BRIAN: This is backstory with the American History Guys. I'm Brian Balogh.
ED: I'm Ed Ayers.
PETER: And I'm Peter Onuf. We're looking today at the phenomenon of historical reenactment in America. Most weeks on the show, we field questions from listener callers. But this week, we decided to mix things up. We found a few people involved in what struck us as unusual sorts of reenactments, and so we posed a few questions to them. Our first call went out to Marvin Grier. He works doing living history presentations in Atlanta and in his free time does much of the same. He's reenacted a huge range of roles from the American revolution through World War II playing the part of African American civilians, slaves, and militia members throughout that period. We were especially interested in hearing about his experiences playing the parts of enslaved people, and so we got him on the phone to ask about that.
ED: So can you tell me how you think about portraying enslaved people?
MARVIN GRIER: I personally think it's it's - I feel it's an honor because it's less of a story of victimization and how people were treated, but a story of survival. How African Americans, including my ancestors, survived, how they preserved their culture, their heritage, and their stories, their beliefs during a very hard time in American history.
ED: And do you find that it's very hard for you? You say it's a you find it a story of survival and even triumph, but it's gotta take an emotional toll, doesn't it?
MARVIN GRIER: Oh, it definitely does take an emotional toll. I usually take a day or two to kinda decompress, take some time to myself to either write down how I'm feeling, what I'm feeling. The better events that I do, I think, are more realistic, and I do have to do more reflection on them as opposed to events where I just come back. I'm like, okay. Back in the groove of things because things weren't that intense.
ED: Has there been one episode in particular that seemed to reveal all these dynamics involved in portraying a slave person?
MARVIN GRIER: There's a little town in eastern Georgia called Westville, and they put on an event there once every two years. And I was supposed to be portraying an enslaved person, and, I was accused of, at that point in time, of stealing some salt.
ED: I should point out that stealing salt is a big deal because there's nothing else to preserve meat. Right? So that's like stealing gold some other time.
MARVIN GRIER: Exactly. It was a very big offense that I had done, or at least allegedly, I will say. Now I was arrested and the they put me in handcuffs and stuck me in in the courthouse. And the deputy to the sheriff, he he left me alone for a little bit, and I was able to wiggle my way out of the handcuffs they had me in. And I was on the 1st floor, so I jumped out the window and escaped. And almost immediately, the spectators watching the event start pointing me out, telling the sheriff and his posse where I had gone. Oh, he went that way. He went that way. Well, I wound up getting caught. And, after they catch me, people are shouting things like "oh, yeah! You got him!," and racial epithets.
ED: Wow.
MARVIN GRIER: It's really it's starting to get really kind of disturbing. I'm like, wow. Is this is this really 1862? The kind of the conclusion of the story is the sheriff and deputies take me on the behind the building, and they, they pretend to execute me. And they allow the after they do that, they allow the public to come up. And people start asking things like, well, thank god he's dead or that that's one lesson we have to deal with, and you got him and give him thumbs up and high fives and clapping and cheering. And, one lady says, well, he ain't dead. And the the guard's like, "yes, ma'am, yeah, he's he's dead, ma'am." "Well, poke him with a stick. Prove he's dead."
MARVIN GRIER: Wow. Like, "ma'am, you can't you can't poke the dead even though he's a criminal." And she's, like, "well, throw him in an ant pile." And I'm not gonna use the exact terms, that she used. But she said throw him in an ant pile and let the ants eat him. And she was saying "feed him to the hogs" and things to this effect.
MARVIN GRIER: I have this cloth over my face, but my I'm pretty sure my eyes look as big as saucers. Like, wow. Wow. This is really authentic experience and in horror. Like, people really treat people like this or treated people like this. It's a very disturbing experience.
ED: Well, I know that you're an educator and that you do this precisely to educate people in ways they could not be educated otherwise. What did you learn from that episode?
MARVIN GRIER: I learned mostly about kind of the mob mentality that although we as society says, oh, well, I could not if I was living during World War II in Germany, I wouldn't turn any Jews. Or if I was living in the south during the 18 sixties, I wouldn't own slaves or I would free my slaves. It really taught me that no matter what we say in our time, our our 21st century mindset doesn't dictate how we would act in the 18th, 19th, or even the 20th century, and that we don't know what we do until we're put in those situations.
PETER: Well, Marvin, it sounds like you're doing wonderful work. Oh, thank you. Thanks for joining us.
BRIAN: Thank you, Marvin.
MARVIN GRIER: Oh, thank you for having me.