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DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.3| WILLIAMS-FORSON: SEEKING THE ABSENT POTENTIAL_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 44 because of the research and interpretive work con­ducted there. But, we also gathered data from ot­her plantations in the Chesapeake region, given that recent historical and archeological approaches had brought to light scholarly evidence on the daily lives of the enslaved and those landowners who benefited from the institution of slavery. Fig. 1: Faux fish. Photo taken by the author, 2016. So, the exhibition begins with an illustration of how slave labour was operationalised in the eighteenth century along the seacoast. Mount Vernon’s location on the river not only influenced what foods the Wa­shington family were able to enjoy but also would have had an impact on the busyness of the servants and staff as they prepared for any guests who might visit. In the inchoate society of the 1700s, those ens­laved were expected to perform a wide range of jobs that were hard, laborious, and unrelieved by time of day. These were the stories that had to go into the interpretation, and I had to rely upon historical documents, paintings, and other art owned by the Washington estate, documentaries, Washington’s planter diaries, and my own research on Black wo­men and food to tell an intricate, yet complex and powerful story. By January 2016, we had settled on the penultimate title, Fire& Freedom: Food& Enslavement in Early America, because enslavement was hellacious, and the word“fire” reflected the contradictions embed­ded in the hearth as a place for cooking and also for administering terror. Having settled on this, we began pulling out the elements we needed to look at them together as classes of information and for consistency, length, and messaging. There were six banners in all, and each had a title, text, and a focus statement to capture the viewer’s attention.  These were pulled from the banner text I had written. Last­ly, they contained an image and caption titles. The exhibition contained three products—a cluster of tra­velling banners that were initially set up in the main hall of the NLM at the National Insitute of Health; a larger set of the same banners that were installed immediately outside the library entrance as well as inside; and, display cases. Exhibition Design— Banners and Display Cases It is difficult to tell a messy story in a linear way. However, exhibitions are by nature hierarchical in how the information is presented, so as to enable au­diences to digest the content. And though we were not presenting this interpretation chronologically, we did want it to flow smoothly and to tell several over­lapping stories. So, we began designing the banners, banner texts, call-out sentences, captions, and cap­tion titles with Mount Vernon as the anchor primarily Fig. 2: Fire& Freedom traveling banner display in the main hall of the NLM. Photo taken by the author, 2016.