Texarkana Gazette

A hardscrabb­le life

Woman recalls growing up in cabin that once housed slaves

- By Jesse J. Holland

WASHINGTON— It’s been years since Isabell Meggett Lucas has been inside the tiny house she was born in, a former slave cabin where her ancestors sought refuge from the hot South Carolina sun.

But the 86-year-old woman never envisioned that when she finally returned, the wooden two-room house would be viewed by millions of people inside the Smithsonia­n National Museum of African American History and Culture as an example of what home life was like for slaves in the South.

Visiting the new museum, open for a little over six months now, gave Lucas and her family a chance to share with museum curators a first-hand glimpse of how descendant­s of African slaves lived in the post-Civil War and Jim Crow South, their joys and pains and how they survived a hardscrabb­le life without electricit­y or other modern comforts.

“It’s my home. We all lived there together and we were happy,” said Lucas, speaking softly as she stood outside the weatherboa­rd cabin used during slavery at Point of Pines Plantation on Edisto Island, South Carolina.

Smithsonia­n officials scoured the countrysid­e looking for representa­tions of slave cabins for years before choosing the Meggett family cabin on the coast of South Carolina, curator Nancy Bercaw said.

Lucas, her sister-in-law Emily Meggett and their family viewed the cabin Monday and Tuesday, where it was rebuilt as part of the “Slavery and Freedom” exhibition in the museum almost exactly as it was when the last occupant lived there in 1981. It is believed to be one of the oldest preserved slave cabins in the United States, and although the exact age of the cabin is not known, it sat on the Point of Pines Plantation from 1851 until it was moved plank by plank to the museum.

But Lucas, who lived there from birth until age 19, remembered something about the cabin that isn’t in the exhibit.

“It had a big long porch on the outside,” she said. “My momma would sit on that porch. The cool wind would be getting ready to blow off the rivers and such.

“The wind would blow and we’d sit on the porch … when we would get tired, everyone would lay on that porch under blankets and quilts and go to sleep.”

That’s the importance of having access to the people who lived in the house, because the porch was gone by the time the Smithsonia­n officials first saw the cabin, Bercaw said. People often think of history to be just about objects and things, when there’s so much more they can learn, she said.

“They can give us such insight to what life was like on Edisto Island,” Bercaw said. “Objects hold meaning within them, and as far as we’re concerned, that meaning comes from the family” that lived there.

The museum is still collecting informatio­n about the cabin, including the oral history of the Meggett family, recorded during their trip to Washington.

For example, the 84-year-old Meggett said she remembered coming over before she married Lucas’s brother, and remembered Sunday afternoon games of hopscotch, jump rope and baseball in the nearby grass, where a base would be an old brick, and the children could run free through the grass and fields.

But slowly, she said, people moved away and the cabin eventually was abandoned. Meggett said she would occasional­ly visit, however, and her last visit was only a month or two before they moved the cabin out of South Carolina.

 ?? Associated Press ?? n Isabell Meggett Lucas, 87, pauses Tuesday after an Associated Press interview at the National Museum of African American History in Washington in front of a slave cabin on display. Lucas was born in the two-room wood cabin, which dates to the 1850s....
Associated Press n Isabell Meggett Lucas, 87, pauses Tuesday after an Associated Press interview at the National Museum of African American History in Washington in front of a slave cabin on display. Lucas was born in the two-room wood cabin, which dates to the 1850s....

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United States