With his patrician air, Boris St. John would have run his own plantation. Him with the fraternity pin stabbed through his tie. Though he was past the age of beer keg parties, on Southern Heritage Day, he joined the undergrads in dressing up in Confederate uniforms to parade around the campus main square. After that, they’d come back to their fraternity house and eat an old-style breakfast prepared by the African American cook, who’d dressed up like an enslaved person. She insisted that she was happy to do it, according to the article in the student newspaper. It was so much fun.
Harvey Dixon—how like Dixie his name was—would be a yeoman farmer, which Whitcomb had explained was basically a synonym for “white trash,” though that was a prejudiced term, like “cracker” or “nigger.” We needed to remember that.
“Our yeoman farmers, with their cherished one or two slaves apiece? We can’t say they kept the economy flourishing, but we can say they did their best. We had those good ole boys doing their part, fighting for the Lost Cause, and killing those disloyal and ungrateful runaway Negroes.”
You could hear the contempt in Dr. Whitcomb’s voice, as Boris and Harvey shifted in their chairs. They probably weren’t used to such language from a brother. Our professor was safe, though, no matter what they wrote on the student evaluations at semester’s end. He was the only African American faculty member on campus with an endowed chair. Out of all the history professors, he had the most books: five edited texts and seven monographs, two of which had been finalists for the Pulitzer.
Rebecca, she would have been the master’s daughter. Or maybe the wife of the master’s son. Certainly, with her beauty, someone’s prize. Emma would have been her nearsighted, spinster sister.
Whitcomb and I, we’d have been enslaved. Maybe he would have had the courage to run, but I was a coward. I would have stayed and suffered, but I couldn’t yet decide whether I would have been up at the big house or out in the fields. The hard life or the soft. It might have depended on whether my master thought I was pretty or not. It wouldn’t have mattered if he believed in God.
[Pinchard Family Papers, Boxes 1–12, circa 1806–1934.]
6 JAN 1814 Ahgayuh purchased frm Lanc. Polcott (450 DOLLR)
2 JAN 1816 Mamie purchasd from Lanc. Polcott
4 JUNE 1817 Nick (b) born Mamie (Ahgayuh Nurse)
6 JUNE 1817 Mamie dead
7 MAY 1821 Tess (g) born Midas’s Ahgayuh
29 JULY 1822 Midas sold Lanc. Polcott
The year before, I’d been so anxious to do research in the Old South Collections. The archives had fascinated me. Made me happy for the first time in my socially awkward life. But there was a catch when you did research on slavery: you couldn’t only focus on the parts you wanted.
You had to wade through everything, in order to get to the documents you needed. You had to look at the slave auctions and whippings. The casual cruelty that indicated the white men who’d owned Black folks didn’t consider them human beings. When I began doing research in the Pinchard family papers, I wasn’t reading about strangers anymore. These were my own ancestors, Black and white. Samuel Pinchard was the great-grandfather of Uncle Root and Dear Pearl.
When I’d done research on the weeping time auction, I’d felt so saddened, but now, when I left the Old South Collections, rage joined my sadness. Every white person who crossed my path made me want to scream so badly, it seemed my flesh burned with the effort to maintain control. And to make matters worse, on my walk across campus from the collections, I’d be forced to go past the statue of the colonial founder of my university, Edward Sharpe. The students called his statue “Quiet Ned.”
Sharpe had owned forty-three enslaved Black folks, but had caught religion during a sermon by a Great Awakening minister. After hearing the sermon, Edward Sharpe had decided he was against slavery. But instead of freeing the Black folks he owned and giving them a plot of land to work, he’d sold them for a profit, and bought land and started a university with the proceeds. In the university mythology, Edward Sharpe was lauded as a moral hero, and no information was given on the people he’d traded.
Every time I passed Quiet Ned, I thought of the hurt he’d caused those forty-three Black folks. I’d get so angry, it would make me sick, and I couldn’t eat for one or sometimes two days. I could only drink coffee to keep me awake. I’d tremble, unable to sleep. I’d whisper curses toward flesh-peddling white men, hoping my words could travel to the past.
1 OCT 1824 Nick sent kitchen
6 OCT 1824 Nick sent fields
16 SEPT 1828 Tess sent fields
11 APRIL 1840 Eliza Two & Rabbit born to Nick’s Tess
5 JAN 1843 Venie purchasd frm Lanc. Polcott (990 Dllr)
11 OCT 1847 Rabbit sent kitchen
11 OCT 1847 Eliza Two sent maiding
3 OCT 1851 Nick gone (Ran)
4 OCT 1851 Jeremiah Franklin patrol (10 Dllr)
3 JAN 1852 Leena purchasd frm Hez. Polcott (1100 Dllr)
3 SEPT 1852 Grace Bless Franklin & Victor Pinchard married (Rev. Dalton 2 Dollr)
For the fourth week of his class, Dr. Whitcomb had assigned two big books, John Blassingame’s Slave Testimony and Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll, what our professor called classics in the field. In addition, he’d compiled a homemade reader that we’d bought at the campus copy shop. The reader contained copies of the Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives, interviews with then-living Black people who had survived slavery. These narratives had been commissioned by the government back in the 1930s, when President Roosevelt was trying to put the country to work.
“Ailey, what are your impressions of our readings?” Dr. Whitcomb asked.
I flipped through my notes. “Okay . . . um . . . I hope it’s all right that I comment on the narratives since nobody else has.”
“I’m waiting with bated breath.”
“All right . . . well . . .”
“We don’t have all day, Ailey.”
“I could be wrong, but there is a lot of pro-white bias on the part of some interviewers. And I found this bias extremely problematic.”
“Go on. Expound.”
“Those particular white interviewers clearly are invested in downplaying the brutality of slavery and the trauma suffered by formerly enslaved African Americans. They appear to be steering their Black subjects to say how great they were treated by their former masters, and I thought—”
When Rebecca raised her hand, I expected Dr. Whitcomb to ignore her. I wasn’t yet finished, but he surprised me.
“You have something to add, Rebecca?” he asked.
“Yes, I do. Maybe we should consider, just maybe, that the interviewers for these narratives weren’t racially biased. Maybe these former slaves were telling the truth and their masters really had been kind to them. Maybe they had been happy.”
I raised my hand. “Can I rebut?”
“I don’t know,” Dr. Whitcomb said. “Can you?”
I cut him a glance, and thought I saw a brief smile, but I couldn’t be sure.
“If slavery was so great, why did the Civil War happen?” I asked.
“Because the north was infringing on our southern states’ rights,” Rebecca said.
“Are you seriously going to bring up that old chestnut?” I laughed, and our professor tapped the table with his knuckles. Keep it professional here. Don’t be derisive.
“Sorry,” I said. “But I would like to ask Rebecca, exactly who is this first-person plural in ‘our states’ rights’? Is it white people? And are you referring to the fact that only whites were citizens in this country until the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 granted citizenship to African Americans, or are you thinking of the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, when Native Americans were granted citizenship? Which one, Rebecca?”
“Our southern identity is not about race,” she said. “It’s about the fact that we lost the Civil War—”
“And again, you are using a plural first-person pronoun,” I said. “What ‘we’ are you refe
rring to? Because my Black family didn’t lose the war. We won it.”
“I would expect a Yankee to take that attitude, Ailey.”
“My mother is from Georgia, and her entire family is, too. Further, ‘Yankee’”—I made air quotes—“does not describe African Americans. It is a term that is specific to whites from New England.”
“How did this become a racial debate, Ailey?”
“Rebecca, how is the Civil War not about race?”
“Because the Civil War was about states’ rights.”
“Yes, the right for southern states to hold African Americans in slavery!”
Dr. Whitcomb tapped the table again. “Okay, that’s enough. This discussion has become circular and borderline impolite.”
After class, I waited as he packed his books. “Dr. Whitcomb, I wanted to apologize sincerely for my disruptive behavior. I hope you can forgive me.”
“No harm, no foul.” He zipped up his old-fashioned physician’s bag. But when I began to express gratitude, he cut me off. He told me, have a good afternoon.
But I didn’t want to leave things on an odd note: the next day, I showed up to his office in the multicultural center. I hadn’t made an appointment, and when I knocked on the door, Dr. Whitcomb had a submarine sandwich and chips on his desk. He had rolled up his sleeves, and his cuff links and tie sat on the desk a few inches away from the food. His large-screen television was turned to the sports cable channel.
He waved his hand at me. “Hey there, sistren! I was just watching the playoff report.”
Dr. Whitcomb pressed a button; there was a flash of dark limbs silently running up and down a court. He smiled at me and the dimples flashed. But when I told him I had come to apologize again, the temperature in the room chilled.
“Sistren, I told you it was fine. But now that you’re here, let me give you some advice from an elder with gray in his beard. You need to stop engaging in petty arguments over inconsequential issues. You aren’t here for that foolishness. You’re here to get at least one graduate degree in the discipline of history.”
The rage suddenly overtook me as he put another chip in his mouth. Did he know what it was like, struggling up those steps to the collections to do that research? How I’d lost weight because my appetite had basically disappeared, ever since I’d been reading those journals written by Samuel Pinchard, that asshole of a white man who had the nerve to be one of my blood ancestors? Or the humiliating exercises I had to perform to get those journals from the research librarian? Yes, ma’am, Mrs. Ransom, I’ma be shonuff careful with these here papers. Dr. Whitcomb had no idea how that librarian watched over me, waiting for me to pull out a bucket of fried chicken and start munching on it over her precious original documents.
What did Dr. Whitcomb know? Him and his six-figure salary, his endowed chair, and his fucking cable in his university office.
“Is that all?” His hand hovered over the remote. “Did you need something else?”
I put extra cornpone and molasses into my voice.
“No, Dr. Whitcomb. I understand what you’re saying, and I hope you know I really appreciate you. I appreciate you so—”
“Ailey, stop. That ‘southern belle’ bullshit don’t work with me. Girl, I got regrets and kids older than you.” He put a chip in his mouth, then began to laugh. He was still laughing when I gave my excuses and left.
14 MAY 1855 Holcomb Byrd James hired as overseer
24 DEC 1857 Matthew Thatcher in Guest Cabin
4 FEB 1858 Matthew in Guest Cabin
4 MARCH 1858 Matthew in Guest Cabin
1 APRIL 1858 Matthew in Guest Cabin
6 MAY 1858 Matthew in Guest Cabin
3 JUNE 1858 Matthew in Guest Cabin
1 JULY 1858 Matthew in Guest Cabin
5 AUG 1858 Matthew in Guest Cabin
2 SEPT 1858 Matthew in Guest Cabin
7 OCT 1858 Matthew in Guest Cabin
4 NOV 1858 Matthew in Guest Cabin
24 DEC 1858 Matthew in Guest Cabin
4 FEB 1859 Matthew in Guest Cabin
27 FEB 1859 Leave for Savannah w/ Matthew
10 MAR 1859 Return frm Savannah w/ Matthew
10 MAR 1859 Gloria dead, Sunday last
2 JUNE 1859 Peach blighting
10 JULY 1859 Fire in Left Cabin
11 JULY 1859 Rabbit & Leena dead (Monday last)
11 JULY 1859 Pompey & Sugar & Cletus gone (Ran Monday last)
At Shug’s, Scooter tried to start a conversation, but I told him I couldn’t chitchat. I had eight hundred pages to get through. But I thanked him for the coffee, and no, I didn’t want any breakfast. I wasn’t hungry.
“Ailey, I’ve got a favor to ask.”
“No, youngblood, you can’t hold twenty dollars. I’m light, brother. It’s the middle of the month.”
“Very funny. No, I need you come to dinner with Rebecca and me.”
I looked over my glasses. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I’m not. Rebecca really wants you to come over.”
“That’s not going to happen, Scooter.”
“Why not?”
I rose and walked to the counter. It was a slow morning, and so I stood there for several minutes, talking to Miss Velma. Did she have any new pictures of her youngest grandbaby? And she leaned down and brought up her purse, saying, she shole did.
I returned to my table but didn’t speak to Scooter. I gathered my books and papers and headed toward the door. When he called my name, I didn’t turn around. That evening, he came by my apartment. He stood on the porch, ringing the bell and knocking, but I didn’t open the door. I sat on the couch, listening as Mike scolded Scooter, he didn’t live on this street. So he couldn’t be standing on a lady’s porch, causing a ruckus like he didn’t have no sense. Somebody might call the police, and Scooter was a Black man. He should know better: he had to be careful in this town.
June 26, 1868
Dear Master Samuel
I trust this letter finds you well. I write to inform you that I have been living happy and FREE these last seventeen years. I shall not reveal the names of my benefactors or the city in which I dwell, only that I have been aided by righteous people who are very kind. They ask that I worship the Lord in exchange for my roof, bed, and many good meals and I am happy to do so. Surely God is deserving of my praise. Yet my benefactors have asked me all these years to consider my salvation. They have reminded me that the Good Lord requires our forgiveness of even the most grievous of sins. Master you have surely trespassed against me, my grandfather, my mother, my father, my beloved wife, my children and everyone else at Wood Place who occupy my affection but after much prayer I now write to you and offer my forgiveness. I forgive you Master of your many thousands of evils. I forgive you for being the left-handed comrade of the Devil who whispers his desires in the dark and who you follow without hesitation. Truly I forgive you Master though you are a creature worthy of disgust without mitigation. Daily I pray for your ugly, miserable and tarnished soul. May our most merciful Savior redeem you before you pass from this earthly vale and are sentenced to Satan’s fiery depths.
Your former slave
Nick Pinchard
The Thrilla in Manila
By midterm, I’d made my way through the earliest records of the Pinchard family. I’d walk across campus and huff up those stairs. I’d wave at Mrs. Ransom and she would fix her glasses on her nose then give me the inevitable white cotton gloves.
Those early records coincided with the first land lottery in Georgia in 1805, when white men over twenty-one and white widows were given a chance to each win a plot of land of a little over two hundred acres, with the odds of winning were approximately one in ten. In this way, the territory became Putnam County. Treated as an empty space, instead of the home of the Creek who had already lived there. This was how Samuel Pinchard had come to own Wood Place Plantation.
Samuel Pinchard’s journals were so boring, they made me drowsy, even with my years o
f training. There were accounts of his bargaining with suppliers for feed and livestock and for lumber—and there was much bargaining, because Samuel was an exceptionally cheap man.
But my persistence was rewarded when I realized the date of Samuel’s visit to Savannah, which I’d seen in his journal, placed him there in early March 1859, during the weeping time auction. Not only that, Samuel somehow had also made the acquaintance of Matthew Thatcher, the benefactor of Routledge College, who’d accompanied him to the auction. When I called Dr. Oludara to let her know what I’d found, she told me, hang up. She would call me back, because this was going to be a very long and expensive conversation.
Indeed, 1859 had been a very eventful year for Samuel Pinchard. In addition to the weeping time auction, there was the death of his daughter, he’d received the letter from Nick, an enslaved man who had run away, and then in July, two more deaths had occurred. Leena and Rabbit, two enslaved girls, had died in a fire that destroyed a structure Samuel had called “the left cabin” in his journals. I read and reread those entries in Samuel’s journal: “10 July 1859 Fire in Left Cabin. 11 July 1859 Rabbit & Leena dead.” Two short entries, that’s all he’d recorded of the death of those girls. Rabbit had been the twin sister of Eliza Two, the girl who would become my direct maternal ancestor.
Burning was such a horrific way to die. I couldn’t even imagine that kind of agony, both for the girls who perished in the fire and those who couldn’t save them. The loss of a sister was a grief that never waned. This is what Eliza Two must have experienced, after Rabbit died. Samuel Pinchard didn’t have to write that down in his journals. I understood that grief already. I still dreamed about Lydia, and when I awoke, I still felt cheated that she wasn’t alive.
* * *
For my presentation on the archives in late October, I took twenty minutes to detail the initial records that I’d found in the papers of Samuel Pinchard. I focused on the descendants of two women, Mamie and Ahgayuh, specifically on Nick, who’d been born on Wood Place in 1821, married Ahgayuh’s daughter, Tess, and sired twin girls with her, Rabbit and Eliza Two. In 1851, Nick had run away, but sometime on or around June 26, 1868, a letter had been mailed to Samuel, signed by Nick. He’d written Samuel on the older man’s birthday, though that milestone hadn’t been mentioned—perhaps the timing of the letter had been a coincidence. But the tone of the letter was quite rancorous, as Nick described in generalities what he termed Pinchard’s “thousands of evils.” In another folder in the Pinchard papers, I’d found a flyer offering a reward for Nick’s return. The sketch and description of Nick indicated he’d been of mixed-race heritage, though he did not identify his probably white father in his letter. Therefore, it wasn’t clear whether Samuel Pinchard or another white man had sired Nick.
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois Page 66