Whitney Nell Stewart is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at Dallas. This interview is based on her new book, This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).
JF: What led you to write This is Our Home?
WS: Eleven years ago, I was lucky to be part of a field research team documenting material culture in privately owned antebellum homes for the Classical Institute of the South (now known as the Decorative Arts of the Gulf South). During our month in Mississippi and Louisiana, we spent our free time touring historic plantations, during which we encountered little that acknowledged the institution of slavery nor the people it bound. Even more than this general omission, though, I was struck that when enslaved people were mentioned, it was only as laborers, whether in the mansion, in the fields, in the kitchen, in the blacksmith shop, or even in the slave cabins. Most of those cabins were either gone from the landscape or retrofitted into gift shops, while the white home remained standing in its antebellum glory through painstaking preservation. These tours presented a racialized dichotomy to visitors: labor was Black, home was white. And the more plantations I visited, the more this puzzled me. Why was home racialized as something available only to white folks? It turns out, like everything else, that narrative has a history. I wrote This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations to try to understand why we grant enslavers the right to have homes on plantations but rarely do so for the enslaved people who not only labored but lived, loved, and lost there.
JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of This is Our Home?
WS: Enslaved people across the plantation South struggled to transform sites of forced occupation, violence, and exploitation into something more: homes. Despite white Southerners’ concerted attempts to stop them, enslaved plantation residents continually strove and sometimes succeeded in making their involuntary residences feel more like their own, from sweeping yards and building cabins, to hiding objects in walls and burying kin in the ground.
JF: Why do we need to read This is Our Home?
WS: While I hope there are more than just a couple reasons folks will want to pick-up the book, I’ll highlight two that I feel are particularly compelling.
The first: the book’s use of material culture as a method, theory, and source base. At the heart of material culture is the assertion that objects reveal much: they can tell us about the tangible worlds that people lived in, but they also can tell us about individuals, relationships, communities, beliefs, values, and institutions. Objects—things produced, consumed, altered, and discarded by humans—are legitimate sources for historical exploration. A piece of furniture, a broom, a cowrie shell, or a dress: each is an object, as is a cabin, a yard, or a manicured landscape. If it has been made or altered by human hands, it can be analyzed and interpreted as a piece of material culture. In the book’s appendix, I walk readers step-by-step through my material culture methodology using one artifact from the book—Stagville plantation’s walking stick—so they can get a better sense of how this work is done. I wrote it so those who may be skeptical or hesitant of using objects as sources of historical investigation can hopefully feel more confident in doing so.
The second: the book’s implications for public history. Black descendants of plantations across the country have begun to more forcefully call for a stake in the management and interpretation of historic sites. Their families’ blood, sweat, and tears are in the land; so, too, are attempts to build something for themselves. Demonstrating that these places were home to more than just the white family therefore contributes to the pursuit of a more equitable and honest telling of history at these sites. Of course, many dedicated staff and volunteers of historic plantation sites across the region have been working tirelessly to tell the complicated, difficult, real history of these places. This Is Our Home supports their work, showing how we can rectify antiquated, skewed plantation tours by incorporating Black homemaking across the plantation.
JF: Why and when did you become an American historian?
WS: Born in Alabama and raised in Texas, I’ve long felt a deep desire to better understand the complicated history that made the South what it is today. There is no understanding this place and its people without grappling with how race-based inequality emerged and morphed over time, from Indigenous displacement and erasure to chattel slavery and convict leasing to racial terrorism, segregation, and gentrification. Through the inspiring work of teachers, scholars, public historians, descendant communities, and activists across the region, I began and continue to grapple with the past and its living legacy today, a necessary step on the road to making a better future for all Southerners. I aspire to uplift and contribute to this deeply important endeavor through my work as a historian, author, and educator.
JF: What is your next project?
WS: I’ve got two book projects in the works.
The Story of Texas: History-Making at Varner-Hogg Plantation will explore a single southeast Texas plantation over two hundred years. Varner-Hogg and its inhabitants directly experienced many of Texas’s most consequential transformations, including the Old Three Hundred’s settlement, the chaos and triumph of the Revolution, the rise of cowboy culture and ranching, and the fortunes of the oil boom. In fact, one of the site’s twentieth-century residents—Ima Hogg—converted the plantation mansion into a museum exhibiting what she called “the story of Texas”: Anglo settlement, the Texas Republic, the Confederacy, “our forefathers.” Yet the reality of the past is far more complicated than Hogg’s whitewashed celebration, for the displacement of Indigenous peoples, anti-Mexican ethnocentrism, chattel slavery, convict leasing, and environmental destruction have shaped Varner-Hogg and Texas just as profoundly. This project offers a fuller history by recovering, recentering, and reinterpreting the many different voices and defining moments that make Texas history.
My other current book project, Bitter Vines: Wine and Slavery in the United States, will uncover the conjoined deep roots of American wine and slavery from the Revolution to Reconstruction. Although wine and slavery repeatedly converged in surprising places across the North American continent during the United States’ first century, this history has been ignored and obscured from our collective memory. Bitter Vines will be the first book to reveal the untold stories of Americans who forcefully spread themselves, their institutions, and their vine cuttings from the slave states of Virginia, South Carolina, and Alabama to the anti-slavery hub of Ohio, west to the expanding frontier of slavery in Texas and the nominally free state of California. Through the stories of famous wine-loving Americans like Thomas Jefferson but also unappreciated enslaved winemakers like Henderson Johnson, I argue that wine and slavery not only shaped one another, but profoundly influenced how Americans understood national identity, labor, capitalism, and freedom.
JF: Thanks, Whitney!