BY NORM CANNADA
THE JOURNAL
An exhibit at the Bertha Lee Strickland Cultural Museum in Seneca examines the challenges and impact of African-American women who worked as domestic workers in the Jim Crow-era South. โThe Back Door,โ which is running through Aug. 15, 2020, looks at the maids and their relationships with their white employers. Museum director Shelby Henderson said the name of the exhibit comes from one of the unwritten rules of the period between 1920 and the mid-1950s across the Southeast. โOne of the rules โ the unspoken rules โ was that you never entered through the front door of the house,โ Henderson said of the maids. โIt wasnโt a law, but it was kind of an unspoken code of ethics. Itโs not a warm, fuzzy exhibit, but itโs a very honest exhibit. I hope it stirs people to reflect and create a safe space to talk about what we consider difficult conversations to have, and I hope we generate conversation between people who never would have talked about it otherwise.โ
โThe maids blurred those lines because they crossed those lines within those households,โ Henderson said. โThey had very intimate relationships with the family. They raised the children โ in some cases they spanked the children. They were the caregivers.โ She said many hours of research went into the effort, reading accounts from maids in โa lot of different neighborhoods, and a lot of different states in the Southeast.โ โThis exhibit is important because itโs something that many people โ probably over (age) 45 โ can relate to,โ she said. โWeโre talking about African-American history, local history.โ
Lunney Museum director Nick McKinney said there are โlife-sizeโ images in the exhibit, helping visitors to be โemotionally impacted.โ Audio is used to help visitors connect to the maids as they hear what the women may have been thinking. โIt is kind of like a dialogue in their heads as theyโre doing chores around the house,โ McKinney said. โYou get the emotional impact of what they were doing and how they felt about it.โ
Three retired teachers โ Glenn Abbott and Fred Edgerton from Seneca High and David Johnson, who taught at Pendleton High โ volunteered time to create the exhibit, along with Hendersonโs daughter, Ivy Henderson Ellerby, a 1998 graduate of Seneca High. Johnson, who taught American history, didnโt grow up in the South, but experienced segregation as a child driving to see relatives in Tennessee. โI saw segregated bathrooms at gas stations and restaurants that wouldnโt serve โcoloreds,โ as they were called then,โ Johnson said. โI experienced it, but I really didnโt understand it as a child.โ
Ellerby, who traveled to help with the exhibit from her home in Columbia, said she felt when she was younger there were different expectations on her because of the color of her skin. โIt was kind of an understanding growing up in Seneca that there were just certain places that, as a black person, you knew you didnโt belong,โ she said. โEven places like Ram Cat Alley, I knew growing up I had no business being there, being a black person. It was never really spoken, but it was just an understanding of still knowing your position or your place.โ She remembered a conversation with Henderson and McKinney that began the talk about the era leading to the exhibit, with the conversations leading to her grandmother and how this life affected her. โItโs ironic that these women would have these amazing dinner parties at this fancy house with all these really expensive dishes and then go to their homes and live with their meager belongings,โ she said. โHow did that work? How did she do this? How did she live in this world for 15 to 18 hours out of her day and come back to her regular home and be OK with just having regular things? We all sat around and started that conversation, and my interest piqued with this project.โ
This article was printed in The Journal newspaper on 9/19/19
It is posted here with permission from author Norm Cannada.
ncannada@upstatetoday.com | (864) 973-6680
Bertha Lee Strickland Cultural Museum
208 W. South 2nd St., Seneca
(864) 885-2705
blscmuseum@gmail.com
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