Slavery laid bare: A historic platform for dialogue on race

Looking at the site, she said, evoked "those people reaching up out of the soil, telling their story. It's a monument of what happened."

Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, a historical archaeologist, has spent many hours on the platform explaining to visitors what they are looking at.

"I love this view without the walls because it strips away a lot," she said the other day, surrounded by people on the platform. "I think about walls a lot. This walling away is so symbolic for this site. Now you see this small space between here [at the bow window] and there [at the kitchen] is the space between the great statesman working out his understandings of democracy and the people that he enslaved."

"Yes," said a woman, "and the people who were slaves were not too far away. But they had to come up to serve him."

People, black and white, craned their necks to get a better look.

LaRoche said discussions of race between blacks and whites were often impeded by a "guilt component" in whites and a "shame component" in blacks. But the viewing platform at the President's House has provided a way around such emotional blockage.

This dig "is creating a space - I don't want to say of comfort, that's not the right word - it's creating a space of possibility for discussion," LaRoche said. "It's an opportunity to touch a chord in the past, and it's an opportunity to touch a past that's been so maligned and hidden, buried and walled away. . . .

"What I am seeing is so vast, and the possibility of what I am seeing is so profound, I'm having trouble, in my mere mortal self, talking about it."

To view a video of the excavation

at the President's House and read more about the dig, go to