Hear From the Residents
August 18, 2025
Summer Writer-In-Residence Shannon Jeffries on Being In the Room
Shannon Jeffries is the fourth writer of the Summer 2025 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.
Shannon Jeffries (she/her) is a storyteller and community philanthropist from Cleveland, Ohio. In her writing, she explores the complexities and contradictions of life at the margins and intersections. Her essays have appeared in White Wall Review and midnight & indigo. She is also the author of Deep Condition, a novel released in 2018. Shannon is a graduate of The Ohio State University and University of Maryland College Park. She is based in Rockville, MD.
Antebellum House Party, a poem by Terrance Hayes, is about furniture. Not that made of pine, plastic, or metal, but of people. Lines from the poem emerge as I walk through the front door of the Woodlawn home.
To make the servant in the corner unobjectionable
Furniture, we must first make her a bundle of tree parts
Axed and worked to confidence.
Light floods Woodlawn, but I am most interested in what lies beyond it, in the shadowy history of the home. On the tour, we discuss the layout (the central corridor for living, the ends for working) and its Georgian style, a departure from English architecture. The design of the home is deliberate in its attempt to portray status, down to the height of the guardrails on the winding staircase, the steps more uneven as you ascend.
We discuss the furniture, fashioned for each room, the molding that adorns the ceilings, and the portraits that immortalize the people who walked the halls and toiled the land. In photographs and paintings that depict the families that have lived at Woodlawn – the Lewises, Masons, and others – there are often Black faces, unidentified and unnamed. Like adornments, fixtures, and furniture, the enslaved were part of a room, of a room, but never in it.
An 1853 drawing by Lewis Miller depicts three enslaved persons serving a dinner table, their skin ashen, features obscured by the choice of color and the choice to render invisible, or half-human.
The 1796 painting of the Washingtons by Edward Savage hangs in the front hall, a few paces from the front door. A Black man occupies the right third of the portrait. In his description of the painting, Savage notes that John Riley, the free Black man who posed for the portrait, added an important “coloring” to the painting, as if he were a paint swatch selected to darken a room.
Furniture’s presence should be little more than a warm feeling
In the den.
After viewing several of these images, I grew curious about the “domestic servants,” those most proximate to the white families responsible for their bondage. At Mount Vernon, there was Ona Judge, Martha’s maid, and Christopher Sheels, George’s valet. At Woodlawn, there was Sukey, the seamstress responsible for sewing and tending to clothing, even on bedrest; Hanson, the house’s cook; and Sam, Lawrence’s valet. For the enslaved, survival and “favor” were determined by one’s ability to meet the demands of a mercurial environment – to be still, despite the constantly shifting earth.
The best furniture
Can stand so quietly in a room that the room appears empty
If it remains unbroken, it lives long enough to become antique.
While the analogy of likening the enslaved to furniture may feel crass and uncomfortable, it brought forth an interesting query on movement — its utility and its meaning for those with and without power. The legacy of enslavement at Woodlawn and in the segregation and displacement of Black communities in the broader region are but few examples of how movement is weaponized and used to wield power.
Even in our freedom establishing place is illusory. Later, in Virginia and across the country, the construction of highways would sever Black neighborhoods, displacing families and destroying connectivity. Sitting in the Pope-Leighey house, I’m struck by confounded histories – that highway construction, and the fateful destruction of Black communities, is what brought the home to Woodlawn.
Driving away from the site for the final time, the estate growing smaller in the rearview mirror, I consider what a privilege it is to move, to take up space, to be in a room and not of it.
Recent Posts
Lani Furbank: Summer 2025 Resident
Shannon Jeffries: Summer 2025 Resident
Emily Haynes: Summer 2025 Resident
Matti Ben-Lev: Summer 2025 Resident
Violeta Bermudez: Summer 2025 Resident
Sean Felix: Summer 2024 Resident
Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Sign up now to get the latest
news & updates from us.