A Light on Slaves' Lives

Model Cabin at Mount Vernon Fulfills a Curiosity About the Toiling Hundreds

Joann Bagnerise couldn't bring herself to visit George Washington's home at Mount Vernon, driving by without stopping, thinking too much about the hundreds of slaves who had labored in the mansion and fields beyond the brick walls.

Even yesterday, as the Dumfries resident sat in the warm sun near the estate's new model of a slave cabin, she said she was filled with conflicting emotions.

"It's very solemn," she said from underneath the brim of a wide straw hat. "I'm feeling all who were enslaved here. I'm just standing on their shoulders."

Yesterday, Mount Vernon unveiled its highest-profile slavery exhibit in years, a 16-by-14-foot log cabin modeled on the field hands' quarters on Washington's vast estate along the Potomac River. The exhibit is the first to show how the majority of Washington's slaves lived, Mount Vernon officials said.

In recent years, Mount Vernon -- the most visited historic home in the country -- has undertaken a pricey effort to renew interest in the life of the nation's first president, culminating with the opening of a $110 million orientation and museum center last year. Yet officials say visitors have always craved more information about slavery, one of the most troubling aspects of the life of the war hero, president and statesman.

"It's a complex story. His attitudes about slavery changed over time," said Dennis Pogue, Mount Vernon's associate director for preservation, who oversaw the slavery project. "It's not the brightest spot in Washington's record. But it's part of his story and America's story and one that needs to be told."

Slavery exhibits at historic properties in the Chesapeake Bay region were once rare but are becoming more common, Pogue said. The Jamestown 400th anniversary celebration had African dance troupes, exhibits and speakers. Colonial Williamsburg opened an exhibit on slave life at its Great Hopes Plantation in 2005. Monticello restored the cook's room next to Thomas Jefferson's kitchen in 2001 and is considering building a slave cabin; tour guides routinely discuss Jefferson's alleged paramour, Sally Hemings, who was a slave.

Washington inherited his first slaves when he was 11, records show. But his attitude about the practice, then pervasive on the plantations of Virginia, soured over the years. In 1797 he wrote: "I wish from my soul that the legislature of this State could see a policy of a gradual abolition of slavery."

On his death, he freed 123 personal slaves.

Mount Vernon, which has 1 million visitors annually, was among the first of Virginia's historic properties to re-create slave life, depicting it in the brick quarters of the house staff, not far from the elegant white mansion. But more than 200 of the estate's 316 slaves -- many of them women -- worked fields of wheat and corn on four nearby farms owned by Washington. The cabin, made of rough-hewn logs and daubed by mud, is an attempt to show how their families lived, historical interpreters said.

Working off such historical evidence as a faded 1908 photograph of a decaying outbuilding, Mount Vernon officials had one of Washington's slaves, a woman named Silla, in mind when they created the cabin. Silla, a mother of six, was married to a slave named Slammin' Joe, who worked at the mansion.

Their story had a tragic ending after Washington's death. Silla and the children were freed, but Joe belonged to the estate of Washington's wife. He was sold, and his family split up.

Yesterday, a fire crackled in the grate of the tiny cabin , with a pallet bed on the floor, a few bowls of food on a wooden table and sacks of cornmeal rations on the wall. Outside, a rooster crowed and a wild turkey wandered near the reception guests.

"Having this structure here gives us a sense of place . . . and brings them out of the mythical into the real," said Rohulamin Quander, a D.C. administrative law judge who is a descendant of one of Mount Vernon's fieldworkers. "It gives us the three-dimensional sense that these people were human."

After the program, the guests followed two descendants of Washington's slaves up to the cabin, and each poured a symbolic spoonful of dirt from Washington's farmland onto a newly planted apple -- not cherry -- tree. Bagnerise and others spontaneously broke into spirituals, first "Oh, Freedom," then "This Little Light of Mine."

"Well, we had to be happy," one of the singers, Sheila Coates, the president of Black Women United for Action, said later.

Visitor Tina Blanchard, an event planner from Mount Vernon, stood outside and breathed in the wood smoke from the chimney.

"Going into the quarters is quite moving," she said. "You feel that this small family was working toward a common goal. I don't know if it was survival or what. When they came home, that was their freedom . . . their own domain."