by Rachel May
I can see the women side by side in the kitchen with its great fireplace, the cast iron pots and pans hanging and perched around the hearth, their feet dusty with the dirt that Minerva swept back into the yard three times a day. Did Susan and Hasell give them shoes? Were they barefoot? Minerva must have had Cecilia nearby; I see little Cecilia in a cotton dress of the same material as Minerva’s, that red teakettle print, let’s say. She toddles over to Minerva with something in her hands; they’re clasped together hiding a secret. Minerva holds out her hands, and Cecilia drops into her mother’s palms a small pile of straw she’s gathered from the floor. She’s helping her mother clean. Minerva smiles, says thank you, and pulls her close for a long moment, trying not to cry with the thought of losing her daughter. She feels Cecilia’s chest rise and fall against her shoulder. She takes a deep breath.
As the date of the sale approached, she must have tried to stay calm for Cecilia’s sake; she must have tried not to alarm her.
Thomas Gadsden, the agent for the sale, had an office “north of the Exchange,” in the market area of the city, where people could call to see the enslaved people and make offers. Here, he advertised two people who were most likely George, whom he called “a likely young fellow, 17 years old,” and “Jane, A Girl, 18, A complete seamstress. These Negroes are all of warranted characters, and sold for no fault.” In other words, there was nothing they’d done that had instigated their sale—they were of “good character” and were not runaways or otherwise “troublemakers,” or people who had found their way to resistance—though certainly, these people had resisted in other ways.
George could have been Juba’s son, and Jane was “a complete seamstress.” This news strikes me. I had known of Eliza, Minerva, George, and “the girl Jane” from the estate sale inventory, but I hadn’t seen the ad for the peoples’ sale before. Knowing she was a seamstress, that she had the skill to make dresses and suits and that fine quilt Susan was working on makes me wonder if it was her hand that made some of those perfect stitches that bind the hexagons together, and not just Susan’s. Did Jane help make—or make entirely on her own—the dresses Susan had cut from patterns in the North for her own use? Students in Prof W.’s class studied those dresses and found Susan to be a talented seamstress with fine, even, tiny stitches. But maybe they weren’t only hers. Women enslaved on plantations were more likely to stitch alongside the mistress than women enslaved in the city, but Susan would have known how talented Jane was, and probably made use of her skills as she made use of Juba’s talents as a cook and one of the women’s talents caring for children as the “good nurse” who tended to little Emily.
She was a seamstress. A complete seamstress, meaning she could make whatever a person required. If Jane and Jenny are the same person (the genealogist tells me that the names were considered interchangeable—and I know from reading these records how often masters misspelled enslaved peoples’ names, calling, for example, Minerva “Minnon” in the ad for her sale), then she was sold to Mr. Walker in May 1837. Maybe this is a relative of Mary Ancrum Walker, and Jane went to live with enslaved people whom she knew. Perhaps she stayed in the city, working for another woman in a house in Charleston. Perhaps one day, like Elizabeth Keckley, she bought her freedom with her stitch work. Keckley would make some of the most renowned dresses in the country in thirty years’ time, when she went to the White House to serve and sew for Mary Todd Lincoln.
George was sold that day in May, and Jane would have come back to the house alone, as yet unsold. She was advertised again, this time as “a likely young WENCH, 18 years old.” A “wench” was an enslaved woman of childbearing age. A part of enslaved women’s labor was reproduction—making the labor force the cash crops required, making a profit for their masters. Deborah Gray White explains that West African societies valued motherhood as an important “rite of passage” for women, and that mothers “lived with and nurtured their children in a hut separate from their husbands,” and often most “cherished” their relationships with their daughters. In the “antebellum” communities, “motherhood was still the black girl’s most important rite of passage, and mothers were still the most central figures in black families.” Furthermore, White explains, women and men who produced many children for a plantation would be kept, and kept together, while women who didn’t reproduce, and all men, were “more likely” to be sold. On the other hand, an enslaved woman’s resistance might come in her refusal to bear children. Thavolia Glymph explains that a woman named Cynthia “used abortifactients” to avoid having children, and though her owners threatened to sell her, she was kept.
While Susan and Hasell owned enslaved people in a small, urban household, not a plantation, the same rules would have applied, with reproducing and skilled people being more likely to be kept. Since Susan and Hasell rented out at least Eliza and maybe also Minerva, Jane, George, and the rest of their enslaved people, they were assured of making a profit from the people’s labor even when the couple didn’t use them themselves.
I see Jane, Eliza, and Minerva walking to the market together, side by side, their long skirts billowing around them, the fabric kicking up in front as they swing a leg forward with each step. They move quickly. They’re going away from the house, up Cumberland Street, chatting with each other in tones that won’t raise questions from the whites around them. Quiet. Hushed. Enslaved people aren’t permitted to gather in groups without a white in attendance, to prevent the organizing whites fear results in revolts like Denmark Vesey’s in 1822 or the rebellion in Haiti in 1791. The women talk about the way out, making plans. Eliza and Jane, maybe having both lost babies of their own, are helping Minerva find ways to keep Cecilia beside her. They know that a woman in the neighborhood is looking for a wet nurse, and suggest Minerva ask Susan to sell to her. They tell Minerva about the people of color in the city who can help send her north to freedom with her baby. Maybe Minerva has a husband nearby whom she doesn’t want to leave behind, or maybe, in April 1837, she reveals to Eliza and Jane that she’s three months pregnant, and can’t run with an infant and a swelling belly. In October, she’ll have a baby boy, Samon.
Franklin writes that Susan had moved to Providence by the spring of 1837, probably just after the estate sale. A year later, she came back to Charleston for a visit, going back and forth between north and south as she’d done when she lived in Charleston. Her brothers were still there, after all, with their children. From Charleston, she writes, in November of 1838, to her sister Eliza back in Providence, asking after her daughter Emmie—“Mr. Harris mentioned in his letter that Little Emily had a cold was it anything like the lung fever? Does she get uncovered in the night? I think she had better have a flannel nightgown but you can do as you think best. I intend to send by the vessel a bundle containing some things belonging to Emily.” Franklin writes that Susan and Emily returned to Charleston whenever they wanted to, often for a winter visit when the South provided a warmer respite from northern snow.
A year earlier, in October 1837, Susan was still living in Charleston but biding her time until she had enough money to move north, and the birth of Minerva’s baby boy Samon would help provide the money Susan needed to leave. Susan was so worried for the little girl she left behind in the fall of 1838, but months earlier, she’d sold away all of her enslaved women and their children, separating them from each other. Hilton reveals Samon’s birth when he writes from Newport, in the midst of his honeymoon; he had just married Harriet Thorne, a widow who was older than Hilton and, as Franklin describes her “of the lack-a-daisacal type.” She came from a wealthy family and brought to the marriage several enslaved people who were also from Mary Ancrum Walker’s estate in North Carolina. We don’t know exactly how Harriet was related to Sophia, Hasell’s mother, nor to Sophia’s mother Mary Ancrum Walker, but their enslaved people were probably related, or at least knew one another, too, having lived together in North Carolina. Harriet and Hilton’s marriage wasn’t a happy one, but Hilton seemed hopeful at fir
st and treated Harriet’s stepdaughters as his own. In Newport, Hilton is out of money and asks for some to be sent to Newport immediately. He also writes, on October 8, 1837:
“Minerva has got a fine boy, quite an addition for Susan.”
And a few weeks later, on Halloween, Winthrop writes:
Minerva has had a fine boy and is quite well. She has not gone to work yet. Eliza [Crouch] has not named her baby girl. We were all together last evening. Saw Mr. Smith a few evenings ago—he is the same “Yankee” as ever.
Cotton is very brisk, chief sales from 11 ¾ to 12 ½ for new crop, old from 8 to 11 ½
+ Rice is selling @ $4 ¾ but little coming in; I was in the market this morning.
Reading this letter, I see Minerva holding a sweet new baby boy in her arms, swaddled in a blanket, her daughter Cecilia leaning against her and peeking in at her brother’s face. Cecilia must have wanted to help take care of him—or maybe she was jealous of her mother’s affections and competed for her attention by doing all her chores more quickly, or singing for her mother the whole song she’d just learned from George. Maybe Samon squirms in the blanket, getting hungry, and Minerva knows she’ll have to feed him after giving little Emily her fill.
How did Minerva feel, holding her baby in the company of Winthrop and Eliza Crouch and her baby girl? How did she feel, knowing she was about to be sold with her babies, or that little Cecilia might be sold away from her?
As always, Winthrop is preoccupied with the markets and the price of the cash crops, chronicling his movements in business and his prospects. Mentioning Minerva’s baby here is just another aspect of business for him. Hilton notes that the birth of Samon is “quite an addition for Susan,” meaning that she’ll make quite a profit from the boy’s sale. When Winthrop says, more than two weeks later, that Minerva has not yet returned to work, it’s evident that she was given some time off to recover from the child’s birth. Deborah Gray White notes that slave owners were constantly trying to balance preserving an enslaved woman’s health, and getting as much work out of her as they could. Winthrop and Hilton—or maybe Susan, if she was still in Charleston—are erring on the side of caution, or perhaps offering Minerva a respite since she is to be sold so soon. They probably waited until she’d had the baby before they sold her, knowing they’d get this “increase” if they did so.
Whether Minerva had a husband or lover isn’t known. Maybe, as white owner Mary Chesnut and formerly enslaved couple William and Ellen Craft noted was so common, she was raped. Perhaps she was in love with a man in the neighborhood whom she wasn’t allowed to marry. She likely attended church on Cumberland Street, the closest to the Crouch house. It’s also possible that she attended St. Philip’s with Susan and Hasell; the Crouches had inherited a pew from Hasell’s grandmother, just as they’d inherited enslaved people. This pew was one of the items sold when Susan moved north. Minerva could have attended the church and sat in the gallery, along with other enslaved people.
Mother Emanuel Church might have continued to hold meetings in secret after it was razed to the ground by fire, and then banned in 1834, in response to Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion. Mother Emanuel, the first African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in the South, is where Denmark Vesey staged his rebellion in 1822, and was later hanged for his resistance. It’s where Martin Luther King Jr. spoke during the civil rights movement. Today, of course, it’s infamous for the tragedy that struck its minister and members when, in 2015, they were murdered by a white supremacist. In the days after that murder, I was in Charleston searching the archives, and walked past the memorial around the church most days on my way back to the hotel. The church leaders talked about forgiveness, not retaliation, and I thought of its burning in 1834, how the members of the church who were enslaved, lynched, harassed, and beaten did not succumb to that oppression, how the leaders of the church turn to the world now with forgiveness after such a horrific act, when they’d opened their study group to a white stranger. “We are a forgiving people,” Joseph McGill told me when we met at Magnolia Plantation.
Minerva didn’t live like people enslaved on plantations but was in close proximity to her owners, either alongside them in their home, or in a separate cabin in the backyard. Living within the house might have given her access to slightly better living conditions but certainly subjected her to more surveillance by her owners, and therefore fewer personal freedoms.
I think of my first encounter with slave quarters in Charleston, and how I didn’t know then that it was important that my classmate had named them as what they were; she didn’t erase that history. It seemed we weren’t able to talk about it, but, looking back, I was never able to ask, plainly and without suspicion or anger, how it felt to have inherited a legacy of enslavement, the legacy of owning other people. By the time I got to Charleston back then, I had heard too many things from students about the North versus the South, had heard too many racist comments, too much about how northerners had no roots and no history, to approach a conversation with anything but self-righteousness. I still believed that I had come from a place that was free of enslavement and that it was only the South that had embraced and defended it.
On February 3, 1838, Winthrop, raised in the North, writes home from Charleston to tell his brother-in-law that he’s sold Susan’s enslaved people.
Susan’s negroes were sold last Tuesday, I bought Eliza for $530 and John for $510, Minerva was sold with her two children @ $298, all round making $870 for the three making a good average sale, they certainly sold for all they were worth. I bought John for Hilton and Eliza for the man that employs her who was out of town. If he does not take her I shall put her up again when I will make her dress herself better and she will bring full as much if not more she looked like the dunce when on the Block.
Minerva’s baby Samon was about four months old (though he’s listed as six months old), and her daughter, Cecilia, was either two or three years old; she’s listed as two, but Susan had said she was three in an earlier letter. Minerva must have held her children close that day, and comforted them through the terrifying ordeal of leaving the only house they’d ever known, and being sold, and taken away to a new home, full of strangers.
Winthrop bought Eliza for the man who rented her, which tells us that she’d been rented out frequently, either since Susan left or since she and Hasell had come to own her in 1835. Eliza was bringing in income for them, and likely got to keep a portion of her rent. Winthrop kept Eliza, and, as of 1846, still hadn’t paid her off completely; this means that he hadn’t paid Susan for the cost of her property. Meanwhile, Hilton had borrowed from the estate. Her brothers were not good managers of her funds. As a widow whose husband’s estate was in their trust, she was at their mercy to manage her finances and send her an annual stipend on which to support herself and Emily.
On the day of the sale, historian Beverly Morgan-Welch told me, it’s possible Eliza didn’t dress well on purpose, so that she wouldn’t be sold away from family in the area, or away from her own husband or beloved. Such acts of subversion and resistance were common. In Boston, I met with Morgan-Welch, who was then Director of the Museum of African American History in Boston, to ask her advice about how to tell this story. It was a few days after the shooting in Charleston, and a conversation that I’d expected to take half an hour went on for hours. She shared with me her grief over the shooting; she told me stories about people from the nineteenth century free black community in Boston, which was in Beacon Hill, the neighborhood where we sat. Down the street, I visited the African Meeting House, where Frederick Douglass spoke. When I told her about Eliza’s sale, she told me that I had to remember that enslaved people were not people waiting for life to happen to them, but were constantly resisting. “Plantation tools were always breaking,” she said. “Wouldn’t they have wondered why the tools weren’t made very well?” She smiled, knowing: the tools were broken by the enslaved people, of course, in an act of resistance that would mean they didn’t work that day, that
the master’s business would suffer an economic blow, that they had their autonomy. Eliza might have made sure she wasn’t sold out of the city, that no one would compete with Winthrop’s bid. Maybe she ensured she’d stay near her children, or her husband, or her sister.
Where did Minerva go? To whom did she belong after she left the Crouch household? Did she have to go farther south, where her life would have been even more difficult? Did she remain in Charleston, enslaved in someone else’s house? Did she have more children? Did she make it to freedom in 1863?
What is the story? Magnolia, like every other plantation, is an archive, a site that’s been preserved by the people who value this story, who are descendants of the white family who owned it in the first place. Within this place, tourists can learn the first and last names of every white resident, can see the chairs upon which they sat and the clothes they wore and the dishes they used. Can study the bed frame and its design, the chamber pot, the floorboards polished to a sheen over which each white person walked. The cabins where enslaved people lived are empty, shells of places that were used constantly for decades, the materials within their walls used and reused until they were transformed into something else and eventually fell apart or disintegrated. Joseph McGill’s role at Magnolia, along with other guides who lead the tours of the slave cabins, is to tell the story of the people who lived within those walls, whose labor sustained the plantation.