Portrait of George Rogers Clark, 1752-1818.
This quote from the Gospel of John refers to Pilate’s cross-questioning of Jesus before his crucifixion, a hypocritical justification of a foregone conclusion, but our questioning of historical “truth” may also be as invalid when we are possessed of what we believe is the answer.
This is particularly true when the subject is slavery in the U.S., until recently sometimes described as a happy and wholesome solution.
And so I was particularly gratified this past weekend when I visited Locust Grove, an early-nineteenth house outside of Louisville, one I remember as a rundown farm, now completely and beautifully recreated with a narrative that places the 48 slaves who lived and labored here at the front and center of the story.
This is done with a series of playlets. The first happens on the back porch where two African-Americans in slave costume discuss distilling whiskey; there was an active still out back. One of the two earthenware jugs they were carrying burst, spewing what was certainly tea and not Bourbon on the table, but, not to be discountenanced, the older actor tipped the spilled liquid into his mug. Some license was taken here: slaves would never have sat on this porch drinking and carrying on.
Inside a plausible white man in a costume including a top hat discussed the 19th-century remedies he would have given to George Rogers Clark, who spent the last nine years of his life in an upstairs bedroom. Clark, embittered because the Virginia Legislature refused to pay him what it had cost him to raise two regiments to exterminate the Indians in Kentucky, had been living in a cabin in southern Indiana when he burned his leg so badly that his sister in Kentucky—Lucy, married to William Croghan—insisted that he come and live in their large and handsome house on the edge of the wilderness.
Many years ago it was said that Clark fell in his fireplace and burned his leg because he was drunk, giving rise to the first line in my poem, “George Rogers Clark or A Use for Old Houses: How he fell in the fire and burned his leg half off…” A cleaned-up version offered now explains that the accident was the result of a stroke.
On the second floor, the beautiful ballroom as it was called has now been renamed a parlor, a place for gentle diversions like embroidery rather than the liquor-fueled romps of the early 19th century. Five actors in period costumes made lively conversation, which seemed to stun the onlookers, based on one women’s attempt to get her relative, the publisher of the first newspaper in Kentucky, the Western Courier, to publish two chapters of her unfinished novel. The disapproval such fictions aroused, nearly all written by women, make it likely that it would never be published in the four-page chronicle of local doings which didn’t include, as well, news of the French Revolution—both incendiary topics.
Of course we in the stunned audience had no idea what the African-Americans portraying the world of their ancestors thought of their roles; certainly the young man I saw leaving rapidly at the end of his performance might prefer playing Othello or a role that is not dependent on the color of his skin.
And it will probably be a long time before Locust Grove or any other historic place presents the truth about George Rogers Clark, portrayed in a bronze statue there as the heroic “Opener of the Old North West Territory”—Indian killer and territorial exploiter extraordinaire.
As my next book, an historical novel titled Taken By Indians to be published by Turtle Point Press in a few years, makes clear, the settlement of Kentucky occurred through many acts of violence against the Indians who were here long before us white people named the region “The Dark and Bloody Hunting Ground.”
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