by Rachel May
Joseph’s work is activist; he uses The Slave Dwelling Project to push people to reconsider the stories they’ve been told and perpetuate, stories that silence enslaved people and erase their contributions from our culture. When we visited a plantation in Wisconsin, Joe asked the guide, “Is there a back stairway in this house?” And he said, when we saw a section of the house exposed to reveal hand-hewn beams, “This is what I was looking for. See how these are hand-hewn and left rough? See how they look different than the smooth outer beams?”
This part of the wall was cut away to reveal what was underneath, and it became a metaphor for the entire community that existed behind the plantation’s façade and for the way the story of the place was told. The people polishing the floor, emptying the chamber pots, climbing the back stairs with food and tea and clean linens washed in the kitchen and dried hanging over the lawn in the garden—these were the people whose lives have been ghosted. Joe is engaged in a hauntology.
Joe goes to places where once-enslaved people slept and worked and lived with their families and mourned the people they lost; this is how he makes visible the lives that have been rendered invisible, voiceless, by plantations and cultural institutions and historical societies and towns and states and the nation-state we call the United States. He invites people to join him on sleepovers, to have conversations with him about the stories of enslaved people, and the story of race in America, the issues we face today. Along with another faculty member, I took a group of students from my new home of northern Michigan down to Illinois, to travel with Joe and Mr. L, a high school history teacher, and his students. We went to towns in the Midwest where enslavement had once been alive and well; we stayed in a cabin built by enslaved people, where enslaved people had slept. I’d always been told these were the free states, that this part of the country, like the North, was abolitionist. But even into the 1830s, enslaved people lived in Illinois.
I asked Joe if he communes with his ancestors during his sleepovers, and he says no, because he’s not ready to bear their suffering, to feel the suppressed anger he says they must have felt each day.
We can imagine a quiet evening in 1837, and Minerva has just had her baby. Eliza and Juba have been helping her with the baby and taking care of her tasks at the house since Minerva’s had two weeks off. She’s still sore from labor, during which she was probably attended by a midwife, a woman of color who lives nearby and takes care of all the delivering women. Minerva wouldn’t have had the luxury of the dressing gown that Susan sewed before Emily’s birth. But maybe Jane sewed her a memento for the baby—a small cloth doll, a blanket made of scraps that she transformed into an embroidered blanket, stitched with Samon’s name.
Maybe, in the days after, Cecilia sits with her mother and the baby, uncertain of Samon yet. Now that the first frost has come, they’d be safe from yellow fever. Minerva must have looked down at her baby and swelled with love, adoring his every coo and murmur, nestling her face into his soft hair just as Susan had done with Little Hasell in his infant days. Minerva must adore this child and grieve for the life Samon would have to lead. She must have hoped for freedom, for an escape to a better life for her two babies. She must have done all she could to ensure their safety and keep them from the hardships she knew.
For Eliza and Minerva and Jane, medicine was arrowroot and “blacksnake root, furrywork, jimpsin weed, one that tie’ on the head which bring sweat from you like hail, an’ hickory leaf. If the hickory leaf is keep on the head too long it will blister it.” These are the words of Henry Brown, who also went by Toby. He’s one of the people interviewed as part of the Works Progress Administration. The language as it’s transcribed is fraught with the social tensions and racist stereotypes of that era, the 1930s. Almost all the interviewers were white. How could a formerly enslaved person reveal everything to a white person about enslavement in the racist Jim Crow days? They knew that, just as in the days of their enslavement, if they said the wrong thing, they could be lynched, and the murderer would not be prosecuted. Henry couldn’t say everything in the interview. But the archive remains with testimonies to that time, full of valuable information about what enslavement entailed, and echoes we can hear today, of the voices of peoples who had lived through enslavement.
In Eliza, Minerva, and Juba’s days, older women were respected for their wisdom and knew about the herbs that were harvested for medicine and steeped in tea, and about superstitions, too, like burying an ax underneath a woman’s bed during childbirth to “cut the pain.” They’d have known about “gypsum weed, which was boiled into a tea and drunk. Thread-salve buds was picked and strung on ‘thread like a necklace, den put around de neck to keep off chills.’” Herbs were grown in the plantation and city gardens and harvested in the forests. When someone got sick, they’d have “made hot teas from herbs dat dey got out of de woods. One was a bitter herb called “rhu.” It was put in whiskey and drunk to prevent sickness. This was Ruta graveolens, a bitter plant with a yellow flower.
Women of color—free and enslaved—would catch the babies and help mothers deliver. They were called upon for every birth and for every death, too, Deborah Gray White tells us. Sara Brown, trained as a nurse after the Civil War, describes being trained to work as a midwife: “My white folks give me to de doctors in dem days to try en learn me for a nurse. Don’ know exactly how old I was in dat day en time, but I can tell you what I done. My Lord, child, can’ tell dat. Couldn’ never tell how many baby I bring in dis world, dey come so fast. I betcha I got more den dat big square down dere to de courthouse full of em. I nurse 13 head of chillun in one family right here in dis town. You see dat all I ever did have to do. Was learnt to do dat. De doctor tell me, say, when you call to a ’oman, don’ you never hesitate to go en help her en you save dat baby en dat mother both. Dat what I is always try to do.” Save the baby and the mother both, she was taught to do. She learned midwifery from a doctor, and delivered an astonishing thirteen babies from the same family.
There were white doctors, too, of course, like Hasell, trained in the new so-called “medical profession.” When an enslaved person was sick, owners might call a doctor to protect not the person but their property, which was an investment, as they saw it. What must an enslaved person have thought on seeing a white man approach to treat him with those sharp shining instruments—prods and even saws—knowing the doctor was responsible for torturing enslaved people while studying in school? On the street, in their homes, this white man was given license to kill the black man whenever he desired; how could he be trusted to administer medicine, to heal, when his hands were the ones that whipped, burned, slapped, punched, and tightened the rope for the lynching?
Saidiya Hartman writes, “Why risk the contamination involved in restating the maledictions, obscenities, columns of losses and gains, and measures of value by which captive lives were inscribed and sometimes extinguished? Why subject the dead to new dangers and to a second order of violence? Or are the merchant’s words the bridge to the dead or the scriptural tombs in which they await us?”
As soon as I found the words probably for slave gowns in the fabric notebooks while examining the quilt, and later, the words in the letters about Minerva, Eliza, Jane, Boston, and other unnamed enslaved people referenced in Hasell’s letters; as soon as I encountered in Winthrop’s letter the story of the black man who was stepped upon and then murdered by a white man who would likely be set free; as soon as I saw in the archive stories with the word negroes, and all the racism that came with it, I began to wonder if I could rewrite those words to tell a story. How does my re-presenting those words change the narrative, the story of these people’s lives, the echoes that reverberate through time—if at all? How will I quote problematic language and stories without reifying racism and hatred? How can I reimagine people’s lives with all the knowledge of history we have now? I wonder, throughout the start of the project, if it’s better to reimagine the women who were enslaved by Susan in the 1830s, or to let them remain
undefined for your own imagination to fill, untouched by my hand, which might be clumsy, or an unconscious product of its culture and time.
Eliza, Minerva, and Jane lived in Charleston, but before and after they came to the city, they had probably lived in North Carolina with Mary Ancrum Walker, or in Abraham’s or Charles’s houses in Charleston. Because Minerva was not as common a name as, say, Jenny, we can be fairly sure that she is the Minerva listed as having been owned by Mary Ancrum Walker; a missing record makes it impossible to know if it’s this same Minerva who was owned by Mary and by Susan.
There was a boy named George, about sixteen years old. A woman named Eliza, about thirty-three years old, who was sold in 1838, but there was no Eliza listed in the extant, incomplete record from Mary Ancrum Walker’s enslaved people. Did she, like Bishroom, have a beloved somewhere in the city? Was she hoping to stay in town to be near relatives and friends? Did she have children in a nearby household? Hilton and Hasell and Winthrop seemed to buy and sell their enslaved people from whites of the same class as they were—the middle-class businessmen—who lived nearby. Maybe the people they bought and sold had kin connections around 6 Cumberland Street and the neighborhood that buttressed the battery. Maybe they met in the mornings as they ran errands for their masters, or took their children to see one another, or went to see the circus or the scam “balloon ascension” man whom Winthrop once noted was in town.
There’s no record of Hasell buying anyone; he’s listed only as having petitioned the court to split the inheritance of people that came from Mary Ancrum Walker, in 1835, when he and Susan went to housekeeping. So, while his purchase records could have been lost, it’s likely that all of Hasell’s enslaved people came from the estate of Mary Ancrum Walker, Hasell’s grandmother, who owned a large plantation in Wilmington, North Carolina, and then, after 1808, lived between Wilmington and Charleston.
Juba is named in Mary’s marriage settlement (prenuptial agreement that ensured the wife’s property was protected and would be passed to their children) as “Jouby Ann,” the daughter of Judith. Maybe Juba was born in North Carolina, and came to Charleston with her mother in Mary Ancrum Walker’s early days in the city. Maybe Juba was born in Charleston. She is at one point referred to as “Juber.” Because, the genealogist tells me, Juba is a unique name, at least in Charleston from 1821 to 1960, when only “six entries for Juba and its variants” were listed, we can be almost certain that this is the same person whose name appears in the paper trail.
Six people listed in one hundred forty years. Certainly, many people were missed; enslaved people were not always counted, either as living or as having died. But the rarity of her name makes her easier to find. Juba means she was born on a Monday, and might come from the Ashanti people of Ghana, where the name Juba originated. I learned from Tammy Denease that the Ashanti people were warriors. These were the people from whom Belinda Sutton the African was descended, too. She had that spirit of a warrior, Tammy told me, and so I begin to imagine that Juba might have been born with the same sense of empowerment.
In 1837, Juba was sold in a separate sale to Aaron Caraway Smith, and—the news that delights me—she made it to see emancipation, and took the last name Simons after the Civil War.
Juba Simons.
She’s the only enslaved person in the archive who leaves an archival trace to the years after the war, the only person whose chosen last name I see (Bishroom is listed as Bishroom Vale, but he may have been given his owner’s last name, Vale, without his consent). When I asked the genealogist who found Juba for me if we could find her descendants, she said there’s no record of Juba Simons in the Freedmen’s Bureau records, which marked marriages, births, and deaths after the war, and that she couldn’t find any record of her in the census. There is only this, her death certificate.
Juba Simons was a member of Calvary Baptist Church and lived at 155 Coming Street in 1874, when she died of consumption, what we’d call tuberculosis. She still lived on the peninsula, just a couple of blocks from where Denmark Vesey lived in 1822, and a mile and a half from the Crouch home at 6 Cumberland Street. She was eighty-five years and three months old when she died, having raised her children and then seen them sold away from her, and likely raised and cooked for many other people’s children in addition to Little Hasell and the infant Emily. She was buried at Calvary Baptist Church.
What happened to her in the years from 1838 to 1874? More than three decades of a life lived, perhaps all on this small peninsula? Did she witness the war? Flee to Union camps for her freedom, or was she seized by the Union army to live as so-called “contraband” of war in a contraband camp? Did she help enslaved people escape? Find the children who had been sold away from her?
I know more about Juba than I do Eliza or Minerva. And yet, the only certainties are Juba died January 5, 1874, and lived, from approximately 1835 until 1838, at 6 Cumberland Street. Her death certificate notes that she was “85 years, 3 months,” and what appears to be “10 days” old. Juba Simons, or someone close to her, must have ensured that her death, and therefore the date of her birth, was accurately marked. Most enslaved people in Charleston were not given tombstones and historians note that most enslaved people and their owners did not know their exact dates of birth. These careful notes on her death certificate may signify her insistence on commemorating her birth and life. Thus, we know she was born September 25, 1788, twelve years after the American Revolution. She had a son Sorenzo and a mother named Dianna. She may have had a son named John, if the seven year old boy sold in 1838 was also her son. The Crouch house was small compared to the urban plantation preserved in the Aiken-Rhett House up on Elizabeth Street, or the Calhoun Mansion with multiple stories and marble floors and cabinets of silver in perpetual need of polish. At 6 Cumberland Street, there were eight enslaved people, though Winthrop petitioned to sell seven people in 1837. This we know. They lived together near the water, until 1838, when Winthrop sold them to support Susan. And Juba lived to the old age of eighty-five and three months and ten days.
Over and over, I listen to Mahalia Jackson and Paul Robeson sing “A Balm in Gilead,” a black spiritual that was probably written in the nineteenth century. Robeson’s voice is deep and slow, rolling over the word “there,” up and down. He’s accompanied only by a piano. He died to save us all. The afterlife will bring ease. When Mahalia Jackson sings the song, she starts out more slowly, lingering on the words wounded and whole. Behind her voice, there’s a piano and an organ. I imagine a church service, Eliza and Minerva and Juba standing in a room with their neighbors and family and friends, singing this song.
We can imagine that Eliza, Minerva, and Juba knew different forms of escape possible only in the city: moments spent away at church on Sunday mornings, or at Bible study in an evening; they might have stayed late—long after they’d bought all the goods the family required—at the Saturday-night market, gossiping with friends. This market was for people of color only—free and enslaved—and Minerva or Eliza and Juba and Jane could have visited this market and been welcomed, at ease, for no one was looking over their shoulders to check for their passes, no one was waiting for them to make a misstep or looking for an opening into an accusation. “Slaves held a market every Saturday night, coupling fun with work. Slave women largely presided over this anchor of the city economy, peddling everything from sweet-grass baskets and baked goods to produce.” Here, they could laugh at, say, a neighborhood woman’s gaffe in church the week before, a master’s vanity, a child’s silliness—a funny face, the imitation of a parent dancing, or witnessing the sweet bumbling attempt of a baby taking her first steps. Here, they could laugh as boisterously as they wanted without anyone’s reproach; they didn’t have to feign humility or shame or submit to anyone else’s whims or furies.
Religious meetings, too, offered some refuge. At church services, at study groups, Eliza, Minerva, Bishroom, Juba, must all have found solace in the songs, in the community, in the moments they had to escape the slav
e system for a time, and exchange valuable news and information with one another. They’d have heard from sailors who came into the port, gleaned information overheard at the market or on the battery, and, if they were able, glanced at newspapers and pamphlets distributed around the city—and they shared all the information they gathered with one another as they walked and met in the neighborhood.
If you cannot preach like Peter, if you cannot pray like Paul, You can tell the love of Jesus and say, “He died for all.
A couple of blocks away, there was the harbor, where ships came and went, bringing with them the news from the North and South and the Caribbean, Europe, Africa. Sailors came ashore, black men and white men whose lives were counted more equally on board a ship. They sailed in on brigs, barques, and schooners, bringing with them what had been traded and bought: silks and spices and tea from China and India; sugar and molasses from the West Indies; chocolate, silk slippers, dried fruit, pots and pans made in the North; red wine from Madeira, and of course, more enslaved people, no longer from Africa or the Caribbean now (unless brought illegally) but from farther south in the States, hubs like New Orleans and Birmingham where the trade moved as quickly as ever. The domestic slave trade was booming.
Sometimes I feel discouraged and leave my fear away
In prayers the Holy Spirit revives my soul again
On a wooden schooner, there was the wind flapping at the cloth sails on a still day. More wind, and the ship could heel with full sails, riding the coastline, the sounds of the crew calling to one another from the masts and the crow’s nest. On a dull day, there was no wind, just a hot sun bearing down, and the listlessness of the sails.