by Noel Rae
“Once two of them goes down the hill to the dollhouse, where the Kilpatrick children am playing. They wants to go in the dollhouse and one the Kilpatrick boys says, ‘That’s for white chillen.’ They say, ‘We ain’t no niggers, ’cause we got the same daddy you has, and he comes to see us near every day and fetches us clothes and things from town.’ They is fussing, and Missy Kilpatrick is listening out her chamber window. She hears them white niggers say, ‘He is our daddy and we call him daddy when he comes to our house to see our mamma.’
Under the watchful but seemingly benign eye of the white master a black preacher exhorts his slave listeners. The picture was drawn by the visiting English artist, Frank Vizitelly, at the time of the Civil War.
“When Massa come home that evening, his wife hardly say nothing to him, and he ask her what the matter, and she tells him, ‘Since you asks me, I’m studying in my mind ’bout them white young-uns of that yaller nigger wench from Baton Rouge.’ He say, ‘Now, honey, I fetches that gal just for you, ’cause she a fine seamster.’ She say, ‘It look kind of funny they got the same kind of hair and eyes as my children, and they got a nose look like yours.’ He say, ‘Honey, you just paying ’tention to talk of little chillen that ain’t got no mind to what they say.’ She say, ‘Over in Mississippi I got a home and plenty with my daddy, and I got that in my mind.’
“Well, she didn’t never leave, and Massa bought her a fine new span of surrey hosses. But she don’t never have no more children, and she ain’t so cordial with the Massa. That yaller gal has more white young-uns, but they don’t never go down the hill no more to the big house.
“Massa used to hire out his niggers for wage hands. One time he hired me and a nigger boy, Turner, to work for some ornery white trash name of Kidd. One day Turner goes off and don’t come back. Old Man Kidd say I knowed ’bout it, and he tied my wrists together and stripped me. He hanged me by the wrists from a limb on a tree and spraddled my legs round the trunk and tied my feet together. Then he beat me. He beat me worser than I ever been been beat before, and I faints dead away. When I come to I’m in bed. I didn’t care so much iffen I died.
“I didn’t know ’bout the passing of time, but Miss Sara come to see me. Some white folks done get word to her. Mr. Kidd tries to talk hisself out of it, but Miss Sara fetches me home when I’m well ’nough to move. She took me in a cart and my maw takes care of me. Massa looks me over good and says I’ll get well, but I’m ruined for breeding children.”
After the war Mary Reynolds and her family moved to Texas.
“Mammy gets to Galveston and dies there. My husband and me farmed round for times, and then I done housework and cooking for many years. My husband died years ago. I guess Miss Sara been dead these long years.
“I been blind and almost helpless for five years. I’m getting mighty enfeebling, and I ain’t walked outside the door for a long time back. I sets and remembers the times in the world. I remembers now clear as yesterday things I forgot for a long time. I remembers about the days of slavery, and I don’t believe they ever gwine have slaves no more on this earth. I think God done took that burden offen his black children, and I’m aiming to praise Him for it to His face in the days of glory what ain’t so far off.”
Many other slaves had a strong religious faith, despite the fact that until after the Civil War there were few black churches outside the cities. Most owners allowed only those preachers who toed the official line. “The niggers didn’t go to the church building,” recalled Lucretia Alexander, a former slave. “The preacher came and preached to them in their quarters. He’d just say, ‘Serve your masters. Don’t steal your master’s turkey. Don’t steal your master’s chickens. Don’t steal your master’s hogs. Don’t steal your master’s meat. Do whatsomever your master tells you to do.’ Same old thing all the time.”
“You ought to heard that preaching,” recalled Wes Brady. “Obey your massa and missy, don’t steal chickens and eggs and meat, but nary a word about having a soul to save.” “All that preacher talked about was for us slaves to obey our masters and not to lie and steal,” said another. “Nothing about Jesus was ever said.” Tom Hawkins remembered that when he was a boy on a plantation near Marshall, Texas, “us niggers on the Poore plantation went to church with our white folks. Couldn’t none of us read no Bible. The preacher preached to the white folks first, and then when he preached to the niggers all he ever said was: ‘It’s a sin to steal. Don’t steal Master and Mistress’s chickens and hogs, and such like. How could anyone be converted on that kind of preaching? And besides, it never helped none to listen to that sort of preaching, ’cause the stealing kept going right on every night.”
Carey Davenport, who later became a Methodist minister, told of three distinct forms of worship on the Texas plantation where he had been born in 1855. First there were Sunday prayers in the big house, conducted by the master, who was “’ligious.” However “I could never understand his ’ligion ’cause sometimes he get up off his knees, and before we get out of the house he cusses us out.” Then there were the occasions when “the white Methodist circuit riders come round on horseback and preach. There was a big box house for a church house, and the cullud folks sit off in one corner of the church.” And third, “sometimes the cullud folks go down in dugouts and hollows and hold they own service, and they used to sing songs what come a-gushing up from the heart.”
Richard Carruthers, of Bastrop County, Texas, had a similar experience. “When the white preacher come he preach and pick up his Bible and claim he getting the text right out from the Good Book, and he preach: ‘The Lord say, don’t you niggers steal chickens from your missus. Don’t you steal your master’s hogs.’ That would be all he preach.” But then “us niggers used to have a prayin’ ground down in the hollow, and sometimes we come out of the field between eleven and twelve at night, scorchin’ and burnin’ up with nothin’ to eat, and we wants to ask the good Lord to have mercy. We puts grease in a snuff pan or bottle, and make a lamp. We takes a pine torch, too, and goes down to the hollow to pray. Some gets so joyous they starts to holler loud and we has to stop up they mouth. I see niggers get so full of the Lord and so happy they drop unconscious.”
Mrs. Sutton told of a common aid to privacy. “White people wouldn’t let them have meetings, but they would get a big old wash kettle and put it right outside the door, and turn it bottom upwards to get the sound, then they would go in the house and sing and pray, and the kettle would catch the sound.”
Among the many failings for which they were reproached by the Rev. Mr. Pike, as narrated earlier by Harriet Jacobs, were “tossing coffee grounds with some wicked fortune teller … cutting cards with an old hag … tying up little bags of roots to bury under the door-steps to poison each other.” Generally known as “conjuring,” some of these practices could be traced back to Africa, while others seem to have been homegrown. “They powder up the rattle offen the snake and tie it up in the little old rag bag, and they do devilment with it,” reported Rosanha Frazier. “They get old scorpion and make bad medicine. They get dirt out of the graveyard, and that dirt, after they speak on it, would make you go crazy. When they wants to conjure you they sneak round and get the hair combing or the finger or toenail, or anything natural about your body and works the hoodoo on it. They make the straw man or the clay man and they puts the pin in he leg, and you leg gwineter get hurt or sore jus’ where they puts the pin. Iffen they puts the pin through the heart, you gwineter die.”
In her old age, May Satterfield also recalled some folk remedies and superstitions: “If you wants to have good luck, get some rat veins, wild cherry blossom, and bile them together with whiskey and make some bitters. Put the bitters in a demijohn and keep it in a dark place. Every now and then take a good slug of them bitters, and you ain’t never gonna be sick a day in your life.” Also: “Ain’t no use of nobody killing no hogs on the dark of the moon, ’cause all the meat’ll draw up and there won’t be nothing but grease. Kill hogs on the light mo
on. Ain’t nothing gonna mount to nothing on the dark moon except Irish taters … If you sprinkle a little salt all round the house, nothing can bother you. The spirits can’t get to you … If you want a job with a certain person there is a root that you can chew, and then you go to the person, spit round them, and you’ll get the job … I knows too about Old Christmas night that come just before Christmas. Ain’t many now knows about Old Christmas. On that night I done seen the chickens flap they wings, the cows get down in their stall and pray, the horses neigh, and the trees swing this way and that. All these and many more dumb beasts give thanks to God on Old Christmas night. I’ve seen this with these two eyes.”
Other slaves also had miraculous experiences, among them Ophelia Jemison:
“When I was seeking the Lord, before I converted, he place me in Hell to convince me. I stay down there mos’ a hour. Hell one terrible place. The fire down there is a big pit of brimstone a-roaring and a-roaring. It bigger than Charleston, it seem like. I see the souls boiling in the pit of brimstone. Oh! God have mercy on my soul!
“When I been converted, I went to heaven in the spirit and see with the eye of faith. I done been there. Heaven is white as snow. God and the Holy Ghost, they is one and sat at a big table with the book stretched out before them. God’s two eyes just like two big suns shining, and his hair like lamb’s wool. I walk in there and look over his shoulder. He had a long gold pen and writ down the names of the people down on the earth yet, and when he call the roll up there in his own time, he know them.
“Oh, I ’joicing! I ’joicing! Never the like before. An angel take me and show me the stars, how they hang up there by a silver cord, and the moon just a ball of blood, but I ain’t know how it hold up, and the sun on the rim of all these, going round and round, and Christ setting in a rocking chair over the sun. Gabriel and Michael was with him, one on this side, and one on the other, holding the laws. I see everything just like I say. Sweet Jesus, I hope I reach that place I see.”
The “Moses of her People” poses for a studio photograph when aged about fifty—like so many others born into slavery, Harriet Tubman did not know the date of her birth. The caption “Nurse, spy and scout,” tells only part of her story, ignoring the many hazardous trips she made to bring slaves to freedom. Nor does the portrait convey the fact that she was barely five feet tall but as strong in body as she was in spirit. Also not shown is the loaded pistol she carried when on a mission in case anyone wanted to back out, thereby endangering the other fugitives. As she put it, “Dead men tell no tales.”
CHAPTER 10
FUGITIVES
A NAGGING PROBLEM FOR MANY LATTER-DAY SLAVE-OWNERS WAS THIS: IF, as everyone had now come to acknowledge, slavery was as beneficial to the slaves as it was to the owners, then why did so many of them keep running away? Ingratitude was one ostensible reason; childish willfulness was another; and then there were the lies and propaganda of the fanatical abolitionists. These explained a lot, but was there something else, some other motive that made slaves behave in a manner so contrary to their best interests?
One possible answer—but not one the owners wanted to hear—lay in the pages of American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, published in 1839, and edited by Theodore Dwight Weld and Sarah and Angelina Grimké. In their “Advertisement to the Reader,” the editors explained that rather than rely on the denunciations of their fellow-abolitionists, the “majority of facts and testimony contained in this work rests upon the authority of slaveholders, whose names and addresses are given to the public, to vouch for the truth of their statements … Their testimony is taken, mainly, from recent newspapers, published in the slave states.” The Introduction began: “Reader, you are empaneled as a juror to try a plain case and bring in an honest verdict. The question at issue is not one of law, but of fact: What is the actual condition of the slaves in the United States? A plainer case never went to a jury. Look at it …”
Among the vast amount of evidence produced by Weld and the Grimké sisters were hundreds of newspaper advertisements for runaways—“testimony of the slaveholders themselves, and in their own chosen words.” The book was densely printed, and to save space the editors used only extracts from the advertisements; to save even more space, the names and addresses of the advertisers have now also been dropped. Here, under the heading Floggings, are some of the reasons why slaves ran away:
The Standard of Union, Milledgeville, Ga. Oct 2, 1838. “Ranaway, a negro woman named Maria, some scars on her back occasioned by the whip.” The Sentinel, Vicksburg, Miss. Aug 22, 1837. “Ranaway, a negro fellow named Dick—has many scars on his back from being whipped.” The Chronicle and Sentinel, Augusta, Ga. Oct 18, 1838. “Ranaway, a negro man named Johnson—he has a great many marks of the whip on his back.” The Baltimore Republican, Md. Jan 13, 1838. “Ranaway, Bill—has several large scars on his back from a severe whipping in early life.” The Bulletin, New Orleans. August 11, 1838. “Ranaway, the mulatto boy Quash—considerably marked on the back and other places with the lash.” The St. Francisville Journal, La. July 6, 1837. “Committed to jail, a negro boy named John, about 17 years old—his back is badly marked with the whip, his upper lip and chin severely bruised.” Nineteen other such notices appear in the book, all within a period of not much more than one year—“mere samples,” says Weld “of the hundreds of similar ones published during the same period.”
The next section was titled Tortures by Iron Collars, Chains, Fetters, Handcuffs, &c.
The Spectator, Staunton, Va. Sept 27, 1838. “Ranaway, a negro named David—with some iron hobbles around each ankle.” Grand Gulf Advertiser, Washington, Mi. Aug 29, 1838. “Ranaway, a black woman, Betsey—had an iron bar on her right leg.” The New Orleans Bee, June 20, 1837. “Ranaway, the negro Manuel, much marked with irons.” The New Orleans Bee, Aug 11, 1838. “Ranaway, the negress Fanny—had on an iron band about her neck.” The Memphis Enquirer, June 7, 1837. “Absconded, a colored boy named Peter—had an iron round his neck when he went away.” The Mobile Chronicle, Ala. June 15, 1838. “Ranaway, a negro boy about twelve years old—had round his neck a chain dog-collar.” The New Orleans Bee, July 2, 1838. “Ranaway, the negro Hown—has a ring of iron on his left foot. Also, Grisce, his wife, having a ring and chain on the left leg.” The New Orleans Bee, June 9, 1838. “Detained at the police station, the negro wench Myra—has several marks of lashing, and has irons on her feet.” The New Orleans Bee, Aug 11, 1837. “Ranaway, Betsey—when she left she had on her neck an iron collar.”
From Branding, Maiming, Gun-shot Wounds, &c. here are eighteen of the more than one hundred examples, almost all from a period of a mere eighteen months:
The Raleigh Standard, July 18, 1838. “Ranaway, a negro woman and two children; a few days before she went off I burnt her with a hot iron on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M.” The New Orleans Bee, Dec. 21, 1838. “Ranaway, a negro woman named Rachel, has lost all her toes except the large one.” The Georgia Journal, March 27, 1837. “Twenty-five dollars reward for my man Isaac. He has a scar on his forehead caused by a blow, and one on his back made by a shot from a pistol.” The Natchez Courier, Aug. 24, 1838. “Ranaway, a negro girl called Mary, has a small scar over her eye, a good many teeth missing, the letter A is branded on her cheek and forehead.” (The letter A would have stood for Ashford, the owner’s name.) The Southern Sun, Columbus, Ga. Aug 7, 1838. “Ranaway, a negro boy named Mose, he has a wound in the right shoulder near the back bone, which was occasioned by a rifle shot.” The Milledgeville Union, Nov 7, 1837. “Ranaway, negro boy Ellic, has a scar on one of his arms from the bite of a dog.” The New Orleans Bee, Aug 27, 1837. “Fifty dollars reward for the negro Jim Blake—has a piece cut out of each ear, and the middle finger of the left hand cut off to the second joint.” The Georgia Messenger, July 27, 1837. “Ranaway, my man Fountain—has holes in his ears, a scar on the right side of his forehead—has been shot in the hind parts of his legs—is marked on the back with the whi
p.” The Commercial Register, Mobile, Ala. Oct 27, 1837. “Ranaway, the slave Ellis—he has lost one of his ears.” The Knoxville Register, June 6, 1838. “Ranaway, a black girl named Mary—she has a scar on her cheek, and the end of one of her toes cut off.” The Winchester Virginian, July 11, 1837. “Ranaway, a mulatto man named Joe—his fingers on the left hand are partly amputated.” The New Orleans Commercial Bulletin, July 21, 1837. “Ranaway, Bill—has a scar over one eye, also one on his leg from the bite of a dog—has a burn on his buttock from a piece of hot iron in the shape of a T.” The Commercial Bulletin, New Orleans, Sept 18, 1838. “Ranaway a negro named David Drier—has two toes cut.” The Columbus Enquirer, Ga. Jan 18, 1838. “Ranaway, a negro boy twelve or thirteen years old—has a scar on his left cheek from the bite of a dog.” The New Orleans Bee, Feb 19, 1838. “Ranaway, the negro Patrick—has his little finger of the right hand cut close to the hand.” The Mercury, Charleston, S.C. Nov 27, 837. “Ranaway, Dick—has lost the little toe of one of his feet.” The Natchez Courier, Aug 17, 1838. “Ranaway, a negro man named Jerry, has a small piece cut out of the top of each ear.” The Alexandria Gazette, Md. Feb 6, 1838. “Ranaway, negro Phil, scar through the right eyebrow, part of the middle toe on the right foot cut off.”