How did Magnolia’s former slaves and those workers who were born after abolition face tourism’s exploitative conditions through life-affirming acts of resilience and resistance? The paucity of surviving testimonials from these subjects makes answering this question rather difficult, as does the contrasting abundance of archival evidence attesting to the brutality of slavery and its afterlives. With due caution, I counter-narrate Magnolia from the perspectives of its Black workers, approximating their lived realities from records and research on other enslaved and freed subjects, and projecting their subjective experiences back into period accounts and historical images of the estate. I pay particular attention to how they inhabited the landscape to their benefit, managed interactions with tourists, and created bonds of support amongst one another. With the site’s workers as my guides, I endeavor to uncover Black Magnolia.
