A Review of 'Two Plantations'

Abstract

Based on research compiled by Richard Dunn over more than forty years, the website Two Plantations expands on his work published in print and e-book form as A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia.1 Dunn’s research on seven multigenerational families was culled from plantation ledgers and other source material held by the Barham Papers in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford and the Tayloe Papers at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond. Creation of the site itself, however, was spearheaded by Vincent Brown and is a project of the History Design Studio. Two Plantations leads users horizontally and vertically into representations of the lives of 431 enslaved people at two plantations. The landing page features a short description of the site with a present-day image of a building surrounded by lush greenery, a stately structure presumably on the site of either Mesopotamia (Jamaica) or Mount Airy (Virginia) and rendered in shades of blue. Slight, nearly undetectable animation causes the sentence beneath the description to glow. In italics, it reads, “This is their story.” Clicking an arrow icon slides the user to the right, but not immediately into the names database or the handwritten family tree (painstakingly digitally rendered, since the family tree in paper form is over five feet in length). Instead, the user is advanced to a paragraph length introduction to Dunn’s research set against a blue scale rendering of a page from a plantation ledger. The words “Doctors Hall,” the name of a farm quarter owned by Mount Airy’s proprietors, loom especially large against the zoomed-in page. As a composition, these design choices acquaint the user with the work of a present-day historian of slavery juxtaposed against the work of the slave-owning past as preserved by archivists, endeavored upon by slave owners, and engaged in by the enslaved themselves—men with names like James, Gerard, Isaac. As the user clicks and is guided through the site from left to right (following the logic of a book), such multilayered and intertextual experiences continue. The next slide, against a verdant blue-scale landscape that is neither clearly Jamaica nor Virginia, includes a query as to why studying the lives of enslaved families across two different plantations, in two different slaveholding societies, is important. In Jamaica, enslaved death rates exceeded birth rates; in Virginia, slaves built multigenerational families. On both plantations, however, those in