Black Histories Matter

Abstract

In the small town of Somers, Connecticut, near the Massachusetts border, the cofounder of a prominent American restaurant chain has built an apparently meticulous replica of Thomas Jefferson’s mansion in Monticello, Virginia. As reported in the Boston Globe last Christmas Day, S. Prestley Blake is a Jefferson devotee who wanted to recreate the architectural beauty of the founding father’s longtime residence in his own abode.1 A monument of the southern plantocracy resurrected in a New England neighborhood, this incongruous replica of Monticello may be most notable for what is absent from its design. For all the attention to recreating specific details of the original, including the use of distressed bricks that mimic the uneven surfaces of 18th-century masonry, a fundamental aspect of Jefferson’s Monticello—the very reason for its existence—has somehow gone missing. No attempt has been made to recreate the original plantation’s slave quarters, which were located in an area of Monticello known as Mulberry Row. It would take a great deal of naïveté to be surprised by this. But the omission nonetheless underscores just how easy it is to define historical authenticity in terms that do real damage to the lived experience of the past. No one can look at this replica of Monticello and say that it produces a bona fide approximation of the original—and yet this is the very fiction that animates the entire project.