The Reenactment

Arturo Vargas had taught the history of the Atlantic world for fifteen years at a university in Williamsburg, Virginia, before he finally accepted the invitation that his neighbor, Walt Henshaw, had been extending every fall. Walt was the captain, as he put it, of the Tidewater Volunteers, a reenactment society of some forty enthusiasts who spent their weekends dressed in wool and linen, recreating the camp life and battles of the American Revolution. "You're a historian," Walt said. "You'll love it. It's history you can smell."

He was right about the smell. Arriving at a field near Yorktown on a damp Saturday in October, Arturo was greeted by woodsmoke, wet canvas and the faint, sweetish odor of black powder. Dressed in a borrowed hunting shirt that itched in places he had not known could itch, he spent the morning learning to load a replica musket under the patient eye of a retired dentist, and the afternoon marching up and down a field, being shouted at by a man who sold insurance during the week. He was, he admitted, enjoying himself enormously.

The trouble began around the campfire that evening. Walt, warming to his theme, told the newer recruits that the men they were portraying had fought for one simple thing, liberty, and that everybody in the colonies had understood it in the same way. Others nodded. Somebody spoke warmly of simpler times. Arturo, holding a tin cup of coffee that tasted faintly of the fire, said, as mildly as he could, that it had not been quite so simple. Roughly one in five people living in the thirteen colonies at the time had been enslaved, and in Virginia the proportion had been far higher. For them, liberty had meant something rather different.

There was a small silence. Walt said, good-naturedly, that nobody was denying any of that, but that this was a hobby, not a seminar. Arturo agreed, and let it go. But it did not let him go. Over the following weeks, sewing buttons onto his own coat and reading regimental orders from the 1770s, he found himself noticing, again and again, who was absent from the society's version of the past. Nobody portrayed the enslaved men and women who had fled to the British lines after Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, promised freedom in 1775 to those held by rebels who would fight for the Crown. Nobody mentioned the Native nations whose lands both armies had fought over. Nobody, for that matter, mentioned Spain.

It was this last point, oddly, that led to the real argument. At the society's annual planning meeting, held in the back room of a pizza restaurant, Arturo proposed that the spring event include a short talk, perhaps fifteen minutes, on the wider war. He mentioned Bernardo de Galvez, the Spanish governor of Louisiana, whose campaigns against the British along the Gulf Coast had tied down troops and ships, and the money raised in Havana that, many historians argue, helped pay for the final campaign at Yorktown. Having been born in Guadalajara, he added with a smile, he took a certain personal interest in the matter.

A man named Dale, who portrayed a militia sergeant with tremendous conviction, said that this was exactly the kind of thing that was ruining history: everybody wanting to make it about themselves. Walt tried to smooth things over. An elderly member named Marjorie, who sewed most of the society's uniforms, said that she rather liked the idea. Dale replied that the society was not going to turn its weekends into a lecture on everything that had gone wrong in the eighteenth century. The vote, taken by a show of hands over the remains of a large pepperoni pizza, went against Arturo, nineteen to fourteen.

He considered resigning. He did not, partly out of stubbornness and partly because, sitting at his kitchen table that night, he realized that he had argued exactly as Dale had accused him of arguing: as though the past were a debate to be won. The members of the society, he reflected, did not romanticize the past because they were ignorant. Most of them knew a great deal, often more than his students, about the cut of a waistcoat or the range of a musket. They romanticized it because it was the part of the past in which they could see themselves. Which was, in its way, exactly what he had done with Galvez.

So, in the spring, instead of a talk, he did something smaller. Wearing his itchy hunting shirt, he set up a table at the edge of the camp, beside Marjorie's sewing tent, with copies of a few documents: Dunmore's proclamation, a page from the pension application of a Black soldier who had fought in the Continental Army, and a letter from Galvez that he had translated himself. He did not lecture. He simply answered whatever visitors asked, and when they did not ask, he let the documents do the work.

The table was busier than he had expected. Families who had watched the musket drill drifted over and stayed. A boy of about ten read Dunmore's proclamation twice and asked why nobody had told him about it at school. Late in the afternoon, Dale appeared, still in his sergeant's coat, and stood reading the pension application for a long time without saying anything. Then he asked, gruffly, where Arturo had found it. Arturo told him. Dale nodded, put the page down carefully, as though it were the original rather than a photocopy, and walked away.

Nothing was resolved, exactly. At the next planning meeting, nobody proposed a talk, and nobody objected when Arturo said he would bring the table again. Dale, Arturo noticed, had begun researching the real company his sergeant had served in, and had discovered that it had included at least two free Black men from the county. He mentioned it, a little defensively, over the pizza. Walt raised his slice like a glass. "To history you can smell," he said. "And argue about," Arturo added. Even Dale, after a moment, laughed.