“You’re going to see a lot of enslaved labor building the city itself,” Hannah Bowman, a Black interpreter and guide for the Freedom’s Paradox tour, told me as we walked down Duke of Gloucester Street a few days later. “You have enslaved craftspeople, carpenters, joiners, brickmakers.”
As we passed one of Colonial Williamsburg’s many original brick buildings, she invited me to inspect the indentations in the masonry. “Those are finger marks,” she said. “When the clay was still wet, someone took it out of the mold and touched it.” She showed us several more authentic colonial bricks, all with the same imperfections. “Take a look at those. Do your fingers fit in them?”
I touched the sun-warmed brick. “No. They’re tiny.”
Bowman’s voice dropped. “Those are children. Children make those bricks. It’s easy. All they have to do is put wet clay in molds and push it out. It’s like Play Doh.”
Freedom’s Paradox is an hour-long walking tour that explores a society that developed and codified race-based chattel slavery alongside revolutionary concepts of individual liberty and human rights: metaphorical fingermarks on the edifice of state. This is the hard and ugly half of America’s legacy that its white citizens often struggle to accept.
Black people were largely left out of the picture when Colonial Williamsburg was founded. When W. A. R. Goodwin revealed his plan for the living history museum in 1928, the community met in a whites-only high school to discuss the proposal. The town’s white population overwhelmingly approved the plan in hopes that the restoration would revitalize the local economy — which, as it turned out, meant purposefully pushing Black people out of their homes and away from the new attraction, which itself was segregated. The museum largely presented enslaved people as docile and content, when they bothered to mention them at all.
As the push for civil rights began, however, Colonial Williamsburg came under pressure to present a more complete version of American history. In 1979 it hired six Black actors to portray historical persons, including theater professor Rex Ellis. Before their arrival, “hostesses” at Colonial Williamsburg wore period costumes but did not communicate history by embodying real people from the past. These actors were Colonial Williamsburg’s first interpreters, a category that today includes people of all races. To assuage concerns about historical accuracy, Ellis recalled, the actors spent three months studying colonial history before putting on a costume, and worked closely with the museum’s academic wing to ensure they had their facts straight.
This new way of communicating history quickly took off. Two years after the program started, Ellis created and launched the “Other Half Tour,” a predecessor to Freedom’s Paradox that taught guests about the daily lives of enslaved and free Black people.