Williamsburg celebrates the African-American experience

GREAT HOPES PLANTATION, Va. — A visit to Colonial Williamsburg serves up a smorgasbord of emotions. Awe in that so many of its quaint 18th-century buildings are still standing. Delight in being able to take a clopping carriage ride along the august avenue known as Duke of Gloucester Street, or watch tradesmen practice brick-making and shoemaking with 18th-century tools. Envy over its tidy flower gardens and perfectly trimmed boxwoods.

But discomfort? That's a new emotion.

Standing in the cramped and dusty one-room slave cabin on this interactive living-history site — where as many as 12 men, women and children would have huddled for warmth on dirt floors after toiling dawn to dusk in the fields — all you feel is unease. And that's before a costumed interpreter points out the primitive corn-shuck doll tucked in a shallow pit in the corner.

In the 1700s, when "middling" plantations like Great Hopes (a 6-year-old representation, not an original) existed around the Colonial capital, slaves would have stored their meager belongings and precious keepsakes in root cellars in the floor; the toy in the rudimentary hole is a poignant reminder of someone's lost child.

"Maybe she died. Or maybe," the interpreter says, pausing for effect, "she was sold." Slaves, after all, were a farmer's most valuable commodity in the 1700s; depending on age, skill, gender and place of birth, a slave cost anywhere from 80 to 100 pounds, or twice the yearly salary of a white worker.

Built out of unhewn logs chinked with mud and manure, the humble little cabin — one of a handful of structures on the still-evolving site — stands in stark contrast to Colonial Williamsburg's most famous and opulent building: the reconstructed Governor's Palace. That five-bay Georgian home is so large and elaborately furnished that it required 25 slaves and servants to tend. It also pales in comparison to the showcase Peyton Randolph House, a large re-created urban plantation with 27 slaves.

In reality, though, it's a truer example of how many people would have lived when the Virginia town was the capital of England's oldest, largest and most populous North American mainland colony. Tempting as it may be to associate Williamsburg with the white Colonists who insisted on freedom from Britain (as governors, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry both lived in the palace), half of its population was black. Many of those would have spent their lives on rural middle-class working farms such as Great Hopes, slavery being the cornerstone of Virginia's agricultural system during the 18th century.