The Old Plantation

Beneath the trees beside slave cabins, a group of enslaved African Americans dance and make music - one figure stepping between two others, a man plucking a banjo-like instrument, another beating a drum, the dress and instruments carrying African traditions into the American South. This rare watercolor, attributed to a South Carolina slaveholder, is among the most important early depictions of enslaved people's own cultural life. Now in the folk art collection at Colonial Williamsburg, it is a precious and painful document - a glimpse of community and survival rendered from within the brutal world of plantation slavery.