by Rachel May
That room under the gables and beside the back stairs held a bed, a simpler bed frame than the one in the white couples’ room, and covering the bed was a quilt with great orange shapes against white.
“Who lived in this room?” we asked the guide.
“This would have been the servant’s room,” she said.
“What nationality was the servant?” someone asked.
“Well, we don’t know.”
“Was Louisa African American?”
“I think, probably, but I don’t know,” she said.
She was looking down, she didn’t look at us. She couldn’t acknowledge this and didn’t know how to dodge it. She knew why we were there. We were there to see Louisa’s room, to see where Louisa lived and worked and ate and slept and, I hope, loved and dreamed and found some happiness. We were there to know the lives of the enslaved people as much as we knew the lives of the white people who owned them. This guide worked for the Daughters of the American Revolution. I wondered if she’d ever questioned the cruel portrayals of Native Americans that she’d been taught to replay, if she’d tried to learn more than this slant of the story. Maybe she didn’t want to acknowledge the truth to herself. Maybe acknowledging that the Kinzies held enslaved people would change this woman’s perception of herself, her family. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about this woman. I only knew the story she was telling.
“Newport Gardner arrived in Newport from Annanabo at twelve years and was enslaved by the Gardners. He learned French. He learned to read and write in English. He played music.”
—Keith Stokes
When I first met Joseph McGill three years ago, it was in Charleston, at the Old Slave Mart Museum, where he and Christine Mitchell worked as docents. In Charleston, I’d spent the morning at the Historical Society, scrolling through files to find mentions of the Crouches or Williams brothers, and emerged into the winter heat frustrated by how little I’d found, saddened by a document I’d sat with for an hour, and eager to wander. I left a snowy and cold January Rhode Island to come to warm Charleston, where the flowers bloomed and the palmettos blew in the wind; my friends had joked that this was the perfect time to research in the South. I thought of Susan and Emily, coming down to Charleston most winters for the rest of their lives after 1838. This was before I knew that Minerva and Juba died in the city in 1851 and 1874, respectively; they probably never left the state. I wonder, now, if Susan ever saw them again, on her returns south. I wonder if Susan knew the Mr. Greer who owned Minerva, if her brothers socialized with the Greers and saw Minerva at his home. I wonder how Minerva felt if she ever saw Susan again, if she and Eliza and Juba were relieved to have been sold away from Susan’s family, if they despised her for breaking them apart from friends or relatives they might have known all their lives.
Released from the sterile air of the library, I walked through the city, down to the French quarter, past mansions with their iron gates and stone walls, all the way down to the battery, thinking of Eliza, Minerva, Jane, and Juba, who walked these streets almost two centuries before. I walked to the harbor, along the battery, thinking of Winthrop’s daily dawn walks in the 1840s, resenting him his self-important letters about his morning, constitutionals when his daily work as a cotton factor came at the cost of so many peoples’ lives.
I wandered inland again, until I found the narrow cobblestone street where the Old Slave Mart Museum sits in its original site, when it was called Ryan’s Slave Mart. At the Old Slave Mart Museum, Joe and Christine welcomed me in and sent me through. I was nervous. The document I’d read for an hour at the historical society was a list of people enslaved on a plantation. It was handwritten, in that loopy nineteenth century cursive I’d come to know so well in all the letters and documents I’d find. That was my first encounter with such a document, the first such object I’d touched, and I read with sorrow each of the names listed in the plantation records. Mary, thirty nine years, Rose, seventeen, Diana, twelve, Jane, ten, and in the right hand column, Joe, sixty-five years, Isaac, thirty-seven, John, thirty-one, Betty, twenty-eight and “unsound.” Labeled like a horse—sound versus unsound—Betty was injured, sick, or disabled. In vertical script down the column around Betty’s name are the repeated words “Prime.” I could see the wavering line of the pen in the scrawl of words, the loops of the J and B, the flourish on the d at the end of “unsound,” and there was something in this particularity, in seeing the human hand in this list of peoples’ names and ages, the sickening meticulousness with which this person recorded all the people who would be put up for sale. Seeing the document, I could see this era, could imagine this plantation and the people who lived there in January 1863. They were scheduled to be sold February 5th, even though they’d been declared legally free January 1st. I imagined as I read this list each person—a woman with a skirt blowing in the wind in the middle of a yellow field, a man walking across a field with two children by his side, a girl who walks into a cabin at the end of a long day, her legs and arm aching, and sighs as she sits down. I read this list, touch the paper, run my hand over each word. There is a little girl, two year old Eliza, marked as another object for sale, and I sink into this sorrow.
Inside the Old Slave Mart Museum, I wandered into a low-ceilinged room with brick walls. Three people could have spread their arms, touched hands, and spanned the length of the room. In this room, in the 1850s, dozens of people were crammed together each day, bodies naked or barely clad, waiting to be sold. Behind this building, there was a morgue, where all the dead were sent, and there was a kitchen, to feed the living just enough to keep them alive for the sale. Walking into this space, it was impossible not to imagine the people who waited here, who struggled to survive. It was impossible not to feel the weight of what happened here.
In the 1850s, enslaved people were still needed for the cotton trade, as well as for rice and tobacco cultivation. The cotton business continued to rise with more and more mills up north, and it was here in South Carolina and the other “cotton states” that it was grown. However, it had become distasteful to sell enslaved people from the steps of the Old Exchange Building and elsewhere in the market neighborhood, as they’d been doing until then. Abolitionists visited, foreigners visited, and looked with disdain upon the auction block where Charleston’s slave traders made their sales loudly and publicly, hollering out each person’s attributes and their prices, allowing those interested buyers to examine each man, woman, and child before making their purchases. From 1850 on, the Old Slave Mart saved the master class that embarrassment. Rather than using the public auction block, enslaved people were kept at Ryan’s Slave Mart, and sold from storefronts in the neighborhood. Christine took me outside at the end of my tour to show me the houses that were storefronts.
“That one,” she said, pointing to a pink-painted stucco house with a torch lit beside its doorway. It was the coziest looking house, I would have thought, before I knew it was a place for selling people. “That one was one of the storefronts,” she said.
The lantern’s flame becomes more ominous. Christine turned and said, “And that one, and that one up there,” pointing on and on down the street.
We stood on the cobblestones that enslaved people carried from the harbor and set down here, laid into the mud and muck of the dirt road to make this pleasingly neat paved street where the master class and the brown elite could build their fine houses, where horses clomped, pulling carriages for hundreds of years. The stones under our feet were brought here because they were used for ballast, to balance the shifting weight of the people moving inside a brig; shipments of inanimate cargo wouldn’t have needed such ballast. Ships came into the port after waiting out the quarantine at Sullivan’s Island to be sure none of the surviving passengers were carrying a plague into the city, and the enslaved people who had survived that long passage were then forced to carry the stones used for ballast onto these streets. Now, when divers find shipwrecks with ballast in their holds, they know it was a slaver that
sank, that within that hull what could not survive time and the ocean’s tides and the scavengers therein were the bodies of people who drowned at sea, their graves the Middle Passage. I see some of these ballast irons at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., in the lowest level of the museum where objects tell the story of enslavement; a small room to one side is full of the sound of the ocean, with low ceilings, the feeling of a ship’s low-lit hull.
John Potter and Family Served Tea by a Slave. The Rhode Island Potter family were involved in the slave trade. One of their family cemeteries was near my home in Kingston, formerly Little Rest, RI.
As always, in every part of this story, there is as much resistance and triumph as there is pain. Part of what made slave voyages so “risky” for the white traders was the ever-present threat of revolt, which often came to pass. By “ever-present threat,” I mean the likelihood that a person would rise up to protest the abuse, the likelihood that people who had never met before, who spoke different languages and came from different regions of West Africa as ships traveled up and down the coastline to purchase people to fill their holds, would come to collaborate with one another—across these language barriers, and in spite of the trauma they were enduring. One of the most successful revolts was on the Amistad. It took place in 1839, within Minerva’s, Eliza’s, Juba’s, and Jane’s lifetimes. A group of fifty-three enslaved people, led by a man named Cinqué, rebelled aboard a schooner headed for Haiti. They had been captured and sold from Sierra Leone, sent across the sea for weeks in the ship’s hold, and then sold again in Havana, Cuba, and loaded onto another ship, the Amistad—all this even though the international trade was abolished by European nations and the United States decades earlier. “You call us rebels we were spoons/in that ship for so long the wood/dark, drowned as the men who/made it from song sold on land/like ships like us christened/out of water,” Kevin Young writes in his book of poetry, Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels. Young tells the story of the people who resisted. “one day we took/the wheel from men with eyes of/water we turned the ship towards/the rising sun . . . /that night the sailors turned us towards a Newborn/England . . .”
The people aboard this ship did not succumb to the torture whites doled out. They rallied together, in spite of their language barriers, and succeeded in killing much of the crew and taking control of the ship. Without knowledge of the sea or sailing, they couldn’t control their passage without the crew to navigate them. The slavers steered the ship each night after the rebels, mostly Mendi men, Young writes, directed it during the day to head toward the sun, home, the African continent from which they’d been taken. The ship was discovered and captured off the coast of New York, and the prisoners were held until their Connecticut court case was resolved. Finally, they were released, and in 1842, abolitionists raised money to send those thirty-five people who had survived back home to Sierra Leone.
I wonder if Minerva and Juba heard of this case, if they saw stories about the people in Charleston papers, or heard about it from friends at church or at the market; I imagine that the story of the Africans’ eventual triumph gave them hope.
When I leave the Slave Mart Museum, I go to the harbor and feel the breeze on my face. I look at the water with new eyes, remember what Christine told me, about how she sees these waters as a mass grave, as hundreds of enslaved people who were dead or dying were pushed overboard as the ships came to port. I walk through the park along the water, relishing the ocean breeze and the shade of palmettos. A ship is making its way to the open sea. I stop to read a sign that bears the picture of a black man. His name is Robert Smalls, and he’s a sailor who stole a ship, the Planter, during the Civil War, navigating his family to the freedom the Union navy offered. I imagine how it must have felt to steer past the Confederate checkpoints, how his heart must have raced, and the sense of relief and triumph he must have felt when he and his family made it to safety.
“Arthur Flagg employed other Africans. He was a leader. He had a factory on the outskirts of Newport, on Thames Street, where people worked as chord-winders, using hemp and heating it with molasses. He employed fifteen people, ten of them Africans. His son was a teacher in the school.”
—Keith Stokes
In the Newport cemetery, God’s Little Acre, we wished for a breeze as we walked amidst the graves. The little girl and two of the women in the group—professors and writers—wore broad-brimmed hats to shield them from the sun; another held a piece of paper over her head. As we walked, Keith told us the stories of the people whose graves are marked in slate; these stones are interspersed with those made of granite or marble, the more durable materials that wealthier people could buy. Slate was cheaper than other kinds of stone, but the sadness is that it’s the first to disintegrate, so the African and African American people’s names are fading, the stones falling away in layers. When I asked Keith if they’d do something to preserve them, he said, no, that it seemed wrong to encase them in glass or plastic, that it would be better for them to have been recorded and photographed and to exist as they are, to return to the earth as they will.
Keith told us that in Newport in the eighteenth century, slaves were called “servants.”
“We’re genteel here,” said Keith with a sly smile, and two women laughed, in on the joke.
I studied the grave of a child, William, son of Samuel and Animy, who died at thirty-four hours old on August 4, 1739, and that of Hector Butcher, servant to Ann Butcher; he died at thirty-seven years old, and came from Barbados. I study the gravestone whose top is stained in a drip of white, for Violet Hammond, the wife of Cape Coast James, who died Sep the 3rd, 1772, aged 20 years.
Keith reminded us that in the late eighteenth century, there were twenty-eight distilleries in Newport, cranking out the New England rum that was so beloved around the world that it was a necessary ingredient in the trade for human lives. Jay Coughtry writes, “As in other branches of Rhode Island commerce, the slave trade existed because a few enterprising colonial merchants found a profitable market for the colony’s rum.” Rhode Island was an important part of the triangle trade for its rum, and later, for the domestic slave trade with the textile mills that fueled cotton plantations in the South. The state produced not just the pretty calicos in Susan’s quilt, and the slightly lower quality but still fine “teakettle” print that Minerva, Eliza, Juba, and Jane probably wore, but also the rough negro cloth, which enslaved people sewed and wore in the fields on the vast southern plantations where they picked more cotton to be sent to the North—this endless cycle that bound North and South and made the North just as culpable for nineteenth-century slavery as the South. No one was clean of slavery, not even Moses Brown. He was one of the backers of Slater Mill, the first mill that made use of the cotton gin in the United States. This would launch the American Industrial Revolution and spawn the founding of many more mills in New England. This was in 1790. And yet, in 1775, fifteen years earlier, Moses Brown converted to Quakerism, and had committed his life to ending slavery. He worked to pass the Gradual Abolition of Slavery act that would slowly—painfully slowly—free enslaved people in Rhode Island. He worked to ban the importation of African slaves to the United States—the work his family had been doing for generations. And yet, he helped found the mill that would help ensure the vitality of the domestic slave trade for many years to come by producing far greater yields of cotton cloth than had ever been produced before, requiring vast quantities of cotton to be grown in the southern fields, and the people to plant, tend, and harvest it. How did he live with this contradiction, of perpetuating slavery in the southern “Cotton States” when he’d worked so hard to disable it in New England? Did he see the effect of the mills in his lifetime on enslaved people in the South, or was domestic slavery a distant evil to him, disconnected from his own family’s involvement in the international slave trade in Rhode Island? Was the allure of the money he knew he’d make from the mills too strong to resist?
John Camino’s father was a tribal chief in El Amina and asked a merchant to take John to America and educate him. Instead, John was enslaved, and then bought his own freedom with lottery winnings. He was recruited to educate and convert Africans to Christianity by the Congregational Quaker Community, and went on to become a Rhode Island privateer. He was killed at the Battle of Block Island.
—Keith Stokes
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, before the cotton gin’s invention, our nation (before it was considered a nation and just after) was built in the northern colonies with the labor of enslaved people. In Newport, enslaved people lived in the same houses as their owners because there wasn’t enough space for them elsewhere. If you’ve ever visited Newport, you know that the houses are nestled together in town, sometimes just a small gasp of a breath between one and the next. Their wooden siding is painted brick red, sky blue, brown, white, green—historically accurate colors. They’ve been carefully tended over the years, and carefully preserved. These houses rise up for blocks behind the shops on the main street that runs along the harbor, and then there’s the top of the hill where the town levels out, and beyond, the mansions of the Gilded Age that line the other side of the shore. In the colonial houses, enslaved people slept in attics, small spaces that might be used today as a pantry—anywhere there was a nook—and worked as skilled laborers, cooking, sewing, raising children, firing iron, building houses, fishing, making chocolate.
Time passed, and the American Revolution unfolded, fought by soldiers white, native, and black. Years passed. Rhode Island passed the gradual emancipation laws. There were the compromises, the confrontations, and we were propelled into the Civil War, witnessed by Juba and perhaps Eliza. Keith told the story of Dinah, whose husband, Neptune, fought as part of the first black regiment in the Civil War. The Free African Society claimed that Neptune hadn’t paid his dues and therefore wouldn’t be given a sum for burial, but Dinah fought the society, sued them, and won. She was able to bury her husband.