In Sleeping with the Ancestors, written with Herb Frazier, Joseph McGill Jr relates a fascinating, decades-long quest for truth. His work as a preservationist led to the formation of the Slave Dwelling Project. All over America, McGill sleeps overnight in former slave quarters. In an informative and engrossing book, he now tells the story of this groundbreaking endeavor.
The idea came to McGill after a visit to Anne Frank’s hiding place in Amsterdam. Cramped quarters gave Anne, her family and friends temporary sanctuary from the Nazis. For McGill, “being there connected that space to her and her diaries that told of her life in hiding … That tour taught me the importance of preserving historic buildings.”
McGill started out as a civil war re-enactor. Now, as a Black man, his job is particularly important. He is part of a growing movement to save landmarks of Black history. Calling attention to the perilous condition of many slave cabins, his is a clarion call, grounded in the message that Black history is American history.
Unfortunately, as an African American preservationist, McGill is one of a tiny number. According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2019 an estimated 15 million Americans worked in historic preservation. Between 1% and 4% were Black.
McGill’s first sleepover with ancestral ghosts was meant to be his last. Due to his passion, the project grew. Now it’s a non-profit, sending him across the country. “I get paid to sleep around,” he jokes.
His subtitle is: “How I Followed the Footprints of Slavery”. For sure, his book will help counter the toxicity of these times. With carefully researched fact, he refutes countless Gone With the Wind-like fictions, tales that comfort white supremacists. He confronts racist fantasy head on, through vivid first-hand reportage and thoughtful scholarship. Briefly living as our forebears did, he challenges nostalgia for a nation that never was. Amid rightwing book bans and anti-woke laws, this is a book long overdue. What is at stake is the unifying possibility offered by America’s heritage.
Ten years ago, most adroitly, Clement Alexander Price observed: “As America increasingly grows more diverse, unless preservationists learn to make their work seem more important to people of color, they run the risk of becoming irrelevant.”
Preservation efforts in communities of color are separate and unequal. One part of McGill’s journey saw him working for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Admirably, in 2017, it launched the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. Since then it has had around 1,600 requests for support. The goal is to raise $92m. It says it has “supported 242 historic African American places and invested more than $20m to help preserve significant sites imbued with Black life, humanity and cultural heritage”.
By contrast, over the past 60 years, more than $100bn in private investment has gone towards restoration of hundreds of thousands of buildings on the National Register of Historic Places. Primarily, they have exemplified aspects of white history. A frightful number have Confederate associations and histories.
McGill’s mission is to protect, preserve and rejuvenate the humble houses in which African captives and their descendants lived. Without their harsh labor, what would America be today? In a way, his objective differs from mine. So often, stately structures associated with elites engage me most. On the other hand, the opposition and hostility we encounter is exactly the same.
In the 1990s, I urged Richard Moe, then the trust’s director, to intervene over the unique home of Madam CJ Walker, a Black entrepreneur of the early 1900s. He scoffed: “I intend during my tenure to steer the trust away from preoccupation with saving the houses of the rich.” No matter that the trust maintained not a single house of any rich person who was not white and Protestant.
McGill speaks powerfully about all the people who “hate” him. To the heirs of Confederates, wishing to believe in the happiness of the enslaved and the benevolence of their enslavers, correctives can be too bitter to swallow. But McGill contends there are also African Americans who “hate” him, for being too easy on white people, those who come to hear him lecture or spend a night in quarters.
“They think I’m not Black enough” or “hard enough on white people”, he writes, adding: “Some northerners would prefer to ignore the idea that their ancestors either enslaved people or provided economic comfort to those who did.”
What of me? The most important way in which McGill and I diverge is over his complex but bold call for reparations. He is quite specific, calling on plantations open to the public and those who host weddings to hand over a percentage of receipts. He also says firms like Brooks Brothers, which made “slave cloth”, or Citibank, which financed slave purchases and cotton crops, should pay a rebate to descendants of the enslaved.
Surely this would raise only negligible sums. Abraham Lincoln sought to compensate slavers in states that didn’t secede. Except in the District of Columbia, such measures failed. Regarding reparations, Britain offers a far better example of what makes sense. The UK paid £20m to former slaveholders. A staggering loan, secured with the Bank of England, took until 2015 to repay. Yet by the close of the 19th century, Britain was still the richest nation. Significant sums can be paid if political will is there.
Sleeping with the Ancestors is easily absolved for this or any other minor imperfection. So many are so determined to get us to believe the past was far nicer than we think. Joseph McGill Jr points out what folly it is to ignore things. It never makes them go away. He shows that the first step to reconciliation, towards mutual understanding and justice for all, is admitting we have a problem.
The hateful legacy of slavery is one of the worst problems. It will not go away by magic.
Sleeping With the Ancestors is published in the US by Hachette
