Descendants Today

Descendants Letter of Commitment at Arlington House.

NPS

From the descendant Family Circle:

Today, the story of Arlington House is a story of moving forward together. We, the descendant families of Arlington House, have come together and formed a Family Circle to work on healing and repair and to use our unified voices to encourage our country to do the same. Simultaneously, park staff are rethinking how they manage the site and engage with us.

Together, we aim to shift storytelling, decision-making, and preservation of the site to genuine co-production between descendant families and park staff. We are not there yet, but we and the park continue to learn from where we have been. It is a story of vulnerability, mistakes, patience, persistence, learning, and trust.

Our enslaved ancestors built and managed Arlington Plantation. Their lives and stories have been given less agency than they deserve. For generations, our families have continued sharing, researching, and lifting up our stories. As the park services catches up to what many of our families have known for a long time, it will take all of us working together to interpret this history factually and completely.

In 2020, park leadership asked us “what can we do for you?” We said “bring us together.” For 3 years, a racial healing practitioner facilitated reconciliation dialogues among and between us, park staff, and park partners. Spread out across the country and sequestered in a pandemic, our meetings were virtual. Even virtually, the dialogue process was incredibly powerful. It meant different things to different family members, who reflected the following:

• This is the way you talk about problems. you don't deal with the abstract. You deal with the personal. And in that way, you're better able to take advantage of the opportunities to act.

• Sharing our family history in and of itself is history.

• The world tries to make us forget. But this has been a coming together and the circle helps us to remember.

• On the night that a facilitator was elected to the senate in an unexpected win, she was very emotional. Some relatives said, “buck up. leaders don't cry.” But her grandmother said “it's okay to cry. You cry and then you go to the microphone and speak loudly and clearly and know that your voice is no longer your own and when you feel tears in your throat those represent the voices of those who have never been heard.” So, if you are feeling tears now, they are the ancestors before us and the descendants to come.

• In each of us, our past and our present converge. We are the carriers and the transmitters to the generations to come. What we do or fail to do could silence the voices in the past and those to come.

• I always felt like I had more family that were out there and I feel like I found it in all of you.

• Looking at all the little patches of boxes in this Zoom quilt and amazed there's a box for me. It heals my own story.

We came together again on April 22, 2023 with the milestone of holding a family reunion and the public Finding Our Voice event at Arlington House in April 2023. That was the first time members of all families associated with Arlington House had been in person together on site since 1861.That day, family representatives and the park superintendent signed a Letter of Commitment to affirm our collaboration. Today, the letter hangs in the center hall of the plantation house.

We are working with the National Park Service on deeper research of our ancestors. We maintain our connections as a Family Circle. To symbolize our interconnectedness, we are creating a quilt sewn from the fabrics of all our families. We have helped review and edit the park’s key messages and are in progress on editing the content of exhibits, materials for youth, and more.

There is still much work ahead. Together, we are working to reclaim the narrative of Arlington House. The current narrative is not inclusive of the history, the people or the contribution of many who lived, worked and died in these spaces. We will expand, not exclude, the history of Arlington House. Through example, we will promote healing and repair nationwide through inclusive interpretation, storytelling, and conversation.