by Rachel May
Juba has three dresses now, each purchased with her own money or in trade for vegetables from her backyard garden or the baskets she expertly weaves. Maybe she becomes a washerwoman in the years after the war, living on twenty dollars a month—several dollars from each of the ten families for whom she took in washing. She’s had to start making her own soap again, as she’d done in the 1830s when Susan and Hasell kept her at their house on Cumberland Street. Now, she’s blocks from that neighborhood, closer to Marion Square and nestled in with friends and family around her.
So much for store-bought, she might think to herself as she sweeps ashes from the fireplace to begin the process of making lye. Her back aches as she leans forward to get the ashes at the back of the hearth. Soap is too expensive to buy readymade, but the whites who employ her won’t pay for the soap she makes. She ends up with about twelve cents per pound of laundry in profit—a pittance for all the labor of hauling and boiling water, making soap, scrubbing out their damned sweat marks—and yet, it’s all hers to keep. No portion of her pay goes, anymore, to greedy and abusive owners. It’s hers.
As she gets ready for her portrait, maybe she pulls her hair back into a bun at the base of her neck, the part to one side of her face, her hair draping across her forehead. Maybe she dons a bonnet with a spectacular white feather. Maybe she ties her hair up a white head tie, just as she’d seen her mother Judith do in her older years. Does she wear a necklace or a ring given to her by her husband so many years ago? Does she bring her son Sorenzo, if he’s living nearby, or in her own house, with his wife and children?
We don’t have any known images of Juba, but I imagine she had one taken. I can see her in her bedroom that morning, facing a dresser she got from her former master’s house, one of the few things she still has that was a hand-me-down; she’s slowly replaced all those things given to her by her former masters with objects of her own choosing. On the dresser sits a small mirror, chipping at the edges. She leans towards it, pats the sides of her hair, secures the scarf tied at her neck with a round pin. Smiles. Just right, she thinks to herself, and then she turns from the mirror and walks out of the bedroom she shares with her sister, heels clicking over wide creaking pine boards, into the small main room where two of her cousins have left their beds made up and tidy, just as she prefers, and then out the front door into the bustle of Coming Street.
I wonder if, back in Providence or visiting Boston, Susan and her daughter Emmie ever saw Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth speak, in those years leading up to the war, or if Susan’s sisters Eliza and Emily ever talked to her about abolition and their disagreements with the southern way of living. Were there tensions between them? Emily and Eliza Williams lived in another part of the city; Emily’s husband, William Harris, who had helped sell so much southern cotton and lumber (produced by enslaved people) was the stepson of Moses Brown, the abolitionist. How did he reconcile himself with his stepfather’s beliefs?
Did any of the women and men Susan had once enslaved travel through Providence and freedom before or during the war, or in the early days after? Maybe, as Susan was sewing and arranging her parlor, Eliza, the woman Susan once enslaved, had help from someone like Harriet Tubman, who would have helped her eventually move north, where she could escape into the black neighborhoods in Providence. In Providence, people of color owned hotels and boardinghouses and could have secreted her farther north, to the elite black community in Boston, or New Bedford, that whaling town to which Douglass traveled in 1838, disguised as a sailor.
Between the 1840s and ’60s, Susan and Emmie had settled into their old home back on Providence’s George Street, where Susan made her samplers as a little girl and learned to sew from her mother. She helped her mother care for the boarders and took charge of the family finances. Franklin writes that she “kept a tight rein” over her parents’ finances. I wonder if this is because she was severe, as Franklin describes her, or because she was so concerned about her welfare as a widow without the ability to get a job of her own. In the 1840s, many of the women working in Providence’s textile mills, less than a mile from Susan’s home, were immigrants as opposed to local farm girls who had worked in the mills when they first opened in the early 1800s. Susan didn’t go to work at the mills, but used her fine stitching skills to support the family. For so long, I thought of her as the woman in the photo with the stern face, someone who must have been unhappy. But then, years later, I see the second image of her, still tightly corseted in her black dress, but smiling at the photographer.
“She certainly kept up with the fashions of the day,” says Prof W. when she sees the latest photo.
She looks happier here, and kinder, too, and I think about how much my impression of her was shaped by Franklin’s remembrances of her as a “stern” woman, and my own perceptions of her based on that first photograph.
This second photograph is accompanied by the sermon a preacher gave at her funeral. He describes her as generous and religious and devoted. She lived as a widow for sixty-six years, he says. She did a lot of volunteer work in the church. In the days after she moved north in the 1830s, she wrote to her brother-in-law Mr. Harris to ask for a recommendation about which Bible to buy.
Emily Crouch’s watercolors; many are of Rhode Island landscapes and ports. It’s Emily who painted the portrait of Franklin that’s included in the beginning of this book; she lived with him in Providence in her old age, bringing with her the trunk of clothes and the quilt tops, prompting Franklin’s conservation of the collection. Emily never married and supported herself by teaching painting at schools in Providence, including the Moses Brown School, the Quaker school he founded in 1784; the school continues to serve students from preschool through twelfth grade.
In Providence, she’d have cleaned the home and prepared meals, gone out calling, visited with friends, done the sewing and mending. I imagine her on a cold November day, bundling into her cloak—that shawl she’d so carefully directed to be made from South Carolina—and stepping into the narrow, cobblestone street alongside Brown. When the chill of Rhode Island’s November air strikes her face as she steps into the street, she pulls her shawl tight across her chest, nods to her neighbor in passing, thinking of her husband and the warm fall days they spent together in Charleston, newly in love, sewing and dyeing a bonnet and picking roses for cordial. Those days were sweet, she must have thought. Maybe she was softer then, easier to laugh and more tender with her loved ones. But the death of her baby and husband would change everything. She lived to ninety, and never remarried, but her brothers often mention a male friend in their letters, asking him to send them the Providence newspapers. Maybe she fell in love again.
Her sister Eliza Williams, whose marriage had been “prevented” by the family, Franklin writes, never married. She lived to eighty-two and died in Boston. Susan took the furniture that had been left to Eliza in her parents’ will. I don’t know why, nor how they felt about each other. The majority of the letters saved are from Winthrop and Hilton, sending word north; those letters were saved first by Eliza, and later, presumably, by Susan. “My dear sister,” so many of them begin. But who was she? I used to think there was another archive of letters held by the southern branch of the family—along with that letter from the Gaud family cited in the 1960s magazine—and I searched for that bundle, imagining that that was where Susan and Emily and Eliza Williams talked about all they felt and knew. That’s where the women’s voices would predominate, I imagined, as they appeared here and there a decade before, in the 1830s, when Susan wrote home and Eliza saved her letters. I called their descendants, whom I thought may have those letters, but I found that the letter from the 1960s is part of the collection in Rhode Island after all. As far as I could tell, there was no mysterious missing bundle, no more secrets waiting to be uncovered, as the quilt and its letters sat for so long before Franklin excavated them, and then I returned to them.
When the war struck, Susan reappropriated her skills, knitting and sewing for
soldiers instead of for her Victorian-era parlor to establish herself as a lady. Maybe those dreams of rising up to the upper echelon of the middle class had faded, anyhow, now that she was back in her parents’ house and laboring alongside them to care for students again. She’d bemoaned her mother’s hard work when she lived down in Charleston, wishing her mother didn’t have to work so hard when she had such “good help” (her enslaved women) to do her chores. Back at home, through the long depression years of the late 1830s to ’40s, Susan brought in extra money with her handmade goods, which later became donations for the soldiers during the war in the 1860s.
I traced my fingers over her penciled letters and numbers—mittens and scarves and hats, all detailed with prices and names—the people for whom they were made. There weren’t any dates. This was a small notebook, easy to slip into her pocket as she walked through town or sat at her fireside table at night after Emmie had gone to bed, knitting without having to think about the stitches, her needles moving as if on their own, muscle memory taking over while her mind drifted to Emmie’s progress as an artist or memories of her chubby sweet boy, Little Hasell, thirty years gone.
Did she ever see the effects of the Fugitive Slave Act, passed in 1850? Did she witness or cause the capture of enslaved people who were then delivered back to their owners in the South? What did she make of the rising abolitionist movement that grew around her in the North, having owned people herself down South? Did she face recrimination from her siblings? Did Winthrop and Hilton?
I think of those famous sisters, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, whose family Susan knew when she was in Charleston. They lived in the same neighborhood as Susan and Hasell, by the battery, and attended St. Philip’s along with them. They must have passed each other along the battery, strolling in the afternoon or walking back and forth to the market. When Mrs. Grimké passed away, Winthrop was sure to note her death in his letter to Susan. The Grimkés were a long-standing and powerful family in Charleston, and the girls’ rejection of their parents’ slaveholding was well-known. They moved north and became Quakers, like Moses Brown, turning away from their family’s way of life and drawing a sharp divide between the two sides.
Susan was no radical, or what Sarah Ahmed would call a “killjoy,” as Angelina and Sarah, and Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, were feminist killjoys—those who see the problems with the status quo or resist their oppression and walk against the crowd. Susan’s sisters Eliza and Emily might have been killjoys, as they were at least opposed to enslavement. The woman Eliza, who was enslaved and dressed poorly when sold on the block, might have been a killjoy, resisting her sale by posing as an unappealing purchase. In writing her essay on killjoys, Ahmed quotes Sojourner Truth’s speech at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. Truth supposedly raised her arm at the end and said, “Ain’t I a woman?” to proclaim her humanity in the face of the slaveholders who disavowed that claim.
It doesn’t matter whether, as scholars once debated, Sojourner Truth ever spoke those words. She was said to have spoken those words, and later, she herself claimed to have done so. It was an erroneous history that struck a chord with the public and carried her message further. Why not embrace it? She used the misattribution for her own—for the abolitionist cause’s—benefit, because she saw that it was effective. “I sell the shadow to support the substance,” is the caption on one of Truth’s own photos, explaining that the sale of this “shadow,” the photographic portrait of herself, would support the abolitionist cause.
In the days after the war, everyday women and men fought to proclaim their freedom and status as citizens, with the agency to own their own homes and land, thousands of whites resisted—in the North and in the South. After so many years of the booming cotton industry, and thus the booming slave industry, it would take years to push closer toward justice. The people the Crouch-Williamses enslaved might have been able to take advantage of the chaos of war to claim their freedom, or, unable or unwilling to move for various reasons, waited for the moment they could leave. I imagine, in the early days of the war, the people enslaved in fields at Middleton around those symmetrical pools, and nearby Boone Hall, cultivating and harvesting rice and the fine Sea Island cotton that Winthrop bought and sold, their days in the hot sun, the sounds of battle reaching them at the plantations around Charleston. Some ran for freedom in the midst of the battles and fires and made it to Baltimore and then north, enlisting in the Union Army; others were made to work throughout the war, helping to build Confederate camps and forts, feeding the soldiers, digging trenches, doing the hard labor of battle behind the lines. Maybe William, the “house boy” Winthrop bought in 1856, worked for a time as one of the Confederates, forced to strengthen the army until he could escape—then went north, spending time first in a contraband camp outside of Washington, D.C., with hundreds of other formerly enslaved people, and then traveling to New York, where he enlisted and fought for the North. Almost 200,000 African American men fought for the Union, and nearly 30,000 of those men died. Some of those men, like Cathay Williams or William Cathay, were actually women, and others, like Albert Cashier, were trans men. Some enslaved men were forced to accompany their masters in the Confederate army while they fought.
It’s likely that Juba was still in Charleston during the war, or somewhere nearby, since she was there in 1874. I wonder if she fled the city during the fire in 1861, if she met her children in the neighborhood—if George and John, if they were her sons, were still in the city as well. Maybe she sat in a church on watch night, New Year’s Eve, waiting to hear of the emancipation proclamation. Maybe she heard those words in 1863 and celebrated with friends. And yet, her and her children’s lives in the days of reconstruction would have been difficult, with white men like Winthrop resentful of her new freedom and continuously attempting to deny it of her.
Maybe, during the war, she escaped and became a Union nurse, wrapping soldiers’ wounds, feeding them their medicine, helping with bloody amputations, comforting them. Maybe Minerva and Juba slipped away during the war, south to Hilton Head, to which many runaways fled, or to St. Helena Island, where the Gullah Geechee community continues to farm land they’ve lived on since their ancestors were brought from Sierra Leone. Just as African Americans were the abolitionists who propelled the country to emancipation, so they were the people rebuilding their own lives after the war. The Penn School, on St. Helena Island, was founded in 1862 and served to educate formerly enslaved people after emancipation. Today, the Penn Center serves as an education and history center on an island still protected from, but threatened, by development.
At a farm on St. Helena, a woman named Sara Green and her husband, Bill, teach young people to farm sustainably, hoping the love for this land, the desire to stay and to farm as they and generations before them have done, will resonate with these children and teens so that they can protect this place from the developments encroaching all around. If you’ve been to Hilton Head Island, you’ve seen the results of this development. It’s a place full of hotels, along practically every inch of expensive shoreline. It, too, was part of the Sea Islands where Gullah Geechee people lived and fished and made their livelihoods in the years following the Civil War. In contrast, there’s St. Helena Island, quiet, green, with a national park that protects long stretches of the shoreline, and small farm stands and restaurants on the way on and off the island. The residents of the island have worked hard to protect this place. In the 1860s, the Sea Islands were isolated, the communities insular. Charlotte Forten, a wealthy black woman from Philadelphia, was one of the abolitionists and writers (she was a poet) who worked for emancipation and the education of freedmen during and after the war. She wrote about her trip to St. Helena, to teach freed people of color:
. . . Some of the officers we met did not impress us favorably. They talked flippantly, and sneeringly of the negroes, whom they found we had come down to teach, using an epithet more offensive than gentlemanly. They assured us that there was great danger
of Rebel attacks, that the yellow fever prevailed to an alarming extent, and that, indeed, the manufacture of coffins was the only business that was at all flourishing at present. Although by no means daunted by these alarming stories, we were glad when the announcement of our boat relieved us from their edifying conversation. We rowed across to Ladies Island, which adjoins St. Helena, through the splendors of a grand Southern sunset. The gorgeous clouds of crimson and gold were reflected as in a mirror in the smooth, clear waters below. As we glided along, the rich tones of the negro boat-men broke upon the evening stillness,—sweet, strange, and solemn—“Jesus make de blind to see, Jesus make de cripple walk, Jesus make de deaf to hear. Walk in, kind Jesus! No man can bender me.