All That She Carried

by Tiya Miles

  He and his wife were focused on building and maintaining wealth, as was the tendency of slaveholders with roots in the middle class, and a legal trail marks their many transactions in land and people.23 During the decade or more in which Robert Martin rose to the ranks of factor and planter, he and Milberry lived in elegant comfort and saw their two eldest daughters, Ellen and Henrietta, marry into Charleston upper-crust families, the Aikens and the Meanses, respectively. Henrietta’s merger with one of Charleston’s older established families, the Meanses, became the primary vehicle through which the Martins’ papers have been preserved in the collection of the South Carolina Historical Society.24 Martin died with a small fortune to bestow upon his heirs, made up of owned people, animals of husbandry, land, houses, a hotel near the new intrastate railroad in Aiken, furnishings, and stocks. Because he had risen high enough for his property to have been cataloged in detail and, later, for his house to have been photographed for the Historic American Building Survey in 1927, we can gather an inkling of how everyday life unfolded for Rose and her enslaved fellows behind the walls of his Charleston estate.25

  In the 1830s, the prized lots south of Broad Street were already occupied by the ornate second homes of rice planters. Martin had no choice but to build farther north, in a neighborhood called the Neck because of its elongated shape above the harbor. Because it had not been the first choice of white planter families, the Neck was a neighborhood of racial and class diversity, a place where the rich and the poor spied each other across the narrow streets. Here in relatively close proximity in the interior of the coastal city, lived working-class whites, free people of color, and a subset of enslaved people who were permitted to live on their own, hire themselves out, and pay wages back to their owners.26 But even in this unusual enclave, monied men like Robert Martin found ways to set themselves apart. They purchased corner lots on higher ground with robust sea breezes, installing water-control systems that flushed their waste downhill to their poorer and colored neighbors, and surrounded their large parcels with stout brick walls, in keeping with an earlier Charleston architectural practice. These men erected virtual country estates inside the northern part of the city, creating a Charlestonian architectural form known as the “plantation-style suburban villa.” Rather than mimicking the slender, sideways orientation of Charleston’s oldest planter homes in the “single house” style by the bay, the suburban villa strutted out, broad and brash, toward the street. These homes, built from the 1830s through the 1850s, were wide and open-armed, with verandahs facing forward, grand exterior entry staircases, and rows of elegant pillars making for a dramatic curbside presence. They mimicked the look of eighteenth-century plantation mansions, bringing the country into the city and declaring the owners’ desired, and at times realized, planter status.27

  Robert Martin’s suburban villa, built around 1834, was a classically Georgian-style mansion with Greek Revival elements. It featured a “triple tiered piazza entered by divided curving stairs.” The structure revealed, according to the art historian Maurie McInnis, “the importance [Martin] placed on entertaining” and “his preference for bold architectural details…indicated by the heavy Tuscan columns below and fluted Doric ones above that support the piazza.” Like other merchants and planters who built on the Neck, Martin “devoted considerable attention to elaborate and extensive gardens.”28 His was a walled compound completely surrounded by red brick and wrought iron, softened only by the lush green of the subtropical foliage. What felt luxuriant and safe for Robert, Milberry, and their children, however, would surely have been bleak and imposing to their captive human “chattels” like Rose.29

  We know so much about Martin from his records and the imposing house he built. Historians follow paper trails. Since Rose left none, it is easy to let her fade into the margins of this record-driven chapter, to let the Martins take center stage in our time as in their own. There is a centrifugal pull, in reconstructing enslaved lives, toward telling the stories of their owners primarily or instead. This is a default we must resist—but how? Not one record in the Martin family papers describes Rose or the life she lived. Her cares and her kindnesses, fears and frailties, fade behind a wall of silence. Can we scale it?

  Let us turn to Harriet Jacobs for guidance in imagining. Jacobs masterminded her family’s escape from North Carolina to New York. From her room in the home of an employer in upstate New York in the 1850s, Jacobs penned a penetrating memoir of social critique. Hers was the first autobiography by a Black woman to reveal the insidious culture of sexual harassment and assault in slavery as well as to confront the gender double standard between white women and Black women in Victorian society, which always categorized Black women as impure. She expressed, pointedly, that those who have not experienced legalized bondage can never know “what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another.” We cannot enter the consciousness of a girl born into slavery who matures to give birth into slavery and can have no reasonable hope of rescue.30 We cannot know Rose, but we can draw on the resources at our disposal—documents, cityscapes, architectural records and the built environment she inhabited, slave narratives, and Ruth’s inscription on the sack—to picture the woman she might have been and summon the shape of her daily life.

  PAINED BY THE RETROSPECT

  Today the brick walls of Charleston seem picturesque, luxuriously fringed by palmetto fronds, burnt-orange trumpet vines, and snow-white gardenias hot with perfume. We admire the Old World intricacy of this storied city while taking photos of Charleston’s famous iron gates. We see the tall, striking walls as elaborate garden boxes resplendent here as nowhere else in the nation. We gaze with longing glances at the seeming romance of another age, lapped by gentle waves and bathed in sunlight. But in the early and middle 1800s, when Rose likely lived in this city, these walls were barrier fences. The urban estates inside functioned like prisons, with every white person a virtual warden. The walls could double as weapons, too, when spangled on their upper ledges with sharp barbs of broken bottles placed at the master’s direction. Elaborately worked wrought-iron gates adjoined the thick segments of brick, spiked in their decorative aspect like knives and swords. To Charleston’s elite slaveholding residents, like Ralph Izard of Meeting Street, these weaponized walls bestowed “an air of comfort to the premises.” The walls represented social order, the proper structuring of life, in which certain classes of people (white, Black, free, slave, men, women) and different types of activities (business versus domestic affairs) were kept to their appointed places. Comfort and structure for the owners meant danger and chaos for the enslaved. Walls barricading family homes from the sight lines of the streets prevented freedom of movement, escape, and revolt by enslaved people and, more subtly but just as ominously, veiled the sights and sounds of physical and sexual abuse. The romantic walls of Charleston, as an art historian of the city put it, “forced slaves to focus on the master’s world.”31

  Miles Brewton House fence with mounted spikes, 27 King Street, Charleston. The spikes were added to the plain ironwork fence after Denmark Vesey’s rebellion plot of 1822. Photograph by Tiya Miles; information from William P. Baldwin, ed., Ornamental Ironwork of Charleston (Charleston: History Press, 2007), 95.

  The palisaded Georgian villa at 16 Charlotte Street, where Rose lived and labored for the Martins, now houses a legal firm. Behind the main structure, a “brick two-story dependency” is shrouded by a net of vines. This was the kitchen and slave quarters back in the mid-1800s, the shadow space of the grand estate where Rose might have spent much of her time.32 Imagine Rose, dressed in a plain frock of cotton or linsey-woolsey, perhaps in a shade of blue or gray or a printed calico, covered in front by a simple apron. She wears a square of fabric around her head to catch the sweat in the southern heat and, perhaps, to enjoy a flash of some preferred pattern or color. This was
a style, as New England schoolteacher Emily Burke said of enslaved women in the nearby coastal city of Savannah, Georgia, in the 1840s, that fashioned a “headdress” out of “a sort of turban, made by folding a cotton handkerchief in that peculiar kind of way known only to themselves.”33 Beneath Rose’s brightly colored head wrap, she thinks thoughts we cannot conjure, perhaps about a parent long lost, or a God on high, or ancestral spirits who could protect a downtrodden people.

  The Charleston suburban villa of Robert and Milberry Serena Martin and their family, built in the 1840s, is now the site of a law office. Photograph by Tiya Miles, 2018.

  Rose’s waking hours must have revolved around the Martins. This family held power of breath over Rose, power to overwork and extort her, to make her tend to the private needs of their feelings and bodies. Rose was subject to them, directed by force of law and custom to carry out, as Harriet Jacobs baldly put it, their “will in all things.”34 She might also have been a prop to her owners, another sign, like their double parlors and fine furnishings kept within it, of their solidified wealth and membership in the planter class.35 During the short hours when Rose was not carrying out commands, she probably slept in the stifling brick kitchen house, on a pallet or a bare stretch of floor. Rose may have had her own family members on this compound, Black, or Native, or mixed-race people with whom she was intimate. We cannot access this part of her life, however. The kinship bonds of a slave were often of little consequence to enslavers and therefore unnoticed in the record.

  We will never know, for instance, based on the inventory taken after Robert Martin’s death, whether any of these enslaved residents were related, if they supported one another or rivaled one another for status, if they chose to spend time in the evening talking together, or saw the same cloud shapes in the sky on an overcast Sunday afternoon. Cicero, the highest-valued enslaved person on these Charleston premises and listed at $1,000, would have possessed special skills for life in the city. Perhaps he was a head man in the house, a butler and a carriage driver, outfitted in the formal livery of suit jacket and brass buttons as a display of the white family’s wealth. Jack and David, listed at $800 each, may have been mechanics, coppersmiths, or wheelwrights who kept things running about the place and could be hired out by the Martins to bring in extra cash. Sophia, valued less than most adults on the list at $300, likely performed basic cleaning, maid-in-waiting services, and domestic maintenance tasks. Other enslaved women who worked at the house at various times but may not have been captured by this specific document would have contributed to keeping the home clean and orderly. James, valued at only $100, must have been a child. The elderly woman valued at $100, who did not even warrant a recording of her name, may have been a nanny to the children or light task worker at the house. Rose, whose name on the list is preceded by a spare “ditto” symbol, indicating that she, too, was enslaved, was the counterpart of Cicero among unfree women in the household, valued the highest. Rose’s monetary estimation of over $500 suggests that she was talented in some manner that slaveholders appreciated, perhaps as a seamstress (the only artisanal craft that measurably elevated enslaved women’s ascribed “worth”) or as a cook.36

  Rose likely knew the fundamentals of sewing, a critical skill for enslaved women. She was unlikely, however, to have been a mantua-maker (to use the term preferred in Charleston for an accomplished dressmaker). If a seamstress, she would have stitched clothing for others enslaved at the Charlotte Street house or on the Martins’ country estate, mended clothing for her owner’s family, and repaired torn or frayed sheets, blankets, quilts, and tablecloths in heavy use.37 If a cook, she would have spent her days bending and sweating over iron kettles at the open fireplace in the kitchen behind the big house and trudging several long blocks to market for ingredients and then bearing them all back again.

  If the Martins saw fit to subdivide Rose’s efforts and sell her labor, they might have hired her out to white associates or free people of color in the city (some of whom owned and rented enslaved people) and then pocketed the income. In order to walk the mucky streets crowded with other Black workers, Rose would have worn a required badge of copper or tin reading “Servant” or “House Servant.” These tags were meant to differentiate Blacks with permission from owners to chase errands, hawk fruit, or work the wharves as hired-out slaves from those who lacked it, in a city where, as one British traveler put it, “the whole of the working population are Negroes…all the servants, the carmen and porters, all the people who [sell] at the stalls in Market, and most of the Journeymen in trades.”38 The city guardsmen who patrolled the movements of enslaved people looked for undocumented victims to jail. An enslaved person without a badge (also required for free people of color for a short period of time, as well as for resident dogs)* or present on the streets after curfew faced police harassment and capture, jailing, and carceral torture in the city’s fortress-like Work House.39

  “Bird’s-Eye View of Charleston, 1850.” From Erskine Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in Antebellum Georgia and the Carolina Low Country (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000).

  Rose’s purpose, in the minds of her owners, was to serve liqueur and season meat, ease aches and sooth discomforts, embody value and increase wealth—in short, to sustain their lives and livelihood while relinquishing her own. She would also have been an intimate, a caretaker as well as a dependent, which made the nature of this relationship between owned and owner enmeshed and corrupt. Why did the Martins, professors of the Christian faith and congregants of the Episcopal Church, treat a member of their household as if she belonged to a demoted category of the human?40 How were they able to maintain a bifurcated view of their world, one in which they could possess a person, steal her labor, rely on her ministrations daily, and still think themselves upstanding members of society?

  By the time Rose was subject to the Martins’ authority, in the early 1800s, South Carolinians of the upper classes had long adopted a frame of mind, often referred to as “paternalism,” that allowed them to feel that slaveholding was morally right and even benevolent. Inspired by their cultural roots in European feudalism, in which lords and serfs related on unequal but accepted terms, elites believed in the correctness of a hierarchical social structure that they understood as being not only natural but also ordained by God. To them, the world was strictly ordered, with a proper place for everyone in it: a select few at the top would dominate and take responsibility for a vast mass of dependents below. In this eighteenth-century paternalistic vision of a stable, organized society bolstered by an early-nineteenth-century Christian revivalism, landholding white men maintained the right to control those beneath them in status, even and especially loved ones within the household.

  The refined men, or fathers, at the heads of these estates eschewed the outright brutality of previous generations of patriarchs, preferring to enact their will through the pull of mutual obligation and emotional manipulation, as well as by bestowing perks in exchange for desired behavior. Their method for exacting compliance often devolved, however, into psychological or physical punishment.41 In cities with infrastructural support for slaveholder dominance, an owner could tell himself he was kind to his owned man while “send[ing] him to the jail with orders to have him whipped so many times a day for a certain number of days,” as Emily Burke put it in a letter.42 Just as God reigned over his creation with the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell, the white male father figure governed the dependent inhabitants of his household. In addition to being culturally familiar to the many South Carolina elites who borrowed the cultural practices of British high society, the ethos of paternalism legitimized slavery by suggesting that the slave order was organic and right.

  White women, white children, Black and Indigenous enslaved people, free people of color, and even white men without independent financial means were therefore subject to the direction of well-heeled men at the to
p of the social ladder in Charleston and the Lowcountry South. Elite white women benefited from this social structure even as they paid a dear price to live within it. Trading autonomy for bodily protection, personal comforts, and elevation to the respected pedestal of southern “lady,” wealthy white women often consented to this order through silent acquiescence and active reinforcement of racial lines.43 During her ten years in Savannah and on nearby plantations, Emily Burke recounted a series of abuses carried out by women slaveholders. She described, for instance, the beating death of a twelve-year-old Black boy who fell asleep while caring for a white baby, thereby allowing his face to touch the child’s. The mistress, “enraged” when happening upon the boy dozing with the infant in arms, “gave him such a beating as he deserved at such an outrage.” A few weeks passed before the boy died, and, as Burke reported, “by his death his master lost five hundred dollars.”44

  Enslaved women saw through this contradictory social arrangement that allowed white enslavers to claim beneficence, decrying in oral and written narratives the emotional cruelties and physical acts of violence encouraged by a system in which a subset of the population dictated the terms of most others’ lives. Harriet Jacobs described southern slave society as “a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and it makes the wives wretched. And as for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation.”45 Rose may have agreed with Harriet about the interpersonal rot endemic in a society built on slavery. Rose may have thought a great many things about her condition and the state of her social world that we cannot quite access.