White accounts of emancipation are often fundamentally twisted, skewed by rank sentimentalism, rendering slaveholders and the enslaved as something closer to coworkers. But to say only that leaves us in a negative space. The people in those rooms were people, individuals. The rooms themselves were electric, full of possibility. Even if that possibility was to be crushed by something—the weight of history or narrative itself—does not mean that we should walk right past them, empower chronology so completely that we erase the might-have-beens and the sometimes-weres. Dominant narratives can erase pockets of resistance. And the capacity of a single policy shift to turn a master into a strange neighbor cannot be overstated, unless we are the ones overstating, for our own reasons. Which is why I want us to linger in these electric rooms, to think about their possibility.
We are sometimes, I believe, a little afraid of entering electric rooms. Of lacking certainty, or, worse, being seen by others as lacking certainty. Not seeming wild-eyed, but being caught moving away from certainty. Those of us who prize words and thinking cannot shake off the shibboleth of clarity in an unclear world. Definition closes around us so absurdly fast that we should recognize it for what it is: a closing off of possibilities, a shutting down. Certainty is something we make for ourselves for small reasons.
A few years ago, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I encountered Winslow Homer’s A Visit from the Old Mistress. Homer’s post-pastoral, post-traumatic, fully enigmatic scene was completed in 1876, the year that Reconstruction would effectively end, dooming African Americans to all that overtook them in the next era, centennial to bicentennial. The painting depicts three African American women plus a child, who are gathered near a hearth, and an older white woman, who stands in a doorway through which she has either been invited or intruded. One of the African American women is seated, which seems like a large choice, given the presence of the old mistress. In my read, there is no notion that she will be asked to sit.
Is the painting sentimental, like the story I was told in the antique store? Who has the upper hand? Do we know? Do the subjects of the painting know? Women are visited by a woman who claimed ownership of their entire being. They stand there together. What happens next? Do we know, or do we only think we know? Despite the various readings over the years, Homer has left most of the questions the painting might ask unanswered. If we answer them too easily ourselves, we push past the possibility of what we might uncover. Rather than freeing us, analysis buries us again.