DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.3| WILLIAMS-FORSON: SEEKING THE ABSENT POTENTIAL_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 42 cooks—one male and one female cook and her hus­band—can be found within the first fifty pages of the book, highlighting its importance in the overall story of the household cookery. It was a perfect scenario around which to tell a set of stories and to queer the archive and the museum exhibition. We left that meeting with the idea that“meals tell stories”, and that we would tell these stories through the lens of“A Cooks Day, 1790s”[sic]. Meals Tell Stories/ A Cooks Day The cook’s diary page begins with the enslaved wa­king long before daybreak to begin preparing the day’s meals. At 4:00 a.m., Nathan, one of Washing­ton’s two enslaved cooks, wakes up in his bunk in the male quarters. He washes, shaves, and dresses for the day. And, in a nearby cabin, the other cook, Lucy, and her husband Frank Lee, the butler, also wake up and prepare for work. By 4:30 a.m., the day is well underway, wood is gathered, and bu­ckets of water are filled. Milk is obtained from the cows, eggs from the hens, flour, salt, lard, or butter is readied for biscuits. Even though I only had this one page from which to tell this particular story, aspects of this narrative occurred at several other plantations and farms, large and small, northern and southern, throughout the nation. Aside from this one page from the diary, the remaining sources reflected white experiences(the Washingtons and their guests), including documents(probate re­cords, diaries, and other papers), and artifacts. Most of these sources came from the collections of the History of Medicine Division at the NLM, extant reference books and articles, and material artifacts housed at the historic Mount Vernon plan­tation. So, how would I tell the story of the chan­ging technologies that affected the everyday lives of Black people in bondage in the new nation using such scant resources? Where would I get the rest of my sources from? What artifacts would be best for telling these stories? One approach is to read the gaps that are left by the archives. That is, the documents that are not there and the information that is not in the written record. Artifacts also reveal gaps. Because an ob­ject, though created for one purpose, can have a number of other uses and meanings. Reading these materials from the perspective of African American lived experiences would lay bare even more of what is not there but can be interpreted, challenged, and revealed. In her article,“The History of Technology, the Resistance of Archives, and the Whiteness of Race”, Carolyn de la Pena writes:“Much scholarship [tends] to focus on big questions concerning the re­lationship between technology and cultural values or social change, rather than examining cultures and social relations embedded in the technologies themselves. Within this landscape, there are few built-in mechanisms for producing scholarship that prioritizes race”. 7 De la Pena also suggests that the real difficulty“occurs in tandem: difficult-to-locate sources combine with our own tendencies to fail to see all that can be found in what is available, and to creatively engage and interpret it in order to draw race out of the archive” 8 . De la Pena challenges us to dig deeper and read more carefully—work that involves risks. She says, “In order to write the histories on race and techno­logy that are missing, we must, again, become the historians who ask about what is missing from the record and the archives. We have to be willing to talk 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’s 7 Carolyn de la Pena,“The History of Technology, the Resistance of Archives, and the Whiteness of Race”, in Technology and Culture, 51/ 4(2010), 919–937, at 921. 8 Ibid., 923, original emphasis.