A Hard Truth to Portray

There are positions open for slaves at the Bratton plantation. Applicants must be willing to pick cotton, drink the master’s liquor, gossip, sing spirituals, mourn the dead. The job is unpaid. Starts immediately.

Since last summer, when four African American “living history” volunteers raised complaints about scripts they were asked to read, managers at Historic Brattonsville, 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 who played Watt, the Bratton family’s most loyal slave, was dismissed after ad-libbing a dark, drunken 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 “systemic 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 to the public; Confederate reenactors spend untold vacation days tracing their ancestors’ footsteps. But historically, plantation museums have glossed over the subject of slavery.

The experience at Historic Brattonsville -- an idyllic settlement 36 miles southwest of Charlotte, N.C. -- underlines the difficulty of facing it head-on. Fifteen years ago, managers here decided to bring in costumed interpreters to describe slave life in the first person. By last year, Brattonsville had developed a strong, cohesive group of volunteers who compared notes about the feelings that surged through them during reenactments.

Four of them, particular 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, of rapes.

John Joyner, a 58-year-old businessman 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 come out of their eyes.”

‘A Podium for the Truth’

On the way into Brattonsville, a tunnel of oak trees opens to a green, misty clearing. Scattered in the woods are weathered buildings: the log cabin of Scots-Irish settlers, the brick slave quarters, the Greek Revival home of the Brattons’ third generation.

Thirty-six miles from Charlotte, the settlement was hushed on a recent weekday morning. Horses switched their tails in a meadow, and fat drops of water slid off the leaves. You could hear bees buzzing.

Here, in one of the brick outbuildings, a retired kindergarten teacher named Kitty Wilson-Evans seems to slip into a second existence as 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 years, Wilson-Evans’ was the single black face among the white reenactors who mustered at Brattonsville, a tradition that goes back decades. But she gradually drew the admiration of local African Americans, 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-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 he visited Brattonsville four years ago and met Wilson-Evans, who told him that reenacting 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, Tiffani.

A similar impulse attracted Joyner, 58, who wears gold hoops in his ears. Joyner was born in Montclair, N.J., and works as a consultant to chemical companies. An ardent scholar of black history, he peppered recent conversations with references to reparations, Stepin Fetchit, the Weather Underground, black nationalism, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”

He too volunteered in 2001 to interpret a slave at Brattonsville after seeing Wilson-Evans -- “this diminutive little lady with all this power emanating from her.” Reenacting slave life began to feel like “a calling,” he said, “something you have to do.”

“We saw it as a podium for the truth.”

‘A Real Minefield’

White history buffs had long revered Brattonsville as the site of a Revolutionary War battle. By June of 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 of the danger. Bratton’s militia surrounded the British and routed them, a battle that was dramatized in the 2000 film “The Patriot.”

When the site opened to the public in the 1980s, historians turned their attention to a less visible aspect of Brattonsville’s history: the plantation’s slaves. Upon Bratton’s death, he bequeathed 23 people to his son John, a doctor. At his death, John had 139 slaves, who were divided among his 14 children.

John Bratton’s sons returned from serving in the Confederate army to a changed world, and two of them became active in the Ku Klux Klan, according to the museum’s official history. When the leader of a black militia was found hanged, a jeering note pinned to his clothing, two Brattons fled the country to avoid prosecution.

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, stories circulated of the “pit” where the Brattons supposedly put slaves as punishment, he said.

Galloway poured his time into repairing relations with the black community. By the late 1990s, about a dozen African Americans were volunteering as slave interpreters, and the site won an award from the American Assn. of State and Local History for its portrayal of slave life.

It was a risky endeavor. Living history had been around since the 1960s, but it had traditionally focused on the “peaceful, placid history” of colonial folkways, said Garet Livermore, who teaches interpretation at the Cooperstown Graduate Program in Museum Studies in New York.

Increasingly, though, visitors are interested in more-complex history. Smaller institutions in the Deep South have begun to add living-history programs that reflect slavery, something they “wouldn’t have dreamed of” 10 years ago, he said. Trying to re-create slave life is “a real minefield for managers,” who must introduce controversial ideas without alienating the audience, he said.

When Chuck LeCount arrived at Brattonsville 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 where his predecessors had played Watt as a strong man, Joyner imagined a man who was “very servile,” always wiping sweat from his brow. He toyed with giving Watt an exaggerated minstrel-show manner -- “yassa, massa,” as he puts it. He diagnosed Watt as having Stockholm syndrome, 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 a slave, he gazed at a road beside 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.

LeCount objected to some of his additions: Joyner, he said, “got local history and facts wrong. You just can’t do that.”

On road trips to other historic sites, Joyner compared notes with Michael Harper, who played Big Jim, and the Sanderses. In August, they presented managers with a list of demands. The four asked for 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 beatings and rapes.

They asked for new costumes, more publicity and “respect from staff as historians, volunteers, people.”

LeCount, 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 slave who was blinded by a beating when she was caught trying to read. When schoolchildren -- who make up 40% of the site’s 30,000 annual visitors -- emerge, they are often “pretty shell-shocked,” LeCount said.

“I would have loved to push the envelope, 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 were not satisfied. Ultimately, “it boiled down to who got to write the scripts,” LeCount said. No previous group of volunteers had ever been given that right, he 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 Joyner 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,” LeCount said.

Joyner was asked not to return. He had often been late or unprepared for performances, but the ad-libbing was a breaking point, said Van Shields, director of York County’s Culture and Heritage Museums, which oversees Brattonsville.

“We had a script for a Christmas Candlelight Tour,” he said. “Obviously, at the Christmas Candlelight Tour, we don’t want to talk about someone being raped.”

Since then, the four friends have met regularly in Joyner’s handsome town house. On a recent morning, Joyner served a dry red wine and fruit salad. They joked companionably about the Underground Railroad.

“We’re the group that ran away,” Harper said.

After lunch, Harper returned to his carpentry job, and Charles Sanders returned to the waste treatment plant where he works. Joyner went to his home office, and Tiffani Sanders drove home to Rock Hill. She said, a little wistfully, that she still missed the plantation sometimes.

‘Be Careful’

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 she 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, an 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.”

Wilson-Evans is especially sensitive to criticism of Watt. Her husband, John, who died of cancer in 1995, originally played Watt, and the memory of his performance at the Revolutionary War battle still makes her well up. Her husband played the slave as a strong-jawed hero who comforted his wife with perfect gentleness, then turned away to perform his duty.

Over the years, she knows, African American interpreters have formed their own hypotheses about what motivated Watt to warn his master about the British: the hope that Bratton would free him, or fear for his life, or sheer accident, or weakness.

Wilson-Evans has also heard, too many times to count, that Watt was an Uncle Tom who betrayed his own people.

At this suggestion, every trace of the kindergarten teacher drains out of her and she speaks in a fierce near-whisper.

“Don’t you ever say you know what you would have done if you had been in someone else’s place,” she said. “Whatever the reason was, Watt took it to the grave.”