So when you are sleeping in history, you need to keep your boots on. Joseph McGill is an African American historian and preservationist who has been sleeping in slave dwellings around the South for the past several years in order to connect with history. One of those nights was spent in the brick "cabins" on Mount Pleasant's own Boone Hall Plantation.

There was a time when many people assumed that most of our African American history from before the Civil War was lost. Much of the physical evidence of the peculiar institution was believed to have dissolved with age, termites and ordinary decay.

You can find an antebellum silver tea pot easier than you can find an ordinary rice bowl from 200 years ago. In the 1960s many people said there just wasn't any surviving material evidence of the slave experience. Some saw this as an excuse to just make stuff up. Others thought less remembered the better. Many slaves could read and write. Many more learned to do so during and after their liberation. There are letters, newspapers and even literature. The WPA interviewed hundreds of survivors in their old age. There are military and government records of all kinds. Artifacts have been preserved, passed down through the generations and dug up. For those attempting to piece together what life was like for their ancestors, with time and patience, much can be put together. However the result of that at best is going to be a documentary or a research paper. McGill, who had become involved in the effort to preserve the considerable number of surviving slave dwellings decided the way to know what they were really like was to spend the night in their homes.

Many aren't as pristine as the carefully preserved brick structures at Boone Hall. Some are tumbled down, termite ridden near ruins. Others were re-purposed into storage sheds when tenants and hired hands fled the plantations as mechanical agriculture replaced manual labor across the south and industrial jobs opened elsewhere. Many were quietly demolished or allowed to disappear because the owners, both Southerners and wealthy people from the North who purchased the plantations preferred not to remember what those little, primitive dwellings represented.

One determined historian/preservationist spent 12 years saving a slave dwelling on an upstate historic site. Bus loads of school children come to see the tiny house. For some it means visiting a place like that where their ancestors lived, looking almost exactly the way it did when it was used for that purpose. One slave dwelling had been turned into a state of the art "man cave" with air conditioning, a flat screen TV and a beer cooler.

Joe McGill has spent the night in nearly every slave dwelling which was still structurally sound which was available to him.

He gets offers to visit and connect these little buildings to the larger history from all over the southeast and beyond. There are slave dwellings in Maine and Philadelphia as well as the South.

They're found in cities, as at our own Aiken Rhett House in Charleston.

Some have become surrounded by the suburbs as on James Island at McLeod Plantation.

He's carefully documented each visit.

If Joe isn't lucky enough to be spending the night in the former cabin turned luxury man cave with the AC and beer cooler, he at least hopes to have a place which has been sprayed for bugs. The old wooden buildings, often filled with cast off junk, are a prime place for snakes, rodents and insects. There is no way to keep the mosquitoes out without blocking off all air circulation. Light attracts flying insects of all kinds. Dark invites free movement for all the creepy things which love the night. On one occasion he killed a large roach and a spider and went to sleep assuming himself to be alone and safe, leaving them dead on the floor. When he woke up, both had disappeared, carried off by something hungry and larger.

In these tight places, many no more than 8 x 12 feet, entire families once lived between long days of hot work. Furniture was uncommon. Children usually slept on straw in the attic. When it wasn't hot and buggy, it was cold and wet. Life in these dwellings continued in South Carolina from 1670 to the 1960s.

Most of the time Joe sleeps in a comfortable suburban home. On his travels for research and teaching, his nights are passed in hotels with hot running water and electricity. These little buildings aren't places to raise your kids now or rest before a lecture. However they offer Joe and the increasing number of people who share these nights with him an opportunity to feel what history was like.

African Americans are increasingly comfortable dealing with this difficult subject. No one gets to select their history. It's always a human story about limits and embarrassments. On some occasions, the best way to get close to that challenging reality is to close a creaking door and try to sleep.

However when he does that, Joe keeps his shoes on. Even when he is the only person in the dwelling, he's seldom alone.

He wants to get into the history, but when something moves in the dark, closer than he's comfortable with, it's good to be able to put your feet down with confidence and leave in a hurry. History is always there to come back to later.

William Hamilton (www.wjhamilton.com) is an attorney who lives on I'On Village.