by Rachel May
This is what M. NourbeSe Philip has done in her book, Zong!, in which she gives voice to one hundred fifty enslaved people, from an archive that had rendered them voiceless. Philip reinvented the archive so it spoke not the voices of the slaver but the enslaved, who were murdered. It is a heartbreaking and tragic story. The slave ship Zong, full of kidnapped people, sailed from the west coast of Africa and lost its way. People held in the ship’s hull began to starve to death, and as they died or were deemed to be dying, or were perfectly healthy but worth some insurance value, as the crew determined, the captain and crew pushed them overboard. Living and dead. Pushed into the sea. It was, of course, not uncommon for slave ship captains and crew to push dead and dying people overboard. The high number of casualties during the voyage was part of what made the process so “risky” as an investment and what prompted Christine Mitchell to think of the waters leading to the old site of the Sullivan’s Island “pest house” as a burial ground. Sailors pushed the bodies of enslaved people overboard as they came into port, Mitchell told me, and you could smell those ships before you saw them, for all the stench of excrement and rotting flesh. It’s impossible to visit the shores of Sullivan’s Island, today, and not to feel that history, to look out on those waters and not to see that story, the horrific brigs sailing toward shore, the terror people onboard must have felt.
Philip is a lawyer and a poet. She went to the archive, and read and reread and reread the document, which consists of a couple of pages chronicling the court case. And from these words, she extracted those that would speak the story she wished to tell—of the enslaved people murdered by the ship captain, drowned at sea. This, says Patricia J. Saunders, is a hauntology. “These conversations take very seriously the question of the absence, or some would even say the impediments, in the work of mourning the millions of dead in the aftermath of slavery.”
When I talked to Philip after reading Zong!, she told me that the sea is a tombstone, a marker for this tragedy. She went to visit the site marking the murders in Jamaica, where the Zong came ashore after the captain’s atrocity, and she felt these people there. Her book was written in collaboration with the people from that ship who drowned, and she has named these collective voices “Sataey Adamu Boateng.” At the bottom of each page of the book, there are listed the names of the people who drowned. These aren’t their real names, since we can never know their names, but they are the names Philip has heard and given them, markers of their humanity. This is how she’s upended the archive to speak—to hear, to voice—the people within it.
This woman, Mary Brice or Bryce, of Virginia, was photographed ca. 1853, later than Eliza and Minerva and Jane’s time in the Crouch household on Cumberland Street. But Mary offers a hint of what these women’s lives might have looked like—what they might have worn, how they might have portrayed themselves had they had the chance. She holds a fan in her hand. She wears a white tie on her head, and has fastened with a gold pin a wrap around her neck. I wonder if someone gave her that pin as a gift—her husband, maybe—or if she bought it or bartered for it herself. Maybe there are tintypes of Eliza, Minerva, Juba, and Jane somewhere, in an archive I’ve never seen, and maybe their names are inscribed on the back or in a note accompanying the photographs, and maybe someday those images will be united with their whole stories, wherever their whole stories may be.
On April 5, 1834, Charles W. Crouch bought a “mustee slave named Jane and her son William.” He bought her from William Rice. In 1823, there was a William Rice in the New England Society membership listings in Charleston. Maybe this was the same man, affiliated, therefore, with the family through their northern connections. He might have simply been a neighbor, or a man who brought his enslaved people Jane and William to auction that day, and Charles bought them by chance. A “mustee” person was of both African and Native American descent.
Jane and William lived together at Charles’s house, along with Susan and Hasell and Winthrop when they first moved to Charleston. This may or may not be the same Jane as “the girl Jane” who was sold in 1837, though people listed as “girls” were not old enough to have children. This is, more likely, the same person as the woman also called “Jenny,” described earlier.
Jane and William were bought at about the same time as Susan described the woman who was probably Juba as being lazy, as having stolen things. And then, two years later, this was the same Juba who joined the Crouch household along with her children and was met with Susan’s approval.
Don’t ever feel discouraged, for Jesus is your friend; And if you lack for knowledge, He’ll never refuse to lend.
In President Obama’s eulogy for the Reverend Pickney and the eight other people murdered at Mother Emanuel, the church that, he says, continued to hold meetings in the 1800s even when they were prohibited from doing so by “unjust laws,” the President ends on the song, “Amazing Grace,” which he sings accompanied by the congregation. He talks about the original sin of slavery on which our nation was founded. He talks about how each of us can be granted grace, without deserving it. He says, “For too long, we were blind to the pain that the Confederate flag stirred in many of our citizens. It’s true our flag did not cause these murders, but as people from all walks of life, Republicans and Democrats, now acknowledge . . . , the flag has always represented more than ancestral pride—” and the congregation cheers and claps, “For many, black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation. We see that now. Removing the flag from this state’s capitol would not be an act of political correctness . . . it would simply be an acknowledgment that the cause for which [the soldiers] fought, the cause of slavery, was wrong.” And again, the crowd cheers.
And I think of all those Confederate flags I saw when I was in school, in North and South Carolina, and the flags I’ve seen in the Midwest, too, usually in the form of a sticker on a truck’s back window or rear bumper.
“If we can find that grace, anything is possible . . . everything can change,” President Obama says—and then he sings.
Minerva, Cecilia, and Samon, just three years old and four months old, respectively, were sold together for eight hundred seventy dollars; John was sold for five hundred seventy dollars; Eliza was sold for five hundred thirty dollars.
I wonder how young John fared out on his own, what the lives of Minerva and her children were like in this new household. Did Eliza want to stay near her children, or loved ones, or the community of friends in the free and enslaved populations around her, or simply the only place she’d ever known?
Inspired by Harriet Tubman’s story, I begin to imagine a different life for Eliza, one in which she escapes to freedom. With no children to tie her to Charleston, she has nothing to lose now that she has been parted from Minerva and Juba. She befriends that sailor whose eye I’ve imagined she catches. She learns the ropes and knots and names of the sails, learns port and starboard, learns the dialect of a sailor, learns, hidden in darkness beside her friend on the ship, to haul ropes and walk the deck and climb masts. She learns to lick her finger and hold it in the wind to feel which way it blows—offshore breeze, she says. I imagine that soon, she’ll barter for cloth to make sailor’s pants, with vegetables from her garden. Soon, she’ll cut off her hair. Slip out in the night. Fail to return. Succeed in undermining Winthrop one more time, getting hired onto the schooner her sailor friend has assured her needs another hand (her friend will get the captain drunk, The captain will be incapacitated, he assures Eliza). I imagine her stepping onto that boat, pulling at the mainsail to tighten it against the wind, and watching the moon as the men around her shout and hustle, as the captain hollers orders at her, as she feigns her way into a new life—a life that, like Prince Hall—she takes for herself.
7
The Leonids: A Sermon in Patchwork
In 1833, the stars are falling. It’s November, a clear night in Georgia, where Harriet Powers’s parents work, enslaved in the field. Imagine stepping out of the cabin in t
he middle of the night, maybe woken by a nightmare, maybe to relieve yourself, and seeing hundreds of stars raining down above you from a deep blue sky. The sky’s almost-purple hue is lit up by streams of white and gold, star after star coming at you from a center of fire, so stunning and so frightening that you’d holler out to your wife sleeping in the cabin to Come look! The world’s ending!
There are Geminids in December, North and South Taurids in early November, Lyrids in April, Orionids in late October, Draconids in early October, Perseids in August, and in mid-November, there are the Leonid showers that Harriet Powers depicted in that central square in her quilt. The Leonids emerge from a single point in the sky, so that as you watch them “fall,” you might feel as though you’re racing through outer space as in the opening Star Wars credits, or, as people recounting the 1966 Leonids described them, as if you were driving into a snowstorm with your headlights on, the stars making a cone around you. In 1966, the Leonids fell in the thousands per minute.
If it was that powerful a visual spectacle in 1966, when we understood what a meteor shower was, imagine what we would have made of it one hundred and thirty years earlier, in 1833, before we knew what meteors were and what caused them. Imagine that you have a strong faith in God and in Jesus’ second coming, and that you rely on word of mouth and secondhand news from someone who’s able to read the papers and pamphlets that make their way around the countryside. Imagine that you’ve come from a long day working in the fields and your shoulders ache; that you and your wife chuckled at the man in the next-door cabin as he sang to his homemade guitar in a tone-deaf ditty; that the two children who aren’t your own but who need some love fell asleep nearby, and your wife hummed to them and rubbed her hand in circles on the little girl’s back; imagine that you recognized in her motion the grief she held for the daughter you both lost a year ago. That you kissed the back of your wife’s neck, in that gentle spot that makes a divot around her spine. This would have been an ordinary night, until the Leonids began when the sun went down—and then they are an incredible surprise, something you’ll talk about the next day and the next and the next, surprised to see the world go on after you’d been so certain it was over.
Harriet Powers was born four years after the 1833 Leonid meteor shower, in 1837, but she’d have heard stories about them from the time she was a toddler harvesting creek shells for her family “to use as spoons,” and then as a young girl working in the fields while her mother cooked for the master’s family. The showers were legendary, and changed the way scientists understood meteors. There wouldn’t be another one that powerful until just after the Civil War. In 1895, almost sixty years after the shower Powers had heard about, this is how she described the central square in her quilt: “The falling of the stars on Nov. 13, 1833. The people were frightened and thought that the end had come. God’s hand staid the stars. The varmints rushed out of their beds.”
A man named Basil Hall, son of the Reverend Charles Cuthbert Hall, was eventually gifted Powers’s quilt. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich notes that “unlike Smith [who bought the quilt from Powers] . . . , Hall avoided dialect in reporting Harriet’s descriptions, but in many ways the account he preserved reveals a view of the world even richer and more complex. . . .” When Jennie Smith recorded Harriet’s descriptions in dialect, she was able to “keep her at a distance,” Ulrich writes, (after all, white Jennie Smith couldn’t have considered herself to be anything like African American Harriet Powers, no matter how much she supposedly valued the woman’s art); Smith infantilized Powers, Ulrich tells us, making her view of the all-powerful God seem childlike.
In the square that depicts the shower, I see rabbits and mice (or a cat?), its tail curled around its body. And God’s hand in the sky, great and all-powerful in the top left corner. Harriet Powers made the men, in pant-legs, distinct from the women in their dresses. She created the people with their arms in the air, alarmed by the falling sky, rushing to find each other, to pray at the end of the world.
Why does the man at the forefront stand with one hand on his hip, the other raised? Is he preaching? Praying? Greeting God? Trying to help the people around him?
All over the world, people witnessed those Leonids and were stunned by it. This engraving was made fifty years after the showers, and became the most famous image of the event. It was made from a thirdhand account: Joseph Harvey Waggoner saw the Leonids in 1833, when he was thirteen; as a Seventh-Day Adventist in 1887, he told the story of the Leonids to Karl Jauslin, who painted an image of the scene, from which Adolph Völlmy made this engraving. The image was meant to convince believers that the end of the world was nigh, as foretold in the Bible. Waggoner said of witnessing the stars: “It appeared so grand and magnificent as to be truly exhilarating . . . It is not possible to give in a picture a representation of all the stars falling at all points of the compass at once. But they fell in myriads to the north, east, south and west. . . . The stars of heaven fell unto the earth.”
This is how we remember an event not just in the first generation but in the second, how an event can be passed down from person to person, creating collective memories, so that this image—the best-known image of the 1833 Leonid shower—was made fifty years after the shower, by a man who hadn’t witnessed it himself but had been shown a painting, which was made by someone who had been told a story about how the shower looked that night. It is an example of how memory slips between us, how we take it on and change it, how we understand ourselves and our families and even our nations (if we believe in nations) generation to generation, memories building on each other, legends growing, shared memories culminating in events that may or may not resemble what they “really” looked like, how they felt, what they were. Harriet Powers’s quilt is an amalgamation of Biblical stories and natural events witnessed by people who came before her. She called it A Sermon in Patchwork.
This quilt is held at the Smithsonian and is the first quilt Powers made.
In 1891, Harriet Powers sold her first quilt of Bible stories, the quilt held by the Smithsonian, for five dollars, encouraged by her husband to take half the price she’d asked because of the “hardness of the times.” She sold it to a white woman, Jennie Smith, who exhibited it in the Cotton States Exposition in 1895. Smith had tried to buy it a few years earlier, but Powers wouldn’t sell until 1891, when she apparently needed the money. Smith said that Powers described to her each square, and “has been back several times to visit the darling offspring of her brain.” When a group of Atlanta University wives saw Powers’s quilt at the exposition, they commissioned Powers to sew this second quilt as a gift, now held in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
“. . . the darling offspring of her brain.”
There’s condescension in the line. The word darling. That word minimizes a piece of art, which Smith must have understood it to be since she made such an effort to buy the quilt (though she ended up underpaying when Powers was obligated to sell). Gladys-Marie Fry writes that “pictorial tapestries like these have been called ‘living history books,’” because they include so many references to local and national events—the meteor shower, the coldest day in 1895. Powers described her images: “A woman froze while at prayer. A woman froze at a gateway. A man with a sack of meal frozen. Icicles formed from the breath of a mule. All blue birds killed. A man frozen at his jug of liquor.” She described the “dark day of May 19, 1780,” when fires in New England blocked out the sun. And in between these historic moments, there were Bible scenes: “Job praying for his enemies,” and “Adam and Eve in the garden. Eve tempted by the serpent. Adam’s rib by which Eve was made. The sun and the moon. God’s all-seeing eye and God’s merciful hand.” There is God’s merciful hand in the 1833 Leonid shower block, when He “staid the stars,” and kept the world from burning. There is God “creat[ing] two of every kind, male and female.” Smith also reported that Powers loved animals and wanted to see the circus when it came to town. She didn’t say whether she was able to attend or not.
Did Harriet Powers see a circus? Did Eliza, Minerva, Jane, and their children see a circus in Charleston? Did they attend the annual horse races, another public festivity that Winthrop wrote about in 1838? He describes the “Balls, Parties, Concerts, Diorama, Theatres and Exhibitions,” that made the city “unusually gay.” Did the women celebrate alongside the free blacks, the poor whites, and the master class? The races were one of Charleston’s major social occasions, and Cynthia M. Kennedy writes that “slaves did join those who thronged the racecourse, and took advantage of the socially sanctioned leisure time. Family and friends of the slave jockeys attended as a show of support or solidarity,” and, Kennedy notes, some enslaved women combined work and play by bringing their white charges to the races with them. While the races gave wealthy whites an opportunity to reassert, or reify, their superior position and “quite literally facilitated reproduction of the master class, because social functions showcased young debutantes who married during a subsequent season,” African Americans found a measure of power in watching the participation of black jockeys in the races. Lisa K. Winkler writes:
For blacks, racing provided a false sense of freedom. They were allowed to travel the racing circuit, and some even managed their owners’ racing operation. They competed alongside whites. When black riders were cheered to the finish line, the only colors that mattered were the colors of their silk jackets, representing their stables. Horseracing was entertaining for white owners and slaves alike and one of the few ways for slaves to achieve status.