All That She Carried

by Tiya Miles

  Rose may have understood her movements to matter on more than one plane of being. Just as she drew on inner strength to withstand this trauma, she may have called on spiritual help to sanctify her emergency pack. Extrapolating from interviews with Black residents of coastal South Carolina and Georgia, one anthropologist who has worked closely with the sack has suggested that Rose’s packing instantiated a spiritual ritual, given that the bag resembled “regional medicinal bundles.” And Rose, he has indicated, quoting contemporary interviewees, may have been “doing something with, a blessing, something sacred, the way a rootworker would.” In this interpretation, the sack, once packed, became animated with a protective spirit through Rose’s ministrations and, especially, through the lock of her hair, which could hold special purpose in the religious practices of the enslaved.41

  The little sacks known as conjure bags populated enslaved people’s daily lives across the U.S. South, the Caribbean islands, and Latin America. Red flannel was a favorite color for these magical packets, which were often sealed with string and then worn around the neck or waist or buried near a person’s dwelling.42 Manufacturing conjure bags fell under the purview of conjurers or rootworkers, spiritual practitioners in a Black folk tradition that borrowed from African religious beliefs, particularly the Kongo culture of central Africa.43 While many enslaved Blacks accepted the Christian faith of the dominant slaveholding society in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, others rejected Christianity and upheld African-based beliefs. The majority of enslaved people engaged in religious conviction and ritual that interwove Euro-American and African traditions of faith to greater and lesser extents, praying to a Christian God or Islam’s Allah, singing biblically inspired spirituals and retelling Bible stories, while also fearing witches and turning to rootworkers in times of need.44 We know from the reports of formerly enslaved people, most famously Frederick Douglass, that medicinal and spiritual specialists produced roots stored in folded cloth or fabric bags to protect recipients from sale and beatings. The Bakongo version of these conjure bags are known as minkisi, while the American varieties are often referred to as gris-gris bags, hands, or mojos.45

  Knowledgeable, respected, and also feared, people accepted as conjurers in enslaved Black communities possessed special skills and responsibilities. Their craft involved divining information and influencing social relations through rituals that drew on the “spiritual empowerment of…objects.”46 Adherents of this faith believed that rootworkers’ packets carried magical properties to act in the world—to heal, protect, harm, or ferret out information. While there is no evidence to suggest that Rose was herself a rootworker with unique spiritual powers recognized by a community, the bag she packed does bear resemblances to items used in this magical system. Conjure bags were made of cloth. They typically included an object personal to the recipient (the person being helped or harmed)—such as a swatch from an item of clothing or, especially, a cutting of hair. The bags included natural elements like roots or vines, animal body parts, and particularly dirt from graveyards (often called “goofer dust”), which was thought to facilitate connection with ancestors. In Brazil, these African-inspired conjure bags, called mandingas, contained the kinds of natural elements described above as well as handwritten notes; in Islamic-influenced African regions, gris-gris bags also contained scraps of paper with writing.47 Among Bakongo believers, these bags could include terrestrial elements viewed as “medicines,” including “chalk, nuts, plants, soil, stones, and charcoal.”48 The items pressed into a conjure bag took on spiritual power through the ritual work of the maker, who called on the aid of external spirits or invigorated things inside the bag by eliciting the spirits within them. Words, either written or spoken, were an element of the conjurer’s practice that invigorated the conjure packet. Through ritual, the bag could come alive, in a sense, to do its intended work.

  Perhaps Rose hoped that her bag would act as a protective charm for Ashley, or as an aggressive charm against Ashley’s traders or new owners. According to Ruth’s sewn record, the sack enclosed hair, clothing, a natural element (pecans), and even spoken words. Or maybe Rose was suspicious of African-inspired magic and trusted in prayer to a Christian God. It is possible, too, that she believed in aspects of both faith traditions and doubly endowed the sack, speaking to the object itself or praying for its recipient as she completed her solemn task. We do not require a firm grasp on Rose’s religion in order to see her packing as an act of power meant to stymie the slaver’s theft of her daughter’s life and identity. Rose made an evocative thing on the day she packed the cotton sack, a thing full of potency and intention. Through the work of both heart and hands, Rose rebutted the tyranny of slavery with the force of spirit materialized.

  BINDING TIES

  Of all the things packed into Rose’s “artful composition,” hair is the most symbolically compelling.49 A reading of the sack as a protective spirit bag would suggest that a braid of Rose’s hair was meant to enliven it with Rose’s spirit. Certainly, the braid must have been meant to capture and concretize a tactile memory of Rose for her daughter, functioning like a snapshot that Ashley could hold in her hands. For Rose, the associations attached to a braid may also have been similar to the tattered dress, as an example of the care that Black women could take with themselves even as masters and mistresses sought to disparage and control them. For hair, like the clothing we will explore in the next chapter, was an arena of personal struggle with political implications for the owned and their owners.

  Black women took special care with their hair when they managed to steal time from their manual labor, but this proved an infinitely challenging task. Curly hair is more vulnerable than straight hair to the stresses caused by sun, water, sweat, and grooming, making the tight spiraling curls common to many African Americans especially delicate and fragile. Caring for this hair type requires patience, even as the flexibility of Black hair has long inspired creativity and versatility. In the central and West African regions from which enslaved Blacks were taken, community members prized intricate hairstyles formed of braids and twined tresses, which rose to the height of an art form. Black women in slavery, however, lacked the leisure time for hairdressing and did not possess the implements (picks and wide-toothed combs) best suited for grooming their particular texture of hair. They, as well as Black men, sometimes used wooden implements with metal teeth intended for carding wool (separating and elongating the fibers) on their own heads, due to a lack of grooming tools. After “combing” their hair with a carder or their fingers, Black women often wove it into cornrows braided flat against the scalp in arresting designs or into plaits that extended out from the scalp or hung to various lengths. As an alternative to braided styles, they frequently separated locks of hair into sections and wrapped each section with string or twine to keep the hair untangled or to extend their corkscrew curls into straighter tendrils.50

  Black women covered their heads with handkerchiefs or bandannas during long days out in the fields or inside hot kitchen houses. These head coverings protected the hair from dirt and exposure and often preserved the hairdressing preparations that the women had created for themselves or that had been styled for them by others on their lone day free from forced work. On Sundays, before attending church or clandestine parties, enslaved women changed out of their everyday head coverings for distinctively arranged head wraps and sometimes revealed their hair untwined and loosened.51 The African American practice of oiling the hair with grease to moisturize and further protect it (curly hair dries out more rapidly; hence the avoidance of daily washing in most Black people’s hair-care routines in our time) may have been borrowed from local Native Americans. According to the travel accounts of European explorers who observed them, members of Indigenous nations in the Southeast regularly “shined” their hair with bear grease.52 Hairdressing was for many unfree African Americans a communal endeavor that brought women (and men) together as they helped o
ne another to comb, braid, twist, or shave their hair. The sense of sociability and mutual support around hair-care activities continued past slavery into the barbershop and the beauty parlor, fixtures in Black communities even today.53

  While enslaved Black women took pride in caring for their hair when they could seize the opportunity, they also faced punishment for having hair that white slaveholders found too similar to their own in texture, length, or style. Hair on “Black” heads that seemed “white” according to a Eurocentric standard threatened to blur the exaggerated lines between the races that buttressed a hierarchical slave society. The cultural associations of hair with erotic beauty and certain types and arrangements of hair with European feminine ideals also influenced the likelihood that longer, straighter hair on Black women would attract sexual interest across the color line. Evidence culled from slaves’ narratives and testimony, white women’s diaries and letters, and descriptions of the increasing mixed-race population that emerged in early and antebellum American society points overwhelmingly to a pattern of interracial sex (often, but not always, coerced or forced) between white men and Black women of any hair type. But Black women with hair approximating a white feminine ideal and the lighter skin tone that often accompanied this characteristic were particularly sought after by white men and deemed dangerous by white women.54

  In numerous narratives and accounts of their experiences in slavery, African American women and their male relatives revisit the trauma of hair shaved or cut in acts of slaveholder retribution. Harriet Jacobs, we will recall, suffered the sexual predation of her master but chose intimacy with another white man in order to ward off her owner. When her owner discovered that Harriet was soon to have a second child with this sexual rival, he lashed out to exert control and deface her allure. “He rushed from the house, and returned with a pair of shears,” Jacobs relates. “I had a fine head of hair; and he often railed about my pride of arranging it nicely. He cut every hair close to my head, storming and swearing all the time. I replied to some of his abuse, and he struck me.”55

  Louisa Picquet experienced captivity in South Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana, sold each time to a new man with plans to hold her in sexual slavery. After gaining her freedom in the 1860s through the will of her deceased final owner, she moved to Cincinnati. One of Picquet’s owners attempted to pay her for sexual favors and left her physically scarred when she refused; he also, in retribution, kept her hair short. “Mr. Cook had my hair cut off,” Louisa explained, while telling the story of her sale and the auctioneer’s comment about her “good quality” hair, which was still visible despite the lack of length. “My hair grew fast, and look so much better than Mr. Cook’s daughter, and he fancy I had better hair than his daughter, and so he had it cut off to make a difference.”56

  In a devastating account told by an enslaved witness, a woman named Charlotte lost her life through her captor’s gruesome act of hair punishment. Charlotte “had real long hair and they cut one side of her hair off and left the other side long.” After being whipped, Charlotte was “jerked…by the hair” through a barbed-wire fence and never regained consciousness.57 Like so many acts of horrific violence that we are witnessing through the eyes of the enslaved in these pages, the teller of this story did not know why Charlotte had been singled out for such cruel treatment. Given her shorn head and the manner of her murder, sexual jealousy or sexual exposure was probably the cause.

  In Harriet’s and Louisa’s accounts, white male owners used the shears as weapons to separate and demean Black women. In most cases recalled by formerly enslaved people in interviews and narratives, however, it was the white mistress who directed that punishing blow, striking out against Black women whom they feared would attract white men in the family, or already had. One Black woman, the biracial daughter of a planter’s son, was commanded not to refer to her own hair as hair. Instead, her female owner, stressing racial difference, insisted: “Don’t say hair, say ‘wool.’ ” A formerly enslaved man described the fate of his grandmother, who possessed hair that was “fine as silk and hung down below her waist.” Due to the jealousy on the part of the mistress who observed attentions the master paid to this woman, the mistress ordered a whipping and hair shaving. “From that day on,” this interviewee remembered, “my grandma had to wear her hair shaved to the scalp.” Another “pretty mulatto girl” whose hair was “long black [and] straight” was purchased by a judge and brought back to his home. There, the judge’s wife “got the scissors and cropped that gal’s head to the skull.”58 As a signifier of past sexual relations between white men and enslaved women, long, straighter hair on Black children was also targeted by mistresses. One formerly enslaved woman, in describing how masters would impregnate the cooks in their households, remembered: “Sometimes the cook’s children favored him so much that the wife would be mean to them and make him sell them. If they had nice long hair she would cut it off and wouldn’t let them wear it long like the white children.”59

  Hair was a medium through which captors and captives fought for corporeal as well as psychological control. Since slaveholders claimed the right, by law, to the bodies of the people they owned, they sometimes sought to demonstrate that right by dictating hair length. By caring for and claiming their hair as a part of their own bodies that they should have the right to treat as they wished, enslaved Black women like Rose rejected this unjust authority and invasion of bodily privacy. Rose took this sense of self-possession even further when deciding to part with a braid of her hair, a piece of herself, by choice. When Rose clipped one of her braids for Ashley, she was passing on proof of the kind of self-regard, self-care, and mutual aid that sustained life in captivity and even sometimes brought to beleaguered souls moments of pleasure in bodily adornment.60

  By giving a gift that had once been a part of her own body, Rose also bestowed a potent reminder of her presence in Ashley’s life. For hair could function as a token of memory and social connection across the distances the slave trade created. In one such example, a formerly enslaved man in Texas wrote to his sister in Virginia after the siblings and their mother had been separated. The letter writer, Hawkins Williams, begged for a piece of his niece’s hair to remember her by: “Please send me some of Julia’s hair whom I left a baby in the cradle when I was torn away from you—I know that she is a young lady now, but I hope she will not deny her affectionate uncle this request.”61 Through the medium of her braid, Rose may have wanted to synthesize nearness and convey to her daughter a lasting memory of their emotional connection. She might have used her hair to materialize the mournful yet bracing sentiment expressed by another enslaved mother, Phebe of North Carolina, on the eve of her master’s move out of the state:

  My dear daughter—I have for some time had hope of seeing you once more in this world, but now that hope is entirely gone forever. I expect to start next month for Alabama, on the Mississippi River….If we never meet in this world, I hope we shall meet in heaven where we shall part no more. Although we are absent in body, we can be present in spirit. Then let us pray for each other, and try to hold out faithful to the end. Farewell my dear child….Farewell my dear child.62

  Phebe would leave behind not only Amy, the daughter she addressed in this letter, but also another daughter, who was pregnant and could not travel, as well as several grandchildren. Amy would probably have treasured a braid of Phebe’s hair if she sent one and if, in fact, the desperate letter ever reached her. Hair carries with it a meaningful, even mystical, valence that Phebe’s Amy and Rose’s Ashley would have felt, as it exists in an odd in-between space that defies biological or cultural categorization. Hair on the head is both dead and alive, part of a body but not a body part, and hair transgresses social space by extending out from a person’s form. Hair also resists decay, giving it the strange quality of time arrested. Hair fibers may have therefore been experienced as a special kind of material that represented the life of the giver.63


  White Victorians of Rose’s and Ashley’s era also thought that hair could bind together disjoined persons. Widespread cultural practices of the 1800s and early 1900s show that many people saw hair as a tie between loved ones separated even by the distance of death. Hairwork, the craft of fashioning hair into objects such as jewelry, buttons, or wreaths, was a product and exemplar of a nineteenth-century ethos of sentimentalism. In a custom that reached its height of popularity between the 1850s and the 1890s, members of the white upper and middle classes bestowed and saved locks of hair in remembrance of a deceased loved one or as an expression of a romantic relationship. Artists fashioned innumerable strange and wonderful trinkets out of human hair: necklaces and bracelets woven of hair with clasps made of gold and precious stones; lockets and brooches featuring miniature painted scenes in which hair was pressed in to provide color variation and texture; rings, earrings, and watch chains inset with woven hair; framed embroidery with hair used as thread. Lovers exchanged paintings of one another’s eyes adorned with hair strands and set into rings or lockets.64 Mourning jewelry (as well as wreaths fashioned of hair of the deceased and dried flowers) was the most popular use of an art form crafted to heighten and display emotion. Wearing or keeping safe the hair of a departed loved one “physically manifested that grief,” providing a constant material reminder of the emotions attached to that person (including the pain of loss).65 For members of Victorian society, hair was a sentimental material that functioned as an emotional tie or thread; the association makes sense, given that hair is itself a natural fiber with properties akin to wool and the special quality of belonging to a specific human body.