by Rachel May
Forten spent two years on St. Helena Island before she had to return to Philadelphia due to illness. She’d later marry Sarah and Angelina Grimké’s nephew, Francis James Grimké, a white man; this turn of events would have been unimaginable to the southern slaveholding Grimkés, whose lifestyle Winthrop hoped to emulate.
As she walked down the sidewalk in 1870, Juba would not have to step aside for the white people she passed. She’d have set her own hours and days of work, or determined whose washing or cooking she would do. As Thavolia Glymph writes, “From 1866 through the 1880s, tasked work remained a visible hallmark of the strategies black women employed to institute free labor relations in domestic employment . . . Taking on jobs by the task and working part-time as day or casual labor allowed household servants precious time for their own domestic production and moved white women employers toward a new order in labor relations in the domestic sphere.” While Juba, a skilled cook, might have taken full-time employment in a single household, she may have chosen, instead, to do some cooking, some cleaning, and some washing for people. Or, maybe she made her living by making baskets or selling other goods or food at the market. No matter what, her life was markedly better. She was free. And, the women in whose house she’d been enslaved—Winthrop’s wife Cassie, for example—had to learn to care for their own homes and children. “For a time,” Glymph writes, “the pedestal of white womanhood was cracked. Former mistresses worked, and black women suffered far less violence than previously.”
Juba would have walked to the photographer’s temporary or permanent studio, paid her fee, and decided which backdrop and objects she’d include in her portrait. Would she sit holding a fan, like Mary Brice or Bryce, pictured in a previous chapter? Would she hold a skein of yarn, like Sojourner Truth? A basket, like the woman pictured here? Maybe she was literate and wanted to proclaim her hard-earned skills by holding a book. Maybe she held something having to do with her skill as a cook, like contemporaneous occupational portraits of men holding the tools of their trades—a blacksmith holds a horseshoe, a chimney sweep holds what looks like a broom, a shoemaker holds a wooden shoe form. Maybe Juba walked to the studio wearing a beautifully embroidered apron, like the one Harriet Powers made for herself with starbursts. Maybe she carried with her the large copper pot in which she made her favorite dishes for her family and friends—sauces for brisket, grits, sweet potatoes boiled for pie.
Her work as a cook meant that she shaped people’s lives. As Rebecca Sharpless writes, we remember the food we knew as children, those meals that comforted us when we were sad or struggling, the favorite foods we ate when we were young and now request for celebrations. We go back to what we always knew. We make for friends and family those dishes with which we grew up. “What humans eat at home,” Sharpless writes, “and what they offer guests are general markers for their society. As cooks, African American women profoundly shaped the foodways of the South and, hence, its overall culture.” Juba held this power. She was probably taught to cook by her mother, Judith, and in turn, continued to help shape what has become known as American food. She’d also have to have fought against the racist cultural inscriptions of black women cooks (the “mammy”) that whites must have continuously tried to superimpose upon her—which are, Sharpless writes, continuously reified today with images like Aunt Jemima, “representing a reassuring tie with the Old South in which cooks worked happily for whatever came their way.”
If Samon was able to live to adulthood, I imagine that when he thought of his mother, he must have thought of his days beside her in the kitchen, the smells of her cooking, the sight of her hands expertly chopping vegetables at the countertop, or sitting in the yard as she bent off the ends of beans with that sweep snap, or plucking a chicken or braising a ham. If she was able to claim literacy, maybe she risked her life and her son’s by teaching him to read as Susan or her other mistresses napped in the afternoon or went out calling; maybe she held a book up for Samon and traced with her hand each letter on the page, while the smells of the stew she’d made for dinner that night rose up behind them on the stove. Maybe she was caught trying to teach her son to read, or to learn herself, and was severely punished at the work house or by her mistress or master—this could have been Susan or Hasell—a punishment she barely survived. In 1870, she’d have moved through this new world, free, able to determine how much she was paid for her work, and if her employers treated her poorly and she was unhappy with her circumstances, she could demand higher pay, refuse to do certain tasks, and, if she wasn’t given what she required, she could leave.
Maybe Samon lived near or with her in Charleston, and they continued to share meals. Maybe Samon was married and he and his wife were able to offer meals to his mother, easing her work after long days piecing together her living. Maybe he took care of her in her old age, and she was able to stay home and do easier tasks as her body allowed.
In 1865, Hilton and Winthrop and their families moved back to Charleston, where Winthrop resumed his cotton trade and watched the city rebuild. He wrote, in October 1865:
. . . I find Charleston gradually improving and as it were rising from the ashes, stores are being put in order, repairs going forward in all directions, King St. is thronged morning noon and night but the negro race predominates, very few ladies (white) to be seen at any time. Negro soldiers throng the side walks and crowd along regardless who they jostle. Grace Church has been the only one of the Episcopal order open until last Sunday when Rev. Mr. Porter opened the Church of the Holy Communion. I attended and found all there to be the old citizens and their families, not a blue-coated Yankee to be seen, it seemed like old times. The Holy Communion was duly administered and received by all present in the most solemn manner, as became the occasion viz the reopening of this church permanently since the close of the late Civil War. . . .
Winthrop continues using his connections in the North to make a profit, asking his brother, Hilton, who’s visiting Providence and hoping to resettle there, about the price of soap. He says they live on “fish and schrimps [sic], which are now very abundant and cheap.” The Crouch-Williams family continued to cope with their material losses and resist the upward mobility of “freedmen.” Both men say they wished they could return north after the war, but that their business connections are all in the South; Hilton returns home for a spell, but Winthrop soon writes to say he’d better come back for a job prospect.
Winthrop’s letters in the days after the war are a sharp reminder of the challenges of Reconstruction, the proliferation of lynch clubs; and a portent of the Jim Crow laws that would come. In November 1865, he wrote in response to the newspaper that Mr. Cross, Susan’s friend, had sent:
. . . by which I notice many strange and peculiar, the most marked is the general tone of the reading, all showing strong radical anti-slavery feeling antagonistic to the south even to the perversion of truth and common sense: such a condition of public feeling prevails [in the] north resulting from the overthrow of the south in the recent contest and being so strong and we so weak can only be changed by time. The south is down trampled underfoot, we cannot raise hand or foot but by permission of our masters of the north. I see no chance at all for the south and regret the day I ever came here to reside.
He’d continue with his cotton business, but struggled to make the same level of wealth he’d had before the war. In the days after, in 1865, he was sad to find himself celebrating a gain of ten dollars, as he’d lost more than $60,000 in cotton alone (not including his investments and properties), in the war. He says he has:
money due . . . from the Planters but never expect to collect much of it for they are all ruined in the emancipation of the negroes . . . The whole south will become of no value to the Federal Government. There can never be another large cotton crop made and each successive year there will be less and less made until finally there will be only small farms where formerly there were large Plantations and this state of things will be brought about by the mistaken philanthropy in the north toward
the negro.
I think of James Baldwin’s writing, the recent film made from his essays, I Am Not Your Negro, explaining that the creation of “the negro” is a fiction generated by whites to oppress people of color. Why do you need this fiction? he asks the white viewer. What in you requires someone to be beneath you?
In 1868, Winthrop wrote that with the upcoming election, he feared the “companies of negroes” who have “been drilling and outnumber us largely.” He said he was “heartily sick and tired of this disturbed state of affairs,” meaning, the struggle for African Americans to gain their rights and freedom.
He’d written in 1865 that “we are bound to have trouble in the South soon and it will be long years’ trial to get rid of the negroes. I consider the question settled as to their fate, it can be none other than that of the Indian extermination and much more rapid than that of the Indian so far as this city is concerned. We may be safe from any rising here but the seaboard plantations will suffer.”
Winthrop continues nonchalantly, to say he needs to write to their sister Abby, that he’s delighted to have run into the author William Gilmore Simms (who would write the pro-slavery book in response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin). How did Winthrop become this person? He came from Rhode Island, where Narragansett and Wampanoag people had been murdered and enslaved, sent to Europe or the West Indies to be sold; the European settlers attempted to “exterminate” Native Americans from their land in order to make way for farmers, who would come to make the cheese that was sent to those plantations to feed the enslaved people who grew the sugarcane that was turned into molasses that was shipped back to Rhode Island to make the rum that was shipped to the west coast of Africa to trade for people.
One long, breathless, exhausting, infuriating cycle that did not, of course, “exterminate” anyone. People from the Narragansett, Wampanoag and Massachuset nations continue to thrive in the northeast.
In the footnote of the 1865 letter from Winthrop, Franklin, transcriptionist, archivist, preservationist, writes, “Fortunately, I suppose, the dire prediction of extermination was not fulfilled.” This was in 1952, almost one hundred years later, and on the cusp of the civil rights movement. Like Winthrop, Franklin couldn’t have foreseen the radical changes that the 1960s and subsequent decades would bring. He was a vocational-technical high-school teacher but had money to invest, as evidenced by the many papers on investments that were cut up into templates in the back of the quilt from the 1930s.
Franklin would die in 1953, a year after transcribing these letters. He’d never live to see those social changes.
His phrase, “I suppose,” stays with me. His reluctance. His ambivalence. Another ominous echo through time.
I imagine that Minerva, Jane Jones, and Juba Simons watched the Industrial Revolution and cotton boom with frustration if they were still in Charleston, wishing for the end of slavery, planning rebellions and subversions, attending church services and meetings, and raising their children. Perhaps one of Eliza’s daughters was named Eliza as well, and was part of the same family that appears in the 1900 census of Hasell W. Crouch, son of Charles (nephew of our “original” Hasell, the doctor):
Eliza E Jenkins [Eliza E Crouch], b. December 1856 in South Carolina, widowed, black, servant, 4 children born, 2 alive, parents born in Georgia
In 1838, after Susan returned home to Providence, her brother Winthrop said that he kept Eliza “for the man that lets her.” The man who rented her. Perhaps that man didn’t buy her but his cousin, Hasell W., did, and after emancipation, her daughter stayed on as the Crouches’ servant. Maybe. It is remotely possible.
If the preacher Winthrop mentions in 1866, living in the yard with his wife, took a new name upon emancipation, he may have been Esop Smith, the first preacher of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Columbia, which continues to hold worship services today. The church was founded in a sword factory in 1866, but Winthrop reported that the preacher was working in a church on the college campus. It’s possible that the community first met at the college chapel and then, when Reconstruction began and the city was being rebuilt, they were pushed out of the chapel and sent to the sword factory. If he was, indeed, the same man, Sam, whom Winthrop owned in the 1850s, then he went on to thrive as a preacher. He set up churches throughout the South with his wife, and owned land in Georgia. This work of founding black churches was, like the founding of schools for free people of color, Richard E. Powers writes, crucial to black communities. Esop never learned to read, but he was a talented and impassioned speaker who was capable of winning over a congregation with his words. I imagine him on land of his own, his wife working with the women in the church to help the impoverished people around them develop new skills, find work, send their children to schools and educate themselves. They’d have helped to set up schools, to build houses and places for worship. I imagine what it must have felt like to board a train heading to a new town, side by side, helping to rebuild a country through which they could finally travel freely, even as they were still under constant threat from angry whites.
Esop Smith’s mark to denote his signature in the voting register.
I stopped on a street corner in Charleston known as the Four Corners of Law, for on each corner stands the post office, courthouse, city hall, and St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, which Winthrop wrote was being rehabilitated with new glass after the war, in 1866. Here, today, a woman sat with her sweetgrass baskets displayed, working on one as she waited for passing tourists to buy. These baskets have long been made by women from the Gullah Geechee community, who, like the Gee’s Bend quilters, learned the art from their parents and grandparents, an art passed down through the generations. Weaving takes hours and days. But when a woman in a documentary was asked how long a basket took to make, she said she didn’t time it and didn’t care to know; a basket simply takes as long as it takes, she said.
Some of the baskets I saw in Charleston had a single arched handle that twirled from one side to the other, and others were wide and flat with symmetrical handles on either side. The strands of grass—bulrush, in earlier times—were bound by wider palmetto fronds to form a thick sort of rope that wound around and around, like the coils that form a clay pot, to make the circular basket. A weaver slides a bone or spoon end into the rows of grass; looping the frond over to bind each cluster of grasses as she winds them. The variation in colors comes from stripes of pine grass. Museums now collect these baskets; like quilts exhibited in the 1970s, and the Gee’s Bend quilts, this craft, too, is seen as an art.
I asked a woman where she got her grasses, imagining she’d say she gathered them. I thought I was asking her a question about the region—where the grasses grew—but she said that she bought them. In the past, people gathered the grasses from the marshes and wetlands along the shore, but now the sweetgrass is threatened by development; the areas where the grasses grew are impinged upon by great hotels and expanding roads.
I remember seeing Mary Jackson talk about her sweetgrass baskets years ago in an episode of Craft in America. This was two years before I’d begun studying the quilt, and long before I’d return to Charleston. I remember how Jackson talked about her baskets as pieces of art that were born out of necessity. She needed to leave her job to stay home with her young son, and was searching for a way to bring in some money, when she remembered the craft she’d been taught as a child by her mother. She sold her first baskets that year, and went on to become an acclaimed artist whose work is collected and commissioned. I remember her small granddaughter looking on and making a basket of her own.
Mary Jackson with one of her baskets.
In the episode, “Memory,” she talks about how the baskets were used by enslaved people to winnow rice, in a process similar to that developed by Native Americans and Asians, she says, and makes the gesture, while holding the basket, of tossing the rice into the air to separate it from its husk, as if flipping an egg one-handed in a pan. The wind does the work of separation.
; We call these fanners, she says.
Her feat was to make the basket, like the one she’s holding above, from the design of the old fanner basket, but to add a top. It was difficult to fit her hand between the bottom and top, she says, but after some trial and error, it worked.
“It’s called sewing,” she tells the audience. “Binding the basket together is sewing.”
The skill of basket making was brought from Sierra Leone and Senegal, by people who were kidnapped and carried across the Middle Passage, carrying with them the muscle memory in their hands, the artistry in their minds and souls. Jackson says that the skill of basket making made her ancestors more valuable as enslaved people, and therefore helped to keep the family together—they worked together to make the baskets, so were kept together by slave owners. I wonder if this is a skill Eliza, Minerva, Jane, and Juba knew. I wonder if they spent evenings teaching their daughters—Cecilia, when she was older, learning from Minerva—how to sew a basket. I wonder if the boys were sent out with their fathers or uncles or older friends to gather up the sweetgrass and the bulrush and make the baskets used in the fields during harvest, to hold vegetables, fruit, cotton, and rice. That Carolina Gold rice.
Mary Jackson, holding a nineteenth-century basket, demonstrates how her ancestors would have held the basket on their heads as they carried produce to market, and I imagine Eliza and Minerva walking side by side with those flat-bottomed baskets balanced on their heads, their children swaddled against their backs or running beside them, the women chatting and laughing about something that happened in the kitchen that morning, or about the strangeness of the circus animals they’d seen the week before.
The giraffe! they might have declared. The oddest creature!
Their children might have asked when they could see the lions again, and roar at each other with raised hands like claws.