Maya Freelon’s joyful portraits of enslaved children at the historic Stagville Plantation

As a child, Maya Freelon visited historic Stagville. All schools around Durham, NC take field trips there. At the start of the Civil War in 1860, Stagville was part of a massive plantation where the Bennehan and Cameron families enslaved over 900 people.

“I remember thinking, ‘How could people live in these conditions?'” Freelon (born 1982), now a well-known contemporary artist, told Forbes.com. “It was hard to deal with as a child; It still is.”

Freelon has returned to historic Stagville, bringing her artwork and some special guests with her.

When the Library of Congress announced a grant for artists interested in using their collection for inspiration, Freelon applied. Inspired by Deb Willis’ book Reflections in Black, the first comprehensive history of Black photography, including early photography of African Americans before emancipation, Freelon wanted the opportunity to view the earliest images of Black people in the library.

She was particularly interested in children. Children living in slavery.

Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t much to be found. Photography mid-19th century^Th Century was extremely scarce, complicated and expensive. Why would white photographers “waste” their effort on enslaved people, especially their children?

The sparse pre-emancipation images of black children that Freelon found were not the kind she wanted to transform into an art project.

“Many of the images were racist or showed the children in active servitude, which I wasn’t interested in (depicting),” she said. “I was specifically looking for joy.”

That made her task even more difficult, so she settled for candid shots or anything that wasn’t really humiliating. Still a short selection. She had to expand her search criteria to the period immediately after emancipation, the era of tenant farming in the South, not of slavery, but hardly of freedom.

Freelon’s family knows all about it. She is the descendant of black stock traders.

“My grandmother often reminded us that we came from a family of sharecroppers who never got their fair share,” Freelon remembers.

That would be Grandmother “Queen Mother” Frances Pierce, who was nicknamed “Queen Mother” while visiting Ghana. The same grandmother who met and befriended the famous poet, author and activist Maya Angelou (1928-2014) while living in Boston. The first name Maya Freelon comes from her godmother Maya Angelou.

“It is deeply embedded in me that the work was unfair and the wages were unfair, even when slavery was abolished,” Freelon said.

Incorporating the Reconstruction period gave Freelon more and better images to choose from as photography improved and expanded during these years. For ten days in February 2024, Freelon worked with a librarian at the Library of Congress to review physical and digital images from the collection. She found pictures as small as a postage stamp. She is sure that no one has seen many of them for years. Maybe decades.

“How could I raise her? How could they be remembered in a way that isn’t property or just documentation? “How could I take these images and turn them into something beautiful and honorable,” Freelon asked himself.

What she dreamed up can be viewed at Historic Stagville through January 25, 2025, during the exhibit “Whippersnappers: Recapturing, Reviewing, and Reimagining the Lives of Enslaved Children in the United States.”

Freelon’s portraits place children front and center amid a kaleidoscope of colors. It makes the children happy, colorful and playful. She turns them into children. She celebrates them. By enlarging the children’s portraits beyond their original size, Freelon confronts the viewer with their undeniable presence and sheds light on the biases and omissions present in the historical record.

A useful reminder for thinking about slavery. Not only adults had to endure the terrible conditions, but also children. A significant number were the result of rape by white slave owners. According to the law at the time, the race of children was determined by their mother – black – and not by their father – white.

Most of the photographs featured in “Whippersnappers” are from the US Library of Congress’ online catalog “Prints & Photographs” and are available for viewing and downloading by the public.

Historic Stagville

Freelon’s funding proposal also included the Historic Stagville site to display the results of her research. Michelle Lanier, director of the North Carolina Division of State Historic Sites, happens to be a friend and colleague. When discussing the potential for the Library of Congress project with Lanier, it was Lanier who suggested the Bennehan House (circa 1799) in historic Stagville.

“How great would it be to raise these kids in a real home that they didn’t even have access to,” Freelon remembers.

And there they are. Freelon’s portraits are displayed in the Bennehan House, the former plantation house. The artworks are free-standing so as not to damage the walls and respect the historical structure.

“Each room is a vignette, a kind of dreamscape,” Freelon explains. “There is a particular room that is considered some sort of office space that probably recorded the names of over 200 African-American children who were born there. In this room there is (an artwork) of a child standing at a window, holding his hands up and playing with these names printed on tissue paper. I printed out all of their names and created a memorial sculpture. It was likely that the names were recorded in this very room.”

Freelon never found any photos of pre-emancipation Stagville children. The site features an outstanding collection of photographs of the Stagville descendant community and highlights the formerly enslaved people who lived there in its tours and programs.

“I felt tremendous pride that I was able to come full circle and (bring back) these children (even though they were not connected to Stagville) – the familial connection and the separation that occurred during enslavement, where you were torn from your own family could become family and sold north, south, east, west, these people have a lineage and a connection,” Freelon said.

The cruelties of enslavement were both personal and universal. What the enslaved children experienced with portraits in Freelon’s artwork in historic Stagville, wherever they came from – the few surviving photos of enslaved children rarely list their names, ages or locations – would have been owned by the Bennehan and Cameron families similarly experienced in east-central North Carolina.

The name “Cameron” is well known in Raleigh-Durham. Duke’s basketball arena, Cameron Indoor Stadium, has no connection to the slave traders, but the family was a trustee and donor to the nearby University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where a campus street is infamously still named after them.

The title of the exhibition refers to both the innocent and the guilty.

“The idea of ​​a whippersnapper is a kid who is smart, quick as a whip and also a little bit defiant,” Freelon said. “On the other hand, I also thought: Who holds the whip and who has the power?”

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