INSTRUMENTO DE RECOLECCIÓN DE LA INFORMACIÓN

“For what history is changes with time and place or, better said, history reveals itself only through the production of specific narratives. What matters most are the process and conditions of production of such narratives. Only a focus on that process can uncover the ways in which the two sides of historicity intertwine in a particular context. Only through that overlap can we discover the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others.”90 _– Michel-Rolph Trouillot

“This is just a situation where we are discussing that historic relativism often doesn’t want to touch challenging subjects.”91 _{– Julia Rogers, Historic Interpreter,} Duke Homestead

People don’t always do as they are told. History is not always heard as it is told. The interpreters at Duke Homestead State Historic Site and Tobacco Museum do not adhere to a single narrative; they speak from the same script, but they do not tell the same story. Despite the variations, the historic site is a tool for communicating the past to a contemporary audience. By considering the process through which the intended narrative is transferred to visitors, the movement along a trajectory from the scripted, to the spoken, to the received, history becomes the product of a multitude of authors, voices, and interpretations. Even the three categories of scripted, spoken, and received become blurred and indistinguishable. Historic Interpreters Emma Smith and Julia Rogers scripted the narrative, but only after having spent years speaking it as a tour guide. Additionally, Rogers speaks her tour in a manner that best addresses what she hopes will be received, but ultimately the received history is individually defined by each visitor who

90 _{Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 25.}

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engages Duke Homestead. The categories of scripted, spoken, and received narratives become tools for analyzing and discussing history, but they, like history, are an oversimplification, and an imperfect means for understanding the complex cultural and social phenomenon that is the cultivation, construction, and circulation of history.

These categories bump and rub against each other. Each influences the others. These variable categories combine with the manifold of other factors that influence the internalization of history. As a result, the absorption of history is far from universal or exhaustive. Politics, archival resources, and money influence the preservation, celebration, and interpretation of specific sites, stories, and spaces. The stories that formulate the accepted national, regional, and local conceptualizations of communal experiences and identity are, consequently, incomplete. Anecdotes of the past are then assembled and written, only then to be verbalized to diverse audiences. In this sense, history moves. It travels from lived experience to observed occurrence, from spoken lore to written record, from outlined anecdote to recounted sequence, from heard presentation to processed ideas of reality. This traveling occurs in no set linear order.

Historic sites are not time capsules. They are dynamic, living, and changing spaces. The narratives attached to these spaces are meant to be transgressed, and it is in the moments of transgression that we discover new opportunities for understanding and communicating lessons, anecdotes, and conceptions of the past. Sites exist today, and their interpretive efforts

surrounding tours are products of this time. At Duke Homestead, for example, the current tour does not solely speak to ‘history.’ It mirrors a contemporary understanding of history, the guides’ current perceptions of historical importance, and the perceived purpose of the site as a space that can teach a story worth hearing today. The guided tour is a moment where the past and the

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present meet, and where the history of Durham is recreated, revived, and retold, constantly renegotiated in relation to the story’s own context of transfer.

The latest scripted tour includes Caroline. She lived on the site, cared for Duke’s children, and was later employed by Washington Duke. If this site is a space that tells of those who resided on the property, Caroline is fundamentally a character in the story. Yet Caroline has no words. The interpreters at the site have not found diaries that she kept. There are no images of Caroline to display alongside the pictures of the Duke family members. The museum and historic site of Duke Homestead bare no physical markers of her presence, no evidence of her life or relationship to the family. Her name is not embedded in the landscape of Durham, found on street signs, buildings, or historic markers. Her name is not fully known, as evidence of her life is missing, leaving us unsure of her identity.

Even if Caroline and Caroline Barnes are one and the same, her records are incomplete at best. They consist primarily of legal documents that mark her civically recognized status as an enslaved person, a laborer, and later, confirm her death after she was freed by emancipation. Despite the absence of intimate details of Caroline’s life, she is a critical voice in the history of Duke Homestead. The void in the physical archive is supplemented by the words of the tour guides, as they verbalize and project her story onto the landscape. Although not consistently remembered, Caroline is a part of the scripted, spoken, and received story of Duke Homestead, a person whose life and actions are inseparable from the space now enlivened as a historic site. Caroline has no words, but she has a narrative.

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