A NORTH HOUSE MUSEUM EXHIBIT INVITES REFLECTION DURING BLACK HISTORY MONTH, AND BEYOND

“People want their history to be good or bad. They want to say, ‘If I lived then, I would have been a good guy.’ But it’s not that simple.” – David Briggs

David Briggs could see it on my face.

The pause. The furrowed brow. The moment when polite listening gives way to real reckoning. That’s when he knew he’d done what he set out to do: make me think.

“The look on your face means I accomplished my goal,” Briggs said.

Briggs is a docent with the Greenbrier Historical Society at the North House Museum, where the exhibit on Anthony and Fanny Carter is currently on display. During Black History Month, a time often filled with familiar narratives and clearly defined heroes, the Carters’ story does something different. It refuses to resolve neatly.

“People want their history to be good or bad,” Briggs said. “They want it to be like a movie, over in an hour and a half. They want to be able to say, ‘If I lived then, I would have been a good guy.’ But it’s not that simple.”

A Story That Resists Easy Answers
Anthony Carter, his wife Fanny, and their three children were enslaved African Americans owned by Henry Erskine. In 1837, decades before the Civil War, Erskine emancipated the family. Why he did so remains unknown.

What is clear is that someone taught Anthony Carter to read, write, and do arithmetic, an extraordinary and illegal act at the time.

“It was illegal to teach enslaved people to read and write,” Briggs explained. “Slave owners were terrified of rebellion. Once you teach someone to read, they’re going to read about liberty.”

On display in the exhibit are Anthony Carter’s logbooks, filled with careful calculations and strikingly elegant penmanship. They reveal a thoughtful, methodical, educated man, one whose intellect contradicts the laws that sought to limit him.

Anthony Carter was freed in 1837. But in Virginia, freedom came with an expiration date. An 1806 law allowed formerly enslaved people just one year to leave the state; stay longer, and re-enslavement was a real possibility.

“Most people left,” Briggs said. “They were out of here.”

Anthony Carter remained.

Freedom Under Constant Threat
Why Carter stayed is one of the central mysteries of his life.

He taught himself to be a cobbler and earned money digging wells and graves. Records suggest his shop once stood near what is now the site of the Greenbrier Valley Visitors Center in Lewisburg. In the context of the day, he was doing well, well enough to save enough money to purchase an acre of land.

“That’s huge,” Briggs said. “That’s relative prosperity.”

But Carter’s freedom was fragile. Court records show he was brought before the court multiple times, not because he was enslaved, but because he was free and had failed to leave the state.

“He’s legally free,” Briggs explained, “but because he was supposed to leave, anybody could accuse him of anything. ‘I’m missing a rake, and I saw him near my barn.’”

Briggs suspects, carefully noting this is an assumption, that Carter may have avoided being sold back into slavery only because he was useful.

“Had he not been the only cobbler in town,” Briggs said, “he probably would have been sold back into slavery. That’s the bizarre context, freed by your owner, but vulnerable to being sold again by the government.”

Anthony Carter died in 1844, just seven years after gaining his freedom. Briggs suspects the physical toll of hard labor, paired with constant stress and legal vulnerability, shortened his life.

Complicity, Survival, and the Economy of the Day
One of the most unsettling documents tied to Anthony Carter is a tax record showing that he rented two enslaved men to help him dig wells and graves. The money Carter paid did not go to the men. It went to their enslaver.

“That document exists,” Briggs said. “We know it happened.”

What Carter thought about that arrangement remains unknown. Did he struggle with it? Did he quietly help the men when he could? Or was survival simply survival?

“This was the economy of the day,” Briggs said. “He needed help. If he rented those men for four cents and made four more cents, that’s profit. That’s what we do.”

Briggs offers no judgment, only context. And then he turns the question outward.

Why This Story Still Matters
“We like to call it human trafficking now,” Briggs said. “But trafficking in humans, that’s slavery. And it’s not gone.”

Legally, slavery no longer exists in the United States. Morally, most people oppose it. Yet modern life, Briggs notes, remains entangled with exploitation, often far enough removed that it feels invisible.

“Do you want to pay $200 for your shoes,” he asked, “or do you want the cheap ones?”

His challenge is direct and universal.

“Point at yourself,” he said. “White, Black, rich, poor, point at yourself. How are you still involved in these echoes?”

For Briggs, this is what Black History Month should invite, not self-congratulation, but reflection. Not tidy morality plays, but human stories shaped by impossible systems.

“This isn’t about making anyone feel guilty,” he said. “It doesn’t make you evil. It makes you human.”

The Harder, More Honest Work
Anthony Carter left no journal explaining why he stayed, why he endured, or how he reconciled freedom with fear. What remains are fragments, logbooks, court records, tax documents, and the questions they force us to confront.

“Anthony Carter is just like you,” Briggs said. “He was trying to get by.”

That is why Briggs centers on personal stories rather than statistics. Numbers tell us scale. Stories demand empathy and accountability.

“The broad-brush version of history wants to make you feel good when it’s over,” he said. “But that’s not the real story.”

The real story, Briggs believes, is ongoing.

“At the end of the day, you look at yourself and say, ‘I didn’t treat that person as fairly as I could have. I’ve got to do better,’” he said. “Then you forget. Then you try again.”

The Anthony and Fanny Carter exhibit does not ask visitors to decide where they would have stood in history.

It asks something harder.

It asks them to recognize themselves.

If you’d like to explore these questions for yourself, the museum is open for self-guided tours Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and docent-led tours are available on the hour, from 1 to 4 p.m. Call 304-645-3398 for more information.