Stephen Seals grabbed his wide-brimmed straw hat to stop it from blowing away. He adjusted his glasses and straightened his brown waistcoat. Seals, who has worked at Colonial Williamsburg for 17 years, portrays James Armistead Lafayette, an enslaved man who served in the Continental Army. He estimates that he has performed as James Lafayette more than 1,000 times.
Many Black people would find the idea of playing an enslaved person at a public historical site emotionally taxing or simply humiliating, and Colonial Williamsburg has always had a difficult time finding actors to fill those roles. I myself was uneasy when I realized that Seals would be doing a first-person interpretation of an enslaved man. I worried, in part, that he would try to use an exaggerated 18th-century Black vernacular in a way that can render enslaved people as caricatures and obscure their humanity and intellect.
But Seals doesn’t use dialect; he wants the audience to focus less on how he’s speaking and more on James Lafayette’s story. Born on a Virginia plantation, James was enslaved by William Armistead, an ardent Patriot who allowed him to enlist in the Continental Army. James may have done this hoping his service would be rewarded with freedom. He soon began working for the Marquis de Lafayette as a spy: Pretending to be a runaway slave, he crossed British lines, pledged his allegiance to the redcoats, and became a courier on their behalf. During the remainder of the Revolutionary War, James operated as a double agent, sharing important tactical and operational information with the Americans and feeding British officials false information about American military plans. Many historians credit his espionage with helping American and French forces defeat the British during the siege of Yorktown, which effectively ended the war. In 1787, James was granted his freedom by the Virginia Assembly, in part thanks to Lafayette’s personal advocacy. After he was emancipated, he chose to adopt Lafayette as his last name.
Seals is constantly reading new documents that historians have discovered and refining his presentation, and he keeps in touch with James Lafayette’s descendants. He finds it particularly gratifying when people tell him that he’s helped them understand enslavement, and the revolution itself, in new ways. Growing up in Charleston, West Virginia, and later Richmond, Virginia, Seals attended predominantly white schools that he said mostly overlooked the role of Black Americans in their curriculum, except during February. “I don’t want any Black kids coming to a historic site and not seeing themselves reflected in their history like I did,” he told me. “Because it made me worry that maybe there was no place for me in this country.”