Amber Wiley, A Sojourn for Harriet, Stagville Photograph, $200

This photograph was taken on a visit to the remains of Horton Grove, housing for enslaved people at Stagville Plantation. Stagville was a part of one of the largest forced labor camps in the United States – the 30,000-acre Bennehan-Cameron plantation complex. The deeply emotional journey to Horton Grove was part of a larger series of events by and for Black women curated by Johnica Rivers and Michelle Lanier, entitled “A Sojourn for Harriet.” This moving retreat was a place of reconnection to the life and tribulations of Harriet Jacobs, and the larger history of Black presences in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina. The dwellings at Horton Grove, constructed c. 1851, were some of the largest enslavement quarters in the United States, and are the only two-story enslavement quarters still extant in North Carolina. Descendants of the original inhabitants lived on the site until the 1970s, working as sharecroppers on land toiled by their ancestors. March 2024.