This appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press
 

This was in the St. Paul Pioneer Press a month or so ago. I thought it was interesting, very poignant. However, I must confess I am perplexed as to why folks are offended by the truth? With all the things in the world to be offended and concerned about, the poor, the hurricane, the victimization of children, the AIDS dilemma in Africa, the portrayal of women in the media, the lack of clothes on Mariah Carey, this is what they complain about. The other puzzling thing for me is how these interpreters handled their boss. I fully understand their concerns
.... let's face it, happy slaves is an oxymoron right up there with jumbo shrimp. Slavery was UGLY, the portrayal of it is bound to stir up ugly emotions. Sounds like they didn't want to have a dialogue with the man, they wanted it their way-- period. How many of us get to dictate to our bosses how ##%%$ is gon' be? On a more humerous note, how exactly do you explain getting fired from a job as a slave:confused: ?????

Interviewer: Mr. Jones New York Theatre Company welcomes you. Tell me about your acting experiences.

Jones: I am a Yale drama grad, I have a MFA from Howard University. I've done several commercials, and print ads. I also worked as a slave interpreter at a museum.

Interviewer: Well that must have been very emotionally moving work, tell me about it, why aren't you still with the museum?

I wasn't ethnic enough........?

I was too ethnic...........?

I wasn't fired son, I quit that job as a slave, too much bowin' and scrapin'.

I wasn't being artistically fulfilled as a slave, it was time to move on.

ONLY IN AMERICA CAN YOU GET ASKED TO LEAVE A JOB AS A SLAVE !!!

SLAVERY SCENES NOT PRETTY, AND THAT’S THE POINT

BY ELLEN BARRY
Los Angeles Times

McConnells, S.C.-- There are positions open for slaves at the Bratton plantation. Since last summer, when four black “living history” volunteers raised complaints about scripts they were asked to read, managers at Historic Brattonville, a museum and historic site, have been coping with the most awkward of personnel issues.

First, the interpreters who played the slave bride and groom left, complaining that their characters were mindlessly happy. The man played Watt, the Bratton family’s most loyal slave, was dismissed after ad-libbing a grim soliloquy at the Christmas Candlelight Tour.

The interpreter who plays the slave Big Jim is on a six-month “hiatus” unsure whether he can find common ground with management but talking about “systematic changes.” The four have criticized the museum recently in local newspapers.

It is an odd position for the museum’s directors, who were proud of the progressive impulse that led them to emphasize slavery in their living-history programs. Across the South, lovingly kept plantations are open the public. But historically, plantation museums have glossed over the subject of slavery.

The experience at Historic Brattonville--an idyllic settlement southwest of Charlotte, N.C. --underlines the difficulty of facing it head-on. Fifteen years ago, managers decided to bring in costumed interpreters to describe slave life in the first person. By last year, Brattonville had developed a strong, cohesive group of volunteers who compared notes about feelings that surged through them during re-enactments.

Four of them, good friends, agreed that they wanted to portray the brutality of the system more forcefully. Their scripts covered weddings, funerals, holidays; after interpreting for three or four years, they wanted descriptions of whippings and rapes.

John Joyner, a 58-year-old business man from Charlotte, began slipping in references to octoroon concubines in New Orleans and “breeding farms” where enslaved men were forced to impregnate women. He began to improvise in the role of Watt, hoping to provoke strong reactions.

“When people leave these events, they leave applauding, laughing, and saying, “Thank you for the show,” said Tiffani Sanders, 32, a freelance graphic designer who volunteered with her husband, Charles. “We should see tears cone out of their eyes.”


In one of the brick outbuildings, a retired kindergarten teacher named Kitty Wilson-Evans seems to slip into a second existences a slave named Kessie. Over the 16 years she has worked at the plantation, both salaried and as a volunteer, Miss Kitty, as the other employees call her, has become so deeply connected to the place that when she feels sad, she sometimes drives here and sits alone in the slave quarters.

For the first few year, Wilson-Evans’s was the single black face among the white re-enactors who mustered at Brattonsville, a tradition that goes back decades. But she gradually drew the admiration of local blacks, inspiring a new generation of passionate volunteers.

Charles Sanders, 36, grew up around plantations, and his feelings about them were not friendly. His great-great-great-grandfather was born into slavery; according to family lore, the white master would feed him “like a cat under the table,” Sanders said. As an adult, Sanders would speed up his car when he drove past a plantation.

But that all changed when h visited Brattonsville four years ago and met Wilson-Evans, who told him that re-enacting slave life could help resolve his anger about the past.

“She said, If we don’t tell our history, nobody else will,” said Sanders, who began interpreting the slave groom opposite his wife Tiffini.

A similar impulse attracted Joyner, 58, who was born in Montclair, N.J., and works as a consultant to chemical companies. An ardent scholar of black history, he peppered recent conversation with referenced to reparations, Stepin Fetchit, the Weather Underground, black nationalism and MLK’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”

He too volunteered in 2001 to interpret a slave a Brattonsville after seeing Wilson-Evans--
“this diminutive little lady with all this power emanating from her.” Re-enacting slave life began to feel like “a calling,” he said, “something you have to do.” “We saw it as a podium for the truth.”

White history buffs had long revered Brattonsville as the site of a Revolutionary Was battle. By June 1780, British troops had taken control of most of the state when they approached the farm of William Bratton, who commanded a rebel militia. On the morning of July 12, Martha Bratton dispatched a slave, Watt, to tell her husband to the danger. Bratton’s militia surrounded the British and routed them, a battle that was dramatized tin the 2000 film “The Patriot.”

When the site opened to public in the 1980’s, historians turned their attention to a less visible aspect of Brattonsville’s history: the plantation’s slaves. That history still reverberated in 1995, when Chetter Galloway, the museum’s first full-time curator of African-American history began interviewing local blacks about Brattonsville. Among the descendants of slaves or sharecroppers, stores circulated of the “pit’ where the Brattons supposedly put slaves as punishment, he said. By the 1990, about a dozen African-Americans were volunteering as slave interpreters, and the site won an award from the American Association of State and Local History for its portrayal of slave life.

“Trying to re-create slave life is “a real minefield for managers” of museums, who must introduce controversial ideas without alienating the audience, saidGaret Livermore, who teaches interpretation at the Cooperstown Graduate Program in Museum Studies in New York.

When Chuck LeCount arrived at Brattosville in 2001, with specific orders to update slavery programs, he quickly realized what a challenge it was to find black people willing to interpret, especially in a volunteer capacity.

“If I was an African-American and wanted to interpret, I would think twice about interpreting a slave,” Lecount said, “it takes a certain type of person to delve into and interpret a painful past.”

Joyner, for one, threw himself into the work, It didn’t take long before he put his own mark on the scripts. For years, audiences had gathered to see “Watt’s Decision,” a scenario in which the slave weighed whether to defect to the British, who might give him his freedom, or save his master’s life, Watt ultimately sided with his master and was celebrated for his loyalty. But while his predecessors had played Watt as a strong man, Joyner imagined a man who was “very servile,” always wiping sweat from his brow. He diagnosed Watt as having Stockholm , a psychological condition in which a hostage feels allegiance with a captor. “He wasn’t a hero,” he said. “That’s what they wanted him to be. He was a quisling.”

Joyner also started to “gradually slip things in.” Once, while interpreting slave, he gazed at a road besides him and talked about hearing “slave coffles”--shackled columns of people--
Clanking toward the market. Another time he added a description of a slave-breeding plantation in Virginia. LeCourt objected to some of his additions: Joyner said he said,
“got local history and facts wrong. You just can’t do that.” On road trips to other historic sites, Joyner compared note with Michael Harper, who played Big Jim, and the Sanderses. Last August, the presented managers with a list of demands. The four asked or more control over the scripts, complaining that the scripts made them sound “like happy slaves.”
They asked to be allowed to portray slave experiences across America, not just at Brattonsville, and to more directly portray beating and rapes.

LeCourt , like other managers, argued that interpreters were already conveying the brutality of slavery, although they did it more by suggestion than graphic drama. In one scenario, Wilson-Evans played an elderly save who was blinded by a beating when she was caught trying to read. When schoolchildren-- who make up 40 percent of the site‘s 30,000 annual visitors-- emerge, they are often “pretty shell-shocked,” LeCourt said.

“I would love to push the envelop, but we have to wait for (the audience) to come along at the same pace,” he said. Angry people, he said, “are not going to learn anything.” After the August meeting, museum managers created a panel of African-American historians to act as an independent sounding board. But the four volunteers where not satisfied. Ultimately, “it boiled down to who got to write the scripts,” LeCourt said.
By the fall the Sanderses had decided not to return. Harper declared himself on leave. “Chuck straight out told us ‘What I have to do is look out for the customers,’” Harper said.” “I said, ‘Well, Chuck you mean to tell me that when the truth offends people, you’re going to change the truth?’ ” It wasn’t until the annual Christmas event that Joymer became openly defiant. Asked to play a morally upright slave, Thomas, who refused to drink the master’s liquor, Joyner instead launched into a drunken soliloquy of scraping gratitude, then changed gears abruptly, delivering a “melancholy” speech about the loss of
freedom and family. The museum got complaints from visitors who “thought it was offensive,” Le Court said. Joyner was asked not to return.

Among the slave interpreters who remain at Brattonsville is Wilson-Evans, 66, who has had to perform more often since the others left. She speaks of the departed volunteers sadly, and says doesn’t know how she will replace them. “I really thought of them as my children,” she said. “Being young , they wanted things just a little different.” But she has little patience for the idea that a visit to Brattonsville should leave the audience horrified. She likes to remind audiences that Bratton “was a businessman” who used slaves the way other businesses used valuable equipment-- with care, until they broke down. Then he got rid of them, and act she likes to compare to a yard sale.

“They’re a talented group,” she said of the departed volunteers. “They just wanted the harshness to come out. But you’ve got to be careful, especially when we have children around.”

:confused: