by Rachel May
While stories of African American people have been obfuscated, erased, and suppressed in archives and government records, the story of Little Hasell’s death is repeated over and over again in the archive, and distorted over time. Franklin, the grandnephew, writes in 1951 that Little Hasell was kicked in the head by a horse. Susan’s letter says he fell from a crib. Another note from Franklin says he was dropped on his head. Emily, who was an infant when Little Hasell died, might have relayed the story to her nephew Franklin as she remembered it told by her mother. Maybe Susan rarely talked about it and Emily was left to her own imagination to conjure up the incident that caused her parents so much pain. Maybe Susan retold it wrong on purpose—absolving herself of guilt or shifting the blame, making it an easier memory.
How did Little Hasell die? The nurse had just left, Susan said. The nurse was an enslaved woman, unnamed. This could have been Minerva, who, with children of her own, could have been a wet nurse, or Eliza, who was in her thirties (with no children recorded as living with her, she may have been a nurse if not a wet nurse, or she could have been a wet nurse who had just lost her own baby or had a child sold away from her).
Did Susan scream for one of them to come and help her when she found Little Hasell on the floor after his second fall from the crib? Did she blame Eliza and Minerva? Did she ask for their advice about what to do for him in those moments after? She was a new mother, twenty-three and lonely. Did she rely on Minerva and Eliza to comfort her? I wonder how Minerva and Eliza felt when Little Hasell died, and Juba, who was called “Mammy” by Little Hasell, as her own children called her. Her children must have played with Little Hasell, and helped raise him, too, pulling him away from the great kitchen hearth when he got too close, spooning smashed peas into his mouth, wiping clean his face. Susan wrote that when she and Hasell lived with Hilton, they had six people helping them—helping them, she said, as if it were their beneficence that inspired their help—including a six-year-old and a three-year-old.
Brain head down, Charles Bell, 1802.
Susan must have wondered, all the rest of her life, if she might have done something differently to save her son. She might have saved him, she must have thought. He might have lived—because this grief was followed so quickly by another: Months after Little Hasell died, Hasell the doctor died, too, leaving Susan twice-bereaved.
A letter from Winthrop (who has just recovered from the dangerous “typhus fever,” he says, and is getting up and about again) on December 2, 1836, reveals Hasell’s state of health (and mind) seven months after Little Hasell’s death.
Hasell has been unwell ever since he came upon the island. He took cold and as he was very bilious he was compelled to take medicine, since which he has been imagining he was going to have all sorts of diseases—the fact is he is very much reduced by fasting and being physical so much so that he has got the Hypo. And the Doctor says, too—there is not much the matter with him. He might be up and well in a week if we could make him think he was getting better. We are all at Charles’ yet, where we shall stay until Hasell gets up . . .
The “Hypo” that Winthrop refers to might have been hypothermia, the chills and fever caused by being too thin and overworked. While the doctor said there wasn’t much wrong with him, maybe today he’d be diagnosed with a disease that’s curable with antibiotics. Maybe he’d be referred to a therapist to deal with the death of his son. Maybe he was wracked with guilt at not having been able to save him, or traumatized by watching his boy seize repeatedly before death. He could have lost faith in his profession, or his ability to help his other patients; he might have lost his faith in God. He was almost certainly deeply depressed. In the sole remaining scrap of the letter Susan wrote home about his death, she said that Hasell was never right after Little Hasell’s death, and that she believed he died not of yellow fever but of heartbreak.
Hasell never got up. He died a few days after Winthrop wrote this letter, on December 6, 1836. His cause of death on the death certificate was listed as yellow fever, which he could have caught treating patients in Charleston before he went to the island or from someone who had come to the island from the city.
Why were they on the island in December? They usually went in the summertime to avoid yellow fever and for Hasell’s medical practice. Maybe this December they needed an escape and they longed to be back where their son had last been alive. Or maybe Winthrop misspoke and they’d just come from the island.
Maybe the doctor Hasell died because he’d been too long away from Charleston during his college days at Brown, or maybe it was because he’d never developed immunity as a child if he left Charleston in the summertime as his father had. Only strangers were susceptible to yellow fever, or those who had left the city for too long a spell. Many years later, in a sermon preached by Rev. Fiske in honor of Susan upon her death, Fiske notes that the doctor Hasell “died, a martyr to professional duty and sacrifice, in an epidemic of yellow fever.” Did Hasell go out to help someone when he knew he might fall prey to the disease? Was he being heroic, intentionally making himself a martyr, or are these the flourishes of a man trying to make sense of Hasell’s death for Susan’s sake? The inscription on Hasell’s grave, probably written by Susan and her brothers, as well as, perhaps, Hasell’s uncle Charles, at whose house they stayed after Hasell’s funeral, reads:
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF HASELL WILKINSON CROUCH, M.D. A NATIVE OF THIS CITY, AND GRADUATE OF BROWN UNIVERSITY, PROVIDENCE, R. I. WHO DIED THE 6TH OF DECEMBER 1836 IN THE 28TH YEAR OF HIS AGE AN INTELLIGENT PHYSICIAN RAPIDLY INCREASING IN USEFULNESS AND REPUTATION A JUST & GENEROUS MAN WHOSE AMIABLE DISPOSITION AND EXEMPLARY DEPORTMENT SECURED THE ESTEEM AND CONFIDENCE OF ALL WHO KNEW HIM A SINCERE FRIEND AN AFFECTIONATE HUSBAND AND FATHER, HIS PREMATURE DEATH IS TO HIS FAMILY AND FRIENDS INDEED A BEREAVEMENT. BESIDES HIM LIE THE REMAINS OF HIS ONLY SON HASELL CHARLES CROUCH WHO DIED AT MOULTRIEVILLE SULLIVANS ISLAND ON THE 26TH MAY 1836 AGED 2 YEARS & 10 MONTHS.
Hasell was twenty-eight when he died, but the women in his life, Susan and Emily, would live long lives. By the following year, Susan’s baby daughter, Emily, would be living in Providence with her parents and sister, and Susan was eager to follow. Until her estate was settled, they stayed at Charles and Eliza Crouch’s house. Susan was now a widow with an infant daughter, heading into years of financial depression caused by the falling cotton prices. Susan sold off all of Hasell’s belongings—except for the quilt they were making together and his dental forceps—including the enslaved people they owned.
Winthrop bought Eliza and John for $530 and $570, respectively. W. or Mr. Greer bought Minerva (spelled Manerva here) and her two children Cecilia, listed here as Celia, and Samon for $870 total.
She must have told herself—if she considered it at all—that she had to sell “the slaves” in order to survive as a widow in the recession. She wouldn’t be able to go north, Winthrop told the court to petition the estate sale, unless she sold Hasell’s goods, including “seven” enslaved people. Minerva, Eliza, Juba, and their children would be sold away, their lives forever changed by the changes in Hasell’s and Susan’s lives. This was the reality of enslavement, in which nothing was certain and the threat of sale always loomed, taking a mother farther from her children or husband, sisters, friends.
The estate sales for Hasell’s goods were private, meaning the women were advertised to be sold not on the public auction block but at the family home, 6 Cumberland Street. The enslaved people were sold on three different dates: on May 11, 1837, “the boy George,” who was listed in the inventory as sixteen years old, was sold. On May 23, 1837, “the negro girl Jane,” said to be about twenty in the inventory, was sold. (The discrepancy in their reported ages is to be expected, as owners did not know their enslaved people’s birthdays.) On January 30, 1838, Eliza, Minerva with her children, Cecilia and Samon, and John were sold. John was seven. He and George may have been Juba’s sons in addition to Sorenzo.
George was sold for $700 plus the cost of advertisi
ng and commission ($6.93 and $7.50); Jane was sold for $560. Eliza was sold for $530, John for $570, and Minerva and her children for $870.
W.S. Walker bought “the girl Jane,” who was said to be twenty at the time, for $560. James S. Burgess bought George for $700.
I imagine Minerva, Eliza, and Juba watching the agents approach that day, setting down their accounting books in the living room, inviting people in to peruse the household items and the women. I wonder if, as Mary Ancrum Walker had done, Susan attempted to stipulate that Minerva be sold with her children (Walker noted it should be done “if possible”), and if it matters whether she did or not. Like Hasell, she might have thought slavery was a “necessary evil,” but she helped perpetuate it by using the enslaved people she inherited and then profiting from their sale, with Winthrop’s help selling them as trustee of Hasell’s estate.
Minerva did get to stay with her children, as they were sold as a “lump sum,” but George and John were sold away from Juba, who was likely their mother. I imagine the scene of their parting, Juba hanging onto her boys with all her strength, seeing in her son George’s face his babyhood, remembering holding him as an infant. George might have sobbed, too, holding her, looking much younger than his sixteen years. I think of how sweet and innocent the sixteen year olds I know today look—how I always think, when I see them, that they look too young to drive, and far too young to enter a dangerous world. I can’t imagine any of them being torn from their mothers and sold to work for someone else for the rest of their lives, knowing that at any moment they could be sold again, and again.
How amiable and exemplary could a man be who owned eight enslaved people (the record notes seven but there were eight people including Juba), including children, at the time of his death? How much do we forgive a person for living “in their time” and how much can we blame a person for not seeing clearly enough? In the case of the Holocaust, a person can still be prosecuted for killing Jews. We believe the soldier should have resisted. Descendants of the perpetrators carry that weight. Holocaust survivors carry that weight. We have a name for descendants who carry the trauma: “second-generation survivors.” The Holocaust is within more recent memory, yes, but not so much more. Slavery was abolished only about eighty years before the Holocaust, a single lifetime. How do we cast ourselves in its light? And, if we can blame others for their part in slavery, then how do we assess ourselves for all we take part in today? I begin to think about all the things in which I’m implicated—every purchase, nearly every decision I make, I realize, has consequences in this global economy. Where are the supply chains for this paper, this computer, this lamp, this sweater? What am I wasting that I could reuse? What could I buy secondhand instead of new? How am I implicated as part of so many institutions—a university, a US citizen? I begin to ask myself what I’m choosing to see, and of what am I still ignorant? To what have I been blind?
This plaque stands at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island, commemorating the thousands of enslaved people who passed its shores and, in the 17th and 18th centuries, were quarantined at the island’s “Pest House” before being deemed healthy enough for transportation to their sale on the mainland. The pest house had long since moved by the time Susan and Hasell summered on the island, in a house near the fort. In the ad for its sale, Hilton listed the house as “pleasantly situated on front Beach.”
6
Hickory Root
There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin sick soul.
—African American spiritual
On a plantation, Christmas provides the smallest respite from work. There is, on this single day, a good meal, either gifted from the master or claimed for oneself. Chicken, bacon, flour or cornmeal for bread, molasses—maybe even sugar scraped off the cone in the big house pantry—to make a pie, collard greens, and maybe carrots or potatoes. Maybe the children picked vegetables from the gardens the family kept for themselves near the cabins, just as Juba and Minerva and Eliza might have picked and prepared their own vegetables on the holiday, if Susan and Hasell allowed them time for it. Maybe Juba saved what food she could from the kitchen—a slice of ham fat here, a handful of nuts there. Maybe she went to the meat market and bought a piece of ham earned with money she’d made from renting herself out. Juba, Eliza, and Minerva were often rented out; when Eliza was sold, Winthrop said he’d keep her for the man who rented her, if he wanted to buy her.
For enslaved people who had to secretly claim celebration at other times, there is open singing on Christmas, and talk and laughter and dancing. Except for the work of preparing the celebration, there is no labor on Christmas. There is rest—a nap after eating, the rarest indulgence. All the other days of the year are regular days, work from sunup to sundown, the body weary. The only other time to celebrate openly is if an enslaved couple has a wedding. And then, only if the union has been condoned by the master, “more chicken was fried” for dinner. If it is a private wedding, secreted in woods thick with leafy trees and Spanish moss and swampy undergrowth, then there are clothes made fancy by the seamstresses and mantua (dress) makers, and there’s excess food taken from the plantation, and instruments handmade or claimed for oneself from the master’s store, a celebration into the night, under a cloudy sky or stars with a sliver of moon, not too much light—to protect the group from unwelcome eyes or hostile ears. There are all sorts of ways to escape and resist.
In the wake of Hasell and Little Hasell’s deaths, Susan was lonely. She was mourning. It was winter in Charleston, probably rainy, cooler than those summer days. She would have been back in the city, and having never really been accepted by Charleston’s ladies, she was probably eager to see family and old friends. Her brothers kept asking for her sisters Emily and Eliza Williams to come down for a visit, to stay and help Susan in her grief.
Preparing to leave the city meant that she’d have to settle Hasell’s estate—meaning, manage his property, the things that signified his membership in the master class, his citizenship in the country. In practical terms, Susan, a widow, had nothing without that money. She would not be able to leave without at least some of it, and would now be dependent on her brothers and parents again.
While Hasell’s whole estate wouldn’t be settled for a year, in May 1837, five months after Hasell’s death, Susan’s brothers petition the courts to allow Susan to sell the estate goods so that she can “return to the north.” Once permission is granted, they set to work selling Hasell’s books, the furniture he and Susan must have so carefully moved back and forth to the island each year, his medical tools and supplies, and the pots and pans and stove and all the things she’d requested to be sent down by her family as she made their home, hoping to become a part of this new city with her husband and young children.
These must have been sad days, and busy days, too, with infant Emily at her side, being nursed perhaps by Minerva, who had a two-year-old and was pregnant with another child. Eliza and Minerva, Jane, George, William, Juba and her children, would have been responsible not only for the daily chores of running the household and tending to Susan in her grief, but also the preparation for Susan’s move—knowing all along that this would mean their own sale, too.
The house on Sullivan’s Island, which Hasell had only recently bought with the profits from his now-busy practice, with all the hope of their future bound up in it, was put up for sale, as were all their goods. The advertisement for the furniture ran in the Charleston Courier on May 2, 1837, and, just as estate sales organizers do today, the family tried to entice people with some of the items they would find:
Crockery, glass-ware, straw bottom and Windsor chairs, a variety of genteel Household and Kitchen furniture. Genteel, the sort of goods one might like if one were, like Susan, trying to make their way as ladies who had gone to housekeeping, building parlors that proved their statuses. The estate sale was on May 4, and the public would have wandered through the house—just as we do at estate
sales today—grabbing what served their own purposes.
In the handwritten list from the estate sale, marking to whom each item had been sold and for how much, there are double-columned sheets detailing the medical texts that Hasell had so carefully collected during his days in school, and of all the things they’d acquired as a young couple in the master class. Dutch oven, frying pan, tin kitchen—the tin kitchen, a cooking contraption, that Hasell had had Susan’s father send down by schooner from Providence. Pots and kettle, sifter, warming pans.
And in the midst of this list, there are the names of his enslaved people sold at auction, on different dates, along with these goods. Eliza, Minerva, Juba, and Jane would have seen this day coming with a sense of dread. To whom would they be sold? Would they be separated from their children? Eliza might have watched people tour the house and buy goods, the same delight crossing the white peoples’ faces when they found a delightful chair as when they decided to buy her—another possession claimed. Maybe, in the days leading to the sale, Minerva begged Susan to let her choose her new masters, to keep her with her children, to keep her in the neighborhood near friends and family. They had stayed together through Mary Ancrum Walkers’ death, having been brought from North Carolina and Walkers’ thousands of acres there, probably leaving behind family and friends they’d known for decades. They’d endured the uncertainty that Sophia Jane Withers, Hasell’s mother and their trustee, had brought, and now, they waited again with trepidation to see what would happen when their owner Hasell, whom they’d likely known and cared for since he was a child, passed away, too. Maybe Juba made finer meals, trying to persuade Susan to sell her to a master of her choosing, or to keep her with Sorenzo and her other children. Minerva must have been relieved at Little Hasell’s death if she was his wet nurse. Maybe she saw his death as justice for Susan and Hasell. Maybe, even as she resented him, she wept for Little Hasell’s passing, too, having come to love the child she’d fed and nurtured. She must have felt the easing of a burden, with one less child to raise, slightly less labor for her—less laundry, fewer emotional obligations to soothe and sing for and entertain someone else’s baby when her own children needed her. Maybe she and Minerva were related—their mothers Judith and Dianna could have been sisters, or cousins. Maybe Juba helped with Minerva’s baby Cecilia. Maybe they were simply close friends, having lived together for so many years.