Traipsing Around: Travel and Psychogeography: Charleston Troubles

After travelling for 2 days and nights via Chicago and Washington DC, (with 3 and 6 hours in each city respectively), I arrive in Charleston in the early morning hours and after waiting for the service to start, I get the 6am bus into town. The historic centre of Charleston is one of the most beautiful cities I have ever walked around. It reminds me a lot of Bath, in the UK. There are hundreds of perfectly preserved, symmetrical, Georgian and Regency houses along leafy, calm, tree lined streets and lanes. From the front they look like similar houses in the UK, with solid doors up a short flight of honey coloured stone steps, some with elegant porticos, but they have a colonial twist. On the sides, instead of flat, straight walls, many have decked, wooden verandas on each level, connected by wooden staircases, so they have a more ethereal, open, airy construction. I spend hours just walking these harmonious streets, wandering at random across one beautiful street after another, looking at one picturesque house after another.

My meanderings take me around the city to the Charleston Museum and thinking this would be a good place to get my bearings, I enter and head straight towards an exhibition which gives a timeline of the city, from prehistory, through the War of Independence and the Civil War, to the modern city as it is now. I am amazed at what I find. There are a series of short videos, extracts from a longer piece it is true, which do acknowledge the debt that the city owes to slavery, its wealth being based on rice plantations which used thousands of slaves in rice production, but it is an acknowledgement which is very neutral in tone and simply stated as a fact. At no point is there any indication at all that slavery was wrong, or that the treatment of slaves was inhumane in any way. On the contrary, whilst it is acknowledged that slaves were taken from Africa, it is stated that in Africa there was an indigenous system of slavery already in place in rice plantations there, with the implication that the slaves in America where only doing what the slaves in Africa were doing already! So that’s Ok then! Thinking I may have perhaps missed a section of the exhibition, or a separate room or something, I traverse the exhibition 3 times, but no, I haven’t missed anything. For a while I am angry, no livid. The beauty of this city now sits in a very different light and I’m wondering if I can possibly return to those striking streets, knowing its foundations are built on brutality and enslavement and what is worse, a slavery that is not condemned. I am so incensed I leave the timeline altogether and walk quickly through the Natural History exhibits. On the first floor, I find a visitor’s questionnaire and I write a small essay of complaint on the reverse, leaving my email address and welcoming the museum’s comments. I have not had a response so far.

I understand that race relations are a very sensitive subject, particularly in Charleston, where 9 people were gunned down in a church here only a few months ago and of course, Britain also perpetuated the slave trade for centuries, so is certainly not blameless in that cruel enterprise. Nonetheless I was shocked by the re-presentation of history in that museum. The balance is redressed to some small extent, by the exhibition in the Old Slave Mart Museum, where slaves were once sold and where there is a sobering narrative on the history of slavery in the area, including a list of the names, gender, trades, ages and prices of the slaves that were sold on particular days, hundreds of them, like so many cattle, in this charming and attractive city.

New York Times Article