No name turned the key of their prison. They stopped talking and started singing. Out under the sun, corn-shucking songs that laughed to a fiddle’s sawing beat just wouldn’t do. Out here hands were turning their own muscles into someone else’s cash. So every song was a question. (Am I born to die, and lay this body down?) Some say that songs talked in cipher about running away. (On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I stand, and cast a wishful eye / To Canaan’s fair and happy land, where my possessions lie.) Some say those songs just promised pie in the sky. But, either way, these songs acknowledged that tears watered any Eden their singers could imagine. For only once songs sounded the depths of the river could singers and listeners wade through the sorrow to walk on the other bank.3
So in the dead land the men sang to her. The sound faded across the rows of plants. The dusty mechanism of her arms rose and fell.
At last they tried a new tune whose wave carried across the gray field. The melody rose to joy and plunged to sadness and back again. Simple words named the brutality of their shared fates, and simple words promised that the world might have color once again, if the song could but sweep her up to the surface. Hair as black as coal in the mine, little Liza Jane / Eyes so large and big and fine, little Liza Jane. You are beautiful. We need you. You cannot go where you are trying to go. Come back up, and join us.
You plant a patch of cotton, I’ll plant a patch of cane / I’m gonna make molasses, to sweeten Liza Jane. The singers kept one eye on the overseer. The other watched her. For they knew that no matter how they strove with their song, she would never see her mother again. As the men sang the verse again, they saw her bend down, holding onto the handle of her hoe for support. Here she was, all alone. Her chest lifted and fell in convulsions. She could not bring herself to go on living by herself. But they were asking her not to let herself die.
Sobs began to heave out of her mouth. The men came around to the chorus. They felt the pain in their own dead flesh, cracking as the part that wanted to live tried to break through. Oh Liza, poor gal, Oh Liza Jane / Oh Liza poor gal, she died on the trail. Liza, they sang. Lucy raised her head. Tears flowed down her face and she opened her mouth: “I got happy,” Lucy Thurston remembered eighty years after her resurrection, “and sang with the rest.”4
IN THE THIRTY-ODD YEARS since the 1780s, when slavery’s survival as an institution had looked so imperiled, a complete reversal had taken place. The new zombie body of slavery, stretched by new kinds of power, new technologies of exploitation, new markets, and new forms of credit, was now growing at a metastatic rate. Individuals like Lucy, their lives ripped asunder so that their market value could be extracted, were watching as their links to hope and to each other dissolved. And what could bring an end to their ongoing torture? Enslaved people’s opportunity for collective resistance along the lines of Saint-Domingue had been foreclosed by enslavers and governments. Nor could enslaved people call upon powerful allies who might help bring about a peaceful end to slavery’s expansion. For virtually all white Americans were now interested, almost all profiting in some way—financially, psychologically, or both—from slavery’s growing empire.
The bond between white people was about to be tested by the political controversy called the Missouri Crisis, in which northern and southern congressmen divided over the question of whether slavery should grow even more. The crisis lasted from 1819 to 1821, causing political insiders to panic—such as retired president Thomas Jefferson, who famously referred to it as a “firebell in the night.” In the end, however, the crisis—itself a product of white people’s successful conquest of half a continent—would by its outcome raise the question of how enslaved people could ever draw upon any resources beyond their own and those of the others in the same coffles and fields and slave quarters.
At the same time, if people like Lucy could not survive in body and mind, it was obvious that no reversal of history’s course since the 1780s would be possible. And if survival by means of outside help was unlikely, survival through the efforts of the enslaved acting together may have seemed even more unlikely. To understand why, plumb the depths of loss that Liza and Lucy’s chorus knew so well. Many of the people who came out of the chains and off the blocks, who couldn’t make their weight in those first weeks in the cotton fields, had lost everything: their words, their selves, even their names. It was no foregone conclusion that Lucy Thurston would even remember her name, much less speak again. Forced migration to the frontiers of slavery took children from parents who named them and taught them to talk, brothers from sisters who carried them as babies, wives from husbands who had whispered to them in the night, men from friends who had taken whippings rather than betray them. Survival by means of joint effort would require strong bonds, and all existing strong bonds had been broken.
One woman on Joseph Shepherd’s Mississippi plantation changed her name to “Silence.” Another sold-off woman said she was no longer Sophia, but Sophia Nobody. Many found that when they reached back for essential memories, nothing was there. Margaret Nickens’s mother and father, brought to Missouri from Kentucky and Virginia as children, forgot their own parents’ names. Whenever they saw an adult slave who resembled their fuzzy memories, they asked: Are you my mother? Are you my father? A Tennessee girl lay in childbirth, when to her appeared a woman. Who are you, she groaned, not recognizing. “Don’t forget the old folks,” the ghost replied, and vanished. Only then did the daughter recognize her own dead mother. The midwife put an axe under the bed to cut the young woman’s pain as the contractions grew harder. Soon she’d name her own newborn, a sword to pierce her own heart, another child sentenced to be sold from her mother.5
From the Atlantic ships ancestors had crawled, more dead than alive. Against all odds, strangers from one hundred different ethnic groups had learned to talk to each other, and become kin. Now another massive disruption was taking place, and it, too, was destroying families and social networks, sweeping away all of the relationships and statuses that made up the structure of social life. Like the earlier Middle Passage, the journey along the road southwest had given many reason to feel distrust of their peers—if not of relatives, then of the wider circle of the people who shared their badges of slavery. They’d been talked into coming in from hideouts in the Carolina woods, only to find they had been “sold running” to a trader. Slave traders’ enslaved assistants doctored people up, blacked their hair, rubbed their skins slick with oil to grease prices higher. In the jails where coffles slept, bullies intimidated the small, stole food, and raped. Traitors betrayed plans for revolt. On new slave labor camps, the pushing system pitted migrants against each other. When picking season came, one person’s skill could push up another’s quota.
After weighing-up some might become friends. Others already planned to be enemies. One man might see in another a competitor for a woman, and in a woman a conquest; a woman, in turn, might see another woman as a rival. Small rewards of money or favor convinced captives to abandon incipient solidarity. William Anderson complained that “slaves are sometimes great enemies to each other, telling tales, lying, catching fugitives, and the like. All this is perpetuated by ignorance, oppression and degradation.” When another captive saw Anderson, who had recently been transported from Virginia to Mississippi, eating a stolen fowl, he ran and told the overseer that William was “eating up all of the chickens on the place.” Anderson got one hundred lashes.6
In the older states, many enslaved African Americans had believed that techniques from African spiritual traditions could enable one to exert some control over events. William Grimes, who had been sold to Georgia from his Virginia home in around 1800, consulted fortune-tellers; they reassured him, telling him he would one day be free. Henry Bruce remembered that some of the other people enslaved in Virginia with him had hired a slave “conjuror” to bury a little ball of what looked like dirt—a “jack,” or “hand,” a symbolic object—under the doorstep of an enslaver who was planning to move them to Alabama. When the white man chan
ged his mind, at least temporarily, all of the African Americans congratulated themselves on their success.
Enslaved migrants brought these traditions to the frontier. Archaeologists have dug up little brass “hands” under doorsteps in the slave quarters of Andrew Jackson’s “Hermitage” slave labor camp outside of Nashville. Yet Bruce, who was transported to Missouri, Mississippi, and Texas over the years—despite anything conjurors could do—noted that many enslaved people on the frontier had changed their minds about the efficacy of “voodooism,” as he called it. With him, some now scoffed at their peers’ claims that their once-magical hands could control white people’s growing right- and left-handed power. And in their desperate, isolated circumstances, those enslaved people who could exert some control, magical or otherwise, often used it as what ex-slave Henry Bibb called “instrumentality”—a tool for getting what one wanted, no matter how it hurt other enslaved people. When Grimes got to Georgia, for instance, his enslaver told him he had to sleep in the same bed as an older woman who manipulated the slave owner. The teenaged Grimes complained to his owner that “Aunt Frankee” was a witch who was trying to ride him. The enslaver told Grimes to get back into bed and give the woman what she wanted.7
Even among those with goodwill, different origins could be a cause of conflict. Some people clung to the shreds of old identities, sometimes using them as walls to hold away or even abuse those among whom they were now enslaved. “Grandpa loved Virginia long as he had breath in him,” said a woman born in a Mississippi labor camp. At Congaree, the enslaver forced Charles Ball’s Maryland-born friend Lydia to marry a man from Africa. This man spoke only rough English. Enslavers made him “work with the other hands in the field, but as soon as he had come into his cabin, he took his seat.” He refused to help Lydia with cooking, cleaning, child care, or the family garden patch. And he beat her.8
Many enslaved people spoke literally different languages. As of 1820, enslaved people in many Louisiana labor camps—like Île Breville on the Red River, for instance—spoke only French or creolized African-French hybrid tongues. Captives from the Chesapeake, including Charlotte Rogers of Virginia, couldn’t communicate with them. Isolated, she imagined her mother was there singing beside her as she labored. She walked miles to meet a new arrival to Louisiana, one whom she had heard was from her own Virginia. Even in English-speaking districts, eastern seaboard accents sounded strange on slavery’s frontier. Migrants from South Carolina’s low country spoke the Gullah dialect or an African language. At Congaree in the Carolina interior, Charles Ball met an African-born Muslim man who prayed in Arabic. Elisha Garey remembered that his grandmother Rachel, whom “the Traders fotched [to Georgia] from Virginny” in the early nineteenth century, “never did learn to talk plain.”9
Yet over the first half of the nineteenth century, enslaved people across the southwestern cotton frontier developed the “talking” that seemed “plain” to Elisha Garey. Nobody knows how long it took to create a common accent, vocabulary, and grammar. But enslaved migrants to the plantation frontier created this dialect, and it was what linguistic scholars call modern “Vernacular African-American English.” The crucibles where they forged the new way to “talk plain” were places like the cabin to which the overseer assigned Charles Ball—a dwelling that already contained a man named Nero, his wife, and their five children. Nero surely could not have been overjoyed by this development—a young man moving in with him and his family—but he led Ball to his home with welcome anyway. They ducked through the cabin’s low doorway, and then the man’s naked four-year-old girl collided around her father’s knees with an excited hug. She’d been baby-sitting her infant brother all day, and her father’s return meant relief and food: “Now we shall get good supper!”10
Nero looked down at her for a moment and then turned back to Ball: “Did you leave any children at home?” Ball couldn’t choke out a word. Nero fell silent, too. When his wife, Dinah, came in, followed by the couple’s three older children, and heard the news that a new body would further crowd their tiny cabin, she simply went out to gather wild greens. These she boiled, and added them to the family’s weekly cornbread ration. Ball sat down with them, and for a few minutes the world no longer seemed to swim around his eyes. After eating, he climbed into the loft of the cabin and rolled up in an extra blanket they had given him.
Soon Ball was drawing his own weekly ration of corn. But he piled it in Dinah and Nero’s basket, and they shared it equally. A few days later, Dinah offered him some of the molasses that she and Nero had bought with money earned by weaving baskets for sale in the evenings. “I therefore proposed,” Ball recalled three decades later, that as “a member of the family, I would contribute as much towards its support as Nero himself.” The pennies he made from selling wooden bowls that he carved would go into the family pool. They shared the produce of their garden patch with him. The family traded ears of corn from Nero’s patch for beans that Lydia had grown.
Families and communities do not run on the fuel of pure altruism. Everyone got something from these exchanges. People from different origins, collected together in a system designed to pit them against each other even when they were working in the same field, could have chosen not to help each other. Some at Congaree were selfish and grasping. But more saw that survival required them to make a new and different kind of family. Even those who stayed outside drew benefit. Ball helped Lydia’s troublesome husband to dig a grave for their baby boy, because he knew of no other way to help Lydia. He watched the African man lay his son in the ground. Beside the tiny body, the father laid items for the boy’s brave journey across the water to a place where the father’s ancestors waited: “a small bow and several arrows; a little bag of parched meal; a miniature canoe, about a foot long, and a little paddle . . . a piece of white muslin, with several curious and strange figures painted on it in blue and red.” By this, he told Ball, “his relations and countrymen would know the infant to be his son,” and would welcome the boy back into his ancestors’ kingdom. He put a lock of his own hair on his son’s chest, scooped dirt into the grave with his hands, and told Ball and the others present that “the God of his country was looking at him, and was pleased with what he had done.”11
Lydia’s husband could not bring himself to reach out to the living people in his new world. Only the dead received his trust. But many others chose to treat unknown fellow migrants like brothers or sisters. After teenager John Brown was sold from Virginia to Georgia in the late 1820s, he endured vicious beatings at the hands of his new owner. “[I] used to wish to die, and only for John Glasgow I think it must have come to that very soon,” he later reflected. Glasgow, an older man, led one of the work gangs. He taught Brown how to keep the pace in the cotton field, and he told the boy “not to cry after my father, and mother, and relatives, for I should never see them any more. He encouraged me to try and forget them, for my own sake.” Death was here, but so was life, and Glasgow guided Brown toward the second. When the enslaver shattered Brown’s nose and eye socket with a booted kick, Glasgow cleaned the teenager’s wounds. With a careful hand and a warm ball of tallow, he massaged Brown’s displaced eyeball back into place.12
Like the other things that enslaved people shared—food they cooked, bean plants in a garden patch, enough space for one more man to lie down in a cramped cabin, a piece of hard-won advice—caring hands helped migrants to come out of the first few days and weeks alive. After that, captives of the new slave labor camps began to work together. So as winter approached, Ball and Nero each bought three blankets with their small extra earnings. Cut up and sewn carefully, they made eight warm coats for Ball and the family. The small village on the edge of the cotton frontier built patterns that linked small groups together. Every Monday night, after weekly rations were distributed, one member of each household had to wait for a turn to grind corn at the hand mill in the yard. The last one did not finish until one in the morning. They assigned the sequence by lot. Each person ground his o
r her own corn and woke the next one.13
Not everything was collective. Enslaved people shared possessions, but they also used them to mark out boundaries, forming relationships and structures out of both contention and cooperation. I am more than a hand, said the little money-making tobacco patch that Jimmy planted in the Tennessee woods owned by his enslaver. I am more than what the law says, more than a body to be sold, beaten, raped, and divided from my children at the will of whites, said Myra, who wanted a calico coat so she could “show out” on Sundays. I am not cheap, worn-out, identical to a thousand others, I am unique, said the umbrella old Toby carried under his arm when he walked to town on a hot Mississippi Sunday, hoping to meet his next wife.14
Though scarcer on the southwestern frontier than back East, possessions shouted all the louder, because they now had to assert an identity for people who had not known one since birth. The things people made and claimed as their own even marked ties beyond the grave. While chopping firewood one day in the Alabama woods, Anthony Abercrombie became aware of a spectral presence hovering in a nearby tree. He dropped his axe and ran, but later realized that the ghost dropping nuts from the tree must have been Joe. Joe had promised Anthony twenty-five cents for helping him to shuck his corn. But before Joe could sell the corn, get the money, and pay Anthony, “Marse Jim” had shot Joe dead. Now Joe was back to fulfill his obligation, giving him something to gather and sell.15
WHILE ENSLAVED PEOPLE WITH almost nothing to divide were finding ways to make their mite into a basis for sharing, the first waves of slavery’s expansion were creating tremendous gains for white Americans. The surge after 1815 was particularly lucrative. Many of the new dollars suddenly circulating through the US economy had been generated by the toil of people who had been commodified as hands and then put into the whipping-machine. Economic power meant political power. Since Jefferson’s victory in 1800, an alliance between northern and southern pro-expansion white politicians who simply referred to themselves as “Republicans” had dominated American politics. John Quincy Adams, son of the only non-Virginia president to serve before the 1820s, had switched from the Federalists to the Republicans while representing Massachusetts in the Senate during Jefferson’s second term. And the results of the Battle of New Orleans made the Federalists irrelevant.16
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