published on
An interview with Maureen Elgersman Lee the director of the Bray School Lab at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia for a story on SavingPlaces.org.
https://savingplaces.org/stories/stories-and-structure-the-history-of-black-education-at-the-williamsburg-bray-school
Transcript:
Maureen Elgersman Lee
And those moments of discovery, I've had those at other points in my career, and they do, you know, when you're looking for someone and you find them and then you find more than what you were looking for, in many ways you just really have to kind of stop. And sometimes, sometimes you just whisper. Like I know I've done in the past where I just whisper like, I see you. I see you. Right. So for me, there's two things. I'll start with the first. The first is the context for the Bray School. I'd love to think about the Bray School in the context of the diaspora that we have Williamsburg Bray School in the context of Virginia, in the context of what will be come in short order, the United States and the other Bray schools in places like Philadelphia and New York and, also in Rhode Island.
And I think about to Canada and I think about to the British colonized Caribbean. So I like to think about the Bray School in the context of the African diaspora. That it is a diaspora story. So that is the way I like to think about it. Even we may be looking at something very, very local in terms of Adam and Fannie in the College, but I always, from my mind, I'm always thinking about it in the context of the diaspora.
The other thing is, I would probably say the student list, the only of the three student lists that has the ages of the students. That list is kind of my rock in this work because it helps me remember that we are talking about children, right? Particularly the younger children, those three and four and five. And I think about the spirit and the innocence of children in the context of slavery.
(01:59)
And I think about the education, learning to spell, learning to read, learning to recognize words being trained in some of the fine hand work that the girls were trained in, being trained in the fundamentals of the Anglican faith in the Book of Common Prayer. And I, and I hope that there were pockets of joy in somewhere in those experiences, in those moments. And I kind of, I wanna think that there was laughter. I want to think that there was some joy that they experienced. So I, I imagine echoes of young children and, and hope that there were echoes of laughter even as they were considered chattel.