by Rachel May
“Those of us who teach, write, and think about slavery and its afterlives encounter myriad silences and ruptures in time, space, history, ethics, research, and method as we do our work. Again and again scholars of slavery face absences in the archives as we attempt to find ‘the agents buried beneath’ the accumulated erasures, projections, fabulations, and misnamings.” This is Christina Sharpe quoting Hortense Spillers and writing about her own work as a black scholar of slavery, and the problems with doing this work in a society that exists in what she calls “the wake” of slavery, with systems that are still defined by those in which Eliza, Minerva, Jane, and Juba found themselves. She goes on to say that black scholars of slavery face the additional challenge of being “expected to discard, discount, disregard, jettison, abandon, and measure those ways of knowing [slavery and Black being in slavery]. . . .”
Tammy Denease as Belinda Sutton the African at the Royall House & Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts.
I think of Tammy Denease, who portrays historic black women at schools and historic sites in New England; she says that by the end of every February, she’s exhausted from having to present the Middle Passage over and over again. This is what white people want to hear about, she says. Like Keith Stokes, she also wants to tell not only the history of the Middle Passage and enslavement but also the stories of women who were inventors, teachers, pilots, soldiers—women descended from those who survived the passage and, against all the odds stacked against them, used their intelligence, talents, skills, and educations to triumph.
Abolitionists used to distribute the image you’ve probably seen a dozen times, which you’d recognize in an instant, of the enslaved or formerly enslaved man who is naked to the waist, his back to the camera. His back is covered in welts, his skin raised in thick scars that testify to abuse. You know from looking at this image and studying the layers of scars that this man survived years of abuse, in all its nefarious forms, including heavy beatings. This image was meant to illustrate the evil consequences of slavery and spurn people to action. Susan Sontag writes about how we’re drawn to such images, and what it means to look: “One can feel obliged to look at photographs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity to assimilate what they show. . . . Images of the repulsive can also allure.”
We are drawn to these horrific images—for example, the picture of the lynching, which Claudia Rankine erased to focus our gaze on the white mob rather than the black bodies. You have seen that image a thousand times, too. When we see it, we recognize it as an icon, as something our culture created. As Euro-Americans, Sontag writes, we feel an obligation to look at these lynching pictures, at the images of enslaved people in the United States, in order to feel the “monstrousness of the slave system.” And yet, she says, we don’t look at images of people abused and attacked in wars of U.S. aggression around the world. We have national projects, national agendas, she says, and we remain true to those agendas; critiquing a war abroad would not be patriotic.
I think about Minerva in 1851. She died between October 26th and November 1st. It must have been cooler, and maybe rainy, in Charleston then. She must have heard the many church bells ringing around her home, marking the hours. She was said to be thirty-nine when she died, which means she was born about 1812, and was about twenty-two when she lived at 6 Cumberland Street, twenty-five when she had baby Samon. In 1851, if they’d survived, Samon would be fourteen and Cecilia would be sixteen. Were they enslaved at houses around Mr. Greer’s where Minerva was enslaved? Had they been sold further away, or died of disease or beatings? Did anyone from Minerva’s household go and call for her children to come see their mother before she died?
In the last hours of her life, if they weren’t able to stand beside her, she must have thought of Samon and Cecilia. If they weren’t with her, she surely saw them in her mind’s eye as she took those final breaths. Maybe it was the image of one of her children’s faces she saw as she passed, that delight in Samon’s eyes just before he fell into her arms. The warmth of her baby boy as she caught him and held him close.
Susan in her older years.
“Many years have passed since I have received any communication from you or any member of the family in Rhode Island,” Winthrop writes in November 1864. “I have recently heard through [my son] Winthrop via Point Lookout where he is a prisoner of war that our Father and Mother are both dead and that you are living in the old Homestead at 51 George St. Though painful to have my son in captivity, I am grateful that his cousins have opened up correspondence with him, which will give him some relief in the way of sympathy.”
In 1864, while Juba found ways to navigate the war, and Eliza, perhaps, built a new life in Boston, the Crouch family lived on, suffering (as they perceived it) under financial strain and the trauma of the war unfolding around them, but otherwise unharmed. Winthrop bemoaned the loss of his fortune in the course of the war. Up until the Emancipation Proclamation, he and Hilton went on living their lives, raising their children, and buying and selling enslaved people.
Hilton was sorry to hear that his parents had died while the war between North and South raged around him. A year and a half earlier, Hilton writes home to Susan, saying that he hasn’t had any news since May 1862, when their parents weren’t well, and he hopes “this will find them alive with the enjoyment of health. I would very much like to see them. . . .” The more sensitive brother, Hilton is “very anxious” to hear from Susan “and to know how you have all got along. If you can let me hear from you even if it is only a few lines, it will be a great relief to my mind.” Hilton was living then in Columbia with Winthrop and his family. Winthrop had managed to keep the cotton business running up to this point, and Hilton filled in for the bookkeeper, Mr. Ewart, the man who had hired Winthrop in his early days in Columbia. Mr. Ewart was killed in the Battle of Secessionville, Hilton reported.
Hilton’s nephew, Winthrop’s son Winty, was “still in the army and has grown to be a large stout man. He has been in a number of battles and thus far escaped all harm.” His younger brothers, Henry and Trezevant, were still in school. Unlike so many wealthy southerners, Winty fought instead of paying a poorer man to fight for him; such common arrangements had come to make the war known as the “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.” Winty seemed to flourish in the army, at least according to Hilton, who says that “Camp life agrees with him,” after seeing him on his trip to Columbia with “a detachment of Invalids.”
A year and a half later, Winthrop writes to thank Susan for corresponding with his son Winty, and, having heard about conditions at the prisons, writes that he hopes Winty was being cared for by those northerners around him: “I trust that he has had his wants supplied from my old friends in New York.” I wonder if, during the course of the war, Winty fought against people he knew from the North. Did he come up against friends, relatives? He made it through a dozen battles unscathed, and when he was captured by the Union and sent to Point Lookout, he was kept alive and well by his aunts and cousins in New York, who brought him food and clothing. Did they talk politics during those visits? Did Winty believe in the cause for which he fought—southern secession, the upholding of his father’s way of life, enslavement? Or did he simply enlist and fight because it’s what was done? Did Eliza and Emily talk to him about abolitionism? What happened on those visits, in those letters? Winthrop would write again, thanking Susan and Emily for their kindness to Winty. Though many in the prison camps succumbed to smallpox, Winty was lucky to return home safely. A list of “South Carolina Prisoners Died in Hospital” at Point Lookout, where Winty was housed, was published in the September 8, 1865, edition of Charleston’s Post and Courier, with the names of hundreds of casualties. Other parents read that list and came upon their children’s names with heartache, but Winthrop and Cassie were spared.
Meanwhile, Hilton’s letters north to Susan are full of concern and longing to hear back; he writes
that he sent several letters over the weeks and months and has gotten no reply.
Feb. 25, 1863: My Dear Sister, Your last letter that I have received was dated in May 1862 and came to hand in June, since that time I am totally unadvised respecting the welfare of our parents or any of the family. I have written you twice since the receipt of your letter but do not know that they have been received by you. I have been living at this place since August last and am now living with Winthrop. . . . His firm has moved their business up here.
Hilton’s wife Harriet, Franklin wrote, was never happy, nor were her daughters. They demanded too much, Franklin said. This must have been family lore. Harriet and her daughters were always wealthier than Hilton, having inherited the enslaved people passed down from Mary Ancrum Walker. Walker came from that elite upper-class, while Hilton was always struggling in the middle class. Maybe the family’s resentment of Harriet, Henrietta, and Rosamond comes from that class difference, their perception that the women demanded more because they’d been given more. And yet, Hilton profited, and was served by those enslaved people until the war.
By 1864, Winthrop and Hilton and their families had been living in Columbia for three years. There’s another silence in the correspondence, as Susan and Winthrop surely wrote back and forth to each other in letters lost or confiscated in the course of their transfer. It’s not until June 1865, just after the end of the war, that the letters become more frequent again and Winthrop and Hilton are able to recount the full scale of their losses for Susan. Hilton write in June 1865, “Winthrop’s warehouse and store were all burnt . . . they had a large amount of cotton on hand and six large warehouses all of which were destroyed. This will break up their business entirely.” Winthrop didn’t know “what he would do for the future,” and Hilton writes that he’s “in the same quandary.” While Winthrop has his wife, Cassie, and three children in whom to take comfort, Hilton writes that he’s “alone in the world, and feel that I have but a few years now to live.” His wife died in 1863, and he longs to go back to the North and make his life there again. He lives in Columbia with his stepdaughters and their children, having made one of them, the little boy named Willie who suffers from epilepsy, his “pet.”
He is now five years old last April and he has entirely lost his mind and does not speak. At two years old he was a fine promising child and talked but he has Epileptic fits and spasms which have reduced him to the state he now is in. The doctors say he cannot recover and that he may be taken away at any time. He is a very fine looking child and to look at him one would think him a very smart child. He is very fond of me, will leave his mother anytime to come to me.
Hilton writes home about Willie in each of the previous letters, and continues to chronicle his progress for Susan. Winthrop writes that the child is “idiotic.”
Thus, in the wake of war, the everyday aspects of life go on for the Crouch-Williams families—the child is brought to doctors, the mothers tend to their babies, the grandfathers dote. But they must also have been coping with the trauma of having witnessed the war unfold—what would have felt very different for Hilton and Winthrop as opposed to Sam and Dianna, the couple Winthrop owned before the war, or John, Juba, Eliza, and Minerva, if they were alive to see it. Now, the freedmen and women were rebuilding their lives, finding ways to make money when they had nothing, or relying on the little they’d saved from renting themselves out or selling their own vegetables, crafts, or wares.
Hilton writes about the family’s evacuation of their home when “General Sherman burnt the place,” but notes that “although the house was robbed and plundered, we were more fortunate than many. Winthrop’s house was burnt and all his furniture; he only saved eight chairs and one mattress but was fortunate in saving a large portion of their clothes” because they’d packed up the day before to move to “our side of the city (they living on the western side) to avoid the shells which the enemy were favoring us with.”
In February, after his renowned March to the Sea, Sherman directed his troops north to Charleston and Columbia. Hilton recalls that windy night when Columbia burned at the hands of the Union soldiers: “That night the 17th of February was a night of horrors and never to be forgotten. The wind was blowing a hurricane and we were surrounded by a sea of flames and expecting every moment that our House would be fired. About one o’clock, I sent Rosy [my step-daughter] and the children in the woods with only a change of clothes for them by which both Willie and Rosy took the cold and have suffered very much for it.” And yet, the whole family survived.
Winthrop writes that “the House was burned by Sherman in February . . .” and “On the 12th of February last some of General Sherman’s scouts or spies entered the city secretly and another warehouse was burnt to the ground containing Sea Island Cotton and an enormous amount of bagging, rope, and twine on storage and on the 17th February General Sherman swept the rest of our warehouses containing some 2500 bales cotton, all of my books, papers except my two ledgers, one day book and my two iron safes were rifled and then burnt. . . .” He lost two hundred bales of cotton, and notes that his warehouses were some of the largest in the city. He blamed not the United States Army but Sherman himself. “fortunately we saved one cow from Sherman’s men,” he says later in this same letter.
He managed to save his silver “by burying it, and after the Yankees left town I dug it up. My bonds, notes, and valuables were not discovered by the soldiers and escaped plundering.” Of course, he says, so much of what he owned in stocks and notes is now worthless in Confederate dollars. “What my losses on Bank Stocks, Rail Road Stocks, Banks of the States, and Real Estate I cannot estimate. Then I lose $37,500 in eight percent C.S. bonds besides on half of the Confederate money Bonds&c. of Blakely & Williams [his cotton trading company] which was near $20,000. At present, I have nothing valuable I can sell, not even real estate.” The amount of money Winthrop must have accrued before the war was vast. He says that he had been planning to retire, having enough Sea Island—the finest—cotton stored, and savings and investments made, to secure his income for many years to come.
Now, he prides himself on his great skill at milking the cow (as he tells it) that she yields enough milk and butter to keep the family afloat, in addition to the vegetables he got from his “small kitchen garden.” (Later, in another letter, though, he says that their formerly enslaved man still milked the cow.) He writes about his new thrifty ways: “I buy a small piece Beef for ten or fifteen cents, make a soup or a stew for the whole family with a dish of rice and tomato sauce comprises our dinner nearly every day in the week. Our garden has yielded green peas, snap beans, lima beans, corn, cucumbers, watermelons, okra, and tomatoes but all the earlier vegetables are past. We are out of corn and flour. Fortunately, we saved one cow from Sherman’s men,” though he lost another cow and calf. He says that the milk and butter from the cow “is our chief living and the greatest luxury in such times as these. We make all the butter we use which is not much but we enjoy it more for not having it more than five days for breakfast out of the week. We have not had butter for any other meal than breakfast for the last three years . . .”
It’s strange to read Winthrop’s pride in his new methods of survival, which were the ways that his enslaved people survived for so many years before the war—with kitchen gardens, chickens or livestock they bought with money made from their own vegetables, eggs, baskets, or sewing. Scraps of meat, milk, and butter where they could get it. He continues to insist that he’s superior even in doing the work they once did for him, for years, without pay.
Two people, who might be his formerly enslaved people Sam and Dianna, remained with him for a short time. Right after he recounts the details of buying butter, and having just a little for breakfast five days a week and none for other meals for three years—and just before he lists the amounts of money he lost and says that his wife, Cassie, would like some quince preserves and grape jelly (with apologies for the seeming extravagance but “we have not had any preserves for
the last four years”)—Winthrop writes: “We have but two servants left, a man and a woman. We hire a woman to do our washing. The man is house steward and milks the cow. The woman cooks. These will only remain with us until fall, when we return to Charleston.”
He says that his wife will hire only “one Irish or German girl” when they get back home. “Our cook woman I bought seven years ago with her husband. He is an old man and a Methodist Preacher since the army occupied this town he obtained the College Chapel and has held services there regularly ever since. Although he lives in my yard he is a much more important character than I am and lives far better than I do. The loss by Emancipation [bears?] on me lightly. I suppose $12,000 in gold will cover it.”
How cavalierly he writes off people’s lives with $12,000 in gold. How flippantly he says the man lives better than he does, as if completely unaware of the figures he just listed, the prices of cotton and stocks and bonds he says he lost, the hopes he has of starting his cotton business back up again when he returns to Charleston. He tells Susan in 1860 that he sold John, who is likely the man he bought in the 1830s from Susan and Hasell’s estate. At that time, John was only about seven; in 1860, he was about twenty-three. Winthrop sold John, whom he’d watched grow into adulthood alongside his own son, for $1,000 but says no more about to whom he was sold, nor what the man John was like, what he had done for Winthrop in those intervening decades. Did he sell Juba, who was likely John’s mother, too, if he had bought her in 1837-8? More than two decades spent with a man and he can only say he sold him and made a tidy sum.