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FEATURES A conversation with Neil Kerwin |
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It began in a box. Tony Cohen, CAS/BA ’94, lay in a fetal ball, crammed inside a two-foot crate on a train headed from Philadelphia to New York. Thumb-sized holes let him breathe but offered no relief from the heat. He’d already cut off his pant legs with the pocket knife he brought along, but still the sweat poured off him.
When the rumble of the box slowed to a stop, Cohen knew he’d entered a station. Pitch black faded to a hazy yellow as the boxcar door opened for more freight. Then the train was off again, but something was wrong. Cohen could still see light inside the box. Pressing his eye to a crack, he peered out into the car and saw, to his horror, that just a few feet away the boxcar door had been left open. “I literally had tremors in my hands for days after that trip,” says Cohen. “It was harrowing.” It was also history. An admitted claustrophobe, Cohen didn’t smuggle himself on a six-hour trip inside a box for a thrill. He was trying reproduce the 1849 journey of Henry “Box” Brown, who escaped slavery in Richmond, Virginia, by shipping himself north as freight. Of course, Brown didn’t have a cell phone in his pocket tempting him to dial 911 if he feared falling from the train. But Cohen wasn’t looking for factual accuracy—he wanted emotional accuracy. After becoming fascinated with the history of the Underground Railroad during an American Studies class at AU, Cohen decided to trek the path himself in 1996. Walking 1,000 miles from Maryland to Ontario, however, wasn’t enough. “What I couldn’t really access during the walk was the fear factor,” says Cohen. “I could get someone to hunt me down maybe, but that would be simulated. I wanted something real.” So even as his crate rattled closer to that open door, Cohen didn’t reach for his phone. He felt real danger, tasted real fear. Three hours later he emerged, squinting into the sun just outside of Penn Station, pumping his fists above his head, and understanding for the first time what freedom really means. “I was doing something dangerous, something illegal; I was risking my life, my reputation,” he explains. “The trembling in my hands told me something about slavery that a book never could. And it wasn’t that escape was this or that. It was, ‘My gosh, Tony, you have advantages over the past that you never even think about.’ It changed my vision of myself. I felt like people can contribute to the world, or they can just go along for the ride, and I realized that I wanted to contribute.” A year later, after Cohen’s unique exploration of history won him an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show, he got to offer someone else that feeling. “A while after I did the Oprah Winfrey Show, I got a call from one of Oprah’s people,” Cohen recalls. “She said, ‘Oprah wants to do what you did. She wants to walk the Underground Railroad.’ And I said, ‘Uh . . . no she doesn’t.’” A month away from playing an escaped slave in Beloved, Winfrey wanted an authentic slave experience to help her get into character. All Cohen could see, however, was himself and the popular talk-show host being chased by fans all the way to Canada. “I knew the walk wouldn’t work for her,” he explains. “I thought, she couldn’t get that real experience unless we could transport her back in time, and then I said, ‘Huh, maybe that’s what we’ll do.’” Working with a friend who owned a farm that had been a plantation, Cohen planned a 48-hour slavery immersion experience for Winfrey. She would arrive blindfolded, be changed into replica slaves’ clothing, work as a slave for a day, and then escape. Dropping the celebrity into a slave’s world, however, proved more difficult than packing himself inside that crate. “I would get these strange calls from her handlers,” says Cohen. “They’d ask, ‘What kind of shoes will she be wearing? We need to know the brand.’ Well, there is no brand; they’re handmade . . . Then they’d ask, ‘Is she going to have fleece socks?’ and I knew we were on two different worlds.” Cohen’s solution was simple. He lied. “We made up two itineraries,” he explains with a chuckle. “The fake one for when they called, and the real one . . . I told them she’d be cutting flowers in the garden. Then she’d be guided to a log cabin where a freed slave would feed her gingerbread cookies. And meanwhile I’m on the other line arranging for some guy with bloodhounds to chase her down in the woods.” The shocking difference between the two itineraries proved overwhelming. Winfrey halted the experience after seven hours, later describing on her show how the complete lack of freedom was more than she could handle. But something happened in the abbreviated immersion that Winfrey has since said changed her life, spurring her to shift the format of her show from traditional daytime talk to what she now calls, “Change Your Life TV.” “When I met with her afterwards, she said, ‘All my life I thought I’ve sympathized with the plight of my ancestors,’” Cohen recalls, “‘but now I feel real empathy, because I know what the loss of free will feels like . . . You have to do this for other people.’”
That request has inspired Cohen’s latest history experiment—Historic Button Farm Living History Center. Seated in the sprawling woods of Seneca Creek Park in Germantown, Maryland, the 60-acre former plantation is being shaped into a historic venue that will do for the Antebellum South what Williamsburg does for colonial America—only with a twist. “If you go to a place like Sturbridge Village or Colonial Williamsburg, you observe people engaging in daily life activities,” says Cohen. “Here, you’re going to get at the daily life itself.” To make that happen, Cohen formed the nonprofit Menare Foundation, which recently secured the property through a 50-year curatorship lease with the state. He’s restoring the farmhouse, barn, and land to create an exact reproduction of a plantation circa 1850, complete with a 17-acre cotton field. Secluded from any visible roads or telephone poles, the farm, says Cohen, will give visitors the chance not just to study history, but to live it. In addition to slavery immersions, Cohen plans to offer hands-on tours and workshops on open-hearth cooking, post and beam construction, blacksmithing, and other nineteenth-century crafts. “Living history museums are going through a difficult period right now,” says Cohen. “The public is kind of like, been there done that. Now you’ll see commercials for Colonial Williamsburg putting on special shows to attract people, but what’s missing is that hands-on aspect. That’s what people want—that physical, tangible connection to the past . . . We live in a very immediate world. There’s the Internet, CNN. All these things can take us to any point in the world, but it’s just one-dimensional. People still want to feel like they’re alive.” But Cohen isn’t waiting until the farm is restored to give people that feeling. Since its focus is experiencing history, his living museum has turned the restoration itself into an attraction. The full slate of activities won’t be ready until 2008, but Cohen has already hosted two slavery immersion groups and several short-term volunteer groups to pitch in on the work. In July, for instance, 55 high school students from the National Student Leadership Conference visited the farm to turn soil, build fences, and plant tobacco. “We learned very quickly that people want both the final product and the behind the scenes,” says Cohen. “They don’t want to wait for the curtain to open up.” And though it might seem that you’d have to be pretty obsessed with the past to want to live like a nineteenth-century slave even for a few hours, Cohen doesn’t think so. His hope is that he can do for others what he’s already done for himself and Winfrey—create a hands-on history lesson that’s focused more on the future than the past. “People say that we must learn from history or it will repeat itself, but history doesn’t repeat itself; people repeat themselves,” says Cohen. “History is just a frame, but it’s people and their experiences that sit in that frame and make the picture. So we offer that historical frame, but once you’re inside you have to rely on who you are, not some textbook about what other people did . . . Ultimately, it’s less about teaching people history and more about using history as a tool to help people discover what they want to do with their world.”
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