by Rachel May
Douglass would have been wearing a vest underneath a jacket with tails, narrow at the waist, and pants that seemed to billow slightly and then taper to his shoes. A tie cinched on his collar, a white buttoned shirt. Perhaps a top hat. These clothes signified his status as an important, respected, educated man—a man of relative wealth, a free man, a man who commanded crowds and led them toward abolitionism and suffrage. He may have been born enslaved, into a cabin like the one pictured above, which stands at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens outside Charleston, but he’d claimed his freedom and escaped. He’d gone north on a train, and now he helped lead the charge toward emancipation. Thirteen years later, he’d deliver a speech on this anniversary, and speak the words quoted above, articulating the need for struggle to create real change. The year was 1857, just a few years before the start of the Civil War, and now, looking back, his words seem to ring through the years that followed and led to those opening shots, the long battles and many deaths that were to come. Freedom does not come without agitation. We cannot have “the ocean without the mighty roar of its waters.”
In Illinois, when we visited the so-called “Indian Agency House” and the Dodge cabin, Joseph McGill, our leader, wore his blue uniform from the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment. The Fifty-fourth was made up of African American soldiers recruited after the Emancipation Proclamation was announced in January 1863.
The first Congressional Medal of Honor awarded to an African American man was given to Sergeant William H. Carney in 1900, for his valor on July 18, 1863. He fought in the Fifty-fourth Regiment, in a battle outside Charleston. Sergeant Carney rescued the American flag when its bearer fell, and is famously quoted as saying that the flag “never touched the ground,” in spite of his injury in the battle. Frederick Douglass, who had been working for abolition since his escape north in the 1830s, saw two of his own sons off to the Civil War in the Fifty-fourth Regiment.
Maybe you saw the movie Glory in the late eighties, starring Morgan Freeman as Sargeant Major John Rollins, Denzel Washington as Private Trip, and Matthew Broderick as Colonel Shaw, the white man who led the soldiers into battle. Though that battle didn’t win Fort Wagner, the Union prevailed two months later, in September, when the Confederates retreated.
Sergeant Carney in his younger and older years.
The Robert Gould Shaw Memorial stands on the Boston Common near the State House; one of the Crouch relatives called the Common “the lungs” of Boston, where people congregated to take air and walk together, just as Winthrop did each morning along the battery in Charleston. I’ve walked past that memorial in Boston Common many times in my life, but never took notice of what it illustrates. Now, I read every plaque on every monument I pass, in my home state and others. What do we publicly commemorate and what do we ignore or silence? This monument was erected in honor of Colonel Shaw and the men of the Fifty-fourth Regiment who fought even when they weren’t granted full rights of citizenship and weren’t being paid equally. The monument was originally proposed to be erected near Fort Wagner outside Charleston where Carney and Shaw died, but after residents protested to its installment there, it was finally completed and erected in 1897 in Boston.
Nearby, there’s the memorial that includes a free man of color named Crispus Attucks, commemorating his part in the American Revolution, when he stood to face British soldiers and was murdered by them; Paul Revere’s famous engraving, based on an image by Henry Pelham, helped demonize the British and spur the new nation towards war. Attucks was of African and Native American descent.
Growing up, I must have walked past these monuments countless times. In school, we learned about Concord as the place from which the “shot heard ’round the world” was fired, starting the revolution and our country’s fight for freedom. I never learned about Crispus Attucks. In high school, I’d run over the Old North Bridge during cross-country practice, and then cross the street and cut into the woods to the marshy preservation land through which soldiers must have walked and fought, winding their way along the river. This is land that belongs to the Wampanoag and Massachuset nations, from whom Attucks was likely descended. I imagine how these marshlands along the river must have looked before colonists arrived, the waters full of migrating birds, those white cranes I loved to see moving as if in slow motion through water up to their knees. There would have been the hum and hiccup of frogs on summer nights, the skies filling with the sounds of honking geese as they moved north come spring. People must have pulled basketfuls of fish from those marshy fresh waters, and had access to the oysters, clams, and saltwater fish at the Atlantic shores, too. This is long before over-fishing, before the pollution that industrialization would bring, and decades of mill run-off that was toxic to these waters.
Emerson’s house, Concord, MA. and a replica of Thoreau’s cabin, built in 2009 at Walden Pond.
In all those years I moved through Boston’s and Concord’s landscapes, no one ever told me about Crispus Attucks, who was a hero of the revolution just as much as Paul Revere. No one told me about the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Massachusetts infantry regiments, made up of men of color who fought and died for a country that hadn’t granted them full citizenship and paid them three dollars less than their white counterparts made, nor that the men had to keep fighting—and dying—for their rights to equal pay even after the war was won. Though I knew that Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were important thinkers who wrote and spoke and lived in town, I never learned that Frederick Douglass came to Concord to speak in 1844 and that he lived in Massachusetts, settling just after his self-emancipation in New Bedford, a whaling town. I was never taught that in the 1840s, Thoreau refused to pay his taxes in protest of slavery and the Mexican-American War. This was just before he went to Walden Pond in 1845 to live simply (with a little help from his mother’s cooking and laundering services). No one told me about the African American women who worked to recruit men for the Fifty-fourth, who raised those infantrymen’s families back home while they were away fighting, who sewed and knitted goods to sell, or worked in someone’s kitchen, or taught someone else’s children, to pay their own children’s way to school or to buy their shoes for the year or to make enough for their dinner each night.
In school, I’d never learned that African American women worked as spies in the South—not only Harriet Tubman but also Mary Touvestre, who stole the plans for the battleship CSS Virginia from the man for whom she worked, and delivered the plans to the Union. There was also Mary Elizabeth Bowser, who worked with her former owner, a woman educated in Boston who returned to Richmond, Virginia, and became a spy for the North. Bowser was hired as a domestic by the Confederate White House, where she observed documents in the company of men who assumed she wasn’t able to read or write and couldn’t begin to understand their conversations and papers. She took advantage of the opening their racism and sexism created and sent the information she gathered to the Union.
Bowser and Touvestre were born to enslaved women, thus enslaved themselves, raised in city homes like the one in which Eliza, Minerva, and Juba lived in Charleston, or in cabins that looked like the one that opens this chapter. And now, by the 1860s, they’d been emancipated, at last, thanks in no small part to the work of abolitionists like Tubman and Douglass, who pushed Lincoln toward emancipation.
I try to imagine Eliza and Juba during the war, having learned that Minerva, mother of Cecilia and Samon, daughter of Diana, would not make it to hear the Emancipation Proclamation. She died on November 16, 1851, of “dropsy,” or edema, probably caused by heart failure. Her last name was listed in 1851 as “Greer,” so she was still owned by the man who bought her in 1838 when Susan and Winthrop sold her. Eliza may have still been owned by Winthrop, as there’s no record for her sale after Winthrop bought her in 1837-8; he refers to her once in 1839, indicating that he must still have owned her then. Whether he ever sold her or not, I allow myself to keep imagining that she escaped. Then again, so many records are lost.
She might have been sold to the man for whom Winthrop said he bought her, or sold to someone else in the years that followed Susan’s departure. Maybe she found her way to the homes of sympathetic people on Beacon Hill, who took her in and helped her start a new life. Maybe she’d claimed literacy in the south, and eventually came to teach at the Abiel Smith School, lived nearby on Beacon Hill, and spent her early evenings before dinner walking and visiting with friends. Maybe she wrote her own story, as many former slaves did, and testified to her life in the south under Susan and Hasell’s hands, to help promote the abolitionist movement.
I imagine her in 1870, walking in a cream-white dress that swishes around her ankles, in a straw bonnet decorated with artificial flowers that’s set forward on her head, listening to a story her friend tells her as they walk uphill. Their bodices button up the front, with gold pins fastening lace at their necklines. The skirts, now, are flat in the front and gathered into bustles in the back. Maybe she’s wearing a skirt with a pull in it that allows her to raise the hem when she’s out walking, to avoid the wet and dirty ground. This creates the look of what I always thought of as a princess dress, with fabric gathered up in even waves around the skirt. It’s late summer, and the evenings are cool; the trees around the Common have just begun to change color, revealing orange and yellow tips that will soon blossom into full-fledged fire. Eliza pulls her shawl around her shoulders, dodges a puddle, tucks a fallen piece of hair back into her braid.
If she was, indeed, able to escape, did Eliza hear of friends and relatives back in Charleston during or after the war? Did she know of Minerva’s death?
In 1851, over a decade after Susan and Hasell sold her, Minerva was still in Charleston, likely walking to the market and along the battery, visiting with friends when she could, maybe seeing her children if they were still nearby. She may have been sent to the work house and strapped to that horrific wheel, may have endured beatings at the hands of her mistress and master, may have survived slaps and whippings and rapes. I wonder if she bore scars from her time under Susan and Hasell’s ownership. And I hope that, like Bishroom, she was also able to live with her spouse, the father of Cecilia and Samon. That she was able to see her children grow up. That she got to watch Samon take his first steps, rushing towards his mother’s arms as all able-bodied babies do, delighted in his ability to stand and walk.
Either at the time of her death or before, Dr. Michael tended to Minerva, providing what care he could offer, or simply arriving to declare her cause of death. Did Eliza or Juba Simons see Minerva before she died? Were they related, or friends? I think of Eliza and Minerva tending to Little Hasell and imagine the hundreds of times Minerva might have escaped or ignored Susan’s demands to tend to Cecilia and Samon, to hug instead her own children, to sing to Samon when he woke late in the night, to teach Cecilia to weave as she was taught by her own mother, pushing the spoon into the straw to sew the basket tight.
Maybe by the time of the war, Minerva’s children were in Charleston, acting as spies; maybe Cecilia delivered messages from whomever she worked for to one of the Union sympathizers or Union troops around the city. Or maybe she and Samon and Eliza laid low until the victory they prayed for came about and they were at last free. Maybe they spent those worried and sleepless nights dreaming about what they would do and where they would go should the Union win—and then, when the time came, they stashed away the money they’d earned by being rented out by their owners, and they fled.
Did they see the battle at Fort Wagner? See the fire and hear the shots from the city? Did they hear about Sergeant Carney’s bravery in upholding the flag during the battle? Maybe Minerva thought of her son, Samon, who would by then have been in his mid-twenties. Maybe she dreamed he’d made it to Union lines to fight with the Fifty-fourth regiment, or that he’d simply escaped north, to settle with a family, a wife. Maybe he escaped to live in the swamplands in which archaeologists are discovering evidence of the people who settled there. Deep in muggy, mosquito-filled wetlands, communities of people who had claimed their own freedom lived, fished, and farmed together, subsisting outside the bounds of the nation that mandated they live in bondage.
I imagined that Eliza might have dressed as a man, a sailor, and escaped north. Maybe, like Lizzie Hoffman and Martha Lewis, African American women who fought in the war, Eliza and Minerva disguised themselves and stood alongside their brothers, husbands, and friends. Scholars estimate that nearly four hundred women fought in the Civil War as soldiers and spies. Imagine dressing yourself up to go undercover, donning blue pants and a blue coat, cutting your hair, setting that dapper hat on your head with the curled horn to signify your Union alliance. Imagine walking into battle with a new name, one adapted to cover your given gender. Imagine becoming friends with the men in the trenches, most of whom would never know your life-before, as a woman in a dress, a woman with fewer rights and choices. As a man, you could hold a bank account, find gainful employment, live alone, and choose your own mate, if you wanted one at all. This was the path that Jennie Hodgers chose, claiming the name Albert Cashier, and continuing to live as Albert when he left the army, taking advantage of the opportunity to vote.
Albert Cashier in uniform. A musical in Chicago recently commemorated Cashier’s life and legacy as a trans man.
I think, too, of Cathay Williams, an African American woman who was born enslaved, disguising herself as a soldier to serve in the army from 1866 to 1868, under her new name William Cathay. Today, she’s commemorated with a bust statue in Leavenworth, just outside Kansas City, keeping watch eternally out towards the horizon.
Before she made herself into William Cathay, Cathay Williams was born into enslavement and “forced to serve for the Union Army as a cook” during the Civil War, as journalist Miranda Davis writes, and then, after the war, became a Buffalo soldier, enlisting under the new name. She served for two years before being discovered. She was tall, at five foot nine, which worked in her favor. I think of a recent conversation I had with a fellow tall friend about being called “sir” when we’re bundled up in our winter clothes and walking or skiing around town. With a hat, a heavy coat, and our height, people just assume. I think of William Cathay in her army uniform, the same one Joe McGill wears during his Slave Dwelling Project sleepovers today—the hat set down over her hair, the square-shouldered jacket, the pants that no woman would yet have worn. How must it have felt to slip into that uniform and claim that authority, hold her gun, and step up, ready for battle?
The bust of Willam Cathay/Cathay Williams, dedicated in Leavenworth, Missouri, in 2016.
This narrative has become, in so many ways, a story of images: those we choose to consume, those we seek out, those we choose to create, those we use or deride for our purposes. There is Nat Turner, in supposed defiance, and the white people, in supposed supplication. Just as one is supposedly black and the other is supposedly white, so the image is, like race, a fiction, perpetuated over and over, until people begin to think it is truth.
When I seek images of Bowser, I come to find that those that attributed to her online are not in fact of her; someone posted the image, and people copied and pasted and passed the image around, and this picture came to be known as a picture of her. When I go to research the painting of the “Black Sailor” from Rhode Island, I’m told by the historical society that this is originally a painting of a white sailor; it was transformed to represent a black man at some time, by whom they do not know. Maybe this was an effort by an artist to commemorate black mariners, to change the archive by changing the painting itself.
The same is true with the way we perpetuate stories. There are the stories I was told, and here, on the other hand, are the stories I seek out, the stories held in the gaps and silences of those earlier stories, the people and places and historic events that have always been there, told by people of color, activists, historians, writers—if only I’ll find them, read them, and listen.
While I once thought that I’d be able to find descen
dants of Eliza, Minerva, Juba, and Jane, and could learn more about the women from family members, could ask the family for their advice, input, and permission before publishing this book, I have not been able to find anyone, even with the genealogist’s help. Maybe someone will see these records and hear echoes of their own family stories here. As I’ve zig-zagged between archives to recollect the scattered letters, contracts, and objects that haven’t yet been digitized, I hope that someday, someone else will take this information, and rewrite the story. If no text is ever dead but constantly changing and alive, then this is just one more fluid piece of an ever-changing narrative and archive, a thread that loops and tangles and then is pulled straight and taut through time, then and now, that sshhhhh-ing sound in my ears as the cotton thread comes up through the fabric—as it will be changed, re-pieced, re-stitched, again.
I keep asking myself: What should I be doing in a time when this history of racial oppression, our foundation, rises up again, fracturing in the daylight, evidencing what’s always been there. I think of those days in North Carolina, when people said in front of me the things they’d never have said in front of a person of color, imagining I was “safe” because I’m white. I think of all of those arguments I had with them—what did they amount to? Did they change anything? I was so strident back then, so angry about what I was just coming to witness in explicit terms after seeing it in implicit terms around Boston and with my friends—and the segregation of a city I’d believed was “liberal,” until I left and returned to see it with new eyes. Boston has been called one of the most racist cities in America. Now that I know the stories from Beacon Hill, of Prince Hall and Phillis Wheatley, Mumbet Freeman and Belinda Sutton an African, and of the Robbins family in Concord, I know that enslaved people built Boston just as they built Charleston, that enslavement is just as much the root of northern history as of southern. Educating myself is only part of it; still, after so many years, I ask myself how am I going to become better at these conversations and at living in this time?