, and your hair smells of smoke. You burn the hell out of yourself. And all the pans are heavy, except the copper pots on the stew stove. And you’re bending over all the time. So on a lot of levels, while it’s charming to do, I’m really glad I don’t have to do it.”
Sorensen’s cooking demo and Q&A session is part of a series of videos, broadcast live on YouTube and Facebook and available on the Monticello website (monticello.org), that seek to connect guests with the history of the Monticello estate even as the grounds themselves limit visitors.
As Sorensen peels, spices, and prepares an apple compote like the kind Jefferson would have eaten, she uses skills that were once a source of pride for Monticello’s enslaved workers—as well as, at times, a path to freedom. Cooking gave many workers what they needed to move after emancipation, settling into kitchens across the United States to carve out a new life for themselves.
“It was often done under terrible duress and hideous kinds of racism…but they had this skill that they could do that brought in money for their children’s education, to buy a piece of property, to act within their Black community…,” Sorensen says. “It’s quite a marvelous story, that level of independence that being able to cook [gave them].”
Teaching at Monticello is one of many jobs Sorensen has picked up due to COVID curtailing much of her regular work. She’s now selling bulk orders of homemade tamales, a business she first ran in Los Angeles in the ’70s. And in her free time, she plans and executes elaborately themed, socially distanced dinner parties at her Charlottesville home.
At the most recent dinner, her two guests arrived on their way back from a day at Monticello. Even in the time of the pandemic, people are finding a way to connect with Virginia’s past through the estate. And Sorensen anticipates that with potential future cooking livestreams, historic venues like Monticello and Montpelier can continue to create connections between past and present.
“I’m often trying to draw analogies so that we don’t see the enslaved community…as somehow being necessarily different,” Sorensen says. “We all have these incredible commonalities. Often, it’s wonderful to see places where people have bridged those gaps and eliminated those gaps.”
July 1 not only heralds the start of another hot summer, but it’s also when new laws go into effect. Things you were doing legally on June 30 (ahem, 20-year-old vapers) are now against the law. And sometimes vice versa (hello, happy hour).
Nicotine users: Virginia bumps the legal age to purchase and consume tobacco and vape products from 18 to 21 years old—unless you’re 18 and in the military.
Happy hour: Watering holes can now advertise drink specials and prices as long as they don’t promote over-drinking.
Distracted driving: Drivers face a $250 fine for using a cellphone in a work zone.
Tougher move over: Motorists who fail to move to the left lane for emergency vehicles parked on the side of the road can be charged with reckless driving on top of the existing $250 fine.
Inspection sticker: The annual mandatory vehicle inspection will now cost $20, up from $16.
Suspended licenses: The DMV will begin reinstating driver’s licenses that were suspended for unpaid court fines and fees.
Teen labor: The General Assembly repealed the Kings Dominion law that prevented schools from opening before Labor Day so that amusement parks would not lose their youth workforce.
Meals tax: Eating out in Charlottesville will cost a few cents more because the meals tax has gone from 5 percent to 6 percent.
Rear-facing car seats: Babies must face the rear of a vehicle until 2 years old for safety concerns. Parents can be stopped and ticketed for a primary offense if wee ones are spotted facing forward.
Surrogacy expanded: Gay couples and single people can now use donated embryos or surrogates.
“…I’m kind of done with him, and I’m moving on with my life. I have things to do.”—Susan Bro after James Fields, her daughter’s killer, is sentenced to 29 life sentences June 28
In brief
After almost a year of work and as its term ended, the Police Civilian Review Board, which is charged with creating bylaws for future boards to assure transparency and accountability from the Charlottesville Police Department, finalized its recommendations July 1. The six-member volunteer board calls for a permanent review board and two full-time staff members. The bylaws and a draft ordinance will go before City Council in August.
TJ party’s overCity Council voted 4-1 to ax Thomas Jefferson’s birthday—April 13—as a paid holiday for city employees, with Councilor Kathy Galvin casting the sole vote to keep it. Instead, employees will get March 3 off to celebrate Liberation and Freedom Day, when Union troops emancipated enslaved people here. And they get a bonus floating holiday, to match up with Albemarle County in official holidays.
The 17-year-old whose 4chan threat of ethnic cleansing at Charlottesville High closed city schools for two days was sentenced to two 12-month suspended sentences, WINA reports. Joao Pedro “JP” Ribeiro, now 18, publicly apologized in a letter written while he was held at Blue Ridge Juvenile Detention Center, and will return to his native Brazil with his parents in August.
Charlottesville native Bellamy Brown, 40, tossed his hat into the ring for City Council, and will run as an independent in November. The former Marine and financial adviser will face independent Paul Long in November, as well as Dems Michael Payne, Lloyd Snook, and Sena Magill.
Bird has suspended its scooter service for the summer. One stranded user posted a Twitter response from Bird Support that said the scooters were withdrawn at the request of the city. However, the city says Bird cleared out for the summer because its numbers weren’t high enough.
A tractor trailer carrying household goods burst into flames June 29, closing westbound I-64 near Crozet for hours, and stranding drivers on the interstate on Afton Mountain. According to the Albemarle fire marshal, the conflagration was sparked by a mechanical issue on the trailer’s tires or brakes.
The home of fourth-president James Madison got 1,024 acres put under conservation easement, joining the 915 acres already under permanent historic and conservation easement in Orange. The Mars family, ranked the third wealthiest in the country, according to Business Insider, provided the cash to record the easements, which will be held by Piedmont Environmental Council.
The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service released its growth projection numbers for 2020, ahead of the U.S. Census. Its assessment: Growth in Virginia is slowing and there will be a lot more old people.
The felony embezzlement charge against former City Council clerk Paige Rice, 37, for an iPhone and Apple Watch valued at more than $500 has many scratching their heads.
“It seems very unusual it got to this point without a resolution,” says attorney Scott Goodman. “It seems like something that could have easily been resolved without a felony indictment.”
A former city employee who spoke only on the condition of anonymity says, “It seems kind of odd to me someone didn’t call her and say, you need to return the phone, rather than sneak around and charge her with a felony. Particularly with her husband working there. It’s very odd.”
Rice is married to Joe Rice, deputy director of communications for the city. Neither responded to C-VILLE’s phone calls.
Rice was a fixture at council meetings for eight years. Last July she was named chief of staff to manage two new employees at the disposal of councilors. The job came with a salary bump from almost $73,000 to $98,000. The larger council staff had been touted by then-mayor Mike Signer, but was criticized by Mayor Nikuyah Walker, who call for a guest audit of the position and its pay.
Rice’s resignation letter came barely two months later on September 12. She took a job at the Focused Ultrasound Foundation as chief of staff.
Attorney Dave Heilberg says embezzlement is a crime of taking property with which one has been entrusted, but Rice’s case “is not as clear cut” as that of an accountant who writes herself a check. What Rice was told about the equipment could be a factor in her defense, and he points out that “technology goes out of date really fast” when assessing its value.
A grand jury from both Albemarle County and Charlottesville—which is also unusual, says Heilberg—indicted Rice June 7. And court records show the date of the offense as October 5, Rice’s official last day.
Goodman says the indictment could have consequences that “could be ugly,” particularly if Rice has information about other people in the city in similar circumstances who didn’t get indicted.
A city release announcing Rice’s resignation said, “The City Council appreciates the service of Ms. Rice over the last eight years and wishes her the best as she moves on to the next exciting phase in her professional life.”
Her next court appearance is August 19.
Quote of the week
“The House [of Delegates] has no prerogative to select its own members.”—Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a U.S. Supreme Court decision that upholds a lower court ruling that Virginia’s legislative districts were racially gerrymandered
In brief
At its June 17 meeting, City Council took steps to remove the birthday of local icon Thomas Jefferson, April 13, as a paid city holiday and to replace it with Liberation and Freedom Day, March 3, which commemorates the arrival of Union forces and the emancipation of the area’s 14,0000 enslaved people. Albemarle will discuss ditching Jefferson’s birthday at its June 19 meeting.
Not much activity has been seen on the ground at the site of the alleged Dewberry Hotel, now celebrating its 10th anniversary as a wraith towering over the Downtown Mall. But the Progress reports some movement on the Dewberry Group website, and renderings of the hotel have migrated from its hospitality to its living section, with a new name: the Laramore.
West Virginia Governor Jim Justice finally paid the $311,000 in back taxes his company owed to Albemarle County, plus the current tax bill, reports the DP’s Allison Wrabel. The county had started the process to sell 52 of Justice’s 55 parcels because of the large arrearage.
Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring spoke out in favor of legalizing recreational marijuana in an op-ed published in both the Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot on Sunday. The General Assembly has yet to pass any measures on the issue, but decriminalization has been an issue generally shot down by Republicans in past sessions.
Central Virginia Electric Cooperative’s subsidiary, doing business as Firefly Fiber Broadband, will receive $28.6 million of FCC funds to provide 1 gigabit internet speeds for over 11,000 homes and businesses in central Virginia over the next 10 years.
Off-year elections traditionally have lower turnout, and this year’s June 11 primary was no exception. With no presidential or gubernatorial candidates at the top of the ballot, many voters chose to sit out the primary, despite several local General Assembly races.
Upon finding the source of the Jackson River, parent to the James River, Earl Swift writes in Journey on the James: Three Weeks through the Heart of Virginia: “From this trickle grows a river that offered sustenance to Indian and early colonist, carried pioneers to new lands of the West, bloomed red with the blood spilled in three wars. No other feature of American topography has so witnessed the country’s history. The continent’s first permanent English settlement, Jamestown, rose on the river’s bank. George Washington explored it, fought on it, and hatched plans for a grand canal system along its shore. On the run from the Redcoats, Thomas Jefferson may have holed up in a cave in its bluffs.”
Thomas Jefferson was not an IPA guy.
We know this thanks to the scholarly efforts of J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham, a Randolph College professor, whose research provides a fascinating account of the work of Jefferson’s enslaved brewer, Peter Hemings, a son of Elizabeth Hemings. Jackson-Beckham’s recently published article, “Missing Ingredients—The (Incomplete) Story of Thomas Jefferson’s Unsung Brewer,” inspired a new offering from Champion Brewing Company, created in collaboration with the professor and media company Good Beer Hunting. Called Intelligence and Diligence—qualities that Jefferson himself attributed to Hemings—the beer will be on tap at an upcoming event at Champion.
Jackson-Beckham’s article evolved from a tale she had often heard repeated during her decade studying the beer industry: America’s founding fathers all brewed their own beer. Given the hard labor of brewing—especially in the colonial era—Jackson-Beckham was skeptical. “The narrative always struck me as implausible,” she says.
In search of the truth, the Lynchburg resident started at Monticello, where, she learned, much of the beer was made by Peter Hemings, whose mother was a sister of Jefferson’s mistress Sally Hemings. As Jackson-Beckham’s article recounts, Hemings learned to brew while he was the principal cook at Jefferson’s estate. In 1821, Governor James Barbour—the namesake of Barboursville—enjoyed the beer so much during a stay at Monticello that he later wrote to Jefferson, asking for the recipe. Jefferson replied that he doubted someone could replicate Hemings’ magic from a recipe alone. The president credited the beer’s quality, in part, to his “servant of great intelligence and diligence, both of which are necessary.”
While Jackson-Beckham failed to discover an actual recipe, her findings were sufficient to create one closely approximating Hemings’ formula—with a modern twist. Jefferson wrote glowingly of Hemings’ brew, except once, when he noted that it had been “spoiled” by “over-hopping.” Given today’s popularity of aggressively hopped beers, Jackson-Beckham wonders whether Hemings may have been 200 years ahead of his time.
And so, Intelligence and Diligence is an homage to the Hemings beer Jefferson said was spoiled. As Hemings likely would have done, Champion and its brewing collaborators started with wheat and corn (along with a little barley for contemporary tastes). To that, they added a healthy dose of Magnum hops. The result is a hoppy wheat ale, 5.6 percent ABV and 56 IBU. Champion’s lead brewer Josh Skinner describes it as clean, bitter, and effervescent with dominant wheat flavors and subtle corn sweetness.
Champion founder Hunter Smith says he’s honored to be part of a project that celebrates the legacy of one of our area’s earliest brewers. The beer, Smith says, “represents another way Monticello and Charlottesville are making efforts to better understand the past and reconcile that with present realities.”
The Intelligence and Diligence release party takes place at 5pm, February 22, at Champion, 324 Sixth St. SE. The first 50 guests will receive a commemorative glass; copies of Jackson-Beckham’s article, and the author herself will be on hand.
Correction February 14: The original version misidentified Jackson-Beckham as a Randolph-Macon professor instead of Randolph College in Lynchburg where she’s on the faculty.
“It’s okay to be white.”
The sentence that first started popping up on high school and university campuses in November is the same one that was plastered onto dozens of fliers, folded into a neat square, stuffed into a sandwich bag with a rock in it and tossed on the lawns of North Downtown residents last night.
Neighbors on Cargil Lane, Marshall and Hazel streets and Locust and Watson avenues were some of many who awoke to find such a message on April 18.
“I think it’s supposed to be intimidating,” says Gail South, whose husband found their note around 7am. “Why on earth would someone do this?”
But Reverend Phil Woodson says it came as no surprise, because there have been almost 40 overt actions or events involving white supremacists in town since August of last year.
“One of the narratives that people like to think is that on August 12, we were invaded, that people came from somewhere else,” he says. “But the reality is that there’s still a large number of white supremacists who live in and around Charlottesville.”
He points to local cars that have since been spray painted with racial slurs, white supremacists who have interrupted City Council meetings and an enormous Confederate flag recently raised on the side of Interstate 64 in Louisa.
Charlottesville has been the target of racist fliers before, and the Winchester Star reports the KKK distributed 22 similar fliers-in-a-baggie in Frederick County April 8.
Flyering is activity that only takes one person, says Carla Hill at the Center for Extremism.
On Monday morning, Reverend Woodson arrived at the First United Methodist Church to find its nearby telephone poles stapled with similar fliers, and with one caught in the netting of the church’s scaffolding.
This flier was a Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson quote that read, “The time for war has not yet come, but it will come, and that soon; and when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.”
Quotes on fliers stapled to nearby telephone poles were attributed to Charlottesville’s beloved Thomas Jefferson, though Monticello’s website says Plato, Felix Frankfurter and Anton Menger have been credited with the same quote: “There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal men.”
Though members of the First United Methodist Church have been very vocal in their opposition to white supremacy, Woodson says he doesn’t believe the messages were directed toward them.
“I really think it was due to the high traffic that would have been downtown for the Tom Tom Festival,” he says. “Any time there’s going to be a large gathering of people, it presents an opportunity for these white supremacists to spread their discord and hatred.”
He adds that local residents should be aware of what’s happening, and that white supremacy doesn’t always look like a man marching down Market Street with a swastika flag in tow.
“We can’t seem to get the vast majority of the community to understand that this is still happening and it’s going to take every single person to get involved in order to make a difference,” the reverend says.
Woodson nods to the Concert for Charlottesville, the free night of “music and unity” that drew Dave Matthews, Justin Timberlake, Ariana Grande and other stars to town in the wake of August 12.
“How many thousands of people showed up to a Dave Matthews Band concert at the UVA football stadium, and how many of those people are actually engaged in confronting white supremacy?”
Amateur archaeologists had been kneeling in the dirt of the South Yard at James Madison’s Montpelier for hours, painstakingly searching for intact artifacts that could be used in exhibits detailing the lives of the enslaved community that was forced to live and toil there. Among them was Leontyne Peck, who was participating in her first weeklong excavation. Peck thought the experience would enrich her life, but she didn’t expect it to be so personal.
As she carefully dug through the brown soil to unearth connections to the people who had been there before, she discovered a connection to her past—a hand-carved pipe covered in Masonic symbols. Peck has vivid memories of her paternal grandfather, Willie Clay, who grew up in Madison County, Virginia, and who had also been a Mason, smoking a pipe filled with cherry tobacco.
“When I touched the pipe, it was like I was touching my grandfather,” she says. “I actually felt connected with him.”
Peck says she understands why descendants of the enslaved people often don’t feel comfortable visiting sites where slavery was the oppressive foundation upon which the landowner’s prosperity was possible (places like Montpelier, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and James Monroe’s Highland). But for Peck, “I feel like I’m home,” she says. Peck has even earned the nickname “Universal Cousin” from her time spent on digs at Montpelier. The first thing she asks someone when she meets him is, “What is your surname?” From one name, Peck, originally from West Virginia, can trace their shared heritage, her own lineage born from the Clays of Madison County and Orange (her maiden name was Clay), to the enslaved communities at both Montpelier and Monticello.
Since her first dig three years ago, Peck has uncovered a meaningful object each time. Once it was a marble (which she plucked out of the ground after only 10 minutes), and another time a pink crystal, not dissimilar to the one Peck has in her own home, to bring good luck, as part of the African spiritual tradition.
“Finding the crystal was another sign to say, ‘We were here, we brought our traditions with us,’ and they passed the traditions on,” Peck says. “[The crystal says] ‘you can work me, you’re getting my labor to get what you need but you can’t take my spirit, you can’t take my soul. When I have this quiet moment with my spiritual force you can never take that from me.’”
Peck says it’s become somewhat of a joke that she always finds something when she participates in a dig—but it doesn’t surprise her.
“There are certain people walking the earth, and I count myself among them, that the ancestors have said, ‘Tell our story and tell our full story because we weren’t born to work for people day in and day out. Our humanity was taken and it needs to be restored.’ …Every time I go on a dig it’s a spiritual journey for me because I feel as though I’m helping to recover and touch the humanity of the enslaved men and women and children who were there.”
The staff at Montpelier has focused on that holistic narrative with their newest exhibit, “The Mere Distinction of Colour,” which debuted in June. The exhibit was made possible by a $10 million gift in 2014 from philanthropist David Rubenstein, and in 2015 museum staff began meeting with members of the Montpelier enslaved descendant community as well as scholars and museum colleagues who concentrate on African-American history. The main goals that emerged from those workshops were two things that are rarely seen at historical sites: Connect the history of slavery with the present, and illuminate the humanity and stories of the enslaved community.
“If you’re African-American, the legacy of slavery is something you live with every day and your families think that way,” says Giles Morris, Montpelier’s vice president for marketing and communications. “If you’re white, you never think that way; you think it’s a historical thing that happened.”
Divided into two former cellar spaces underneath the main house and continuing into the adjacent South Yard (where dozens of members of the enslaved community lived and worked), the exhibit shines a spotlight on the present-day effects of slavery and racism in its Legacies of Slavery video, the economics of slavery, ways in which protections for slavery were written into the Constitution by its author—Madison—and the fate of the enslaved community at Montpelier, with the stories told by their descendants.
The title of the exhibit centers around a quote from Madison during the Constitutional Convention on June 6, 1787, which is displayed on a pillar at the beginning of the exhibit: “We have seen the mere distinction of colour made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.” In contrast, the adjacent economics of slavery part of the exhibit shows that wealth of the domestic slave trade, including in Virginia, was built on the sale of humans—considered property by their owners—to cotton mill owners in the South. Another interactive exhibit reveals that all states allowed slavery in 1787 at the end of the American Revolution.
The next room walks visitors through debates on slavery during Madison’s time, while another room shows an elevated written Constitution with six sections outlined in red. Each highlighted passage corresponds to a panel in the room that illuminates how that language perpetuated slavery without stating so outright.
“People are interested in James Madison for his role in creating the Constitution, which is our rights, our way of understanding our rights,” Morris says. “…he both personally denied freedom to the enslaved people who lived and worked here but also publicly he compromised over slavery and saw the compromises through—and he had very complex and nuanced and interesting writing about all of that. Instead of it being compartmentalized, having the hero story over here and slavery over here, how do you tell one story about how America got created?”
One hurdle for Montpelier was the lack of documentation surrounding plantation life. Madison’s wife, Dolley, and her son, Payne Todd, then the property’s administrator, sold the property in 1846 to cover debt (many documents vanished with the sale), and Madison’s formal books, which had been transferred to UVA’s Rotunda after his death in 1836, burned in the 1895 fire. And Montpelier staff has been building its history with only eight known last names of members of its enslaved community. Because Montpelier is relatively new in relation to other presidential homes (the Montpelier Foundation was established in 2000 and the Madison house only opened to the public in 2009), and because of the flexibility that comes with less historical documentation, the staff has expanded the definition of its enslaved community to anyone who has connections to the western Orange County area and wants to share their oral history and genealogy. Their contributions are seen most in the second part of the exhibit focused on the lives of the enslaved.
One question that arose during the creation of the exhibit: How do you depict slavery in a non-photographic era? With a primary goal from the descendant community being to illuminate the humanity of their ancestors, staff wanted to be careful not to misappropriate any images. They used photos of enslaved people from the Library of Congress and created a shadow effect around the photo. They then overlaid on top words that could have identified who this person was.
The contemporary look of the panels and the space as a whole was intentional, Morris says. By placing visitors in a context they are familiar with, they are more likely to relate to the members of the enslaved community. On one of the panels, a woman bending over to work in a field is defined as: “I was a mother. I was broken. I was tired. I was a singer. I was a worshiper. I was angry.” But each panel ends with the same line: “I was property.”
“People can’t identify with working 14 hours of back-breaking labor every day, can’t identify with the emotional realities [of slavery],” Morris says. “A lot of the story will never be told and can’t ever be told, and we have to acknowledge it. It has to be in the conversation.”
The next room unpacks further the thought of enslaved people as property, with images of actual ledgers from the household projected onto the wall. The notes, written in loopy scrawl, show meticulous records of everything bought and sold. In one letter, Payne Todd asks for a suit of clothes, and Dolley Madison responds that she’s planning on selling certain people and then he’ll have enough money for his clothes.
A video playing in the next room, Fate in the Balance, illustrates this idea in perhaps the most tangible way. During research for the exhibit, the team at Montpelier discovered the story of the Stewart family, and through oral histories, letters and newspapers were able to trace the stories of Ellen Stewart, her mother, Sukey (Dolley Madison’s ladies maid), and other members of the family. Filmed by Northern Light Productions, the movie was shot in Boston with actors behind a screen. The end result looks like a moving chalk drawing—living history that’s fluid.
The film focuses on the fate of the Stewart family after Madison’s death. His will transferred ownership of the enslaved people (300 total in his lifetime) to his wife, but stated no one should be sold without his or her consent. The film watches as members of the Stewart family are sold to pay debts: first Ellen’s brother, Ben, then her sister, Becca, and finally her mother, Sukey. It details how Paul Jennings, who had been Madison’s servant in the White House, eventually earned his freedom and attempted to help 77 enslaved people, including Ellen, escape.
When Peck first saw the video, which she calls “the most powerful part of the exhibit,” she couldn’t watch it all the way through. When the image of Becca holding her baby, whom she had to leave behind at Montpelier, was shown, Peck was so overwhelmed she had to leave the room. She eventually returned and cried through the rest of the film, because “that is the essence of what the exhibit is trying to teach people, about the humanity of the people who were there.”
Margaret Jordan, a board member at Montpelier who lives in Dallas, is a descendant of Jennings and says she feels lucky that her family knows not only the history of how they are related to Jennings, but who he was as a person. For the exhibit, Jordan was filmed for one of the multimedia stations in which descendants and historians discuss topics around slavery. She says the interview caused her to reflect on something she hadn’t put into words: what slavery means to her.
“The world has had slaves for many centuries, but they’ve never had chattel slavery like America has where it was such a dehumanization, a deliberate institutional strategy and attempt to dehumanize an individual and make them into a piece of nothing, something to be bought and sold and take away someone’s complete dignity and not use their last names,” she says. “When I really stopped and dealt with that it’s more than sobering.”
Jordan read the convocation at the opening of the exhibit last June and has spoken at several events at Montpelier throughout the years. She says the first time she visited the exhibit she couldn’t make it through the entire thing because it’s so emotionally draining, but she calls the exhibit “important” and says she always reads something new each time.
“I feel like I’m on hallowed ground when I’m at Montpelier because I know there were hundreds of people who lived there and we know the names of some proportion of them but not all of them, and you feel them looking down saying, ‘Continue to make us be real to people: We lived here, we worked here, we were a part of this, and we suffered here. It’s really important that it be understood that we existed.’”
In mid-February, Montpelier staff, in conjunction with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, organized a national summit on teaching slavery. The goal? Create a universal rubric that could be used in schools and at historic institutions. Fifty scholars, museum interpreters from around the country (including representatives of Monticello and Highland) and descendants of the enslaved community convened for a weekend-long series of workshops and discussions, all aimed at creating the framework for teaching the history of slavery that could become a national model. The goal is to roll out out the rubric in June.
“We had a shared version that historic sites could play a leading role, not just a role, in how the nation comes to understand American slavery,” says Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at Ohio State University.
Jeffries can be heard speaking in the Legacies of Slavery video about the “Disney version” of history he often sees his students bring into the classroom, and myths associated with that.
He was conflicted when Montpelier first asked him to contribute to the exhibit in late 2016. His historian side wanted to jump at the chance to be involved, but he says the African-American in him made him hesitate. He wasn’t sure he wanted to be affiliated with an institution that had fostered slavery. But Jeffries says from his first weekend on the property, when he saw the majority of work that had been done on the exhibit, it was clear that they “got it.”
“Slavery is bound by time but its legacy isn’t,” he says. “Slavery was an economic system that at its core was designed to extract labor at its cheapest possible cost, and once slavery ends the same impulse that drove slavery continues forward, justified by this belief in white supremacy so that everything that we see afterward in terms of race relations, the African-American condition to the development of America is tied to these implications of what slavery was. The things we see today are informed very much so by what happened in the past.”
Jeffries studied history, and specifically African-American history, as a way to explain what he saw growing up in Brooklyn. Riding the subway in a big city was an easy way to see that segregation still existed, and Jeffries was dissatisfied with the explanations he learned in school. And he says lack of education of American history is a growing issue, with an increasing emphasis on STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education. He points to a study released in January from the Southern Poverty Law Center, “Teaching the Hard History of American Slavery,” for which he served as chairman of the advisory committee. It surveyed high school seniors and social studies teachers, and analyzed state content standards and 10 popular history textbooks. The results? Only 8 percent of high school seniors could identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War; just 44 percent correctly answered that slavery was legal in every colony during the American Revolution. Going forward, Jeffries says it is even more important for historic sites to give detailed and complete history lessons.
“Part of the challenge for places like Montpelier is not only to tell an accurate story but also to educate—re-educate people because they aren’t coming in as blank slates,” Jeffries says. “They’re coming with a version of slavery and the role of enslaved people in that story that’s very often just wrong.”
Peck, who also attended the summit, has a term for what she believes should be a straightforward discussion of our American history, including its contentious past: “straight, no chaser.” She says slavery is a collective open, gaping wound for all people, the medicine for which is changing education curriculums from kindergarten to post-secondary institutions, as well as having people continue to educate their families. While in West Virginia, she led a Saturday morning group for white and black children called Club Noir in which they discussed African-American history and culture and took field trips.
“The important thing is that it’s consistent and not just during Black History Month,” Peck says. “Slavery is an extremely heavy topic but it has to be discussed.”
Kat Imhoff came on board as president and CEO of Montpelier five and a half years ago with the vision of telling a more complete American story. She says the local events of August 12 “stiffened her backbone” in providing a 360-degree view of our past.
“I believe that we are constantly rediscovering ourselves and our history,” says Imhoff. “When people treat history as something dull and boring I think you have no idea it’s actually incredibly radical. When you are willing to look under the covers and look at the complexity, and I for one believe Americans can deal with complex stories, it makes our founding very rich, but it also has reverberations about what we do and [how we] think and act today. And for us, that’s what’s so important: We want to link the past and present in order to inform our actions today and make the world a better place.”
Next year marks the 400th anniversary of the first documented slaves from Africa arriving in America at Point Comfort, Virginia. Peck hopes to be there to honor her ancestors, to honor the place where their feet first touched American soil.
“When you’re sitting around face to face you understand we want the same thing: You want your child to be happy, I want my child to be happy,” Peck says. “People want safety, family preservation, want to have fun, good careers. Then, when we dissect how come certain people have privileges and others don’t, that’s what we have to look at as a society. Make it a society that’s fair to all citizens, everyone.”
James Monroe’s Highland recently announced its partnership with ARtGlass to become the first historic site in the United States to offer augmented reality tours using smart glasses designed by Epson. In the planning process for more than a year, the tour includes 11 stops for the viewer in which he is guided to specific points around the property at which images, videos, 3-D reconstructions and conversations between animated characters appear through the glasses, projected onto the Highland landscape. The experience provides the visitor with a more immersive experience, and delivers content in a new
way, says Sara Bon-Harper, Highland’s executive director.
“[The tour content is about] diversity of perspective, the connection with the larger threads of U.S. history and trying to engage the audience in a way that they couldn’t otherwise,” Bon-Harper says.
The AR tours are in a beta testing phase right now, and staff is making changes and updating content based on feedback from visitors.