Digging Up the Seeds of Freedom

Some of the biggest ideas in "Seeking Liberty: Annapolis, An Imagined Community" come in the tiniest, and least likely, packages.

Take the three hamsas, or "hands of Fatima," on view in the exhibition of archaeological artifacts from late 17th-century to early 20th-century Annapolis at the Banneker-Douglass Museum. Based on an Islamic symbol and used by African slaves to ward off the evil eye, these tiny amulets, if melted together, w ould produce less metal than a dime. Yet their presence in this show has a weighty -- if not entirely convincing -- symbolism.

Let me explain. Like any archaeological display, "Seeking Liberty" features lots of dusty old stuff dug up from the ground. Typically, those artifacts tell us something about the way people lived long ago. But this show is less about a long-dead culture than it is about the enduring vitality of a single idea: freedom.

Now it may seem strange discussing freedom in the context of slavery. It certainly did to me. But that's just the point that "Seeking Liberty" tries to drive home: that the hamsas, belonging to uprooted Africans but found in the home of white slave owners, are also evidence that in early Annapolis Muslims and Christians lived under the same roof (if not exactly in harmony). Freedom? Maybe not. But the show would argue that these tiny charms, buried within the soil of slavery, are seeds of something that would grow and flourish.

That's just one of the unexpected messages delivered by this collection of artifacts unearthed over the past 26 years at five sites in historic downtown Annapolis by the Archaeology in Annapolis program, a partnership of the University of Maryland's department of anthropology and the Historic Annapolis Foundation.

There's another message, courtesy of a small, cobalt blue bottle. One of several glass vessels found at the Maynard-Burgess House -- a residence notable for being owned and occupied by two interrelated African American families from 1840 until the late 20th century -- it probably once contained Bromo-Seltzer. But its former contents are less remarkable than its symbolic role in the fight against racism.

That's right. Being a national brand, the antacid would have had a fixed price. That would have made it more desirable than some locally made goods, whose prices were often jacked up for black customers. Its very presence in this household, in other words, strikes a blow for equality.

Among the material collected from the same site are 12 naval uniform buttons (out of a total of 285 buttons found here). In their own way, they, too, speak of inequity, reminding us that the house's earliest residents were washerwomen. Their clients? Most likely students from the nearby U.S. Naval Academy.

"Seeking Liberty" is part of a year-long citywide celebration of the 1708 signing of the royal charter granting Annapolitans the right to citizen-elected representation (that's white Annapolitans, mind you). Yet, as its title suggests, it's more about the pursuit of a dream than its realization.

The exhibition bends over backward to show us the Africans and African Americans who lived with the European Americans for whom the city is best known. Maybe not side by side -- upstairs-downstairs is more like it or, later, in segregated neighborhoods -- but at least together. We see the fragments of their lives: long-buried caches of talismans used in the practice of hoodoo religious rituals; broken household objects; faded scraps and tatters that stand in for people, not things.

"Annapolis is almost as African as it is European," the exhibition's wall text tells us. "We show that here, too."

That's a tall claim. But walk half a block down the street from the museum to the Reynolds Tavern, an 18th-century site still operating as a restaurant (and one of the show's dig sites) and you may just feel something stirring beneath your feet besides the dining room's sagging floorboards.

Seeking Liberty: Annapolis, An Imagined Community Through Nov. 29 at the Banneker-Douglass Museum, 84 Franklin St., Annapolis Contact:410-216-6180; http://www.bdmuseum.com. Hours: Open Tuesday-Saturday 10 to 4. Admission: Free.