Art, Joy, and History

I walked into the Museum a bit nervously.  

For blocks and blocks the sidewalk was lined with twelve-foot-high black metal fences. Modular ones. Temporary ones. Some pieces had doors, which were locked, but they were incomplete walls, you could step off the curb and walk right around them.  

Somewhat more intimidating were the blocks lined completely with walls of porta-potties. J-walking was suddenly stamped out by toilets. 

As I approached Museum from the North, the city feel of DC began to fade away. The beige federal buildings, which house offices for the NOAA, EPA, Department of Commerce, USAID and the US Customs and Border Patrol, eventually give way to the vast and open plaza of the National Mall. 

On the left was the Museum of American History, a museum I’m sure I’ve never been to. Growing up in the DC area, I think I’ve been to almost every other museum on the mall, multiple times. Air and Space, Natural History, Sackler/Freer Galleries, The Hirshhorn, the National Galleries.  

The only other museum on the mall I haven’t been to is the Museum I’m here to see today. The National Museum of African American History and Culture.  

The Museum opened in 2016, while I was spending my brief decade on the West Coast. Brief because I should have been there at least a few years longer, but ended up leaving a few years shy of a decade. By the end of 2020 it was clear my life’s priorities changed, I had changed, the world had changed, so I had better change with it. Or change back.  

So, I moved to the DC-area, back into my childhood home. Not quite into my childhood room, I set my daughter up there, and outfitted it way better than I ever had it. I moved into my sister’s old room (which, gets better sunlight... and has a bigger closet) and gradually began to figure out how to continue my life, work, single parent and become a care-taker to my parents. To somehow lean into role reversal and role expansion, while living in my childhood environment. I did my best. But I realize now, only a few years later, that I maybe possibly, needed taking care of in some way too. 

Still, though, I have had a solid four years back in the area, with a cumulative of eight months spent unemployed due to layoffs, to check out more museums. Why I only managed to get to this a few days before starting work again, while the city was prepping for Trump’s second inauguration, was beyond me.  

But I did make it. 

The north side of the Museum was tightly fenced, forcing visitors to take a slightly longer more distant route around to the south side of the building to enter. I couldn’t tell if the fences were meant to protect the Museum and its grounds from inauguration crowds in a few days, or the other way around. As if the facts and ideas, the histories and truths, laying, waiting, inside, might unsettle the fragile realities of some in the crowds. I know it’s the first one, but...  

There were no lines, so I walked in with a breeze (it was stupid cold, did I mention that?). I had my backpack, so as I approached the metal table with the security guards, I got that nervous apprehension, where you’ve not done anything wrong, but you think you’re suspected of it, so you end up acting suspicious. Maybe it was the high security inauguration setup that I walked through to get there, but I just walked in expecting the feeling of cold unwelcoming surveillance to continue. 

The guard stopped me before I could take my bag off. “You’re good,” she said, waving me along with a warm smile, “enjoy the museum.” 

It took me a moment to process this. Maybe my nerves needed a moment to melt in the heated air of museum. Maybe I just wasn’t expecting weight of misplaced suspicion to be lifted so easily. I thanked her and moved along. 

The main floor of the museum was wide open. The ceilings were high and there was a gentle echo of middle school kids murmuring while their teachers and chaperones tried to herd them into one spot. 

I squished my puffy coat into one of their free lockers.  

Do all Smithsonian museums have free lockers? I’ve never used them if they do. I’ve definitely walked around other museums, uncomfortably warm, or fumbling with a coat or two in my hands. I suppose, it’s possible, even if there were lockers at those other museums, I might have never felt welcome to them. I don’t know if it was the security guard or better signage, but I felt welcome to the lockers here. 

And then I made my way to the information desk to pick up a map. I was getting ready to flip through the booklet for the AfroFuturism exhibit (an exhibit that had sadly left the museum five months prior), when the elderly woman behind the desk approached me and pulled out a paper map and slid it on the counter. 

She greeted me with a soft hello and a gentle smile. I don’t remember asking her or for a tour of the paper map, but I was happy to get it. To maybe, hopefully make it easier to parse through the 5-6 floors of exhibits I had about 2-3 hours to cover. 

She pulled out a pen and circled the escalators to the left of us. She explained to me that the bottom three floors, the basement, the foundations of the building, housed the historical section of the Museum. Covering the transatlantic slave trade all the way through Obama, she said. She then flipped the page over and circled the top two floors, which covered present day (or at least the last ~100 years) of artistic, literary, musical, scientific, academic, athletic, military and religious aspects of African American cultures and histories.  

I thought she was done, ready to send me off on my way after giving me the museum’s standard.  

But then she flipped the page back over, smiled at me and leaned in as if she were delivering a secret. The concourse floors, she said, will take a while, hours. All the art, all the music, the fun stuff, she said, is upstairs. Her personal favorite being the Yoruba sculpture that inspired the exterior design of the Museum itself.  

These floors downstairs, she said redrawing circles on the map, they’re no fun. 

I thanked her and grabbed the map from the counter. But in that moment, all I really wanted to do was discard the map and everything she had just told me. To roam aimlessly into the depths of the museum for as long as I could. 

According to this woman, the floors downstairs, covering five hundred years of history, were no fun. Were devoid of the arts. The arts were all upstairs. The implication being that the safe, feel-good aspects of African American culture were the ones worth engaging with. That the histories below deserved to remain buried, in the dark.  

Before you ask, yes, she was.  

She wasn’t wrong about one thing. To do the floors below, to really go through it, absorb the content, and appreciate curatorial decisions, the lighting, the placement, you would need hours. I only had three for the whole museum. I won’t go through all the exhibits here, there’s a lot to see, and if you’re ever in DC, it is probably the most important museum to see, to understand the history of this country.  

What I did want to touch on was how wrong that woman’s implications of the downstairs floors were. Yes, they were difficult, morally and intellectually demanding exhibits. But at every section, there was also a history of people making art, expressing themselves and fighting to keep pieces of themselves in place or inventing themselves anew in spite of the horrors. The art was at times a statement of being, and at other times a pulse of rebellion.  

I wished we had learned more about slave rebellion in school.  

It’s possible we did and I just wasn’t a great student. I remember learning bits about the Haitian revolution. The name Nat Turner was somewhat familiar. Now that I’m thinking about it harder, we did watch Amistad in tenth grade. And Glory, if you can count that. Visits to Harpers Ferry in my early twenties told me a bit about the revolt led by John Brown. But the vast majority the history of slavery as taught to me in my memory was one of economic drivers for the empowered and the moral horrors they committed. Maybe I need to challenge myself and my memory on that more. 

One thing I definitely don’t remember learning about was the 1739 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina. Here a group of people enslaved, some likely soldiers from the West African Kingdom of Kongo, led a revolt with ambitions to march to Spanish Florida which had promised freedom for fugitive slaves (source). Most of these people were killed in the revolt, formally executed or sold off. The revolt paved the way for the Negro Act of 1740, which only formalized the lack of rights enslaved Black people were to have in British America. No assembly, no growing their own food, no earning money. No learning to write, implicitly no education of any kind, except that which served the interests of white owners. The act also affirmed the rights white slave owners were to have over them, which essentially provided complete and utter obedience under penalty of death, without testimony, without appeal. 

Example of a drum similar to one that may have been used during the Stono Rebellion.

I’m only reading about the Stono Rebellion, though, because this drum caught my eye. The inscription detail reads “Africans in the Lowcountry used drums for cultural practice, communication across distances, and even rebellion.” Which is why the Negro Act of 1740 banned the use of drums by enslaved peoples.  

Specifically, article 36 of the law reads “...restrain the wanderings and meetings of Negroes and other slaves, at all times, and more especially on Saturday nights, Sundays, and other holidays, and their using and carrying wooden swords, and other mischievous and dangerous weapons, or using or keeping of drums, horns, or other loud instruments, which may call together or give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes...” (source).  

Musical instruments were listed beside dangerous weapons. Resistance to being enslaved was deemed wicked. 

Article 36 from the Negro Act of 1740

Article 36 ends with a warning to slave owners: “...whatsoever master, owner or overseer shall permit or suffer his or their Negro or other slave or slaves, at any time hereafter, to beat drums, blow horns, or use any other loud instruments...shall forfeit ten pounds, current money, for every such offence...”  

Just in case, the carelessness or sympathies of white slave owners and overseers were carefully checked. The delegated surveillance strictly enforced. 

This reminds me briefly of Frederick Douglas’ appreciation for the poor white boys who, knowingly or not, committed great crimes to help Douglas practice his literacy as he walked to and from his errands on the streets of Baltimore. He credits their impropriety for some of the progress he made in those years.  

The world that could have been, could still be, if empathy and connection weren’t criminal or taboo.  

Statue of Phillis Wheatly

Less than two decades after the Stono Rebellion, a girl, likely less than ten, in West Africa would be sold into slavery and eventually be brought to Boston. She’d be bought by a wealthy tailor and merchant as a gift for his wife. These were the Wheatly’s, John and Susanna and they would name the young girl Phillis. The Wheatly’s were progressive, as progressive as slave owners come. They provided Phillis with an education, nurtured her literary talents and even ventured with her to London to advocate for her book to be published. And once it was published, they freed her (source).  

There’s more to her story, more to her poetry, more for me to learn, but I’ll share this ending passage of her poem On Imagination:  

But I reluctant leave the pleasing views, 

Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse; 

Winter austere forbids me to aspire, 

And northern tempests damp the rising fire; 

They chill the tides of Fancy's flowing sea, 

Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay. 

I wonder what world Phillis Wheatly was imagining. What things she wasn’t able to say. To pine for. What, despite her circumstances, despite being freed, did she have to pretend to be and think under the surveillance and violence of whiteness? What would happen if her poetry had been deemed ‘no fun’? 

There were other artistic acts of music, song, clothing, dance, writing, oration embedded through these floors. A burl bowl with carvings harkening back to West African aesthetics. Music from Scott Joplin to Medgar Evans to Public Enemy.  

Contemplation Court

The upper floors were wonderful and illuminating and I appreciate the buffer the curators gave between the two sections at the Contemplation Court. But I don’t think I would ever want to entirely separate the experiences. The pain and the horrors aren’t everything. We don't have to absorb the trauma of our ancestries in every piece of our art. Pain isn’t necessary to make art, to express oneself, to advocate for your own existence. But when art is made either because of or in spite of pain, I don’t think that means we should look away from the root of that pain. We can acknowledge the pain while we marvel and indulge in the vibrancy of the art and expression.  

There are different kinds of censorship. I know to many people this woman’s words might have been innocent. But I wonder, how many people has she successfully dissuaded from seeing the history downstairs? From engaging with it? How many people went downstairs and decided she was right and hurried upstairs because it was too grim, no fun.  

How often is our knowledge curated through a hazardous, well-meaning smile?