Haunting.
There’s something eerie about the fallow fields and subdivisions of Sandy Spring, a town of 6,000 residents just north of Washington, DC, in Montgomery County, Maryland.
Driving around the town, doing research for a site-specific piece to be installed on the grounds of the Sandy Spring Museum as part of the exhibit Land Use, Abuse, and (Re)Use, my collaborator and I found ourselves at Woodlawn Manor—an old plantation that Montgomery County has turned into a park. The grounds hold a large house (often rented out for weddings), a stone barn, an equestrian center, a few historical plaques, and a commemorative Underground Railroad “experience” trail.
Walking around, we were both struck by the way slavery was remembered in the space. It barely got a paragraph on the main plaque, which proclaims that the farm was the “envy of Montgomery County farmers and the pride of its owners” before noting that “the farm still saw its share of struggles. Enslaved laborers toiled in the fields, within reach of the Underground Railroad.” Slavery was framed as an unfortunate afterthought, while the Underground Railroad trail—the linear path to freedom and the heroism of white Quakers—were emphasized.
This narrative struck us as a violent mis-remembering, a type of amnesia that refused to acknowledge the actual history and impact of enslavement beyond its being a “struggle,” all while emphasizing the forward progressing “path to freedom.”1
Quickly, the eeriness of the landscape made sense— its suburban pastoral appearance was marked by the violence of the past, haunted. That’s what happens when the past gets half-buried.
In Sandy Spring, and the rest of the United States as well, the challenge is not just to accurately remember the violent history of enslavement, but also to reckon with the fact that racialized violence and expropriation persist in the present.
As Viviane Saleh-Hanna observes,
anti-Black police violence today is ghosted by its historic antecedents, was forward-haunted by lynching and the countless deaths inflicted by armed White men on plantations colonizing the vast majority of the Western Hemisphere, overshadowing but unable to fully erase the fact that chattel slavery extends well beyond the Confederate States of the Southern United States and pollutes the Northern regions of the United States, Canada, Western Europe . . . and vast lands and islands south of the United States. Chattel slavery was the underpinning institution for White modernity.