Scarlett O’Hara has left the building. The real story now standing is harder and more meaningful that the hoop skirt fantasy.
Note- there will be a community day event at the Aiken Rhett House on Oct. 15, 2022
At the Aiken Rhett House in Charleston, they have left the dry bones of history, black and white, open for close examination. The tour is full of raw authenticity, well worth taking, only a block from the city’s visitor’s center but a century away from now.
Charleston, SC is the city where the Civil War began not by the firing of the first shot on Ft. Sumter in 1861, but by the collapse of the Democratic Party Convention in the City in 1860 (which ended without nomination of a nationally supported candidate, leading to the election of Abraham Lincoln).
History remains the foundation of the Charleston tourism economy, listed as the #1 tourist destination in the US by several travel magazines. The old story is gradually being crowded out by restaurant eating and destination weddings, but it’s grip on many of our tourists and the city’s fading aristocracy is still there.
The contest continues weekly on Sunday mornings when the two sides confront each other at Charleston’s Battery where the Confederate Heritage Community surrounds the Ft. Sumter monument with their flags and guns. A delegation of the local peace and justice community stands on high battery across the street under police supervision. The massive statue of John C. Calhoun has been taken down on Marion Square. Civil War monuments throughout the city and state are legally protected. (Calhoun died before the Civil War so his monument was not covered.)
The Aiken Rhett house is largely unchanged from its appearance in 1850. It hasn’t been renovated since. The occasional intrusions of bare wire electrical service running though ceramic tubes and rudimentary plumbing doesn’t really compromise the verisimilitude of peeling paint and crumbling plaster.
However, the two-part self-guided tour gets real in it’s first phase as you tour the large enslaved person’s Quarters out back. There are names and death records of enslaved people referenced. We are told who lived where and what they did during and after slavery. Formerly enslaved people worked in the house until 1908. The house is virtually unchanged since that time.
While the facts and details are sometimes thin, anyone with experience knows how difficult it can be to dig up detail on this part of history. A lot has been found here.
These poorly ventilated rooms are hot when it’s hot and cold when it’s cold. There are no windows on the back side of the house because that might allow dangerous communications between slave and alleyway. Every window can be monitored from the main house as can every entrance and exit. Oppression and fear are neighbors here.
These rooms were occupied until the 1960s. The last black residents certainly knew of Brown vs. Board of Education, Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. These black residents were probably as old and tired and the aged women they served in the big house. By 1975 all the residents, white and black were gone, leaving boarded up music rooms and carriages that hadn’t been pulled in decades, still sitting in the empty stables waiting for something. They’re still there now.
The second half of the tour returns us the great rooms of the big house, where Gen. Beauregard made his headquarters during the Union Siege of Charleston and where parties for 500 people were. sometimes held. This more familiar and popular history is perceived through the lessons of the first half of the tour, though the narration still reminds the visitor who cooked the food and set the tables.
As a lifelong resident of Charleston, a historian and an activist, the weight of this on my mind is heavy. I’m sure it’s heavier still if you are black. In these musty rooms, the full cost of those ancient parties can be measured. The staggering mistakes of history are apparent here.
We had every hope of resolving this in my lifetime. The school I attended was desegregated in 1967. Most people in the community were trying to move forward 40 years ago. As ridiculous at it might appear to someone under the age of 25, we honestly thought we were going to live in a post racial society in the 21st century.
You will not be bored by the tour of this massive house. There is lot of atmosphere and detail here to absorb. This is real. A dozen shiny houses full of carefully polished furniture with its water stains sanded and polished away will not be as fascinating. Charleston has at least four other museum houses to see, all worth a visit. There are four plantations open to the public in the countryside. All are making at least some effort to present the story of enslaved people to willing visitors. Locally Joe McGill leads the national slave dwelling project. Damon Fordham is writing a shelf full of African American history and presenting tours, both worth you time. There is a lot of work being done locally on African American history now.
When I was 17 years old, shortly after the Aiken Rhett house reopened, I went to a Halloween Haunted house there. The museum filled the old rooms with some of its vast collection of artifacts. It was scary enough for a teenager. However, when today I return 45 years later, the lessons are far more frightening to those of us living in post Trump America. We may be trapped.
You can find out more about this house and tour at https://www.historiccharleston.org/house-museums/aiken-rhett-house/.
The mistakes we make within history follow us and our grandchildren. There are no do overs. You live with consequences. So does your city and nation.