At Catapult, J.D. Ho takes readers for a walk in her shoes, gardening where slaves were once forced to grow poison ivy for a president whom the world now praises in all his whitewashed glory:
For obvious reasons, my life in the garden was much better than that of the slaves. One less obvious reason was that I didn’t have to grow poison ivy as an ornamental plant. There were things to admire about the dead president for whom I gardened, but the fact that he forced people to cultivate poison ivy was not one of them. I often wondered how exactly the slaves had managed the task. Did they use jewelweed to soothe their rashes? Did they wash with soap in the river? It was one of the many topics not addressed by the whitewashed tours or interpretive displays, which instead focused on the former president’s device to make carbon copies, his clock that counted days as well as hours, and the architectural peculiarities of his house.
