by Rachel May
He may have been a “reluctant” slaveholder, a researcher told me, because he inherited his enslaved people and couldn’t easily free them. He gave a speech on the “necessary evils” of slavery. But he did take the time to go to court and claim his “half” from his brother. Even if he saw enslavement as a “necessary evil,” he was nonetheless thoroughly engaged in it. He didn’t go back to court to fight to free his enslaved people, as he could have done. He went to court to claim them, to divide them as his and Charles’ inherited property.
There’s nothing to say whether he did or did not perform experiments on the women he owned. Jimmy, the man they rented with the island house that summer, might have been as unlucky as Fed, Eliza as unlucky as Anarcha. I think of Fed enduring the heat of that pit, and the present-day researchers who write that, “Research suggests that people even believe that black people are more likely than white people to be capable of fantastical mental and physical feats, such as withstanding extreme heat from burning coals” and that, “in one study, white participants who believed black people can tolerate extreme heat more than white people can, for example, were more likely to think that black people feel less pain than do white people.” And there is a thread of time that doesn’t palimpsest or fold in on itself but is drawn taught between then—Fed’s days, when he was subjected by a white man to that hot pit—and today, when doctors under-treat black people’s pain because they think that blacks are more capable of enduring it. The black man, the white doctor thinks, is capable of enduring pain because his body is different, stronger. “Well into the twentieth century, researchers continued to experiment on black people based in part on the assumption that the black body was more resistant to pain and injury.” What Hasell did at the medical college wasn’t unusual. It was de rigeur, part of the dailiness of his life.
I think of Fed, and Anarcha, and Eliza, too, if she faced the same fate, and imagine that they must have found ways to evade the doctor’s treatment some days, to resist the experiments to which he would have tried to subject them. When Hasell went looking for Eliza, maybe she was nowhere to be found. When Susan needed an errand run, Eliza could have been the first to wait for its doing, her pass ready in her hands. Maybe Eliza feigned a different kind of sickness than the one Hasell wanted to cure, so her body was unavailable to him. Maybe she made herself throw up with ipecac when he wanted to examine her teeth. Maybe, when she couldn’t stand it anymore, or simply because she felt like it, she went to stay with a free friend of color, and slept in peace for three or four nights—maybe even weeks—until Hasell found her again. There were dozens of ways to deny him, Eliza would have found, and some days, they must have worked. This was her agency.
Dr. Eliza Grier ca. 1897. She earned her medical degree from the Woman’s College of Pennsylvania, where, in the 1890s, female medical students embroidered this pillow sham, simultaneously proving and subverting their domestic training.
It was just a couple of years after Hasell finished his medical degree when they lost their little son. They were in pain. They waited all afternoon to bury him, waiting out the rains that went on for two weeks and made Hasell fear for the health of the city. They knew that rains brought on sickness, but not why. They didn’t yet have the connection between mosquitoes and sickness. One night, Winthrop wrote home from Columbia, saying he was swarmed by mosquitoes and bitten all over. He was lucky then, that he wasn’t struck by malaria or yellow fever, but he never knew that.
They went back to the city to bury Little Hasell, at the grand St. Philip’s Church in the center of Charleston, a few blocks from the seaside at the southern end of the peninsula where all the oldest buildings still stand. They waited until the rain passed; Susan said it was the worst she’d ever seen. Once the storm moved off, they went to the graveyard and buried their baby beside Hasell’s mother, who died at twenty-one just a month after Hasell Sr. was born. Maybe, if you believe in these sorts of things, you’d have thought that Hasell’s mother, Little Hasell’s grandmother, would take care of him in that afterlife some call Heaven. Susan and Hasell believed that, at least, their child’s pain had eased now that he’d passed onto the eternal afterlife.
They must have carried him to Charleston across the bay on one of the packet boats, perhaps already in a coffin made on the island, or perhaps just wrapped in a blanket, carried in Hasell’s arms. It must have been a somber crossing, stepping onto one of those sailboats, Susan taking the hand of the captain with her baby, Emily, nestled against her chest, held tight. She set foot into the hull, took a seat on the bench that ran along one side. Hasell came in after her, tucked himself beside her with their son in his arms, pale-faced and still. He has found peace, Hasell and Susan told themselves. He is in that better place. Hasell must have felt this was a failing, though, not to have been able to save his own child with his new doctoring skills. Wasn’t that his job, to save and to heal? Hadn’t he studied while others around them attended balls and made light of the world? Hadn’t he taken such careful notes of all the tinctures and treatments? And yet, here he was with his own dead child, and his sorrowful wife beside him.
They spent the days after talking about how their child died, conjecturing. Worms? But it didn’t seem to be—No, remember how he fell first from the crib six months ago and ceased talking? How he was less playful, less active, and wanted to sleep more? He didn’t speak, and he was almost three—he should have spoken by now. Hilton noticed, when he visited, that the boy didn’t speak yet, and he called him backward. But Susan and Hasell, delighted with their child, didn’t notice. He was still a happy enough boy. All was well. There was a second baby coming, there was Hasell’s practice, and so much—always—to be done.
But after his death, Hasell pieced it together, maybe with the help of the doctor who helped him treat Little Hasell at the end, who administered the useless potion for the stomach sickness, which was not stomach sickness but a head injury.
The damned crib, they must have thought. That goddamned crib. Did they punish Jimmy for making it too tall? For following their orders? For failing to prevent the accident of Little Hasell’s death? In the days and weeks after, Juba would have made the meals and Eliza and Minerva would have brought them to Susan and Hasell in their bedroom, taken the baby to be nursed, and slipped back to the kitchen as quietly as possible, avoiding the tender grief. There was Juba, maybe sorry to see Little Hasell suffer, and sorry for Susan, but how did the sorrow mingle with her resentment of them? How did she make space for empathy when they were her owners? Little Hasell had called her “Mammy,” and maybe she considered herself something more akin to his mother, lately, than Susan, who was so preoccupied with the baby, Emily. Maybe she resented little Hasell for keeping her from her own children, for taking time from the boys she needed to raise, having always to tend to the boy who sought her out, calling her “Mammy” as if to claim her. Maybe she was Emily’s nurse, too, the “good nurse” Susan referred to in her letters. Or maybe it was Minerva who nursed Emily; with a toddler of her own, she could have been Hasell’s and then Emily’s wet nurse, breast-feeding Emily into chubby, healthy babyhood, into the adulthood that would permit her white body to own enslaved people.
On the day they buried Little Hasell in Charleston, Susan’s sister Emily, namesake of Susan and Hasell’s infant daughter, was getting married up north. She’d accepted Mr. Harris’s proposal; after he’d been denied by sisters Susan and Eliza, Emily said, “Thank you kindly, sir,” and off they were, into this new life. His stepfather, Moses Brown, attended the wedding, even though his Quaker faith dictated that he should stay away from such celebrations. It was quite an honor to have had him there, Winthrop wrote. He wrote to his sister Eliza, back in their father’s house in Providence, relaying the news he’d had from Charleston about Little Hasell’s death, and wishing to taste a bit of Emily’s wedding cake. He was still in Columbia, working as a clerk at the store, and longing to see again some of his family—at least, his sisters, if not his brother, Hi
lton. He found Hilton weak, annoying, troublesome.
Nursemaid with child, ca. 1855, likely from Arkansas.
July 10, 1836
. . . I received a letter from Hilton a day or two he wrote in good spirits but complained of too much, he wrote that Susan would like to see you this summer. Why do you not come on, you will be as safe on the Island as if you were at the North. She must be very sad since the death of little Hasell. I feel very sorry for her. Hasell must miss him very much.
I congratulated Mr. and Mrs. Harris [his sister Emily] on their entrance to the wedded state and wish them all the happiness imaginable and a long life of harmony with “thumping luck and big children.” I have not received a piece of the cake yet but I suppose if I ever visit you or even Charleston again I shall be able to obtain a piece of it as I understand it is very rich so there is not danger of its spoiling. I might have known as a matter of course it would be rich if it was Emily’s cake for she never made anything poor in her life and I don’t think she will now that she has married Mr. Harris.
Yours very truly,
WB Williams
“You will be as safe on the Island as if you were at the North,” Winthrop promised his sister Eliza Williams, meaning she need not fear the summer diseases that claimed the lives of “strangers,” or tourists (and sailors and other workers), visiting Charleston. At this time, diseases were still divided by the classes, as certain diseases, like malaria and yellow fever, affected the poor and the enslaved disproportionately. The wealthy could afford to leave the city—and the mosquitoes and fetid water—and the poor and enslaved could not, unless they were taken along with the families for whom they worked or by whom they were owned. The poor and enslaved people were trapped in the “lowly” neighborhoods by the docks, sleeping in close and dirty quarters, while the middle class and wealthy had cleaner living conditions and better food. When cholera struck, it struck a whole neighborhood. They didn’t know that it was probably an infected well that was making everyone sick. There was so much they didn’t know, I can say now, though in a hundred, two hundred years, someone will say the same of us. We’ll have cures for Zika and HIV/AIDS and cancer, and people will look back on this time with a sense of wonder and pity, that we just didn’t know.
In the 1830s, a person’s fate was constantly in flux due to sickness and disease. One never knew when an outbreak of influenza or smallpox or any one of the fevers would strike, without much to do but offer the patient tinctures and palliatives and simply wait. Hasell’s notebook is full of recipes for cures, but for his son, there was nothing then that could have helped.
I think of Eliza Williams, widowed when her husband died after two months of marriage, and how it must have felt to watch him succumb to smallpox, that most painful of diseases. During the Civil War, when an African American regiment had been felled by the disease, they isolated themselves on an island where they couldn’t contaminate others. But when they ran out of food, those still strong enough left the island—and others who came in their wake found hundreds of dead men sprawled across the ground, the living still moaning and raising their arms for help. At the end, their skin would come off when they rolled over. They would feel as if they were dying of thirst, but if they swallowed, their throats would burn with fire. The blisters would coat their skin and eyelids and throats and noses. They’d run high fevers. They were extremely contagious, by touch or by air; even the bodies could infect others.
There were variolations for smallpox by the time of the Civil War, but the problem was how to perform them. A variolation was an early form of inoculation and involved making a small cut in the skin where a similar virus—usually a cowpox virus, which was less severe than smallpox but still provided protection—was introduced. Around the site, the blisters would pop up and then, as the patient fought off infection, she built immunity to smallpox.
The cowpox virus came from cows, but how to transport it across the miles between cities and across battlefields? The answer would be refrigeration, which wouldn’t come for many more years. In the meantime, they tried putting the diseased cells onto strips of cotton, which sometimes worked, but more often the virus died. Travelers in England came up with such brilliant ideas as bringing along on voyages twenty orphan boys and inoculating them one by one as they traveled across the sea. The virus was passed along slowly enough, through each boy’s body, that by the time the passengers arrived, they’d have a newly infected person from whom they could variolate the citizens of the country in which they’d arrived. Genius. Except for the uprooted, guinea-pig lives of those orphans, who, supposedly, were rewarded with educations and foster families in their new lands. This experiment was part of the dramatic changes in medicine in the mid-1800s: “[The industrial revolution and] spread of democratic institutions helped to provide the required economic, social, and political environment for the astonishing revolution that took place in medicine in the middle of the 19th century.”
The blame for diseases in the 1800s fell to the victims if they were poor or people of color. Middle-class whites, they told themselves, had their cleanliness and high moral standing to thank for their evasion of diseases like cholera that Susan wrote struck the “negroes and poor whites” of Charleston in 1835. They didn’t know that cholera was caused by a contaminated well that infected a whole neighborhood. No, it was people’s moral failings, their inferiority, that killed them. Whites continued to perpetuate the myths that reified their supposedly superior status; the Industrial Revolution’s impact on medicine did not make the practice more egalitarian nor just. We know that smallpox was often used as a weapon against Native Americans, African Americans, and opposing troops—one of our first biological weapons, the deadly infection that killed swiftly and painfully—and that experiments on African Americans were done by white doctors and researchers “well into” the nineteen hundreds.
The more I learn, the more my perception of the world around me changes. I sit in the waiting room at the doctor’s office now knowing this history, thinking about Anarcha when I slide up onto the crinkling paper of the examination table, thinking about how afraid a person of color must have been to come to a white doctor in the nineteenth century. About how blacks are treated differently by white doctors today, given by white doctors less medicine for pain, treated by white doctors as though their bodies are made to endure more.
Everywhere I go, I think about how these stories seem to live under the layer of life in which we exist, in the past that can seem invisible. How do we make these stories public? Where do we recognize our histories and the people whose lives shaped the world we know today?
We have new museums that honor African American history—the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., a similar museum in Charleston, South Carolina, coming in 2020, and the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, whose whole story is of the enslaved people rather than the wealthy whites and the big house. Shana Adams, who invited me to her family’s plantation, Wavering Place, works to tell both sides of her family’s story. She and her husband Robert Adams called Nkrumah Steward to invite him to visit the plantation, upon hearing that Steward is a descendant of enslaved people who were owned by the Adams family. Robert told Nkrumah that they are in fact related—“cousins,” as Steward explains it. Several of the plantations regularly host similar reunions of the descendants of people enslaved on the plantation with the descendants of those who enslaved them, and of course, their family trees are linked. Middleton hosts a “family reunion” every year, including white and black descendants. One woman I met said she hates that term family, as if the blacks and whites are family—“No,” she said, “We were the product of rape; this wasn’t family.”
In the 1950s, when Franklin was recording and cataloging the story of the Crouch-Cushman family, slavery was within living memory. There were people who had been born enslaved, now free, witnessing the beginning of the civil-rights movement, having grown up with stories of their parents’ and gran
dparents’ survival of slavery, and living through the Jim Crow South. There are strings through time that bind the past to the present, ever-unwinding, tangling, spinning back with the sound of a bobbin whirring. Nkrumah Steward feared the Adamses might want to keep secret the fact that he and Robert are cousins and says he was thankful to learn Robert wanted to connect. While Steward is able to trace his ancestors, many of us don’t know our whole pasts, don’t know the stories and names of those who came before us; and of course, many Americans will never be able to know the entirety of the story because blacks were not considered human. They were property.