by Rachel May
The workhouse in Charleston, where enslaved people were sent by their owners for punishments.
Eliza, Juba, and Minerva lived in a two-story house at 6 Cumberland Street, a block from the harbor, several blocks from the work house, and about six blocks from Denmark Vesey’s old house, though he had long passed by the time Minerva and Eliza inhabited the Crouch house. Vesey led the 1822 rebellion that prompted slave owners in the city to install heavier wrought-iron gates with spiked tops like thorny rosebushes, and sharp traps on the house-side of the fence to injure anyone who made it over the thorns. Gates were topped with six-inch spikes. Walls were made higher. You can still see these gates in the city today. Walk around the battery neighborhood, and there they are, before the two-hundred-year-old houses, guarding the yards and the old carriage houses that serve as garages or guesthouses now but were once stables for the horses that drew the carriages, or shacks for the people owned by the big house’s inhabitants. The gates and walls still serve to keep the public out; tourists wander the neighborhoods now, walking or in horse-drawn carts, listening to the tour guides’ tales. The well-to-do locals who live here now—still predominantly white—give the tourists disapproving looks as they pull into their drives and carry groceries inside; the locals gripe about the tourists and the ever-clopping hooves of those big workhorses running through their neighborhoods. They still wish for privacy; they still wish for distance from what’s distasteful—and that includes the past. Most people in this neighborhood do not want to talk about slavery.
I’m told by someone in the North that I can’t make this assumption. This is the neighborhood in which Susan and Hasell lived. It’s where Nathaniel Russell Middleton’s house stands, and the infamous Calhoun’s mansion. North, at the peninsula’s center, John C. Calhoun’s statue stands in Marion Square. Jamaica Kincaid wrote about the statue in her essay on Middleton Place, saying she couldn’t imagine how black citizens of Charleston walked past his statue each day. He’s the “inventor of the rhetoric of states rights and the evil encoded in it, who was elected Vice-President of the United States twice,” she says. States needed to create their own laws, Calhoun argued, so that slavery could be sustained. He wanted to secede from the Union. And there he stands in the middle of Marion Square, standing over the city.
“Do you think I can say this?” I ask Joseph McGill, a Charleston historian and activist. “Someone told me I can’t know that people in this neighborhood don’t want to talk about slavery.”
“Oh,” he says wryly, “I know. Trust me.”
A treadmill wheel used in Jamaica in 1834, similar to the one used at the Charleston work house. We don’t know if Hasell and Susan sent Eliza, Minerva, Juba, or the other people they enslaved for punishments at the work house. Certainly, the enslaved women would have known of friends or family who had been sent there.
In 1822, Vesey organized an uprising in Charleston uniting hundreds of enslaved people in the city to rise up against the minority population of whites. I’ve heard people ask why, if the enslaved were the majority, they didn’t just revolt and take over, as if to imply that they weren’t smart or savvy enough to do so. Wasn’t it that easy—to change the rules by force? The people asking this question don’t think of the system of slavery as a nationwide institution reinforced with organized armies, police forces, laws, and weapons—guns. Enslaved people were not allowed to own a gun, of course, and they were rarely allowed to ride a horse (which would give anyone more speed, and more power), so when they organized any kind of revolt it was on foot and with weapons like clubs and farm tools—pitchforks, hoes, scythes, and if they were lucky—as in the case of Vesey’s revolt—the occasional stolen gun. What defense was a hoe in the face of a man on horseback with a gun? Or a few guns in the face of twenty or thirty? And, if enslaved people made it out of one region alive, how would they get through the next, where any black man on the street could be stopped by any white man on the street, and questioned, and beaten, and arrested, and killed, simply out of a sense of suspicion, or anger, or resentment, or because the white man was in a bad mood that day?
Escape meant weeks running through woods and fields without access to food, being chased by vicious hunting dogs and men on horseback who had nothing more to do with their time—who were motivated by the reward of money and another man’s respect—than to find an escaped man or woman who was hungry, on foot, perhaps without shoes, and often insufficiently clothed. What chance did a black man have in the face of a system built to keep him in check, under the power of not just his owner but any white man, anywhere? “The lowest villain in the country, should he be a white man,” write William and Ellen Craft, who escaped enslavement, “has the legal power to arrest, and question, in the most inquisitorial and insulting manner, any colored person. . . . If the colored person refuses to answer questions put to him, he may be beaten, and his defending himself against attack make him an outlaw, and if he be killed on the spot, the murderer will be exempted from all blame.”
And yet, in spite of the odds, people did escape, and they did make it to the free northern states, which offered refuge until the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed. Until then, free black communities in Boston and Philadelphia could safely welcome those who had escaped slavery in the South. The ingenious Henry “Box” Brown had his friend, Samuel A. Smith, box him up, nail the box shut, bind it with hickory hoops, and mail him from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The box was “two feet eight inches deep, two feet wide, and three feet long,” and he had with him, “one bladder of water and a few small biscuits.” The box was marked “This side up, &c.,” but was not respected by the mailmen, who “hesitated not to handle the box in the usual rough manner common to this class of men. For a while they actually had the box upside down, and had him on his head for miles.” Henry made it safely to Philadelphia, but when Samuel tried to send two more enslaved men north in boxes, he was caught, arrested, and imprisoned.
William and Ellen Craft, “married slaves from Georgia,” escaped together by disguise: Ellen, so fair-skinned she could pass for white, dressed as an elderly male plantation owner, and her husband posed as his slave. In order to keep her from having to speak much to other wealthy train passengers, they wrapped a bandage around her jaw to make it look like she suffered from a toothache, and they put her arm into a sling so she wouldn’t have to write or sign for her husband’s passage as “her slave” (she did not know how to write). Together, they rode the train from Georgia to Philadelphia and then settled in Boston, where they lived until they were hunted by slave catchers from Georgia, seeking to reclaim them under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The Crafts decided to seek safety in England, where they were “highly respected.” They had several children, whom they “spared no pains in educating for usefulness in the world.”
Eliza, Juba, and Minerva would have had access to the free black community in Charleston, which included a temperance society, churches, a dry-goods store, and a network of friends who supported one another. People could buy their own freedom with the money they earned from goods sold at market or by getting a portion of the money they made from being rented out, themselves, to others. Before 1820 in Charleston, they could have been emancipated upon their owner’s death, through the will.
Making a quilt out of hundreds of hexagons was time-consuming and an inefficient way to make a warm bedcover. But when Susan and Hasell worked on the quilt together in 1834 and ’35, they weren’t making something utilitarian; this was to be something beautiful, a shared pursuit—and she was practicing her status as a lady who could make things that proved her position; this was the more elaborate housework that came in the Victorian era. “Mosaic patchwork is not a particularly practical technique, and it does not seem to have been used in utilitarian bedcovers. Instead, it provided opportunities to show off the maker’s skills, personal artistry, awareness of fashion, patience, or determination.” Susan and Hasell were becoming part of Charleston’s society—not the high
society of the balls and parties that kept them up at night when they wanted to sleep, but they were moving upward through the middle class, gaining wealth, buying property; in 1836, just before Little Hasell died, the doctor Hasell bought a house on Sullivan’s Island. And, of course, there were the enslaved people they owned—more signifiers of the white family’s wealth and place in society.
I traveled to Virginia to work on an extant slave cabin that was being restored. I’d learned about it from Joseph McGill, the man who runs The Slave Dwelling Project, which offers a series of overnight stays in slave dwellings to raise awareness and to preserve the buildings in which enslaved people lived alongside the mansions and the fine houses where the white people lived. We need to tell both sides of the story. We need to remember the people who brought their skills to this world—cultivating rice in complex irrigation systems, weaving baskets, inventing looms and corn grinders and ways to separate the rice from the husk, to make the food edible. The Gullah language survives around Charleston on the sea islands. The songs. The instruments and rhythms.
This cabin was on the grounds of an old plantation in the blue hills of Virginia, a ninety-minute drive west from D.C. I stayed in a hotel and drove out at dusk, when the crew leader said they’d be breaking for dinner and would have time to talk. The sun was going down on the hills, green and yellow in the light, the sound of crickets and cicadas and the heat of July pressing in. I turned down a dirt road, wound around and over another hill, and there it was: a three-room cabin reinforced with leaning two-by-fours, and a crew of hard-hatted people walking and crouched around it.
At dinnertime, one of the men showed me his Darwin-era replica microscope, through which he studies samples of dirt and water. This microscope was made of wood that had been sanded into circles, a lens mounted on the top; it was an important—and technologically advanced—tool in his day but looked rudimentary to my eyes. Darwin took this microscope on his voyage on the Beagle, which began in 1831, just before Susan left Providence for Charleston. While Susan settled into her new home in humid Charleston, Darwin set sail for South America, Australia, and—the part of the trip I remember learning about most vividly—the Galápagos Islands. He saw those tremendous tortoises, some of whom have lived long enough to have met both him and you (the oldest recorded Galápagos tortoise lived from about 1830 to 2006).
The man with the microscope told me about water bears, tardigrade, which he’d seen with this microscope. He tried to find one for me to see. “They look like little hippos,” he said. The project director said, when I asked how it feels to work on a cabin once inhabited by enslaved people, “Well, it’s actually a lot of fun most of the time.” He chuckled, wondering—I think—why I was so serious. The others nodded and agreed. The microscope man’s partner was the only one of the volunteers who would talk about race, telling me about her sons from her first marriage, her sons who are biracial, and how she worries for them when they go out at night. She always wonders if they’ll come home safe.
Clermont Farm is a learning site for architectural preservationists, and that’s why they were here: to learn about restoring old buildings. They were not here to talk about race. Still, when the preservation board leader, an older white man, took us on a tour, he told the stories of the slave cabin, of the enslaved people who were here—what little he knew—as much as he told the story of the white people and the big house. “That’s our concern here,” he said, “to tell the whole story.”
I was captivated by a chopping block stored in the back room, from what era they were not sure. It might have been as old as the eighteenth century. It was a worn stump of wood, smooth-edged, where countless chickens must have been slaughtered, where pork was cut into portions for meals, where, probably, the white family got their meat and the black families took as much as they could without anything being missed. The block was on three legs now and painted blue, a newer addition, said the preservation board leader. It was tucked in among dressers, paintings, and chairs used by the whites. It sat beside a great stone fireplace, in what was once the kitchen. This was where the enslaved women would have worked.
The kitchen on the left side of the house, with a large chimney, where enslaved women would have cooked for the household.
It was nearing midnight, and we could hear the cicadas hum, the crickets chirp. It was mid-summer, and when we stepped into the darkness to walk back to the crew’s tents, I imagined how this darkness would have felt to the women who worked in the kitchen. Would they have talked on their way to their cabin, a few hundred feet away? Would they have stopped to look up at the stars? Would they have been spooked by the sound of a coyote howl from the woods beyond the scope of the lantern’s light? Would they have dreaded the sound of a man from the big house walking up behind them?
At Magnolia Plantation and Gardens in July, it was over one hundred degrees and humid. I thought of Clermont, the rolling fields outside the cabin window on a farm that had turned back to woods and open fields, as I hustled toward the slave cabins at Magnolia to catch Joseph McGill’s tour. This was a different scene, with great oak trees that arched over the road, and tidy manicured lawns and gardens that had been maintained for decades. Joseph McGill, the Slave Dwelling Project Founder, and I were both sweating, me more than him, while we chatted in the back of the tram that carries guests around the plantation. He told a dozen visitors about the four slave cabins that sit on Magnolia Plantation under great arching oaks dripping with Spanish moss, and a Chinese Fringe tree, not in bloom now, but beautiful with its fat green leaves.
As we drove under the shade of the trees—quick relief—I thought about how far these plantations would have felt from the city by horse and carriage, boats up the river, or the railroad. It would have taken an hour or two to get here. I wondered if Minerva ever saw these places, if she came from a Wilmington plantation and had become accustomed to the sounds of the fields or woods at night. In Charleston, she and Juba and Eliza wouldn’t have lived like people enslaved on plantations did. She lived in rooms attached to the kitchen in the city house, and on the island, probably in a small cabin behind the house, the sort that people in Charleston today have transformed into pool houses, or adorable guesthouses that you can rent on Airbnb for a few hundred a night—nice “extra income,” Joseph noted, reminding me that descendants of slave-owning families continue to profit from but often silence and erase this history.
His mission is to help preserve and bring awareness to such extant slave dwellings. The story he told at Magnolia Plantation was of people who brought their skills in rice cultivation to the States, digging rice beds and waterways around the timing of tides and water levels, harvesting and husking the rice with baskets that would help to separate the rice from its shell, making it edible, sellable. It was hot work, amid deadly water moccasins, snapping turtles, alligators, and vermin, and resting at night on blankets atop hardwood floors in the cabins, too many to a room, swarmed by mosquitoes come summer. In one of the four two-room cabins at Magnolia, a man who is descended from the enslaved people who worked on the plantation raised his thirteen children and lived there until the 1990s, when he was moved for the plantation’s restoration of the dwellings. He works and lives in another part of the plantation now.
When Joseph raised the question of whether the plantation owner was “humane,” or a “good” slave owner, something guests often ask, Joseph said, “Of course he wasn’t. He was a slave owner, therefore, he was inhumane.”
The truth of Minerva’s life was that she worked from before sunrise to after sunset, and that her labor and her children and their labor were Susan’s and Hasell’s from which to profit, to sell if they so chose. Was Susan “kind” to the people she enslaved? This question misses the point.
Every nineteenth-century family had to endure heavy losses. Sophia Jane Withers, who was eighteen when she married Hasell’s father, Abraham, would die three years later. Hasell’s own marriage, twenty years later, would be similarly short-lived, anot
her three-year marriage.
You can see Sophia and Abraham in their married years, painted in miniatures now held in the Gibbes Museum’s collection. She looks out with large, doleful eyes, a long fine nose, full pink lips that might be smiling, or resigned in acceptance of a moderately satisfied life. We don’t know. For a nineteen-year-old, she looks tired—there’s that shadow against the underside of her right eye. Maybe this is just the way her eyes are set, or the lighting of the portrait. Her hair is parted in the center and hangs loose against her neck. She’s wearing an empire-waist dress with a low-cut neck, typical for her time. Maybe this was her wedding dress. The frame of the portrait is set with pearls, and on the back side, there’s a brown lock of Sophia’s hair that might have been added after her death (it’s possible the portrait was made posthumously, in memoriam). If we had the desire and the permission from the museum, we could test her hair to see what it told us about her genetic history, a scientific advancement she and Abraham couldn’t have imagined. The portrait was painted “circa 1805,” and she and Abraham were married July 15, 1806. In another year, she’d have a son, Charles. Two years later, her youngest, Hasell, our doctor, would be born and she would die a month later.