The documentary “Silenced Voices” received an enthusiastic reception from the crowd that attended a screening of the film on Martin Luther King Jr. Day at the Fine Arts Museum of Gloucester.
“Silenced Voices” is an examination of the interaction between the descendants of enslaved people and their enslavers during a week-long workshop held at Pharsalia Plantation (ca. 1814-1815) in Nelson County, Virginia. It also shares participants’ personal thoughts on visiting the place where their ancestors lived as enslaved people.
Jobie Hill, founder of the nonprofit organization Saving Slave Houses, and Frederick Murphy, founder of the nonprofit History Before Us, created and co-directed the film and were at Monday’s screening.
The event was sponsored by the museum, the Fairfield Foundation, and the Fairfield Family Circle, a volunteer-led group of descendants of people of Gloucester who were either enslaved or enslavers at three historical plantations in the county—Rosewell, Fairfield and Timberneck.
In introducing the film, Dr. David Brown, co-director of the Fairfield Foundation, said he thought that it was important to share the documentary with local descendants of the enslaved and their enslavers.
Murphy and Hill prefaced the screening with brief comments. Murphy pointed to the diversity of the people attending the event, saying that was what Martin Luther King Jr. represented. He said his purpose in making the film was to amplify those who had been enslaved.
Hill said her mission is to facilitate projects that investigate the living and working environment of enslaved people while making sure to involve their descendants in those projects. This particular project was about the female descendants of Pharsalia, two of whom also attended the screening. One of them, Star Reams, said she had been working to “validate some of stories passed down” in her family, delving deeply into a trove of plantation records and learning what the pre-Civil War culture was like. She said the experience had been “really exciting for me and my family.”
“We explored the question of how did we get here and what happens next,” she said.
The film itself shifts from shots of the historic Pharsalia manor house and the rolling hills surrounding it to close-ups of individuals participating in the workshop. There are both one-on-one interviews and a roundtable discussion that includes both the white women who are descended from the Massies, the original owners of Pharsalia, and the black women who are descendants of the people who were enslaved there.
About the moments of coming-together, the film’s website states that “everyone had a voice; everyone’s voice was heard; and most importantly there was the shared understanding that people require different methods and amounts of time to process difficult truths.”
In the film, Reams said her grandmother had been born on the plantation, and that she talked about her heritage all the time. Her great-grandfather “looked like a white man,” she said, and DNA results have shown connections to white ancestors.
“We really wanted to be able to step on the ground and find out what it was like here,” she said, but as they approached the mountain where the plantation lay, her grandmother had a panic attack and refused to go. Only later was she convinced to visit.
Foxie Morgan, the current owner of Pharsalia, said one family member had found a slave book at the plantation’s mill and, recognizing the importance of it, took it home to keep.
“We didn’t realize at the time the meaning of the book,” she said, “but it shows what life was like.”
The roundtable discussion was polite, but the participants didn’t shy away from discussing truths about the plantation. Morgan said that William Massie had reportedly been well-loved by the children in the family and that the slaves on the plantation were treated well.
“We’re proud of that,” she said.
She said she’s trying to make Pharsalia a business that pays for itself and that, while she doesn’t take responsibility for the things her ancestors did, “I don’t ignore it either. I want to understand it and move forward.”
But for black participants, being on the plantation where their ancestors had been enslaved was difficult. They talked about how they felt knowing their ancestors were “bred” for profit and “couldn’t just say no”; how difficult it must have been for their ancestors who were “breeders” to bond with the children they had; and how hard it was for them to process what had happened to the women in their families.
“To be in the room where these things took place was overwhelming,” said one woman in her interview.
One woman said her great-great-grandfather had been sold away from his family at the age of 11.
“I looked at pictures of my sons at that age,” she said, “and couldn’t imagine having them taken away from me.”
But the black women also said that being on the plantation was important to them.
“Every family should know their history and know where they came from, from generation to generation,” said one woman.
In a question-and-answer session after the film, Hill explained that owning slaves was not the Massie family’s commercial business, but it was intended to “build personal wealth off the sale of slave children.”
“This was built into the system of slavery,” she said. “Everyone was doing it. It helped sustain slavery as a system.” She said that three slave journals found on the plantation include 1,300 records of enslaved births. Fathers were only identified nine times, she said, showing that “the fathers were not important in this process. They were concerned with producing children, and the women were the ones who actually gave birth.”
Asked how they felt about reparations, both Reams and Nina Polley, who also was in the film and attended the screening, indicated they weren’t interested.
“It’s not every day you have a property owner that will open up their land for you,” said Reams. “The documentary is a first step in the healing process.”
She said further that reparations seem different when you’re talking about an individual.
Polley said, “There’s nothing anybody could give me that can make up for that … Access and coming to the table are reparation enough.”
