“I will give you the benefit of the doubt, because you gave it to some other pages,” the girl wrote to Pam Northam. “But you followed this up by asking: ‘Can you imagine being an enslaved person, and having to pick this all day?’ which didn’t help the damage you had done.”

Senate Clerk Susan Clarke Schaar said “we received no complaints” after the mansion visit. She said the only thing the pages were buzzing about afterward was the fact that one of the pages was dehydrated and fainted during the tour of the kitchen.

Sen. William Stanley, R-Franklin, whose daughter served as a page this session, was among the group that the first lady took to the kitchen. Stanley declined to make his daughter available for an interview, but he said she told him that Pam Northam offered the cotton to all of the students.

“The first lady’s intent was to show the horrors of slavery and to make sure everyone felt the pain they felt in some small measure,” he said. Two days later, Stanley’s wife got the same tour from Pam Northam and found it “poignant,” he said.

Del. Marcia Price, D-Newport News, a member of the black caucus, praised the student “for her courage in speaking out when a lot of times African-Americans have not always had the opportunity to confront offenses in this way.”