Editor’s Note: Cheyney McKnight—founder and owner of Not Your Momma's History—is a 2021 African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund Fellow. Her project, titled The Ancestor’s Future: An Afrofuturist Journey Through History, is both a piece of performance art and a conversation inspired by Afrofuturism, a genre of speculative fiction meant to build out possible futures for the African Diaspora. Read McKnight’s vision for her fellowship accompanied by images from the in-person event which took place March 17, 2022, at Woodlawn & Pope-Leighey House, a National Trust Historic Site.

As a Black historical interpreter, my mere presence in historical clothing on sites of enslavement tells the story of American slavery. However, it is not enough for Black people to just be present on historical sites; rather, they must have a voice independent from those who have excluded and misrepresented the stories of Black ancestors for generations.

An Inspired Conversation

I had a specific vision for my fellowship project, but with input from Black descendants of enslavement from around the Americas and West Indies, it evolved to include elements from across the African Diaspora.

The performance art piece was set in the parlor of the original home at Woodlawn & Pope-Leighey House. Lawana Holland-Moore, a Mount Vernon descendant (and the program officer for the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund), and myself sat upon a sofa reupholstered by Nicole Crowder, a Black artist, while hand-sewing a garment of reproduction cloth commonly worn by enslaved ancestors while we were dressed finely in the fabric of the future of the African Diaspora.

The tea set is for attaya, a Senegalese tea of gunpowder green tea, sugar, and fresh mint which takes time to prepare perfectly, and encourages conversation. The attaya and open chairs signal to visitors that they are welcome to sit—and speak—with us about the African experience in America’s past, as well as listen to speculations about the far future of the Diaspora.

Plantation museums have long attempted to separate discussions of slavery from the site, and center the interpretive focus on anything but the original purpose of a plantation—a forced labor camp. In placing two Black descendants of enslavement in the center of the house, we are refocusing the narrative onto the ancestors who built and ran Woodlawn.

Understandably, when visitors walked in to see us in our finery and at leisure, there were many questions. “Who are you portraying?” “What does Afrofuturism have to do with a plantation?”

A large part of my project was spent speaking to Black descendants about how they envisioned the future of plantation museums through truth, reparation, and reconciliation. From these conversations emerged the design of this Afrofuturistic set. “Afrofuturism is a way of imagining possible futures through a Black cultural lens,” according to Afrofuturist Ingrid LaFleur.

This was not the setting of a reimagined past, but an imagined future.

A question: In 200 years who will be in these spaces, what will be their purpose, and what will historic preservation look like?

Visitors who have come to plantation museums in the past 100 years were not seeing a true window into the past, but rather a fictional set. As we bring more descendants of the enslaved into the conversation about the use and purposes of plantations, sites are going to start shifting from the models of preservation that came before to models that are informed by input and direct from these descendants.