by Tiya Miles
At a distance of nearly two hundred years, we can recognize, though, that Rose had a mind of her own, whether or not she masked those views when interacting with her owners. We can see that she was smart and sensitive to the needs of others. She was also resourceful, with an admirable ability to acquire things and address problems. She was, beyond that, courageous, given her willingness to engage in activities that could have resulted in harsh punishment. All of this is apparent in Rose’s actions as recorded by Ruth on the sack and hinted at, perhaps and in part, by the high valuation assigned to her in the Martins’ estate papers. Even her owners and their legal proxies seemed to attest to Rose’s talents, though they did so in the language of market value.
With no protection of the law, no recompense or regard, no permissible route to fulfillment of her own inner purpose, this Rose in our imagination strips the sheets and scrubs the floorboards, sews the hems of the slaves’ work pants and fastens the back of the mistress’s corset, stirs the soup in the silver tureen or empties the urine from the porcelain pot rotten with the stench of an enslaver’s waste. As one of two young adult Black women in the household, Rose would have had to juggle these and manifold other demanding duties, serving as a Jill of most trades. She may have washed china and silver salt spoons, cleansed wool blankets and cotton sheeting, dusted tables and writing desks, polished banisters and railings, buffed floors and beaten carpets, laundered and ironed an array of apparel, and made food spills, mud stains, and bodily accidents fade from all of these surfaces, day in and day out. She would have served cups of tea and plates of cake, presenting heavy, ornate trays and whisking them away again. If she also worked as a waiting maid or a children’s “nurse,” she would have helped her mistress to bathe in water that she had hauled and warmed at the fire and then to dress in taffeta that rustled like the sound of paper money fanned out. She may have tended to the feeding and toileting, watching and chasing, and fresh-air gathering of the four Martin children—two boys and two girls—living in the house in 1840.46 She may have gazed at those pampered little ones and hoped for, and feared for, a child of her own. When Rose did become pregnant, she stood at the cusp of a transformation that would reorient her world of captivity. She would gain someone to love fiercely but under the constant shadow of loss that was the lot of the person deemed chattel slave.
Rose entered motherhood in the 1840s, probably 1844. This date is measured by Ashley’s age (nine) at the time of her sale as inscribed on the sack paired with the year (1852–53) that both women entered the documentary record in Martin’s estate inventory, an owner’s death being a time common in the lives of the enslaved when familial separations occurred. Rose was probably twenty-six in 1844, young in our day, but no babe in the woods of America’s nineteenth-century South. She was old enough by more than a decade to have been exposed, in Charleston or elsewhere (for we do not know where she was born), to the sexual travails enslaved Black women regularly faced in a culture where rape was never considered a crime against their persons.47 No record reveals the paternity of the child, Ashley, who probably was not Rose’s first, given that enslaved Black girls usually had a first child at age nineteen.48
Martin’s household included two enslaved males between the ages of ten and twenty-three and one enslaved man between twenty-four and thirty-five in the 1840s. Any of them might have fathered a baby with Rose. One of them, too, may have been Rose’s husband, though this is unlikely. Enslaved Black women in Charleston were less frequently wedded than free women of color and white women, due to the necessity of obtaining an owner’s permission, the lack of legal recognition for conjugal unions between unfree individuals, and the frequent forced separation of couples. Robert Martin could also have fathered Rose’s child, a reality we cannot ignore, especially when peering into the shadow spaces of the slaveholding home, where decades of scholarship have proven sexual predation a common occurrence. Rose may have felt similarly to Harriet Jacobs, who wrote obliquely of her master’s sexual abuse: “I cannot tell how much I suffered in the presence of these wrongs, nor how I am still pained by the retrospect.”49
Censuses scheduled a decade apart notating Black members of the Martins’ Charleston residence do not allow us to pinpoint Ashley’s paternity or her birth date within the decade of the 1840s. We can surmise, though, that by the time of Robert Martin’s death, in December 1852, Ashley had been transferred to his cotton plantation, since her name surfaces on the plantation’s separate estate inventory. It was common practice for planters in South Carolina to move enslaved people around their properties without compunction, in service of labor needs, or as an act of punishment, or as a means of psychological control. Martin may have shifted Ashley or any of his town slaves to the country as it suited his or his wife’s inclinations. We can imagine a situation in which Milberry Martin may have sorely wished to see a brown baby girl born into her Charleston townhome (around the same year as her own youngest daughter and namesake was also born) swiftly relocated.
While this is supposition in this specific case, primary and secondary evidence back up a picture of vindictive behavior on the part of mistresses whose husbands strayed with female slaves. In all likelihood, Rose was separated from her daughter when Ashley was younger than nine, but Rose may have been sent to the Martins’ cotton plantation to work for short stints. It was typical for the Charleston elite to spend the winter social season in town, reside on their plantations during warmer months, and vacation in the hills, mountains, and cities farther north during the sweltering summertime. They would have brought along close domestic staff on whom they depended, and these enslaved personal servants likely also had familial or social ties on plantations in the country.50 The Martins probably took Rose—a valued servant, given her price—to Milberry Place Plantation for seasonal jaunts. Perhaps Rose had chances to watch over Ashley there, giving the girl hearth-baked bread or salvaged strips of pretty ribbon, and wishing she possessed the power to free her child from the invisible prison that she knew with a painful intimacy, and that would, with time, slam shut unyielding bars between them.
* * *
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The odds that a mother and daughter separated by slavery would ever find each other again were scant. The odds that we have identified Ruth’s great-grandmother Rose among the records and buildings of South Carolina are surer but not absolute. In that hazy space between “probably” and “certainly” lies a discomfiting gap. Our desire to know falls headlong into the holes of the record. It is a worthwhile practice, then, to learn the language absences speak and build the skill of valuing what has previously been voided. For here, in the space of loss and longing that the enslaved knew too well, we can choose an “abundant” approach to history, resisting the default in which historical gaps feed contemporary forgetfulness.51
Who was Rose? We know at least this: Rose refused to submit to the lie that said she had no right to love her daughter. Instead, she claimed her child, sought to shield Ashley, and provided a priceless inheritance, which she folded into a sack. Rose’s radical stance, obfuscated in the archives, reveals to us the potential force of human will against the odds. How did an enslaved woman continue to “make generations,” birthing and bringing up babies in the face of impossible exigencies?52 How did a maligned population with no logical reason for hope carry on to keep the country’s faith in the possibility of equality? Even in its faint outlines dredged from the antebellum Charleston muck, Rose’s story begins to show the ways.
Skip Notes
* Charleston is the only American city that required slaveholders to purchase badges. These badges, meant to be worn visibly on the body, displayed an enslaved person’s occupation and announced the master’s permission for that person to be mobile for the named work and even to live in a separate, independent household while carrying out the work. Example occupations found on preserved badges include servant, mechanic, porter, and huckster (seller of f
ruit). In 1840–50, the city of Charleston regularly sold some 3,700 to 4,100 badges per year to enslavers who wished to hire out the people they owned.
PACKING THE SACK
In the diaspora, most black people’s relationship to love has been shaped by the trauma of abandonment.
—bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love, 2001
The captive person developed, time and again, certain ethical and sentimental features that tied her and him across the landscape to others, often sold from hand to hand, of the same and different blood in a common fabric of memory and inspiration. We might choose to call this connectedness “family.”
—Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” 1987
When did Rose know? Did a sense of dread descend on her in the Charlotte Street manor house when she learned, through the wails of Milberry Martin or the murmurs of Cicero, Jack, or David, that Robert Martin, the man who owned her, had breathed his last? Did a shadow fall across her mind on the day of his interment in Magnolia Cemetery, a burying ground for Charleston’s elite?1 Did Rose’s thoughts whirl wildly to her daughter, situated far away at remote Milberry Place Plantation? Did she think about how hard it was to raise a child to nine years old, the age before which many unfree children died of sickness?2 Did she begin, at that moment, a countdown to the inevitable? Did she plan, in that instant, to fight back with love?
A condition described as “brain disease” had taken the life of Robert Martin, as assessed by a Dr. Bellinger and recorded by a city clerk, between December 12 and 18 of the year 1852.3 Martin died within two decades of his ascent to the planter elite. His demise would have grave consequences not only for his family but also for the Black families he and Milberry owned, whose fate was tied up with the lives of their captors. When an owner died and his or her estate was reorganized, liquidated, or apportioned out to heirs, enslaved people suffered. Like ancient slaves for whom burial alongside precious goods with deceased pharaohs and priestly chiefs was customary, modern slaves of the American South in the mid-nineteenth century could expect a kind of death with their masters’ earthly departures. They were made dead to one another through quick sales and forced separations that could lead to relocation deep within the cotton South. Wise to these realities, Rose would certainly have wondered what fresh evils Robert Martin’s passing portended for those she knew and loved.
Surely Rose had witnessed the coffles of forlorn men, women, and children, gliding like ghosts to and from the Old Exchange Building, which served as an outdoor slave mall. These dark human trains of the shackled and surveilled moved across southern roads with increasing frequency in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s as cotton plantations spread westward. White men on horseback with whips and guns guarded the valuable cargo. Along the way, these middlemen of the domestic trade took sexual advantage of vulnerable girls and women, vended people to eager buyers, and transported the suits of new clothes that the prisoners would be forced to wear once they reached the selling floor of a market flying the customary red flag that advertised the peculiar nature of its merchandise.4 A formerly enslaved man from Tennessee who had been sold four times across three states described the dreaded coffle: “We had to travel a good deal of the distance on foot….The women, they put them in the wagon and carried them, but the men had to walk…and you could see the women crying about their babies and children they had left.”5 Some unwilling migrants who came through Charleston, strangers to Rose from distant parts, would have lugged grimy “tow sacks” on backs welted like wounded trees.6 In the surge of forced migration that delivered tens of thousands from the Upper South and the coastal zone to the interior southwest stretching from Alabama to Missouri during the post-1820s cotton boom, enslaved people carried these rough-hewn bags to their next places of incarceration. As one formerly enslaved man from Virginia remembered: “They sold slaves here and everywhere. I’ve seen droves of Negroes brought in here on foot going South to be sold. Each one of them had an old tow sack on his back with everything he’s got in it.”7 Perhaps Rose had traveled in a coffle herself before falling into Robert and Milberry’s possession. At the very least, she would have heard of this bipedal transit system and been familiar with the sights, smells, and sounds of its cruelties.
Is this how Rose seized upon the thought of the bag? Did she picture herself or her daughter marching in melancholy step to the sound of chains clinking across the Carolina swamps and pine forests like so many others? Or did Rose prepare her bundle weeks or months in advance, in expectation of emergency? Considering Rose’s consciousness, her tangle of thoughts and knots of emotion in the winter of 1852, leads us into the unmapped territory of the slave mother’s mind. What was this place like, the inner psychic universe of mothers to the unfree-born? Where were the borders of this place? What were its dominant seasons and colors? Did it ever see the warm touch of a sun? Survivors and witnesses of slavery tell us that if we were able to enter that land, we would find ourselves wading through desert sands of “grief and dread.”8
“Edward Stone’s Coffle Gang.” From J. Winston Coleman, Slavery Times in Kentucky (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940). Note the sacks carried by the enslaved women in the middle of this group of people being marched to a place of sale. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47dc-9fb2-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.
Here, in this country of grief where the danger of separation loomed so large, we can imagine that residents always kept a bag packed, whether physically or psychically. When Rose prepped an emergency kit for her daughter, she packed for persistence in the face of “incapacitating uncertainty,” the common lot of unfree people then—and, increasingly, of many people in our present moment of extreme political and climate disruption.9 Rose would have known this state of instability as the only constant in her life. Yet she found the inner strength to meet a measureless threat with thoughtful action.10 In this determination to act, Rose represents a population that “exercised a degree of courage and will to survive that startles the imagination even now,” in the words of the Black feminist theorist Hortense Spillers.11 Out of the shadows Rose would emerge, bearing the sack as a lifeline and staking a claim for her family’s continuance amid and despite unrelenting change.
“Slave Trader, Sold to Tennessee.” From Lewis Miller, Sketchbook of Landscapes in the State of Virginia, 1853–1867. Note the enslaved men carrying sacks on a stick and over the back toward the front of the line. Courtesy of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia; slide 84-896c.
A SADDER LOVE
We know, from the words they have left behind in narratives and letters, that slave mothers lived in a shadowland of constant, scathingly rational fear. This state of being bred a special brand of resourcefulness. Harriet Jacobs, who had a child with a wealthy white man, “Mr. Sands,” from her North Carolina town, as a form of self-protection from the sexual predation of her owner, “Dr. Flint,” tells us and her nineteenth-century readers that motherhood brought with it “a mixture of love and pain.” “[From the moment] my children were first laid in my arms,” Jacobs disclosed, “there I had watched over them, each day with a deeper and sadder love.” Jacobs was so distraught that her infant son existed as movable property with no surname to speak of that she prayed for the newborn’s premature death. But when her son actually became ill, she desperately sought a reprieve from God, begging for the child to be spared. “Alas what mockery it is for a slave mother to try to pray back her dying child to life!” Jacobs bemoaned. “Death is better than slavery.” After Jacobs gave birth to a daughter fathered by Sands, she expressed even greater dismay: “When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, the
y have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own.”
To save her children from plantation slavery, a fate promised by Flint since she had refused concubinage, Jacobs ran away. She hid in the attic crawl space of her free grandmother’s attached shed, meanwhile convincing the father of her children to buy them in the hope of securing their freedom. Jacobs remained in her hiding place for nearly seven years. The space was barely larger than a coffin. Jacobs could not even stand at full height within it. But she could thwart her master’s efforts to control her life, and she could watch over her children through a hole she’d bored in the attic wall. Outwitting her owner, Jacobs made it north to Philadelphia, then New York, and, after a series of twists, aided her children’s release from the family of their father. Her wily plan to secure her family’s freedom proved successful, and her story is a stunning example of the creative extremes to which enslaved mothers went to fight a system that corrupted the bonds of kinship. But Harriet Jacobs was lucky. Even brilliant escape plots usually failed. The South was a society organized around controlling Black movement, and the North and Midwest were enlisted, by federal law, to aid in the capture of runaways.12
The specific variety of fear that drove Harriet Jacobs to heights of acuity, cunning, and self-sacrifice bloomed like invasive algae among slave mothers. From the scraps of documentary evidence attesting to their desperate acts, we learn that “the enslaved mother spent her entire life fearing the separation, sale, beatings, and deaths of her children.”13 Knowing the likelihood that their offspring would be torn from them, unfree Black mothers went to extreme lengths to prevent the ruin of what the character Sethe in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved called their “best things,” at the hands of another.14 Enslavers were legendary among the unfree for selling children while a parent slept or carried out an assigned errand. Upon suspecting or hearing about the coming sale of their children, Black women screamed and cried, fell to their knees and begged, ran with their babes into the woods to try to hide them, endured kicks and lashing whips as they clung to their little ones on the precipice between trader’s bid and master’s handshake. Enslaved mothers planned and plotted to avoid such wrenching pain to themselves and untold peril to their offspring.