Denmark Vesey's Garden by Ethan J. Kytle

Author:Ethan J. Kytle
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620973660
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2018-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

Former slave Elijah Green, interviewed by Augustus Ladson for the Federal Writers’ Project, was a constant fixture at the Old Slave Mart Museum until he died in 1945.

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TRUTH BE TOLD, Wilson’s critics had little to fear. She did spend a great deal of time authenticating her claim that the building at 6 Chalmers Street had once been used for human trafficking by scrupulously compiling information about the property. Yet this research did not lead the northern transplant to construct a museum that emphasized the exploitative sides of slavery. Indeed, by the time she opened the doors to the OSMM in 1938, Wilson had abandoned her early misgivings about slavery and embraced the local party line.53

“When I went to Charleston I was just as ignorant as any other Northerner,” Wilson told a Virginia reporter in the 1950s. The daughter of a decorated Union veteran, she had grown up in Ohio reading stories such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And Wilson took great pride in her family’s antislavery sentiments. She boasted that her paternal grandfather, Robert Wilson, had not only left Virginia for Ohio because of his deep opposition to the institution of slavery but thereafter was active in the Underground Railroad. Although Wilson never disavowed her antislavery heritage, she became sympathetic to the white southern perspective while living in Charleston. Her transformation was so complete, Wilson told a reporter in 1948, that around town “she is called a ‘Yamdankee’ rather than a ‘DamYankee’ because of her intense love and sympathy for the South.”54

Wilson’s newfound perspective was not a crass accommodation to popular opinion, nor was she simply catering to tourists’ tastes. Instead, by the time Wilson purchased the Old Slave Mart in 1937, she had become a true believer. Perhaps the most important factor in Wilson’s conversion was her trips to nearby plantations and conversations with their former owners. In 1927, she visited Mullet Hall Plantation on Johns Island with a senior member of the Legare family, which had owned it for generations. Highlighting the struggles of the former planter class in a letter to her mother, Wilson emphasized how enjoyable this veritable trip back into the past had been, especially when she observed the reunion between Mrs. Legare and “her old servants and plantation hands.” Wilson noted that “they were all so delighted to see their Ol’ Missis, and she them.” Decades later, she attributed her strong interest in history to such early interactions with elderly white southerners. They “had grown up on plantations and had been through the War Between the States and its aftermath,” she explained in 1956. “The stories they told stirred my imagination and still linger.”55

Little wonder that when she opened her museum Wilson underscored the challenges that plantation masters and mistresses faced, while also embracing the trope of the faithful slave so ubiquitous in elite Charleston circles. One of the stalls on the second floor of her museum featured replicas of two slaves, Aunt Cylla and Uncle Pink, who would not abandon their owners during the Civil War.

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