Janice Hayes-Williams squirts me with a sweet-smelling mist from a small bottle, warding off any hoodoo spirits lingering inside the centuries-old mansion glowing softly before us in the morning sun.
We’re walking into the James Brice House, a colonial landmark being painstakingly restored to tell the history of urban slavery in America.
“That house has more hoodoo than any house in the whole city, in the walls, under the floorboards,” she warned.
Her role in this long-running project is one she’s done before, a rescuer of lost stories.
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“I see her as part of a very old, arguably like thousands of years old, African and African American tradition of oral history, family, memory and there needing to be certain people in your community who just sort of naturally step into the role of being the keeper of the stories,” NBC journalist Antonia Hylton said.
She heard of Hayes-Williams in high school, while researching her family connections to a Maryland hospital that confined Black people with mental illness until their deaths. Hylton’s work culminated in the 2024 best-seller, “Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum.”
“I don’t know that Janice woke up one day and said, ‘Hey, I’m this person,’ or ‘this is my job,’ or ‘someone recommended me for this,’ or anything. I just think she naturally stepped into that,” Hylton said.
We cross planks laid over dirt floors, stripped bare by Historic Annapolis, the gatekeeper of the city’s story for 75 years.
Hayes-Williams may be the only person who can take on the delicate task ahead, weaving race and freedom, slavery and family, to connect the enslaved of the Brice House with their descendants.
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Learning that your American story runs through this kitchen, these exposed-brick walls and those sleeping quarters beneath the eaves of that house will be a difficult, emotional moment.
It’s one this self-taught historian and genealogist discovered for herself. Her family’s Annapolis ties are as deep as anyone’s, reaching back 300 years to the enslaved people Royal Gov. Horatio Sharpe brought from his plantation to a mansion across the river.
Now, it will be her job to tell others — this is your origin story, too.
“Our story is so mixed up, but people want to know, ‘Where do I come from?’” Hayes-Williams said.
“They are finding out from me, honestly.”
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Historic Annapolis hasn’t always been invested in the Black chapters of its story.
Under the leadership of CEO Karen Theimer Brown and historian Mary-Angela Hardwick, it began expanding the tale in earnest. They turned to Hayes-Williams for research.
“She is so much the keeper of the African American history of Annapolis, because she has gathered it,” said Hardwick, who has developed a deep friendship with the historian. “Because her family has been here for generations, because she’s related to everybody, Black and white.”
Hayes-Williams’ late uncle, George Phelps Jr., pointed her toward the intersection of family and history where she stands today.
The first Black police officer in Annapolis, Phelps always called merchant Wiley H. Bates his uncle. It sounded like boasting to a teenager growing up in Annapolis, where Bates remains a cultural icon as the man who created the first Black high school in 1932.
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“We had a knockdown, drag-out. I mean, it was bad,” she said. “So I left his house and went to Brewer Hills [Cemetery] and found Wiley Bates’ resting place. I tripped over the chain link fence and wound up in the whole family plot. There was my great-grandmother, her sisters and brothers.”
That stumble led her to census records, deeds, lists, birth and death records. She found teachers in white historians, including “Annapolis, City on the Severn: A History” author Jane McWilliams, who shared the Black stories they collected.
It took her deep within a sprawling state psychiatric hospital in Crownsville, where the new superintendent needed help with an uncomfortable discovery. He called Phelps in 2001 and asked about a forgotten cemetery.
Hayes-Williams answered the phone that day.
“So I called Uncle George. All he said was, ‘Jesus Christ!’” she recalled. “‘There’s a cemetery, Jesus Christ.’ And I said, ‘I have to go with you.’”
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Identifying the people buried there took 21 years. She overcame state indifference to the numbered graves and was motivated by fear of redevelopment after the hospital closed in 2004.
“Without Janice stepping up, we would not have this humanized angle of the Crownsville story,” said Corey Lewis, an assistant state archivist at the Maryland State Archives. “We gave her dedicated space ... to come in and do the research necessary, looking through every death record in Anne Arundel County.”
It is a unique accomplishment, one that will be honored in September with a memorial dedicated by Anne Arundel County, the new owner of the grounds.
And it gives me a strangely personal connection to Hayes-Williams and her work. My grandmother died at Crownsville, too, a decade after it was desegregated.
It’s true. Our stories are all mixed up in Annapolis.
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Hayes-Williams said it took minutes to find Black descendants of the Brice family.
Using family inventories, she linked the final generations of the enslaved to the name that started her journey, Wiley H. Bates. John Brice and Bates were close friends.
“That’s a big family, OK?” Hayes-Williams said. “I’m connecting them back to John Brice.”
Brice family servants were brought from plantations to provide luxury during the General Assembly. It was urban slavery, and it created something new on the Chesapeake Bay.
They mixed spirituality and Christianity to create hoodoo that Hayes-Williams and others believe remains in their disassembled brick home.
They were light-skinned, the children of their enslavers. They walked the streets on family business, talked with servants from other great houses and married to create families that survive today.
They mixed Africa and America to create a first freedom, one Historic Annapolis will explain when Brice House reopens someday.
Hayes-Williams will ensure they get it right and set the story free.
“Right now,” she said, “they are so forgotten.”
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