DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.3| WILLIAMS-FORSON: SEEKING THE ABSENT POTENTIAL_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 42cooks—one male and one female cook and her husband—can be found within the first fifty pages of thebook, highlighting its importance in the overall storyof the household cookery. It was a perfect scenarioaround which to tell a set of stories and to queerthe archive and the museum exhibition. We left thatmeeting with the idea that“meals tell stories”, andthat we would tell these stories through the lens of“ACooks Day, 1790s”[sic].Meals Tell Stories/A Cooks DayThe cook’s diary page begins with the enslaved waking long before daybreak to begin preparing theday’s meals. At 4:00 a.m., Nathan, one of Washington’s two enslaved cooks, wakes up in his bunk inthe male quarters. He washes, shaves, and dressesfor the day. And, in a nearby cabin, the other cook,Lucy, and her husband Frank Lee, the butler, alsowake up and prepare for work. By 4:30 a.m., theday is well underway, wood is gathered, and buckets of water are filled. Milk is obtained from thecows, eggs from the hens, flour, salt, lard, or butteris readied for biscuits. Even though I only had thisone page from which to tell this particular story,aspects of this narrative occurred at several otherplantations and farms, large and small, northernand southern, throughout the nation. Aside fromthis one page from the diary, the remaining sourcesreflected white experiences(the Washingtons andtheir guests), including documents(probate records, diaries, and other papers), and artifacts.Most of these sources came from the collectionsof the History of Medicine Division at the NLM,extant reference books and articles, and materialartifacts housed at the historic Mount Vernon plantation. So, how would I tell the story of the changing technologies that affected the everyday livesof Black people in bondage in the new nation usingsuch scant resources? Where would I get the rest ofmy sources from? What artifacts would be best fortelling these stories?One approach is to read the gaps that are left bythe archives. That is, the documents that are notthere and the information that is not in the writtenrecord. Artifacts also reveal gaps. Because an object, though created for one purpose, can have anumber of other uses and meanings. Reading thesematerials from the perspective of African Americanlived experiences would lay bare even more of whatis not there but can be interpreted, challenged, andrevealed. In her article,“The History of Technology,the Resistance of Archives, and the Whiteness ofRace”, Carolyn de la Pena writes:“Much scholarship[tends] to focus on big questions concerning the relationship between technology and cultural valuesor social change, rather than examining culturesand social relations embedded in the technologiesthemselves. Within this landscape, there are fewbuilt-in mechanisms for producing scholarship thatprioritizes race”.7De la Pena also suggests that thereal difficulty“occurs in tandem: difficult-to-locatesources combine with our own tendencies to fail tosee all that can be found in what is available, and tocreativelyengageandinterpretit in order to drawrace out of the archive”8.De la Pena challenges us to dig deeper and readmore carefully—work that involves risks. She says,“In order to write the histories on race and technology that are missing, we must, again, become thehistorians who ask about what is missing from therecord and the archives. We have to be willing totalk about race, even when our subjects did not”,and to contextualise race and other variables as intertwined even in history. Yes, as she goes on to say,“it is a risk, and it can lead to overreaching in one’s7Carolyn de la Pena,“The History of Technology, the Resistance of Archives, and the Whiteness of Race”, inTechnology and Culture,51/ 4(2010), 919–937, at 921.8Ibid., 923, original emphasis.