by Rachel May
“How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know? How does one listen for groans and cries, the undecipherable songs, the crackle of fire in the cane fields, the laments for the dead, and the shouts of victory, and then assign words to all of it?”
These are Saidiya Hartman’s words. She’s speaking to the problems of an archive that absences black people’s voices. I thought of this on my way home from Clermont Farm, listening to the radio as I wound through dark fields. A musician was telling the story of “Amazing Grace,” a song written by a white man who used to be a slaver, based on the melody he heard enslaved people singing from the hold below. Singing together was a way through sorrow, and a way of conveying information; hymns could communicate stories, news, and plans for resistance.
We know “Amazing Grace” as the song written by a slaver who gave up the business and sought redemption for his past, but Wintley Phipps, in telling the story of this hymn, plays the pentatonic scale, and says, “You see? This is the ‘slave scale,’” and shows the audience how the song shows evidence of having been made by West African people. Any “negro spiritual,” says Phipps “can be played on the black notes of the piano,” which make the pentatonic scale. “The slaves didn’t come to America with do re mi fa so la ti do. That’s somebody else’s scale, okay?” he says in a talk I watch later. The audience, which looks to be mostly white people, laughs. Phipps expertly gets them on his side with humor. White spirituals, he says, are often built on the slave scale or pentatonic scale. Then, he plays as an example, “Amazing Grace,” which he says sounds so much like a “West African sorrow chant.” He “set his words to a slave melody,” and Phipps says that he believes he wrote that song “exactly as it should be written, so that we would be reminded that whether black or white, we’re all in this together.” He says that wherever the song is printed, the words are attributed to John Newton, the former slaver, and the melody is written by “unknown.” He asks how many people’s lives have been changed by that person called “unknown.”
Whether truth or myth, this version of John Newton’s life, this story of the pentatonic scale, is what I hear as I wind through dark roads, away from a plantation where enslaved people lived and worked all their lives, most of their names never finding their way to a record we can read today. We have to read the story of their lives in the objects that remain, in the spaces and silences. “How can narrative embody life in words,” Hartman asks, “and at the same time respect what we cannot know?” How do we listen for the “groans and cries,” the “fire in the cane fields,” the “undecipherable songs,” the “shouts of victory.” How do we “assign words to . . . all” this?
The men who came to Charleston’s port with news of the world would have lived in what Susan called the “lowly” neighborhood, where free blacks and enslaved people who were being rented out in the city lived in boarding houses down by the wharves. Those sailors would have encountered women like Minerva, Eliza, and Jane at the Saturday market. They’d have, we could imagine, chatted, gossiped, and talked about the news that came down from the North. Would Boston’s or Charleston’s residents have heard about the Great Moon Hoax, published in a New York newspaper in 1835? It was a fiction, a story about an astronomer discovering creatures on the moon—humans with bat wings, unicorns, goats. The man-bats soared in the sky above the river, swam with their wings peeking above the water, while the unicorns jousted onshore. People believed this story for weeks after its publication. They believed that these creatures were perceptible by a giant telescope, and why not? It wasn’t much stranger than the notion of inoculations, swiping one person’s pus with another’s blood to prevent infection, nor, for that matter, of enslavement—the bondage of a human as if an animal.
Enslaved and free blacks in 1830s Charleston must have talked about the abolitionists in Boston, the latest play put on at the Odeon, the establishment of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, a talk at the African Meeting House, or the construction of the Abiel Smith School in Boston in 1834; the institution had been teaching free blacks since the turn of the century and was located in the Beacon Hill neighborhood, one side of which was inhabited predominantly by free blacks. This is where I met with Beverly Gordon-Welch, who told me about The Great Prince Hall. The Abiel Smith School was founded by Prince Hall, who also founded a black Freemasonry society that’s now named after him. He spent years teaching children in his home before building the school with the help of his son Primus Hall, among many others, and funded by a wealthy white donor as well as the black community’s fund-raising. From the late 1700s on, Boston’s black community fought for equal education in the city, and against segregation—a fight that’s ongoing today; the founding of the Abiel Smith School was an attempt to create equal opportunities. The building for the school was constructed in 1834–35, alongside the African Meeting House, a church built in 1808, where Frederick Douglass would later advocate for abolition.
When Beverly Morgan-Welch told me about Prince Hall, who was declared a free man after the Boston Massacre in which Crispus Attucks died, she said he was called The Great Prince Hall, and was “no longer Reckoned a slave, but [had] always accounted as a free man.” So, while he might technically have been, according to legal records, enslaved, Morgan-Welch said he was “always accounted as a free man, meaning he was walking around as if he were free—he claimed his freedom long before it was supposedly given to him.” He claimed freedom, lived his life with the actions of a free man, so he had always been free. Prince Hall later petitioned the Boston school system to open public schools to black students, and helped set in motion the court cases that would come in the twentieth century, like Brown v. Board of Education.
David Walker, a Boston resident, gave his life to the cause for abolition. White, free people of color, and enslaved people would have known of him in Charleston, and they’d certainly have heard about his murder in Boston in 1831. He wrote Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, which was banned in the South for its compelling abolitionist argument. It was considered a dangerous book that could incite the rebellions that whites worked to suppress. Resist, Walker told African-Americans, a message for which he was murdered, though his words would live on after he passed.
In 1828, a man named James runs away in Natchez, Mississippi. Running away is another form of rebellion, resistance, a refusal to submit. James is a sailor, and his owner imagines he is heading for the sea.
150 Dollars Reward. Ranaway from the subscriber, on the night of the 6th Inst., a certain negro man, named JAMES; about 5 feet 8 inches high, brown complexion, well made, the little finger of (perhaps) [sic] the left hand, crooked at the first joint and stiff, has marks of a blow or two on the head, none of his front [teeth] were missing, has some mark made on the arm with powder as sailors some times have, (the figure of an anchor or something else;) [sic] about 25 years of age, a smart, intelligent fellow, reads, writes and ciphers some; will probably try to pass for a free man; has worked at the mill and gin wright trade for the last seven years. It is thought he may make his way to the seaboard, or Richmond Virginia. Captains of vessels, steam boats, barges &c., are warned against taking him on board. For apprehending said fellow and confining him in jail so that I get him, a reward of Fifty Dollars will be given, if taken in the parish; One Hundred Dollars if taken in the state, and out of the limits of the parish; or One Hundred and Fifty Dollars beyond the limits of the state. WINDER CROUCH Bayou Boeuff, Parish of Rapide, La.
I reread the words, “has some mark made on the arm with powder as sailors some times have, (the figure of an anchor or something else;).” This is a description of a tattoo given by one sailor to another. Bind together needles, dip the needles into “Indian or Chinese Ink (lampblack mixed with animal glue, sold in solid rolls or cakes), laundry bluing, or vermilion (artificial cinnabar, i.e., alpha mercuric sulfide, ground with white wine and then mixed with white of egg),” then “stretch . . . the subject’s skin as tight as p
ossible in the area to be worked on,” and pierce the skin with the needles, over and over, “until the design was completed or the subject could no longer stand the pain.” Then comes the cleansing with urine, “rum or brandy,” fixatives, they believe, and the tattoo will endure.
This is what James must have endured to get that tattoo of an anchor on his arm. He must have chosen this tattoo because his life on the sea means so much to him, or his camaraderie with the men on board, or it is a reminder of a sort of freedom he found there. Maybe, like the origins of so many tattoos today, he was drunk one night and did so out of foolishness, or was pressured by his friends to do it.
He is a “smart, intelligent fellow,” who found a way to learn the forbidden skills (maybe from a free person of color he encountered at markets just like the ones Minerva, Eliza, and Juba attended) of reading and writing. He is skilled, too, with the knowledge of the “mill and gin wright trade,” which he’s done for “seven years.” Maybe he is like Boston, who works at Hilton’s lumber mill in Charleston, pressing through the machinery logs for planing, risking his life against the whirring of the great roaring blades, each of the wheels propelling the mill weighing one thousand pounds and three thousand pounds, wheels that Hilton brought down from Providence. He “will probably try to pass for a free man . . . It is thought he may make his way to the seaboard, or Richmond Virginia. Captains of vessels, steam boats, barges &c., are warned against taking him on board . . .” And why wouldn’t he try to pass for a free man? I think about what Beverly Gordon-Welch said about The Great Prince Hall, about the free black community in Boston, about temperance societies and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and all the places where free people of color crafted their lives, developed community, propelled their families forward.
In 1830, Charleston’s total population was 30,289. Of those people, 2,107 were free blacks, and 15,354 were enslaved people. The remaining 12,828 were whites, encompassing the wealthy, the working class, and the poor. That was a black majority: 17,461 people total. Free people of color mingled in white society. They attended St. Philip’s Church, alongside Susan and Hasell. They’d have sat in sight of free people of color who wore the same fine clothes—corseted waists and puffed sleeves, cravats and tailored jackets, top hats—maybe even made by the same tailors and dressmakers, as so many of those skilled sewers were African American: “Women of color and white women together dominated the clothing trades [in Charleston] . . . In 1848 free women of color comprised 46 percent, white women 43 percent, and slave women 11 percent of the 534 female artisans laboring in the sewing trades. Mantua makers and milliners crafted the latest European fashions for Charleston’s wealthy women to display at balls, horseraces, plays, and concerts.” So, women of color, free and enslaved, made up 57 percent of all skilled sewers in the city. Mantua makers were dressmakers, milliners were hatmakers.
Women’s hats in 1835 were bonnets that shielded the side of the face, with an exaggerated brim embellished with flowers and ribbons. Sometimes of straw, sometimes of silk, depending on the occasion and a woman’s class and means. What could she afford? To what did she have access? Her station was evident in her clothing. Everything was stratified—whites into classes of poor, working, and elite, and people of color into the categories of the enslaved, free working person of color, and elite brown person. The higher a woman’s class, the more tightly she was corseted, the more embellishments and buttons and pleats on her clothes. A house slave was supposedly more elevated than a field slave, and had access to, for example, the clothes the master discarded, scraps from the master’s meals, maybe even (illicitly) books in the master’s library.
The sort of bonnet Eliza, Minerva, Jane, and Juba might have worn.
African-American women, Kennedy writes, were artisans, skilled in crafts in which they’d been, effectively, apprenticed by their mothers and the women with whom they lived. “Women of African and European descent labored in these trades, with the former controlling the mantua-making business and the latter dominating millinery. All had mastered skills that warrant their classification as artisans, not merely laborers.” African American women dominated dressmaking, while most hatmakers were of European descent. And all women of the elite classes wore the finest hats and clothes, eyes shielded from the world, as if to blind them from what they didn’t want to see.
It’s likely Eliza would have worn a head tie, but perhaps she wore a bonnet like this, probably of white cotton with a simple tie that hangs down at both sides. As she walks from the house down to the port, two blocks away, does she swing her head to either side of the street to make note of the hustle, to see the men hauling baskets and crates from the ships? To look for a sailor she’s become friendly with on his visits to the city? To greet the women she hopes to pass as they run errands for their own mistresses? Maybe she fingers the tin tag that hangs around her neck, the marker of her momentary freedom from Susan’s house, the marker of her enslavement. Maybe, for a moment, she closes her eyes to feel the sun on her face before setting off again over the dirt road and then the cobblestones, her long heavy dress swinging against her legs, the whispered sound of cotton moving across her body with the motion of her steps.
The second bonnet is from 1837, described here in dramatic terms: “1837 was a pivotal year in fashion, when the large sleeves collapsed and the shoulder greatly decreased in size. Bonnets also gradually changed shape after that date, their exuberance giving way to more demure bonnets with narrow close-fitting brims that hid the face.” “More demure bonnets . . . that hid the face.” The gigot sleeves “collapsed.” Fashions changing to reflect a changing world. This bonnet was worn by Elizabeth Hawes Russell for her wedding, and we can see that the “exuberant broad brim attractively framed the face and echoed the drama of the voluminous wing-like sleeves of the period’s ankle-length, full-skirted dresses. Sometimes referred to in contemporaneous writings as a Victoria bonnet, this particular shape was appropriate for wearing in public in the afternoon.” Maybe one of the elite brown women Eliza could have passed on the street wore a more elaborate bonnet like this one, embellished with flowers and silk. She wouldn’t have described the brim as exuberant, but maybe dramatic. Maybe she’d have seen that woman with a sense of envy, longing for the tight corsets that signified that elite woman’s freedom. Or maybe she’d have seen her in secret at the woman’s house, as the woman was friendly and Eliza was taking the opportunity to learn to read. Literacy could offer escape. Maybe, like Frederick Douglass, who outsmarted white children by getting them to teach him to read by identifying one word at a time, she was able to take what she needed.
Brown silk damask dress, c. 1830, with full skirt and huge sleeves. It closes in back with hooks and eyes.
Did a woman of color wear this dress, housed at the Charleston Museum? It dates to the 1830s. The puffy sleeves are leg o’ mutton, the style both elite white and elite brown women wore in the 1830s. Did a woman of color make this dress? Eliza, Minerva, and Jane probably weren’t mantua makers, or else Susan would have had them cut and sew her dresses; instead, she asked for her dresses to be cut by the woman she knew in the North, and she probably sewed them together herself or had Jane sew them for her. If Eliza, Minerva, and Jane did any of her sewing, she didn’t say as much in her letters. Maybe she wouldn’t have wanted to admit to having her enslaved woman, Jane, do the sewing that Susan was supposed to do as a white “lady.”
There were so many stratifications, so many distinctions between the races—free brown person, wealthy white woman, poor free woman of color, poor white woman, “mulatto,” “mustee,” “negroe”—when we know, today, that it was all a fiction. Today, we have critical race theory—Frantz Fanon and W.E.B. Du Bois and Hortense Spillers and Claudia Rankine and Ta-Nehisi Coates. We have Michel Foucault to teach us about the power of institutions. In this 1830s society, the one-drop-dictum hadn’t yet been articulated but ruled. And even if a woman of color were free, she was still trapped by the social dictates of racis
m as well as sexism, even if she was no longer formally enslaved. Christy Clark-Pujara writes that “free was a terribly relative term,” and that “Free blacks . . . had to cope with the legacies of slavery . . . being free did not mean having rights. Legal losses . . . retracted these newfound gains.” Clark is referring to free African Americans in Rhode Island who were emancipated under the gradual emancipation laws that took years to free all enslaved people in Rhode Island. The same social restrictions held true in Charleston, of course, with the attendant laws that ensured “economic discrimination,” and the denial of full citizenship, including the right to vote.
I imagine Eliza, Minerva, or Jane stitching in the latest hours of the day. Maybe Jane is making a jacket for Cecilia, say, Minerva’s daughter, from Susan’s stack of calico scraps, the remainder of what was sent down from Providence. The fabric may also have been cut from cast-off dresses and pants that Susan and Hasell no longer wear, as Susan herself makes Little Hasell’s clothes from the hand-me-down clothes her parents send her from the North. Fabric is never wasted. But maybe Jane has traded for new fabric with someone at the market, making a shirt or a dress for a woman in exchange for fabric she’s handwoven or for factory-woven fabric she’d bought. Is the fire warm when Jane sits beside it at night, working through a pleat in a dress, setting in the sleeves of the jacket, cutting away the most worn parts of the cloth that have been dulled to white, so she’d have a brilliant blue coat?
“Is it possible to construct a story from ‘the locus of impossible speech’ or resurrect lives from the ruins? Can beauty provide an antidote to dishonor, and love a way to ‘exhume buried cries’ and reanimate the dead?” These again are Saidiya Hartman’s words. She is questioning the archive. She is telling us about Jacques Derrida’s hauntology, which he says is what happens when writers speak to a ghost.