In search of Demonic Grounds at Kingsley Plantation

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I am interested in locating marginalized historical narratives at Kingsley Plantation, searching the landscape for what Katherine McKittrick calls demonic grounds, the grounds that “locates the complex position and potentiality of black women’s sense of place” and are understood not as erased but disavowed (2006:133). Complexity is disavowed at Kingsley Plantation and in its place is the implementation of truncated historical narratives reaching for unobtainable cohesion. Historical narratives are left in their bounded spaces, with Ann Kingsley, the black plantation mistress, being spoken of mainly in a domestic setting, Zephaniah Kingsley, the planter/enslaver, maintains his omnipotent positionality as being discussed everywhere while the enslaved are referenced in domestic and labor spaces. What I argue is that for the sake of cohesion, plantation sites present historical narratives of the enslaved, the plantation mistress and the planter/enslaver in spaces that do not offer complexity and do not challenge plantation spatial dynamics but instead orient visitors to the white male planter’s perspective of the past. search of Demonic Grounds at Kingsley Plantation.

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