Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy by Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts

Abstract

Reviewed by: Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy by Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts Evan A. Kutzler (bio) Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy. By Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts. (New York: The New Press, 2018. Pp. 464. $28.99 cloth; $19.99 paper; $28.99 ebook) [End Page 600] On the evening of June 17, 2015, I left the Addlestone Library at the College of Charleston and paused at the intersection of Calhoun and Coming Streets. Situated between that intersection and an armada of blue lights in front of Emanuel A. M. E. Church was Marion Square: a park still owned by a militia that helped conservative white men "redeem" South Carolina in 1876; the location of a John C. Calhoun monument; and the proposed (but ultimately rejected) site of a monument to Denmark Vesey (p. 332). In 1822, white Charlestonians executed Vesey for trying to organize an uprising against slaveholders. His legacy—including a twenty-year campaign that ultimately placed a statue of him in a park named after the "redeemer" Governor Wade Hampton—reflects our country's complicated standards when it comes to remembering violence. For Ethan Kytle and Blain Roberts, the shooting at Emanuel A. M. E. Church, and the Vesey monument mark the preface, conclusion, and afterword to ten chapters summarizing two centuries of racial slavery and analyzing its memory from 1865 to 2016. The ongoing debate about the legacy of slavery renewed by the Charleston massacre, the authors remind us, "is nothing new" (p. 4). Kytle and Roberts begin their memory study with the history of slavery in Charleston. From 1670 to 1865, they argue, "no American city rivaled Charleston in terms of the role that slavery played in its formation and success" (p. 12). Yet the capital of slavery was also an early locus of performative memorialization, including the Decoration (Memorial) Day celebrations at the Washington Race Course (pp. 53–57). "Slavery and the Confederacy were dead and buried," the authors write, "and their apologists—outnumbered and outgunned—could do little more than carp about these changes" (p. 61). This was true for the time being. By the end of the nineteenth century, as monuments, parks, textbooks, and commemorations indicated, the white apologist narrative triumphed (p. 83). [End Page 601] Measured through guidebooks, newspapers, and preservation societies in the early twentieth century, the apologist revisionism remained the unquestioned public memory for decades. The all-white Society for the Preservation of Spirituals, for example, performed spirituals to segregated audiences and interpreted the songs as primitive survivals of Africa that projected the benevolence of American slavery (p. 212). The appropriation of spirituals reflected how "whites could easily lay claim to what they insisted was a genuine memory of slavery with little fear of being challenged" (p. 214). Even when leaders of the Charleston Movement sought to "overcome historical amnesia" and created a "usable past" in the 1960s, the result was a split public memory that continues to divide the tourism industry (pp. 261, 320). Denmark Vesey's Garden opens up areas for further research in part because the authors analyze the apologist memory of slavery better than they recover opposing memories. This is most evident in the chapter on the Old Slave Mart Museum. As the authors explain in an earlier chapter on the Calhoun monument, Elijah Green reportedly dug the grave of "wicked man" Calhoun (p. 97). Green also sat outside the Old Slave Mart Museum for years, but the authors do not explain the significance of his presence at this critical point on the tourist landscape (p. 248). The authors also choose not to explore the possible meanings of a woman pictured in 1938 in front of that same museum, apparently selling sweetgrass baskets and flowers (p. 246). While the connection between tourism and the whitewashing of slavery is well developed, it is less clear how African Americans carved out public space for themselves within this apologist framework. Still, Denmark Vesey's Garden will spur debate and conversation about our reckoning—or lack of—with one of our great debts to humanity and the truth. [End Page...