It's about the house, it was always about the house

Just came from a meeting with the historical consultant on the project to review a very rough outline/draft of the script. George Tyson has been essential with helping to keep me accurate, not making leaping inferences, keeping everything close to what we know from the records. It's finally beginning to come together and make real sense and what I came away with from today's meeting was this:

1. The story is not so much about the neighborhood, but the house. It's always been about the house, hence the title "The House That FREEDOM Built". The house anchors the renovation, the people who lived there and the neighborhood, it literally and figuratively "houses" the story.

2.The three African women who owned my house were magnificent. Magic. Super. Heroines. Every year the Danish government had to import 300-400 new Africans to offset the fact that the ones they brought here were dying at such high rates. The cane fields can accurately be described as killing fields. And to think that these women survived and endured and then become property owners under those conditions and historical times is just amazing.

3. And the last great takeaway from this meeting was in going over the scope of history through my owners we see that this neighborhood has been fluid from the beginning. There have been parts where it had tremendous continuity and stability and you see how people begin to prosper as in the 1780's. But you also see that there were times when the neighborhood was also abandoned like after the sugar industry declined and slavery no longer existed. Thousands of people not only left the towns but left island, similar to what we have just gone through with the closure of Hovensa.

And so in understanding the ebbs and flows in the history of our town one can glean hope. We are unarguably in a down moment, true, but when we look back we see that we will rise again. We always have. History proves this.