by Rachel May
Back home in Michigan, resting after a sleepless night in the cabin, I called a historic preservation group in Charleston; they’re planting a crop of Sea Islands cotton at McLeod Plantation. I talked to the organizer, who told me this was the first crop of Sea Island cotton to be planted in Charleston since the boll weevil infestation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which sent cotton production overseas. For this crop at McLeod, locals have been invited to take part, to help plant and harvest the cotton, to experience the process. I wonder who will volunteer to harvest cotton on a modern mock-plantation.
When I talk to an instructor about organizing a trip to extant slave dwellings, she tells me that most African American students will not want to come on this journey. Why would they want to visit the sites of enslaved people? she explains. Had they lived generations ago, it would be them harvesting the field. And not by choice. School would be only a dream. She says that students of color can be made to feel like outsiders at the elite school they attend, and a trip like this would, they understandably believe, only make things worse.
I go to bed thinking about McLeod, those fields of cotton, and all that a simple plant seemed to cause. I think of the drawing “The Capture of Nat Turner,” and I remember a dog snarling at Turner’s legs. That doesn’t seem right. I go back to look at the image again, and there is no dog. There’s a gnarled tree stump; it is not a snarling dog. I confused the image with the myth, maybe, knowing that Turner had been found by a dog, and having learned, more recently, about the ways that dogs were trained to catch enslaved people. Enslaved people were told to run away from the dog, and the dog was made to chase them as a training exercise, and then the dog was rewarded for its pursuit. Imagine being told that your work for the day was to train the dog to track your friends and loved ones—to track the future version of yourself that would run away.
The original image caption reads: ‘Turner was bent on getting to what was then Jerusalem, now the county seat of Courtland. He hoped other local slaves and those across the South would rise up with his band, but a full-scale rebellion never took hold."
This is the first image I’d known of Nat Turner’s rebellion. I thought that I wouldn’t need to include this image here, that I could simply describe it. Shawn Michelle Smith writes, “My argument proposes that visual culture is not a mere reflection of a national community but one of the sites through which narratives of national belonging are imagined. I suggest that photographic images not only represent but also produce the nation.” If every image becomes part of the cultural conversation, produces our nation, then doesn’t replicating racist images reify racism? But, describing it doesn’t show what the image was, what it was attempting to do; we can’t deconstruct it unless we look at it. This racism is already embedded. We can’t see how deeply it’s inscribed unless we look at all that’s past—this archive, these letters, this history, the words and the images and the present they’ve created for us. At first, I thought I wouldn’t replicate Winthrop’s most racist writing. But then it seems I have to, to tell this story in its entirety. I hope that if I present these words, these images, in a “new context,” as a friend suggests, their meaning will change.
This image tries to tell the viewer that the black body is a sign of danger. Uncivilized. Unpredictable. Violent. The men in field clothes hold knives and swords and axes. They threaten with their weapons the white people seated prostrate on the ground, those white people dressed in their fine European clothes. There is one white man who fights back with his sword. A white woman sits on the ground attempting to protect her children. It is all titled “horrid massacre,” though the number of enslaved people murdered in the aftermath, again, was more than double the number Turner’s group killed. And yet, here’s another, very similar, image, this one of the Haitian Revolution 1791-1804.
This image of the Haitian Revolution tells the same story—that these are the violent men of color attacking the helpless whites.
And, this is the image that I initially misread, of “the capture of Nat Turner”:
There is the “snarling” root at his foot, and the well-dressed white man with a gun pointed at Turner’s head, while Turner wears rags—the clothes that signify his status as “slave” and field “hand,” objectifying him—and his hand is on his famous sword, which he used to “slaughter” so many white people. He was the enslaved man who proved most dangerous, not for what he did but for the example he set: Enslaved people could emancipate themselves, could revolt and enact the violence that the master class always feared, could upend a system that had been carefully reinforced decade after decade, century after century. Winthrop and Hilton carefully created their own images as “masters” in contrast to this enslaved and supposedly “dangerous” black man.
Critical race theory has taught us that race is a fiction—I am not “white”—no one is white—but I’ve been culturally trained to think and act as if I am. White was an invention to make some people superior and to make people of color—whom the nation needed to work for free in the name of big profits, whom the nation murdered to take their lands—supposedly inferior; the system of superior and inferior was created so that the new nation would work to keep African Americans locked in chains. Ta Nehisi-Coates writes, in Between the World and Me, “Race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming ‘the people’ has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. . . . The belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.” And this belief in whiteness, he says, this elimination of each person’s ethnicity to become white, came “through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land . . .”
Was my misreading of this image, thinking the stump was a dog, rooted in the way that I’ve been inculcated by the white supremacy America was founded on? Was it rooted in my acculturation as someone who is supposedly white? Did I see the root as a dog because, on some level, I, too, believed this supposedly black man was a criminal who needed to be rounded up by a fierce beast?
If we don’t think about how we’ve been bombarded by images, by language, that position us as different races, as superior or inferior to one another, how will we undo those subliminal messages that feed into our unconscious biases? These are powerful images, widely disseminated for nearly two centuries. Google “Nat Turner,” and see what turns up. These images: in black and white. The murderer and the righteous.
Look at the words Winthrop and Hilton and Susan write. They are a part of this culture that positioned them as superior to enslaved people of color. Susan, Hilton, and Winthrop embraced that socialization. They bought and sold people. Eliza, Minerva, Jane, Juba, and William—and they rented Jimmy with their island house.
In her book Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine includes the iconic image of a crowd of white people watching a lynching, only in Rankine’s version, the hanging bodies have been edited out. All we see is the crowd, which is turned toward the camera, their pale faces lit in what I read as various forms of emotion—delight, vindication, anger; they all look engaged in this moment. A smile. A woman reaching to touch her boyfriend. One man toward the center of the image points up, to—in Rankine’s version—an empty sky, a tree that’s just a tree.
I walk around my university campus and imagine the groups of students walking from building to building in the hustle of moments between classes, being rounded up, captured—handcuffed, stolen from their families, sold on a block, robbed of their freedom, sent to work for the rest of their lives, far away, in a land they’ve never seen before, to work for others and to know their children will work for others and their children—always, forever.
Rankine says, “I wanted the reader to be engaged, visually, because racism is about a visual cons
truction. You can have a phone call with somebody, and the phone call would seem quite innocent, and then you walk into the room, and spoken or unspoken is, I didn’t know you were black. Because now that I know that, things are going to change . . .”
Racism is . . . a visual construction. What if, instead of being given so many images of people being enslaved, of people’s backs scarred by whippings and torture, of people being sold on the block, of a black woman caring for white children (as I have included here to imagine Eliza’s and Minerva’s lives, wondering if I should)—if instead, we were always given the images of Sojourner Truth as she chose to construct it for herself, holding yarn and sitting in fine clothes and a bonnet that cues the domesticity from which women of color were previously excluded—of which Susan was so desperate to be a part—and on the table beside Truth, a book, presumably the one she wrote herself? Or the images of Frederick Douglass as he constructed them for himself? Each of them claiming their self-hood in the medium of photography that became available in the mid-1800s. In Shawn Michelle Smith and Maurice O. Wallace’s anthology, Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity, scholars write about the empowerment of people who had once been enslaved to subsequently shape their own identities. Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass were able to claim their representations, to create their images and to distribute that image in photographs—tintypes, daguerreotypes, visiting cards—to construct themselves in a society that had tried to shut them out. Now, they were public intellectuals to whom much of the country turned for leadership and guidance. The images Truth and Douglass produced and distributed, Laura Wexler, Augusta Rohrbach, and Ginger Hill argue, helped them reach and sustain that influence.
Sojourner Truth, Unidentified Artist, 1864, Albumen silver print, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
In one of her talks, Rankine says to the crowd, that all of you, in this room, are responsible for this—pointing to the image of the bodies absent from what we know is the lynching photo (whether the bodies are there or not, the image has been culturally inscribed), the white crowd staring back at the camera. I play this clip for a class. And I pause it there, after Rankine says we are all responsible, and I turn to the students, and ask, “How does it feel to be told this is our responsibility?”
There is silence, and I let that silence remain in the air.
Rankine says, “the removal of the scandal [of the bodies in the tree] just left the construction of whiteness that is implicated in systemic racism.”
The construction of whiteness—the belief that some people are white, and therefore superior to others—not the explicit belief, necessarily, but the implicit belief. Taught by the actions of those around you. Family. Friends. What people say to one another. What we call today microaggressions. Taught with folklore and stories and pictures. Taught with evidence of who is given which jobs and who is given access to which communities and so on.
This is the answer to my initial question, why Winthrop, Hilton, and Susan so easily slipped into the System down South—because they had been trained, by their community, by their family, by the people who taught them their history lessons as children, by this new nation and all of its supposedly-white founders—that they were superior. This was the way things were. This was how they would advance in the world. Their father was part of the triangle trade by sending goods to the West Indies, bringing back molasses and sugar and tea and coffee and chocolate. He couldn’t have been ignorant of that with which he was engaged. Elaine Freedgood argues that authors like Charlotte Brontë knew the implications of mahogany furniture that make up the setting of Jane Eyre. Those items were from the islands of Madeira and Jamaica, which were, Freedgood writes, deforested and planted with cash crops—sugar and Madeira wine—that were harvested by enslaved people. Brontë included mahogany furniture—the wood type explicitly noted—so thoroughly throughout the book to make evident the power of that trade of sugar and wine from the Caribbean islands, a trade fueled by the trade of enslaved people. Freedgood argues that we need to look more closely at the significance of objects that inhabit our world, inhabit our stories. Jane Eyre, which was published in 1847, was perhaps read by Susan and her sisters. We can find the story of the triangle trade in the letters, fabrics, quilt, and commodities of Susan’s and Winthrop’s and Hilton’s families. They knew, all of them, where their sugar came from, where the cotton that was spun into their clothes was grown and by whom.
I keep wondering not only what happened to Eliza, Minerva, Jane, and their children after they were sold in 1837 and 1838, but also if Susan ever felt guilty for what she did to the women and their children? Could she have stopped her brother from selling them, or convinced him to emancipate them? Did she even consider this? Did she think about them on the day of their sale? Were they just commodities to her as well? And even if she did feel something, does that matter in the face of what she did? If I can understand why she did what she did, maybe I can understand how we all do what we do, how we keep living in a system that puts some above others, and that continues to put some so far below.
Bryan Stevenson notes that everyone asks how people could have been so callous to have owned enslaved people “back then”; everyone looks at the past and asks, How could they have done that? But, he says, we are living within a system of enslavement today—the for-profit prison industrial complex that sanctions the free labor black men, via the loophole left in the Thirteenth Amendment; no one shall be forced to labor without pay, “except as punishment for a crime . . .” Except. The loophole. And who is most often imprisoned in this country?
This black body is violent and is to be stopped, and this indigenous body must be removed, absented, our culture continues to teach us. This white body is innocent, victimized, and must be protected. This black body must be slayed. This indigenous body must be erased.
We have seen and perpetuated these same images, over and over, for centuries. Our police forces react with instantaneous fear of people of color, and aim, and shoot. This is the story the police have been told since even before Nat Turner’s day, almost two hundred years ago. This is the story Winthrop tells in his hundreds of letters home, the stories he believes. He can’t imagine the world to come, and the stories he’s unintentionally preserved alongside his own.
11
Living History
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle . . . Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the mighty roar of its waters.
—Frederick Douglass
On an August day in 1844, imagine Frederick Douglass walks through the bucolic town of Concord, Massachusetts, a quiet wind blowing through oaks and maples heavy with humidity. He’s on his way to listen to Emerson deliver his speech on the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the British West Indies (the law was passed in 1833 and went into effect in 1834). It’s 1844, and the British Empire has been free of enslavement, according to law if not practice, for ten years. In the United States, people are pushing for abolition. People like Douglass and Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman and the dozens of people who claimed their freedom out of enslavement and wrote their own stories in the 1840s and ’50s, and long before that, too—James Matthews, who ran away, Moses Roper, born in North Carolina, escaped north to New York aboard a packet boat, and “Aunt Sally,” who dictated her story for the book Aunt Sally, or The Cross the Way of Freedom: A Narrative of the Slave-Life and Purchase of the Mother of Rev. Isaac Williams, of Detroit, Michigan. While she authors the book, a passage told from the point of view of her son Isaac recounts his memories of her spinning by the fire late at night after she’d worked in the rice fields all day; he thinks of how “weary” she was then, a mother at seventeen, and how she continued “sewing industriously to
make or mend some needful garment, when so fatigued with the day’s labor that she nodded between the stitches.” Maybe Jane, a seamstress, was like “Sally,” working late to sew pieces of clothing the family needed, making quilts and coverings, or a hat to keep a child warm on a rainy winter night.
If your mother had been lost for twenty years, and you hoped to regain her through the remembrances of your childhood, how would you recall the birthday festival, and the prayers for you beside your little bed when your head was on her bosom, and the twilight walk through the rose-scented lanes when she told you a story of her girlish days, and that sad morning when, for an outbreak of passion, you fell in disgrace with your father, and she soothed and calmed you, and gently led you back to the path of duty and love!
This is a scene that many children might recall having had with a parent—one parent is frustrated with the child, and the other parent soothes and comforts and helps the child towards the “path of duty and love.” Isaac, the boy who became a Methodist minister, eventually found his mother and bought her from her enslaver in 1852.
Frederick Douglass writes that he had few memories of his mother, as they were sold apart from each other when he was young. That day in Concord, he’d have walked over the dirt roads, past the colonial homes with their double chimneys, tidy rows of windows, and long, straight wooden siding that had been delivered from mills like Hilton’s, planed by men like Boston and Bishroom and George and Adam, from trees into shingles and long narrow boards with perfect rolled edges. These shingled homes are some of the same houses I’d come to know 150 years later, as a child.
Did Douglass think of his mother as he walked through Concord that day? Did he wish she could have been there to see him now, having come so far? Look, he could say if she walked beside him that day, look how we changed our lives, and he would get to see the love in his mother’s eyes.