As competent—and moving—as the exhibits often are, they also tend to omit the more difficult aspects of the slavery era, like the pedophilia, the sadism, and the literal cannibalism of Black flesh. Curators are, for the most part, seeking to present a family-friendly history that can be comfortably discussed by teachers and parent chaperones on a school field trip.
Smithsonian visitors will therefore be forgiven if they return home without knowing that slaves, including children, often went completely naked, no matter the weather—leaving their bodies exposed not only to the elements but to the whims and impulses of their masters, overseers, and neighbors.
Ben Simpson, formerly enslaved in Georgia and Texas, testified to this treatment by his master Earl Stielszen. “We went naked, that [was] the way he worked us,” he told interviewers from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s, at the age of 90. “We never had any clothes.”
The conditions he described were worse than the treatment of modern farm animals: “We never had no quarters” either, Simpson added. “When night-time come he locks the chain round our necks and then locks it round a tree. Boss, our bed were the ground.”
The great Frederick Douglass detailed similar conditions on his plantation in Maryland, writing: “The children unable to work in the field had neither shoes, stockings, jackets, nor trousers, given to them; their clothing consisted of two coarse linen shirts per year. When these failed them, they went naked until the next allowance‐day. Children from seven to ten years old, of both sexes, almost naked, might be seen at all seasons of the year.”
After seeing the Smithsonian’s current exhibitions on slavery, visitors are also likely to go home without clearly understanding that both female and male slaves were purposely and systematically forced to reproduce without their consent, and that because each child would also be born into bondage, the greater the number of offspring produced, the wealthier their masters would become.