Life Before and After Freedom

Event Details

Four storytellers with blacksmith, cooking and brickmaking demonstrations at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens will present life on a Southern plantation before and after the end of chattel slavery.

Following the demonstrations on Feb. 20 award-winning television actress and storyteller Natalie Daise will guide an audience through the development of Araminta Ross as she became the iconic abolitionist and Union Army spy known as Harriet Tubman.

Daise’s 60-minute performance, “Becoming Harriet Tubman” at 4:30 p.m. in the Carriage House, will be a fundraiser for Charleston’s proposed International African American Museum. Seating is limited to the invitation-only event.

“Life Before and After Freedom” will be held 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 20, at the restored cabins that once housed enslaved workers who helped design and maintain Magnolia’s gardens and later were garden guides following the Civil War.

On Feb. 20, Magnolia’s award-winning cabin tour “From Slavery to Freedom” and the storytelling program and craft demonstrations at the cabins will be free with garden admission.

The program at the cabins includes Gullah storyteller Sharon Cooper Murray; children’s storyteller Alada Shinault-Small; and Civil War storyteller James Brown of Charleston; and Dontavis Williams of York County, S.C., will portray a slave named Adam.

Craft demonstrations at the cabins include: blacksmithing, Gilbert Walker of Savannah, Ga.; outdoor cooking, Jerome Bias of Winston-Salem, N.C.; and brickmaking, Rodney Prioleau of Charleston.