Last weekend, we joined another branch of the Episcopal Service Corps in Maryland for part of their retreat. The retreat, which centered on racism, took place on a refurbished plantation/farm. The conversation about racism was just starting to brush the bottom of the surface when we stopped for lunch and then took a walk down to the slave graveyard down the hill.

All around us were fallow fields. Whether they are being used in the present day we didn’t know, but it wasn’t hard to imagine slaves working crops that used to be there. It wasn’t hard to imagine how different our walk down there as privileged white people would have looked different when it was a working farm and when people owned other people.

The graveyard itself was in ruins. The only markers were a cross and a big rock where a male slave was buried. A nearby sign says that one of the families was buried in the plot as well as 25 other slaves. The plot doesn’t tell us a lot; neither does the land really. It does not say how these slaves were treated. It doesn’t say if any of them ran away to Harrisburg, a major stop on the underground railroad a days walk away. All that I know is what my education told me and what I’ve read on my own.

Before this, the civil war era felt like a distant past to me. I did not grow up next to battlefields or old plantations to remind me of that history. Instead, I grew up in Colorado closer to old mining towns, Sand Creek, and Mesa Verde and its mysteries. Slave narratives were powerful and emotionally raw, but they were not real to me. It wasn’t until I stood on top of those who gone before me and suffered in ways I will never know and felt the chilly wind that they endured with most likely less protection than me, that it felt real, tangible, closer.

We did not dance on the slave graveyard like the title suggests. We discussed what we saw and what might have happened. But we didn’t know what to do with the thoughts and information in our head, so we headed back, huddled against the wind. We chatted and laughed and sang and then drove an hour and a half back home where we had to prepare for an event. We did not dance on the slave graveyard, but we might as well have. My question is: how do we get from dancing to understanding? From understanding to doing?

Here’s a link about the history of the retreat center. I wish it was more in depth. https://www.claggettcenter.org/history