DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.3| WILLIAMS-FORSON: SEEKING THE ABSENT POTENTIAL_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 43analysis, misreading the data, and simply gettingthings wrong.[But] it can also open up essential newterrain in the study of how racialized thinking hasshaped technological innovation and influenced ourengagement with its objects in the United States”.9It is a risk that we must take because exhibitions should engage and use a plethora ofvoices, including those whose lives are interlocked by gender, race, class, sexuality,and even age but are also routed in oppression and systemic degradation.Consequently, by using that one diary page, I wanted us to view the historical record through the lensof Black people, not to fill in what is missing but topush the evidence to move beyond the absencesthat were created to hear what is being said whenwe read the sources for Black lives, cultures, and histories. Only then, I knew, would we be engaging theabsent potential.ted the historic Mount Vernon. As we waited to go tothe storage facility, I walked around the home thatsat overlooking Virginia’s Potomac River. Though Ihad been to the site many times before, this time, Iwas struck by an overwhelming sadness because as Ilooked at the river, I realised that my early ancestorswere surrounded by bodies of water that ushered inboth the horrors of bondage and the possibilities offreedom. The water made it possible for early Africans to be driven into the brutal mouth of enslavement, and for some, it was a way of escaping thosesame atrocities either because they jumped overboard during the Middle Passage, died during thejourney, or escaped once they reached new shoresand realised their fate. It was also a barrier to those who wanted to escape Mount Vernon but couldnot because they were surrounded by water and hadno means of leaving. Still, for others, it was a meansof escape. At that moment, I knew that I had to talkabout freedom as central to this narrative becauseof the multiple meanings that the water represented.Creating the Exhibition Scriptand Choosing the Objects:The WaterOver the next several weeks, the title of the projectchanged fromMeals Tell Stories/Martha Washington+ FoodtoMeals Tell Stories+ A Cook’s Day.Arrangements were made with Mount Vernon’s Loan Collection Program to view assets that would be availableto us for use in our exhibition, and a visit to the historic site was set up to survey these objects. We weretold in advance that out of concern for safety andpreservation, we would be given“no more than eightWashington original objects” but that an additionalfifteen or so representational objects would be available to us(email correspondence 2015).On a hot, muggy day during the first week of June,the project manager, exhibition registrar, and I visiThe river was a source of food that provisionedthe household—fish and other water edibles as wellas coffee beans. African foods and livestock madetheir way to the Americas during the Middle Passage when Europeans stocked and restocked slaveships. Africans came to the Americas not only withintimate memories of traditional culinary practicesand cuisines but also with particular regionally based agricultural knowledge. These, and other, skillswere called upon to benefit New World markets,especially the tending of new kinds of crops. Africanwomen, in particular, prepared foods both duringtransport and once they arrived using their customary methods and borrowing from Native Americansand Europeans. They introduced plants and herbssuch as tamarind, hibiscus flowers, and the kola nutto improve tastes and fight diseases resulting fromvitamin deficiency.9Ibid., 926.
