The Inner Passage

A deeply moving photographic and narrative history of a southern waterway that the enslaved were forced to build for mercantile shipping—but which they used to escape slavery.

The Intracoastal Waterway runs 3000 miles along the Eastern Seaboard between Massachusetts and Brownsville, Texas. The earliest canals on the Waterway were constructed by enslaved people living in the Charles Town colony in present-day South Carolina in the early 1700s.

In a paradox of history that unfolds in The Inner Passage, for over a hundred years, enslaved Black people used these canals constructed for white plantation owners to travel southward to freedom in Spanish Florida. Virginia McGee Richards documents the lost narrative of the Inner Passage through 60 extraordinary photographs, detailed maps, and an essay describing her discovery of this untold history. In an accompanying essay, Imani Perry writes about her own journey on the Inner Passage, putting Black resistance to enslavement and Southern history into an immediate context. James Estrin brings decades of insight about photography and the power of visual storytelling to his affecting foreword.

Richards’ images, made with a wet plate collodion process, using the water of the fields and riverbanks of the Lowcountry, tell of resilience and loss along this ancient waterway. They include landscapes altered by slavery as well as portraits of Lowcountry descendants, each a window into a forgotten corner of Southern history, as well as centuries-old “Witness Trees,” live oaks that have survived centuries of planting seasons, river baptism, torture, prayers, war, poverty, massacres, and lynchings. Together, these words and images and artifacts offer a powerful living map of history.