My latest visit to the Bray School at Colonial Williamsburg
- Colonial-NewYorker
- Aug 18
- 3 min read
Needless to say, it is usually true that history most often represents those voices who shout the loudest, nay even then we lose very loud voices, such as the majority of Sappho’s lyric poetry or the works of the polemicist Celsus, but sometimes, rarely, we dig up a remnant that bears witness to the silent voices of the past.
Indeed, all voices of the past are silent, one need only visit the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, Italy to remind us of the finality of time, of the evanescence of life, of the true and deafening silence of the past. What I mean here, though, is that just recently in 2025 we can see a grand example of the resurrection of a witness that speaks, in a manner, aloud the voices which we never could hear, that is to say, the voices of those enslaved and free African students who once attended the 18th century Bray Schools of colonial North America.
Most of these students' names are long lost to time, for indeed most of the near 10 schools founded by the Bray Associates of London in the 1700s are long turned to dust, but the miraculous story of one such surviving exemplar, found standing transformed and nigh unrecognizable on the grounds of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and now restored to its original appearance c. 1760 and placed on its original plot in the Colonial Williamsburg historical center, stands witness to lost names and lost voices.
In a way, it is an odd thing to visit it; one approaches a small and humble house from the rear, designed in the simple elegance common to Georgian structures in 18th century Virginia. Once inside one gains access to two sparsely furnished rooms. To the right stands a classroom empty of all save a few benches and the teacher’s desk, which hardly resembles what we would consider a classroom, lacking all of the comforts and conveniences of modern education. It is in this room, if you are lucky, that you might run into a costumed interpreter portraying Ann Wager, the historic teacher at the Williamsburg Bray School, but aside from this, the most immediately apparent fact is the absence of any students.
See, the Bray School Associates had one goal in mind, that of the conversion of North American enslaved and free African children to the Anglican faith, and as impressive as the restored Georgian schoolhouse is, its most stark and obvious detail is the silence and absence of those who most benefited from this structure and the education, however limited, taught inside it.
In some sense, this profound and visible absence tells a louder tale than one that could be told if the Colonial Williamsburg foundation had tried to portray in some way the student population, for it reminds us that so very often in history, there are thousands upon thousands of lives, just as full of excitement, loss, misery, grace, and triumph as our own, that due to the irretrievable march of time and the wasting away of evidence (or the complete lack of it!), are forever lost to us. It is an amazing thing that now, when one visits the historic district of Colonial Williamsburg, this humble Georgian schoolhouse will forever remind us of those lives, especially those lives that history so often unfortunately tends to neglect, the lives of humans enslaved and taken advantage of by the more commonly lauded inhabitants of the past, whose louder voices leave a more enduring evidentiary base of documents and a stronger public memory. Notwithstanding that, we as a society and as a human species ought ever to remember and honor the memory of those human beings who the past chose not to laud or remember, who nevertheless were just as foundational and important for the preservation of civilized society, whose lives were not lived in vain, but who lived as full and as beautiful a life as we are sure we indeed live, even in spite of the horrid injustices often committed against them for no reason save the common greed which plagues the human race.
In this respect, the Williamsburg Bray School is a historic site that I know I will find myself visiting and musing over again and again, and I am truly glad that it has been rediscovered and is well stewarded by the Colonial Williamsburg foundation.
Nulla avaritia sine poena est.
To learn more about the Williamsburg Bray School, check out these awesome resources created by the Bray School Lab at the College of William and Mary:
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