Mira stood flustered as the man strolled along, nodding at the constructed lies built as truth. Who could look at this and not see it for what it was? To not see the slave system the cabin represented? Instead of a slave cabin they saw a modest-looking room they could have lived in and ignored the truth. None of them wanted to see anything else because the narrative that had been created affirmed whatever falsehoods people wanted to believe.

Like the clerk said, there were reenactments of certain features of plantation life everywhere. Employees dressed up in antebellum-era outfits performed their tasks for an audience. Slaves dressed in cast-off clothes, ripped and dirty. Tour guides wore clothes like the antebellum elite. They ushered groups around to explain what the visitors were seeing. Visitors followed, pausing to watch reenactments of men and women dressed as cooks, as seamstresses, as blacksmiths performing their particular jobs—cultivating crops, hoeing corn, hauling water, feeding livestock, and performing plantation chores. Visitors could see how candles were made, or they could see child slaves churn butter. Families took pictures, and the workers performed their tasks over and over again.

At the laundry house, a group of black women boiled clothes in a huge iron pot. They all were dressed in the same coarse gray shirts and skirts, but they donned headwraps dyed in a rich array of colors. Indigo and sunflower and ivy and lavender. One of the women wore the deepest maroon, the hue of dried blood. The women varied in age, ranging from teenagers to the elderly as they made a circle, using their bodies to create a separation between themselves and the tourists. They beat the fabric to remove the soap, hung the fabric on a clothesline to dry. They didn’t turn to look at those gawking, only focused on each other and their job. Mira watched as spectators tried to break them of their trance. “Are those the master’s clothes you washing? Better hurry and finish before you get in trouble.” Laughter followed, but the women never broke. The sound of their slapping the clothes against the pot grew louder. A small act of resistance, it had to be, and she smiled in this recognition.

A little boy, maybe five or six years old, ran up to Mira and reached for her shirt. He grabbed it and pulled. “What are you?” he asked as he stared up. She met his inquisitive eyes, not knowing what to tell him.

“What do you mean? I’m not anything. I—I’m just here. Like you.”