Where slaves lived, Joseph McGill sleeps and tells their stories

Joseph McGill remembers with a shudder the time he spent at Seward Plantation in Brenham, Texas.

"I stood atop an auction block," he said this week from South Carolina, "and imagined the enslaved with their bare backs exposed to show there weren't any marks. No one would buy if there were scars. That showed defiance."

Time fell away for McGill, a descendant of enslaved workers, as he remembered his auction-block experience.

"That stands out. Yes. That stands out."

McGill, 54, is director of the Slave Dwelling Project, a five-year-old effort to draw attention to those places, still largely hidden on the American landscape, that were populated and used by enslaved black people.

On Thursday, he comes to Philadelphia to sleep in the old kitchen quarters at Cliveden, the National Trust mansion on Germantown Avenue once owned by the Chew family.

Friday at 7 p.m., after spending the night in the mansion's 1767 Kitchen Dependency, once staffed and run by workers held in bondage by the Chews, McGill will hold a discussion on the experience and similar ones he has had elsewhere.

There will also be tastings of Geechee and Gullah foods cooked by chef Valerie Erwin, formerly of Geechee Girl Rice Cafe.

For decades Cliveden was known as the ancestral home of the powerful Chews and the site of the Oct. 4, 1777, Battle of Germantown. But for six years, Cliveden staff and board members have dug into the dark parts of the house's past, seeking to shine a light and bring out a more complete story of American origins and the role played by slavery.

They have engaged the surrounding community, largely composed of people of color, in discussions about how best to tell that story of past enslavement.

McGill's pointed sleepover, his second at Cliveden, is part of that effort. His first night spent at the mansion, about five years ago, was designed to support Cliveden's efforts in telling such stories.

"I do it because there's been less attention paid to the fact that enslaved people served that property," McGill said. "We know far less about the slaves who served than about the rich owners." A history consultant at Magnolia Plantation, outside Charleston, S.C., he wants the stories of "those who built that house and those who served that house" told.

Over the five years he has directed the Slave Dwelling Project, a nonprofit organization, he has visited about 70 sites in 16 states, spending the night and drawing attention to the need for preservation of cabins, old kitchen spaces, work areas, and other places associated with the lives of the enslaved.

Most of his "stays," as he calls them, have been in the South, but he has visited five northern states too, including his first visit to Rhode Island recently.

"I get more pushback when I've stayed in northern states," he said. "There's appreciation for the Underground Railroad sites, and there's appreciation of the Northern Army coming down in the Civil War." But the existence of slavery in the North is not widely acknowledged by the northern public.

"Not only do we talk about slavery," he said of the conversations that follow his stays, "but the legacy. Police forces started out [in many places] as patrollers" monitoring the movement of blacks.

"We're still dealing with the residuals," he said. "All that becomes part of the conversation."

ssalisbury@phillynews.com

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