The big house as home: roots tourism and slavery in the USA

390 Int. J. Tourism Anthropology, Vol. 6, No. 4, 2018 The big house as home: roots tourism and slavery in the USA Jodi Skipper* and Suzanne Renee Davidson Sociology and Anthropology, The University of Mississippi, 510 Lamar Hall, University, Mississippi, USA Email: jskippe1@olemiss.edu Email: srdavids@go.olemiss.edu *Corresponding author Abstract: The dominant discourse preferences the experiences of African Americans who take trips to sites linked to slavery outside of the USA. This paper expands research on roots tourism, by centring the experiences of those who travel to slavery-related sites in the USA. Documenting the case of the Behind the Big House Tour as a response to the Annual Pilgrimage Tour of Historic Homes and Churches in Holly Springs, Mississippi, this study examines evidence for African diasporic roots tourists who acknowledge sites at which their ancestors were enslaved as home sites. Results suggest that this level of acceptance occurs when African Americans come to feel a sense of belonging. The study identifies two general conditions needed to facilitate this process: access to slavery-related sites encouraged by historic site owners or managers and reunion with enslaved ancestors and descendants of those who historically lived and worked at slavery-related sites. Keywords: pilgrimage; diaspora tourism; personal heritage tourism; dissonant heritage; contested sites; legacy tourism; roots tourism; sites of memory; identity; race relations; African Americans; USA. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Skipper, J. and Davidson, S.R. (2018) ‘The big house as home: roots tourism and slavery in the USA’, Int. J. Tourism Anthropology, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp.390–410. Biographical notes: Jodi Skipper is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, where she explores the politics of tourism in the southern USA and cultural representations of African American heritage. Prior to joining the faculty there in 2011, she was a Watson-Brown Postdoctoral Fellow with the University of South Carolina Institute for Southern Studies. She is a graduate of Grambling State University (BA, History), the Florida State University (MA, Anthropology), and the University of Texas at Austin (PhD, Anthropology). Suzanne Renee Davidson is a graduate student in Anthropology at the University of Mississippi, where she studies African diaspora heritage tourists and sites of slavery in the southern USA. She received her BA degree in Sociology from Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kansas, with concentrations in Sociology and Anthropology, and certificates in Cultural Anthropology and Globalization. She was a Business Management professional, prior to beginning a career in the social sciences. Copyright © 2018 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. The big house as home 391 “To fight this new sadness, I absorbed as much of the sun for them, as I could and a new sense of pride consumed me. Pride in the knowledge that by this hour they would have done more work than most have done in a full day. Pride in this beautiful place that they built with their bare hands, bare backs and bare feet. Pride in their skill as chefs and craftsmen and weavers and joiners. Pride that through it all they worked. Through it all they lived. I live because they lived…Their names must never be forgotten.” (Burns, 2015) 1 Introduction The study of African Americans’ journeys to slavery-related sites in West Africa (Bellagamba, 2009; Benton and Shabazz, 2009; Bruner, 1996, 2004; Essah, 2001; Holsey, 2008; Mensah, 2015; Pierre, 2013) and their search for African roots in other transatlantic regions such as Brazil (Pinho, 2008) is of continuing interest to researchers of tourism and anthropology. Yet, the dominant discourse preferences the experiences of African Americans who take trips to sites linked to slavery outside of the USA. Those who choose to visit sites in the USA may find that those sites tend to ignore or minimise slavery during their tours. When slavery is mentioned, it is often done so tangentially and with the centrality of slave labour to the plantation system being obscured and those enslaved remaining the excluded other (Alderman, 2013; Alderman et al., 2016; Butler, 2001; Eichstedt and Small, 2002; Jackson, 2009a, 2012). Scholars have made some progress responding to the traditional hegemonic roles played by slavery-related heritage sites, yet less attention has been paid to how audiences make sense of these contested sites [Buzinde, 2007; Buzinde and Santos, 2008; Buzinde and Santos, (2009), p.441, citing Alderman and Modlin (2008); Dann and Seaton, 2001]. Considering the paucity of slavery-related sites attempting to disrupt traditional hegemonic roles, even less is known about audience responses to such counter-narrative spaces. The Behind the Big House Tour, which shifts the orientation of antebellum slavery tours from master-occupied big houses to ‘back of the big house’ (Vlach, 1993) structures, uniquely presents an opportunity to understand audience engagements with a tourism program developed solely with the experiences of enslaved persons in mind1. Do historic site interpretations like this facilitate reconciliatory relationships between descendants of enslaved populations and the descendants of their enslavers? What does it take for African American tourists to come to experience these sites as ancestral homesteads? For some these sites are places to be avoided, yet for others this form of tourism can help bridge the ruptures of the past in the present. This article is in conversation with scholarly work on subjugated knowledge and African American communities (Collins, 2000; Jackson, 2011, 2012), specifically relating to the interpretation of history in an African American context (Auslander, 2011; Battle-Baptiste, 2011; Jackson, 2012; Rose, 2016) at difficult heritage sites (Alderman, 2010; Brown, 2000; Jackson, 2012; Logan and Reeves, 2009; Rose, 2016; Sather-Wagstaff, 2015; Shackel, 2003). It acts on Jackson’s (2012, p.86) suggestion that the ‘knowledge of descendants of enslaved communities’ be an integral part of the heritage tourism process, by privileging those subjugated knowledge as data. What can we learn from them and how ‘can their knowledge and lived experiences shape our thinking’ [Jackson, (2011), p.448]? What meanings and values do those visitors give to slavery-related sites, those to which they have a genealogical connection as well as those 392 J. Skipper and S.R. Davidson through which they have come to develop a form of fictive kinship? Why do other African Americans continue to distance themselves from these sites? This study answers these questions through the case of the Behind the Big House Tour (hereafter, ‘Behind the Big House’) a slave dwelling interpretation program in Holly Springs, Mississippi, which developed as a counter-narrative to the Annual Pilgrimage Tour of Historic Homes and Churches in the same city. Through interviews with African Americans who have visited Burton Place, a site on the tour, we closely examine what motivates some to connect to what Tillet (2012, p.5) refers to as ‘sites of slavery’. Our analysis is supplemented with encounters recorded by Joseph McGill Jr., founder of the Slave Dwelling Project, who has participated as a Behind the Big House docent since the program’s inception. The conclusion reached is that these roots tourists progress through three general stages: 1 access to slavery-related sites encouraged by historic site owners or managers 2 reunion with enslaved ancestors and with descendant communities of those who lived and worked at slavery-related sites 3 acknowledgement of plantation sites as ancestral homes. 1.1 The Annual Pilgrimage Tour of Historic Homes and Churches Behind the Big House is a non-profit slave dwelling interpretation program in Holly Springs, located in the North Mississippi Hill Country, just outside of the Mississippi Delta. The city developed through antebellum cotton plantations, which depended on slave labour. Holly Springs is in Marshall County, which, by 1836, was an antebellum cultural and economic hub and, by 1850, the largest cotton producer in the state. For over eighty years, the Holly Springs Garden Club’s ‘Annual Pilgrimage Tour of Historic Homes and Churches’ (hereafter, the ‘Pilgrimage’) has interpreted the city’s antebellum period through the structural grandeur and fine furnishings of those mansions once owned by white elites who relied on black slave labour to maintain those homes. This Pilgrimage stems from one founded by the Natchez, Mississippi Garden Club in 1932, as a month-long spring event, which opened Natchez’s ‘unsurpassed collection of privately owned antebellum mansions to paying tourists’ [Davis, (2000), p.52]. After several Holly Springs Garden Club members visited the Natchez Pilgrimage in 1936, they hosted a tour of historic sites as part of the city’s centennial event that October. The second house tour in Holly Springs, the Pilgrimage, began in April of 1938 (McAlexander, 2000). The pilgrimage exemplified what Charles Reagan Wilson identifies as a ‘southern civil religion’, [Bellah, (1980), p.238; see also (1967) and Davis (2000)] which materialised out of white southerners’ “spiritual and psychological need … to reaffirm their identity” [Wilson, (1980), p.238] with romantic and nostalgic, yet mythic representations of southern plantation life, after defeat in the US Civil War [Wilson, 1980; see also Shackel, (2003), pp.21–50, pp.175–179]. The journey helps its pilgrims to ‘seek a relationship’, [Morinis, (1992), p.20] with and move closer to what Hannaford and Newton (2008) call ‘the centre’ [see also Cohen (1992) and Haynes (1998)] of this lost cause ideal, with dedicated slaves, benevolent masters and glorified confederate war heroes. ‘One might interpret the ceremonious exaltation of [this] mythic past as the collective yearning to inhabit it, to turn back the calendar far enough to escape the feeling The big house as home 393 of loss, which was heightened by conditions breeding runaway social change: the Great Depression, World War II and later the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement’ [Davis, (2000), pp.52–53]. ‘This idea informs consideration of pilgrimage as travel to and communion with, a site that embodies and makes manifest the religious, cultural or personal values of the individual’ [Lloyd, (2015), p.28, citing Digance (2006); Hyde and Harman, 2011]; in this case, nostalgia for the South’s loss in the Civil War and the institution of slavery that supported it. This paper does not examine whether contemporary pilgrims to Holly Springs and Natchez continue ‘to embody [this] valued ideal’ [Morinis, (1992), p.4] yet both pilgrimages have acquired reputations for not only being tourist sites where slavery heritage is excluded but contested sites [see Davis (2000) and Skipper (2016)], in which ‘different interpretations and different interests are in competition’ [Bruner, (2004), p.137]. The continued silencing of the experiences of the enslaved indicate that the interpretation of the homes on tour ‘enshrine’ the same ‘cultural ideals’ [Morinis, (1992), p.5] as the Pilgrimage’s founders in the 1930s intended. These pilgrimages were not established as national ‘sites of memory’ (Nora, 1989), but regional ones intended to transmit a lost cause ideology to present and future southern generations (Cox, 2003). 1.2 Behind the big house Many Mississippi communities are historically rooted in the legacy of slavery and the state’s economic dependency on cotton, yet tourism promoters neglect ‘to fully embrace and critique the important role Mississippi played in benefiting from the institution’ [King, (2011), p.172]. Mississippi is not alone in its neglect. Few historic site tours in the USA are developed with the explicit goal of interpreting slavery. Thus, Behind the Big House is not only an anomaly in Mississippi, but in the broader USA. When Jenifer Eggleston, a National Parks Service grants manager and her husband Chelius Carter, a restoration architect, settled in Holly Springs in 2008, they noticed the town homes, which developed out of the 1850s-cotton boom and what Eggleston describes as other ‘tangible links to the legacy of slavery’, kitchen/quarters which had been readapted for reuse for nearly 150 years. Behind the Big House began in 2012 after Carter and Eggleston, also historic property owners, discovered that one of the structures on their property was a former slave dwelling. To Eggleston (2012), ‘it was clear that a significant part of the historic narrative was missing. While a number of the silent witnesses – the structures directly related to the slaves’ accommodations were extant – the stories of the people who lived and used these buildings was largely being forgotten’. To remedy these silences, Carter and Eggleston started Behind the Big House as a counter-narrative to the Pilgrimage. Holly Springs’ current social realities largely reflect that of its antebellum history, with ‘a stark, persistent and entrenched racial divide between…black and white residents’ [Barton and Leonard, (2010), p.305]. Although Carter and Eggleston are white, their relationship to an all-white garden club in a city with a ‘pervasive effect of race on social structure and social interaction [that is] hard to overestimate’ [Barton and Leonard, (2010), p.305] was a strained one. Per Carter: “the program was proposed to the Holly Springs Garden Club as an opportunity to do what other similar pilgrimages across the South had not done – to tell a more complete story of these antebellum homes. Holly Springs, Mississippi is well known [for] its antebellum architecture and this program offers the 394 J. Skipper and S.R. Davidson opportunity to give the visiting public a more accurate and inclusive historic narrative of our town by giving its enslaved population a rightful place in that narrative.” (Carter, 2012) The Pilgrimage is the city’s main tourist attraction and the Garden Club’s major fundraiser. The interpretation of enslaved persons’ homes, along with the historic ‘big houses’, was just too much for some traditionalists to bear. The Garden Club did not overtly sabotage the program, but failed to nurture it. Carter and Eggleston, who researched much of the historical information used for the site interpretations, manage the program with the help of Preserve Marshall County and Holly Springs, Inc., a non-profit historic preservation organisation formed in 2005. Like the Pilgrimage, a few properties are selected for interpretation each year. In the past few years, three home sites have been on display during Behind the Big House: the Hugh Craft House, which includes an 1850s Greek revival style structure; Burton Place, which includes an 1848 brick Federal-style house and Magnolias, an 1853 Gothic revival house featured in the 1999 film Cookie’s Fortune. Each site includes kitchen/quarter structures. The year before Carter and Eggleston developed their pilot program, they discovered that the freestanding kitchen structure on their Craft house property likely housed the Craft family’s enslaved population. The structure includes a cellar, likely for smoking meat; a main floor, with a kitchen and two separate living spaces; and a loft, which might have been a sleeping quarters for enslaved children. David Person, owner of Burton Place, is a retired attorney who became a part of the Holly Springs community after retiring there in 2002. Person has ancestral ties to the city of Holly Springs, but no ancestral connection to Burton Place. The Burton Place property is located just around the corner from the home in which he spent time with relatives as a child. He purchased the three-acre property for restoration and repair after hearing rumours that a developer was going to buy the property to develop condominiums (Koeppel, 2008). The main house on Person’s property was not only a prime candidate for interpretation on the Pilgrimage, but his more inclusive narration of its dependent kitchen/quarters comparably made his property a candidate for Behind the Big House. The kitchen/quarters are a plainly finished brick building, one room deep and three rooms wide, typical of urban slave quarters in the late antebellum South. In addition to the kitchen, it likely included a laundry room and chambers for enslaved persons who serviced the main house. The quarters at Magnolias are the most hidden in plain sight. Much of the antebellum architectural evidence is obscured by mid-twentieth century renovations. Although this structure accommodated living quarters for enslaved persons and the kitchen for the main house under a single roof, these domestic functions were separated by an open ‘dog-trot’ with two private quarters to the east and the original kitchen to the west. Magnolias is owned by Genevieve Busby, an emergency medical technician and her husband Frank, a firefighter, who hope to deconstruct the property to its original state. Carter, Eggleston, Person and the Busbys all live in the historic properties, at least part-time. Behind the Big House takes place once a year, for a five-day period during the Pilgrimage to make use of an already established tourist audience. In addition to attracting the average Pilgrimage visitor, which Carter describes as ‘older and middle-aged Caucasian, largely retired and middle class,’2 there have also been successful efforts to increase African American visitation in a city in which African Americans represent over 79% of the population. With the help of Linda Turner, a local citizen who facilitates school group visits, by its second year the program had 500 to 600 The big house as home 395 Marshall County students, mostly African American, touring the sites. In 2014, Carter’s program report also cited an increase in visitation from the local African-American community, at large. The Hugh Craft main house is the headquarters for Behind the Big House. School groups are given an orientation on slavery in Marshall County and then proceed to the three slave dwelling sites, each within two blocks of each other. No tour of the main house is given. Other tourists are given program maps and brochures and general tour information. Each quarters’ site includes slave census schedules and a visualisation of each property as it might have been in the antebellum period, as sketched by Carter. Each site also has volunteer guides who interpret the spaces occupied by the enslaved community and answer visitor questions. Surveys are given to assess visitor experiences. Skipper’s introduction to Behind the Big House began in April of 2012. While teaching a graduate course on heritage tourism in the southern USA, she learned that a friend, Joseph McGill Jr., then a program coordinator for the National Trust for Historic Preservation (hereafter, ‘National Trust’) and Civil War re-enactor, was staying overnight in slave cabins in Holly Springs. Two years earlier, she met McGill in Anderson, South Carolina just before he spent the night in former slave dwellings there. These stays were part of his Slave Dwelling Project, an effort to draw attention to the structures’ historic preservation. McGill, a friend of Eggleston, was invited to help publicise the Behind the Big House pilot program. McGill put Skipper in touch with Carter and Eggleston who agreed to collaborate with her on a ‘Race and Tourism in the Modern South’ teachers’ workshop, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The subsequent year, she integrated Behind the Big House as an applied component of her heritage tourism course. She continues to work as a Behind the Big House tour guide and trains students in her heritage tourism and African diaspora courses as tour guides. She also co-managed an archaeology excavation at one of the slave dwelling sites, along with bioarchaeologist Carolyn Freiwald. Davidson, one of Skipper’s anthropology graduate students, began working with Behind the Big House in 2015. The Burton Place property is the topic of Davidson’s thesis research. Mary Burton built the house and its accompanying slave dwellings in 1848. She referred to it as ‘the Burton home’. Per the 1850 US slave census schedule, Burton enslaved eight persons. By 1860, that number had increased to eighty-seven. Eighty likely lived and worked on Burton’s plantation in the county; seven were recorded as living and working at the Burton home in Holly Springs. Mary Burton’s granddaughter, Mary Burton-Tyson, renamed the property Fleur de Lis, after the design on the iron fence that Burton-Tyson and her husband purchased and moved to the property in the 1930s (Long and Ridge, 2006). When David Person learned the property was for sale in 2006, he purchased it and began the restoration process. Person renamed it Burton Place. Shortly thereafter, he began welcoming visitors during the Pilgrimage. He began participating in Behind the Big House its first year. One factor that contributes to the unique environment at Burton Place is that, in addition to preserving the history of the structures recognised as former slave dwellings, Person interprets the ‘big house’ as a former slave dwelling. His narration remains the same for both pilgrimage and Behind the Big House visitors. In choosing to incorporate the lives of all historic people who inhabited this home, he is providing a unique space that enables visitors to understand the complex nature of 396 J. Skipper and S.R. Davidson antebellum life, especially in the relationships and interactions between enslaved persons and the slave-owning family. In 2014, Burton Place began serving as a gathering site for several descendants of those enslaved by Mary M. Burton, after Deborah M. Davis, a genealogist and Illinois native, told Person that her ancestors were once owned by Mary Burton. Proceeding conversations led to Person’s request that Davis’s family members visit Burton Place during their 2014 reunion. As of September 2017, Person’s relationship with these Burton descendants continues. This paper stems from our attempt to understand what happens when African Americans, like Davis, come to experience the sites at which their ancestors were enslaved as ancestral homes. Here we examine what meanings and values those visitors give to these sites. Our analysis is rooted in literature on diasporic roots tourism and how roots tourists imagine ‘home’ at slavery-related sites. 2 Roots tourism and belonging Per Patricia de Santana Pinho (2008, p.2), ‘very little has been written on roots tourism’ and ‘the way racial identities shape and are shaped by tourism’, specifically those of black tourists. Pinho’s work specifically focuses on African-American roots tourists who ‘crisscross the Atlantic hoping to find’ (p.2) connections to other black diasporic groups. Some travel to West African countries as places of origin [see also Bellagamba (2009), Benton and Shabazz (2009), Ebron (2000) and Holsey (2008)], while others seek kinship in parts of Brazil, like Bahia, known for its African cultural survivals, less present in the USA (Pinho, 2008). Pinho geographically frames an Atlantic ‘map of Africanness’, to highlight different places visited by tourists seeking links to diasporic black identities. For Pinho (2008, p.80): “there is a fundamental distinction between the roots tourism developed in the West African countries and the one that is carried out on the “diasporic side” of the Atlantic and that distinction is one that involves, respectively, pain and joy. The experience of visiting the dungeons and the menacing “Doors of No Return” evokes the horrors suffered by the ancestors and many tourists are reported to have wept or screamed to express how deeply devastated they felt when visiting these places. Conversely, being in Brazil produces in them the contentment of connecting with “a culture that was able to survive” and with a people that supposedly managed to “preserve the cultural connections with Africa.” Pinho’s analysis does not incorporate the experiences of African American tourists who attempt to connect to slavery-related sites in the USA. These are not the distant, symbolic homelands3, presented in Pinho’s (2008) or in Leite’s (2005) work, but sites that these tourists’ ancestors are known to have occupied. They are more physically accessible than those sites on Pinho’s ‘map of Africanness’, yet many African Americans keep their distance. In addition to evading heritages that hurt or avoiding shameful pasts (Rose, 2016), some African Americans argue against representations of powerlessness in interpretations of slavery that do not recognise their ancestors’ roles in their own liberation (Alderman, 2010). The big house as home 397 Some descendants of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (TST) avoid visiting slaveryrelated sites on the African continent altogether (Simanowitz, 2014). Others who choose to visit directly engage with emotional trauma and ‘intense feelings of pain and anger’ [Yankholmes and Bob McKercher, (2015), p.234] yet we concur with Tillet (2012) and Marschall (2017) that these emotions may be reconciled by a real or perceived acceptance by their African host communities; the guests are being welcomed ‘back home’4. It is an identity-driven quest for belonging (Marschall, 2017; Pinho, 2008; Rose, 1995). For others, ‘sites of memory’ (Nora, 1989) at slave forts like those at Gorée Island, Senegal and Cape Coast, Ghana, also symbolise a ‘history denied to them in the United States [Tillet, (2012), p.96]. African Americans’ search for home outside of the USA indicates that slavery-related sites in the USA are not perceived as sites of ‘safety and refuge’, but as sites of hard work and perhaps physical and sexual abuse, [Rose, (1995), p.90] supportive of slavery heritage tourism’s designation as ‘dark tourism’ by some (Dann and Seaton, 2001; Lelo and Jamal, 2013; Mowatt and Chancellor, 2011). The recognition that the TST existed at sites on the African Atlantic coast, at least gives some roots tourists validation that historic site managers are recognising their ancestors’ lives as significant (Rose, 2016). As a result, diasporic roots tourists leave the broader USA to find a place at which to belong, based on their historical and contemporary ambiguity as citizens in the USA, what Tillet (2012, p.3) refers to as ‘civic estrangement’. Slavery-related sites in the USA may cause them to face unaddressed trauma [see Bindas (2010) and Eyerman (2001)], without the stability of a welcoming space. They may feel a sense of neglect, or homelessness, which deprives some of their ability to connect to these sites on emotional levels. Our observations indicate that this ‘civic alienation’ can shift to a ‘civic belonging’ (Tillet, 2012) for some African American roots tourists who come to accept slavery-related sites in the USA as ancestral homesteads. Our evidence shows that this process requires: 1 knowledge of and access to slavery-related sites 2 reunion with enslaved and enslaver ancestors and their descendant communities to acknowledge plantation and other slavery-related sites as home sites. 3 Research method The central grounds for our arguments derive from participant observation research by Skipper and Davidson and interviews with key informants by Davidson. The personal experiences of African American Burton family descendants involved in Behind the Big House and African Americans who participate in Joseph McGill’s Slave Dwelling Project, provide the primary data for the study. This data choice is based on the premise ‘that participants own emic descriptions of their experience have the potential to provide a rich source of insight into the meaning of home’, [Lloyd, (2015), p.31] and how they come to define tourist spaces as such. 398 J. Skipper and S.R. Davidson This study includes an analysis of five years of McGill’s blog posts, a descriptive record of his experiences in the Slave Dwelling Project. As a follow-up to his blog posts, Skipper and Davidson interviewed McGill by phone in November of 2016. Skipper began working as a scholar-in-collaboration with the Behind the Big House program in its second year. Since 2012, she has acted as a program guide, as well as trained undergraduate and graduate students as guides. Skipper also joined Gracing the Table (GTT) a local group that utilises historical narratives to inspire trans-racial community dialogue. GTT was formed by David Person and Alisea Williams McLeod, then Chair of Humanities at Rust College, a historically black college in Holly Springs. After the first Behind the Big House program, Person, McLeod and several of McLeod’s students engaged in hours of discussion about issues concerning race in the community and beyond. Person spoke of how he, McLeod and three of her students from Rust College were reluctant to let the dialogue end. As McLeod and her students were leaving Behind the Big House, Person asked, ‘Hey what’s your hurry?’ McLeod turned around and said, ‘Why can’t we just talk?’ What unfolded were several hours of discussion. ‘It was a very frank talk about what words to use … very frank and interesting and engaging and unending. About things like, ‘what does a white person call a person of colour? These are things, you know, how do you talk about things like this? So, that’s how it started’ (Davidson interview with Person, November 2016). The encouragement of dialogue is one step that scholars have identified as a necessary component of racial reconciliation and healing (Berlin, 2004; Bindas, 2010; Jackson, 2012; Skipper, 2016). ‘The confluence of the history of slavery and the politics of race…suggests that slavery has become a language, a way to talk about race in a society in which race is difficult to discuss’ (Berlin, 2004). GTT engages this difficult dialogue as an integral part of their programming. Its goal of healing the impacts of slavery through dialogue and open communication extends to an annual libation ceremony to honour those who were enslaved in Holly Springs and volunteer support for Behind the Big House. Skipper (2016) describes GTT’s method as community development through reconciliation tourism, which Barton and Leonard (2010, p.302) define as ‘using tourism as a means of reducing conflicts and constructing linkages between groups’. Skipper’s observations are based on her various collaborative roles over a five-year period, including membership in GTT. Davidson volunteered as a docent during the second Burton Family Reunion in September of 2015. She also volunteered as a docent at Burton Place during the 2016 and 2017 Behind the Big House programs. She began interviewing Burton family descendants shortly after the reunion in 2015. The personal experiences of the descendants of those enslaved by Mary Burton come from eight semi-structured interviews and several informal conversations with six people. Davidson also interviewed David Person. Interviews included questions about which historic sites participants felt a connection to, any specific memories they had regarding those sites, background information about where they grew up, what sites they consider ‘home’ and how they make connections to historic sites of memory – for example through genealogical research, existing family ties, oral histories, or connections with friends or co-workers. In addition, all participants were specifically asked about their connection to Burton Place and their involvement with Behind the Big House. The big house as home 4 399 Findings 4.1 Access In April of 2013, Joseph McGill, Jr., gave a talk entitled ‘Behind the Big House: My 41 Nights in Slave Dwellings’, at the University of Mississippi. Skipper had invited McGill to share his experiences staying in the former homes of enslaved persons, in several different regions of the USA. McGill’s quest to publicise the dire conditions of many antebellum slave dwellings began after witnessing their neglect as he worked for the National Trust Southern Office in Charleston, South Carolina. His plan to publicise their restoration needs, by sleeping in them, came from his experiential practice of camping out as a 54th Massachusetts Civil War re-enactor. Skipper admired McGill’s accessible way of highlighting these overlooked structures, while bringing attention to the enslaved communities who lived there. After his tenure with the National Trust, he continued his Slave Dwelling Project, working with public and private historic property owners and other stakeholders, with comparable goals. His overnight stays are often open to local publics and generally include a presentation on his project and invitations from interested persons to stay along for the night. The Slave Dwelling Project began in 2010 and has expanded to include four Slave Dwelling Project conferences. In April of 2011, at a friend’s suggestion, McGill began an online record of his experiences through a blog. After each overnight stay, he also asks that at least one participant record their experiences. McGill’s project blog is one of few descriptive records of Americans in the USA confronting the past in the present at slavery-related sites and, thus, a great lens through which to analyse those experiences from emic perspectives. You will hear some of those voices in the following narratives. Behind the Big House generally runs from Wednesday to Sunday in one week in April, while the Pilgrimage takes place from Friday to Sunday the same week. In April of 2012, McGill recorded his first Behind the Big House program experiences in his blog. McGill stated that on April 13th, ‘a steady flow of people came through the dwelling to hear the interpretive presentation that I gave’ at Burton Place. He expressed some satisfaction that on that Friday participants could not only access the kitchen/quarters, but the mansion built by Mary Burton to get ‘a complete story’. He adds: “as time was winding down, I was feeling a bit dejected because no African Americans had come to the slave dwelling or the big house for that matter. Then it happened. One group of about twenty African Americans came to hear the presentation. The group listened intently and asked lots of questions after the presentation. The group leaders were local but the bulk of the group was from Ohio. The leaders stated that up until this point they never felt welcome at the pilgrimage and were thrilled that this year the Behind the Big House Tour was offered.” (‘Back of the Big House – Slave Dwelling Project a Stop on Holly Springs, MS Pilgrimage Tour’) Behind the Big House and the Pilgrimage tours occur at the same time, with intersecting tourists, yet coexist without collaboration5. This environment is confusing to tourists. Some intentionally tour the slave dwelling sites. Others accidentally tour them and assume that they are part of the Pilgrimage tour. Some tourists gave credit to the Pilgrimage when it was not due. Like other tourists, they assume that Behind the Big House is an intentional part of the Pilgrimage experience. It is not, but their sentiments indicate what we have found to be a typical response from African Americans who have 400 J. Skipper and S.R. Davidson access to and choose to visit these sites. They want to feel welcomed. They want to know that the narratives at slavery-related sites in the USA also include their ancestors’ experiences. One of Skipper’s former students, who is African American and a native of Holly Springs, only became interested in the Pilgrimage after the event seemed accessible. The student shared this sentiment in a written evaluation of student experiences as Behind the Big House program guides: “It was very interesting for me to see that not only were there people of many different racial and ethnic backgrounds attending … I have never attended a Pilgrimage and never thought about it, but being up close too [sic] it was very nice and I do believe that I would do it again. I felt a sense of pride in my town that I usually don’t feel. I enjoyed the tour. I was shocked because I had always seen the pilgrimage happening around Holly Springs, but I never really cared what it was, but I really enjoyed it. I think that this is something that needs to be a little more inclusive. I’m not sure how many people actually would take part in it, but I always found it weird that, the pilgrimage seemed to be majority white, despite the fact that the town is majority black. I don’t think that is a problem because there is a chance that the black population may not want to partake in large numbers, but part of me wonders why I’ve lived in Holly Springs for 21 years and have only now really learned what it was.” (student program evaluations, in Skipper’s possession) The student confuses the Pilgrimage and Behind the Big House, even after Skipper explained the program differences. This is one indication of how conflicted a tourist with no explanation of events could be. Linda Turner, an African American Marshall County resident, visited Behind the Big House the first year, with some scepticism. After meeting McGill and other participants, she better understood the goals of the program. The next year she worked with Carter and Eggleston to increase African American visitation, namely through local school groups and continues to do so. She supported the goals of the program, after she understood its purpose. This is certainly not the case for all African Americans who tour Behind the Big House. In our interview with McGill, he recalled, ‘an African American woman stepped into the space [at] Burton Place and she was alone, so I’m going into why I’m there and she did not want to hear it. She just kind of turned around and walked away’ (telephone interview with Joseph McGill, 17 November 2016). When asked how difficult it is to get some African Americans to set foot on a plantation, McGill explained: “You know, “why look at that wound?” “Let sleeping dogs lie.” … I think a lot of it also goes back to: we have a segment of our population that lived during a time of segregation when we weren’t invited to these places. There was also a point in our history that these places like this weren’t as forthcoming in telling our part of the story, or if they did tell it, they either sugar-coated it, or watered it down, or made our ancestors seem happy to be in that situation. Some of our people of today aren’t aware that there are those places like Montpelier [Orange, Virginia] or Monticello [Charlottesville, Virginia] or [Historic] Brattonsville [McConnells, South Carolina], that’s out there putting forth that extra effort. You know, to tell the whole story, because of what they’ve been accustomed to for so long.” (telephone interview with Joseph McGill, 17 November 2016) McGill adds that part of what the Slave Dwelling Project tries to do is make that hesitant population aware that there are historic sites accessible and welcoming to them. He has The big house as home 401 had some success. In his blog post, ‘The Secretary of the Interior Standards and the Pursuit of Happiness’, he gives an example of two sisters, descendants of a woman enslaved at Bacon’s Castle in Surry County, Virginia, who initially wanted no involvement with the site. After an introduction to the Slave Dwelling Project and conversations with others participating in an overnight stay, they vowed to make sure that the experiences of the enslaved would continue to be told at the site. The sisters later organised a family reunion there. 4.2 Reunion with the site and its people In 2014, Deborah M. Davis knocked on the front door at Burton Place and began a conversation with owner, David Person. She told him that her ancestor was owned by Mary Burton who developed the estate at the Burton Place. Proceeding conversations led to Person’s request that the family members visit Burton Place during their 2014 reunion. The reunion participants vowed to continue a collaborative relationship with GTT, which organised the reunion, and returned for another visit to the site during their family reunion in 2015. That collaboration extended to Davis’s return as a tour guide for the 2015 and 2016 Behind the Big House programs. For the first four years of the program, only the kitchen and what are interpreted as domestic servants’6 chambers at Burton Place were open to tourists. The third room, interpreted as a laundry room, was closed off until Person opened it up after renovations in 2016. That year, Davis shared family documents with Person for display in the laundry room space. She filled in the gap with names on the 1860 Slave Census Schedule, which only recorded the age, sex and colour of enslaved persons and spent several hours helping with interpretations at the site. That first reunion, 47 family members visited the property, interpreted by GTT members, including Skipper. They were given detailed tours of the main house and kitchen/quarters. Overall, they responded positively to the tour, with emotions ranging from laughter to tears. At that initial visit, David Person not only made the property accessible to descendants of those enslaved at Burton Place, he repeatedly welcomed them home. McGill’s blog reveals comparable experiences at other sites, like Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s former estate7. Prinny Anderson is a white descendant of the Randolph-Jefferson families of Virginia, and one of Joseph’s McGill’s most dedicated supporters. In ‘Sleeping in My Ancestors’ Home’, a guest post on McGill’s blog, Anderson (2015) states: “since I was about 10 years old, I have known that my many-branched Virginia family included as many African Americans as European Americans, given the realities of slaveholding and plantation life. At age 10, I also had a dream of bringing all of my family together. But I knew these insights and dreams would horrify my Randolph grandmother, so they stayed hidden for many years. However, in opposition to both our immediate family members and our extended group of relatives, a handful of the European American RandolphJefferson descendants took steps to align themselves with their kin, the African American Hemings-Woodson-Jeffersons. Initially, we joined them at the family reunions they invited us to attend. After getting better acquainted, we formed a multi-family committee and created the Monticello Community Gathering, held on the mountaintop outside Charlottesville. It was attended by 200 African American descendants and 50 European Americans.” 402 J. Skipper and S.R. Davidson Anderson (2015) adds that on the night of their second gathering, ‘the president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, greeted all of us with ‘welcome home, please be welcome home’. Through site access and hospitality displayed by stewards of the site, the descendants of the enslaved and enslavers8 at Monticello were reunited with an ancestral homestead. We argue that comparable conditions made the Burton Family Reunion possible. In welcoming Burton family members, Person opened a space for descendants of the enslaved community to honour and remember their ancestors. African American Burton family members have not only actively walked through that space, but engaged it as a portal to the past and as a space for reflection in the present. What we found most interesting is that reunion with Burton Place, for Davis, began even before she knocked on Person’s door. Davis shared with Skipper that even before she knew that her ancestors were enslaved by Mary Burton, she felt a special connection to Burton Place. She was drawn to the property and was not clear why. That inexplicable, emotive response gave her the fortitude to knock on Person’s door. For African American descendants of enslaved persons, reunion with these spaces can manifest itself in diverse ways, specifically as ‘embodied experiences’ [Leite, (2005), p.283). One of Davidson’s interviewees expressed that when she walked upon the ground at Burton Place she ‘could feel something. Just like you want to cry, you know? You had not seen nothing yet, but just something about the place. I know there was some connection there. And at the end, you want to cry when you come through all that’. Interviewed Burton Family Reunion participants experienced Burton Place as a site of memory in which they can honour and remember their ancestors. One family member wrote in her questionnaire that ‘memories of the past returned’. Family members expressed a wide range of emotions about Burton Place, including sadness, admiration and reverence. One family member wrote, ‘I felt very appreciative of all the conveniences that I have today. My heart aches to see the living conditions and tools used to accomplish so much’. He was also amazed at the creativity, intelligence and skilfulness of his enslaved ancestors. Four respondents expressed feelings of sadness after experiencing the slave dwellings and two others expressed feelings of gratitude for not having had to experience what their ancestors had. African American connections to these sites seem to transcend the ‘pain and joy’ binary that Pinho (2008) presents for continental African sites and those on the ‘diasporic side’ (meaning Brazil), respectively. Roots tourists’ emotions on the USA ‘diasporic side’ are widespread, ranging from sadness to admiration, reverence, appreciation and amazement. Through pain, for some roots tourists these sites can evoke a sense of pride. As a guest writer on McGill’s blog, April Burns a descendant of the Gillette family once owned by Thomas and Martha Jefferson, shared that she initially had few expectations prior to sleeping in a slave dwelling at Monticello. “I would not dream what they might have dreamed, or feel what they might have felt, because I knew that I would get up in the morning to return to my cozy bed. I did believe that I would be aggravated from lying awake in a dark room unable to sleep on the cold muddy floor. I suspected that I might wake up the next morning very angry and want to hit my white boyfriend. I did not expect to connect with my ancestors and those, who shared my experience on a personal level. Most of all, I knew there would be no laughter. But laughter came. It came with tears. It came with like stories shared during a bonfire. It came with the aching bones of the women, who shared my dwelling. Strangers connected by a common ancestry that of our kinship formed on this mountain[top]. Women, who believed we would never be able to rise from the The big house as home 403 damp cold cement floor, but we received the strength of our ancestors, who rose each morning to begin a new day of work. Some with wounds from yesterday’s beating. Some with feet still swollen from shackles. As the night progressed their strength consumed me. How could they survive this? How could they endure a second night? As the sun rose, we, the dwellers shared in its beauty and realised we had taken a small journey with them. This was the end of our part. It would end quickly while theirs would continue for a lifetime. A lifetime that would end in the small graveyard down the hill with no marker to honor them.” Burns’ account is a clear representation of embodied memories, which Leite frames as ‘key common features in the experience of diasporic tourism as an identity practice’ (2005, pp.276–277). Yankholmes (2017, pp.225–226) describes these ‘slave memories’ as a means through which members of the African diaspora can re-establish a collective identity with their ancestors. Burns expected to be bothered by the known, her white boyfriend and a cold muddy floor, but the unexpected was most affective. She laughed and cried in kinship with other women in the dwelling. She ‘remembered’ her ancestors rising for the workday and ‘saw’ their wounds and swollen feet. She experienced their strength and, thus, made it through the night. Burns’ experience is comparable to the emotional reactions of roots tourists to African slave dungeons described by Holsey (2008, p.198) who suggests ‘that they are recalling crucial yet exceedingly painful collective memories that are already deeply engrained in their historical imaginations’ and to those described by Ebron (1999, p.923) as having ‘everything to do with the ways people understood their own relationships to self and community’. For roots tourists to Africa, this binding of memory and history is an imagined middle passage (Ebron, 1999); for Burns it is an imagined daily life for enslaved people on Jefferson’s plantation estate. Per McGill, unique to experiences of some descendants of Monticello, is that they can be assigned to sleep in original or recreated spaces in which their ancestors worked or lived, ‘because [site managers] have such a powerful research capability’ (interview with Joseph McGill, The Slave Dwelling Project, 17 November 2016). Site managers ‘give those descendants the opportunity to sleep in that space’ and other guests yield to that system. This is certainly not the norm for roots tourists. The spaces in which many of their ancestors lived are unknown or no longer exist. ‘The sites these tourists visit function as metonyms, mnemonic fragments … of the entire lost life-world’ [Leite, (2005), p.282] of their ancestors. Slavery-related sites are the next best thing and portals through which they can connect with enslaved ancestors. Some African American Behind the Big House visitors blatantly take on a fictive kinship to those who were enslaved on the properties, with responses such as ‘I cannot believe what was done to us’. Skipper (2016) describes an example of an African American Behind the Big House volunteer, so emotionally affected by her first time entering Burton Place that she fainted. For roots tourists such as these, the specific site histories do not seem to matter. For some, biological kinships with site-related descendants, both black and white, are also critical to this reunion process. McGill has participated in at least seven reunions of African American descendants in the past six years, including the Campbell family reunion at the Laurelwood Plantation in Eastover, South Carolina discussed in a blog post on August 29th of 2013 (McGill, 2013). In addition, he reports reunions between black and white descendants of plantation-owning families and their enslaved persons at McCollum Farm in rural Rockingham County, North Carolina (McGill, 2014) and at former USA President James Madison’s Montpelier, which hosted the Early Family 404 J. Skipper and S.R. Davidson Reunion of black and white descendants brought together through genetic genealogy evidence (McGill, 2016). The previously mentioned Monticello reunion is another example. These are few in number, but likely indicate increases in numbers compared to those just one generation ago9. They also do not represent the number of ‘interracial’ reunions, across the USA, made possible by more recent genetic genealogy evidence. Davidson’s interviewees, who are descendants of those enslaved by Mary Burton, have all expressed interests in participating in a gathering that includes both black and white descendants of Mary Burton. That reunion has not happened yet and David Person is hoping to facilitate that process through Gracing the Table. 4.3 Acknowledgement as a ‘home’ site One of Davidson’s interviewees who grew up in Holly Springs never knew that she had a connection to Burton Place until a cousin traced their ancestry back to someone who had been enslaved by Mary Burton. She said: I thought [Burton Place] was, it was something to see. I was born there [in Holly Springs], I grew up there and I did not know anything about it.” The same descendant spoke of Holly Springs as being where her roots are and that’s what makes it ‘home’. When asked whether her family has a homestead, or a place that they routinely gather together, she responded ‘We found out about the Burton home and I feel like that might be our homestead. We do not have [current] connections there, you know, but I feel like that might be our home. Wouldn’t you think?’ The interviewee’s response asserts an identity with Burton Place, shifting from no connection to an accepted ancestral home. It is not uncommon for African Americans to have ancestral homesteads in the southern USA – many related to properties acquired by ancestors in the late-19th century. In addition to Holly Springs, more broadly and Burton Place, more specifically, Burton family descendants considered Adolphus Chapel Christian Methodist Episcopal Church and its adjacent cemetery at which some of their ancestors are buried, as ‘home’ sites. Three family members also mentioned childhood homes that were near Adolphus Chapel as their ‘home’. For others, ‘home’ means the villages, towns and cities occupied prior to migrations out of the South. Holly Springs is one of those places for those like Davis, who now live in states in the Midwest or other places outside of the southern USA. These ‘homes’ host thousands of family reunions per year. What is less common is for African Americans to identify plantation and other slavery-related sites inherited and managed by those considered white as ‘home’. We specifically separate those from slavery-related properties given to newly freed people by former owners, or purchased by freed persons and their descendants10. In such cases, these former plantation sites can be adjacent to the properties that their former enslaved ancestors owned after the Civil War. Some of the sites that Burton family descendants consider home sites are relatively near the former rural Burton plantation. That site is privately owned, with restricted access. Although Burton descendants are unsure which ancestors lived at Mary Burton’s in-town estate, what is now Burton Place, Burton Place’s accessibility opens it up as a homestead in a way the rural plantation site, which would have been occupied by more Burton ancestors, is not. Awareness and access are key to ‘sites of slavery’ shifting to ‘home’ sites for descendants of enslaved persons. The big house as home 5 405 Conclusions For many African Americans, especially those who still have familial ties in the southern USA, ‘sites of slavery’ may still be owned by the descendants of those who enslaved their ancestors, or by other stakeholders who might restrict access to these sites from professed fears of confrontations with African American descendants around calls for reparations, property disputes, or attempts at restorative justice. We have witnessed such conflicts at other sites in Holly Springs and other places throughout the southern USA. McGill sees these sites as educational opportunities. We see them as potential vehicles through which to bridge interracial gaps and have more constructive conversations about the roots of racism in the USA. They are complicated spaces and, if not recognised as such, will continue to ostracise even those African Americans who want to connect to them. The examples that we have presented indicate that accessible sites, like Burton Place, for some can not only elicit pain, but pride in a more complicated past. They can be sources of discomfort and consolation, as are the slave castles and factories in West Africa. African diasporic sites related to slavery outside of the USA have been imagined as redemptive, because historic site managers have made attempts to make African American roots tourists feel as if they belong. Stakeholders in slavery-related sites in the USA have not been as accepting and have much work to do. This article presents what we find as the conditions necessary to make that more possible. We observe two conditions necessary for African American roots tourists in the USA to recognise slavery-related sites as ancestral homes. 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(2015) ‘Rethinking slavery heritage tourism’, Journal of Heritage Tourism, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp.233–247. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Another such exception is the Whitney Plantation museum in Wallace, Louisiana, For information, see [online] http://www.whitneyplantation.com. Ibid. Tillet (2012, p.97) argues that African diaspora roots tourists ‘do not construct ‘Africa’ as viable political homeland. Instead, [African] countries remain fixed [as ‘sites of slavery’] in a precolonial past in which the terms ‘slave fort’ and ‘Africa’ are interchangeable signifiers for African diaspora political identities’. Yankholmes (2017) confronts the complicated nature of relationships between continental and ‘diasporan Africans’, with varying levels of acceptance on both sides. Holsey (2008) previously addressed the differences in how diasporic and continental Africans respond to narratives of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the latter being less likely to emotionally connect to the plights of enslaved persons unless encouraged by tour guides. Gracing the Table mediated a successful collaboration between the two programs in 2015. A sustainable collaboration is dependent on support from each new Garden Club administration, which changes annually. That was not guaranteed. Here, we use the term servants to describe those enslaved persons who laboured for the Burton family in the main house. McGill’s relationship to slavery interpretations at Monticello is just one point in several stages (https://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/milestones-research-andinterpretation-slavery-monticello) of research and interpretation of slavery at Monticello (https://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery), which began in the 1950s. This research is rooted in archaeological excavations, namely of Mulberry Row (Kelso, 2002), the centre of plantation activity at the site. Monticello has set the standard for slavery interpretations at historic sites attempting to complicate white master male narratives, such as Jefferson’s. Many are now aware of Thomas Jefferson’s long-term relationship with one of his enslaved persons, Sally Hemings. Anderson’s note on the ‘realities of slaveholding and plantation life’ hints at the pervasiveness of such relationships between white males in the master class and their enslaved women. According to black Burton descendants, their genealogy is no different. This seems to be common knowledge among those Burton descendants considered black, yet we are unsure if those Burton descendants considered white share the same historical knowledge. 410 9 J. Skipper and S.R. Davidson For an earlier example of multi-racial reunions at historic plantation sites, see Jackson (2009b) for a discussion of the 1998 Kingsley Plantation Heritage Festival and Family Reunion in Jacksonville, Florida. 10 Mrs. Burton’s rural properties, at least part, were sold to various folks over the years, even to a former enslaved person and sharecroppers. A major purchaser was a local white family who still own portions of the initial plantation estate.