Denmark Vesey's Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy by Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts (review)

"Telling the whole story can make for an uncomfortable experience," write Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts in Denmark Vesey's Garden, their remarkable new book on how Americans remember slavery (329). Those who prefer their history "whitewashed" to obscure slavery's brutality and minimize the institution's role in the Civil War will find this book uncomfortable, indeed.

A husband-and-wife team with doctorates from the University of North Carolina, Kytle and Roberts teach at California State University, Fresno, and contributed regularly to the New York Times's Disunion series on the Civil War. This book grew from their experiences living for two years in Charleston, where they were appalled by the unwillingness of many white residents and tourists to acknowledge the realities of slavery. Placing this story within the broader national narrative, the book reflects more than a decade of archival work and interviews yet has the urgency and timeliness of an Atlantic cover story.

Kytle and Roberts offer a much-needed corrective to the persistent memory of slavery as an "incidental but comforting fairy tale of faithful slaves and doting masters," a fraud disseminated by many Charleston tour guides, real estate agents, and boosters, as well as right-wing bloggers and commentators nationwide (11). When one side in a debate consistently ignores historical evidence, historians simply cannot be neutral, and the authors come down strongly on the side of historical accuracy over reassuring myth. "The unvarnished tradition of remembering—which has long competed with the whitewashed tradition, though rarely on equal ground—is superior," they write (6).

Interestingly, the "unvarnished tradition" initially had the upper hand in the battle to determine the public memory of slavery. After the Civil War, black Charlestonians and their white allies in the Republican Party regularly celebrated emancipation on Charleston streets and "shook the shackles of slavery" to encourage black voters to support Republicans (83). Temporarily pushed to the political sidelines during Reconstruction, former slaveholders—who just a few years earlier had unequivocally emphasized that they were seceding from the Union to protect their right to enslave human beings—engaged in "willful forgetting," nurturing a "countermemory" of the Lost Cause that minimized slavery's role in antebellum life (82–83).

This whitewashed narrative took hold as segregation spread after Reconstruction. "Charleston journalists, editors, and historians," Kytle and Roberts write, "helped reshape the Lost Cause from countermemory into master narrative, not just across the South but across much of the country" (116). Charleston became a tourist mecca in the early twentieth century, and city boosters assiduously drained slavery of all its brutality. As the white founder of Charleston's Old Slave Mart Museum told one visitor, "We don't go in for slave horrors" (254). This erasure was often quite deliberate. When black Federal Writers' Project employee Augustus Ladson interviewed formerly enslaved people in the 1930s, they told him excruciating stories of violence and abuse at the hands of slaveowners. Ladson's supervisors in the South Carolina office refused to believe what they considered "apparent falsehoods," so they sent a white interviewer to redo the interviews and get sanitized, more acceptable answers (238).

Black Charlestonians consistently challenged this narrative with their own memories of slavery, which they kept alive through oral histories and in the Avery Normal Institute and other segregated schools. After World War II, civil rights activists "harnessed the memory of slavery to animate their fight against Jim Crow," and they pushed to commemorate Denmark Vesey, whose unsuccessful 1822 slave rebellion continues to polarize Charlestonians' memories of slavery (261).

Change has come slowly to Charleston, but it has come, particularly in the past decade. "By the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, a confluence of factors—black political empowerment and activism, growing support from city hall, tourist demands, and new leadership at numerous...