Hear From the Residents
August 22, 2024
Summer Writer-In-Residence Sean Felix: "To Be Free Like the Goldfinches: On the Enslaved Children at Woodlawn"
Sean Felix is the fifth writer of the Summer 2024 cohort to spend a week onsite participating in our local residency program at Northern Virginia’s Woodlawn & Pope-Leighey House and Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food and Agriculture. Our summer writers-in-residence focus their weeks on-site exploring ways to rediscover and re-purpose place and place histories, and use writing as a means to build community, to bring awareness to critical social and environmental issues, and as a creative force of empowerment.
Sean Felix (He/Him) is a rare Black man born and raised in the transient government city of Washington, DC. He has performed poetry all over the city, in Maryland, and Virginia. He’s been writing for over 30 years, and is a middle school teacher, and adult arts and poetry educator at the National Gallery of Art. He’s been commissioned to write and read his ekphrastic poetry with several galleries in Washington, DC and Maryland, including the IA&A Hillyer and the Gateway Arts Center. His work is published in multiple poetry anthologies including with Sunday Mornings at the River and Beyond the Veil Press and has also published poems in Bloodroot Journal, with the Mid Atlantic Review Online, and with the Washington Writers Publishing House. He published his first poetry book, Did You Even Know I Was Here? in 2019. Sean is an award winning haiku writer, loves the natural world, and exploring small moments in time. He currently lives in Hyattsville, MD with his partner and two very silly, and very smart kids.
On Wednesday at Woodlawn, I saw the goldfinches. As I walked around the house from the old carriage path, four yellow and black birds darted into the surrounding trees from a thicket of purple thistles. I rarely see goldfinches near my house. My backyard is populated by orioles, robins, sparrows, petulant mockingbirds, mourning doves, and a lovely cardinal couple. Goldfinches, when I can see them, always bring me joy. They move so quickly, but their brilliance makes me imagine miniature stars zipping through the trees; airbound celestials.
Goldfinches
in the thistle
stinging sweetness
Goldfinches evoke a childlike wonder for me, and in those moments, in the garden, my mind turned to the children. What did the children of Woodlawn think about the goldfinches’ brilliant yellow flitting in and around the purple of the prickling thistles? Did the eyes of the free see differently that the eyes of the enslaved? Do the eyes of those just trying to survive another day see with wonder or always with fear?
I arrived at Woodlawn searching for the stories of the children. Woodlawn and its legacy are built around the stories of George and Martha Washington, Nelly and Lawrence Lewis, and later the Quakers who come to liberate the space in order to show the southern U.S. that profit could be made without enslavement and forced labor. My search started with a tour of the property and two images that fascinated me.
The first is an Edward Savage painting of George and Martha Washington with her grandchildren Eleanor Parke Custis and George Washington Parke Custis and an enslaved man who could have been Christopher Sheels or William Lee. In it you can see the triumphalism of the Washington family with the young boy’s (Washy was his nickname) hand upon a globe and Martha and Eleanor’s hands upon a map of Washington, DC. George Washington acts as the connective tissue in the painting as he is seated with one of his hands upon Washy’s shoulder and his other on the map of DC along with Martha and Eleanor. Sheels or Lee stands off to the side attendant on his enslavers. The painting is mythology based on a fantasy of perpetual control.
The second painting is one of Edward “Sonny” George Washington Butler as a child. In it he is painted almost angelic as he moves down a dirt path barefoot with his dog next to him. In one hand he holds a cap, and in the other he points back toward the sunset, and if you look closer, back toward Woodlawn. He moves toward the future with the support of the Woodlawn, and those who were forced to labor for him at his back to strengthen him with their efforts. Both of the paintings make stark Woodlawn’s past and my own.
The lives and the stories of the enslaved are a part of my history, they are a part of my essence. I am three generations removed from my closest ancestor that was born into bondage, and died on the plantation where she was born. While I never got to visit her there, I carry her with me, as I do all of my ancestors. And so at Woodlawn, I searched for stories. The slavers’ story is everywhere because they got to tell it. Silverware holders, ornate crown molding, portraits, and maps remain as remnants of that life. But standing still for a moment, in front of a tarnished mirror you hear the echo of other stories. The stories of those who were forced to be invisible until desired to be seen are everywhere, even though the homes where they stayed are lost to history. Their spirits stand over your shoulder as you see yourself reflected, or you feel them brush by your hips. The children are with you. Their names were Abraham, Tom, Nana, Bette, Sue, Ambrose, Sukey, Dennis, Nelly, and Randolph to name a few. I am indebted to the folks at Woodlawn, especially James, Heather, and Edwin, who helped me find their names in the manifests and research records, and did their best to answer questions I had about the lives of the children.
I thought of those children as they moved through this space, serving the Lewis’ dinners, shuttling food during parties, forced playmates of the children, and in all cases, divorced from their ability to learn of the world without the grasp of a hand around their throat. Inside, these children were but fodder for the industrial imprisonment machine.
your meals
come from my hand
and as you eat
do you not see my small hands
the delicacy of my face
i am just a child
a seedling like those in the forest
but here, with you,
my canopy is your boot
my soil, your shackles
But I like to imagine that outside, outside there could be some freedom. This is where I will concentrate my research and poetic explorations to reclaim those stolen childhoods. Outside, when they could escape to the woods or the trails of Woodlawn, they could find a world that moved of its own volition. The only reflections of their faces they probably found shimmered beautifully in the Potomac River, a still pond, or a creek. In the woods are stories that only earth could tell, and the sun and moon could teach. Outside is where they could find truth. Out there were the stories of what this land really meant, and these little black children were its students, who locked the beauty away into their hearts to help them survive.
The flowers
don’t stop blooming
even as I bleed,
and the goldfinches,
little suns,
surround me.
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