by Tiya Miles
Being yanked by shaking limb into the void of parental separation was “crushing” for the young Elizabeth Keckley. After experiencing it, and in recalling the hollow moment, Keckley’s mind sought solace in the relief of death. It is possible that forced separation of the still living was worse in its toll on the spirit than actual death, which at least allows for psychological closure.41 Memories of being sold away burned holes into the psyches of unfree children. They could recount the chilling details of these episodes—the sights, smells, and feelings of terror—long into elderhood. For Louisa Picquet, the enslaved woman from South Carolina who moved to Ohio after her owner freed her upon his death, the moment of her sale away from her mother and brother never faded in intensity. When asked by an interviewer, “It seems like a dream, don’t it?,” Picquet replied, “No; it seems fresh in my memory when I think of it—no longer than yesterday. Mother was right on her knees, with hands up, prayin’ to the Lord for me….I often thought her prayers followed me, for I never could forget her.”42
The only kind of love an enslaved child could know was laced with despair, and this they learned early from their parents. Fanny Kemble, the English actress who married into a Georgia planter family, also noticed how loss colored enslaved people’s affect. “I have observed this pathetic expression of countenance in them, a mixture of sadness and fear,” Kemble penned. “The involuntary exhibition of the two feelings, which I suppose must be the predominant experience of their whole lives, regret and apprehension, not the less heavy, either of them, for being, in some degree, vague and indefinite—a sense of incalculable past loss and injury, and a dread of incalculable future loss and injury.”43 Children held captive to slavery suspected that loss and inordinate grief would come for them in ways they could not predict. These little children, like their mothers, dwelled in a state of crushing uncertainty. They overheard parents, grandparents, and adoptive loved ones fretting and fearing visits from body snatchers whose actions were legal. Starting around the age of ten, when the thin veneer of maturity dawns, a child began to understand what she was to slave society: “a person with a price.”44
Finding herself on the auction block of the private parlor or public street, a child strove to withstand assaults to bodily privacy and human dignity. But this was impossible for children—boys as well as girls—as they heard themselves and people like them, including loved ones, referred to by animalistic and pejorative names: “bucks,” “wenches,” “breeders,” or “fancies.” For Black women and girls, this virulent form of degradation meant routine exposure to violation, as shoppers touched the private parts of women’s bodies and had license to take them behind curtains or into private rooms to “inspect” the “goods” more closely. Buyers also had the option to take women off-site for trial-period test runs, even as the traders who procured, stored, polished, and displayed enslaved girls and women had access to their captive bodies at all points along the way of the chain of sale.45
Ashley would be here, among these girls and women auctioned as things even as they were subject to the most human of bodily abuses. She may have been transferred to other hands inside a private home in the country or sold to a trader who would transport her miles west on foot. But it is more likely that Ashley suffered examination and sale in the city of Charleston, a two-to-three-day journey from Milberry Place.46 Hawkers and purveyors of people in Charleston conducted sales on the street outside of the Old Exchange Building (or Customs House) until 1856, when a city code required them to move indoors for the sake of propriety. This regulation led to the establishment in 1859 of Ryan’s Mart, an enclosed slave sale showroom with jail-like pens out back (preserved today as the Old Slave Mart Museum on Chalmers Street).47 Adam Hodgson, the English traveler, was one witness among several to describe the sight of a Charleston slave auction:
Turning from a fashionable promenade, enlivened by gay parties and glittering equipages, I came suddenly in sight of at least 80 or 100 Negroes sitting on a large heap of paving stones….Several merchants and planters were walking about, examining the unhappy creatures who were to be offered for sale. A poor woman, apparently about 29 years of age, with a child at her breast, her two little boys, from four to six years old, and her little girl, about eight, composed the first lot.48
At the end of his lengthy description, which continues beyond this heartbreaking moment, Hodgson castigates the domestic trade in people.
Ashley was not alone in this grueling passage on the block, but, even surrounded by others who shared her circumstances, she must have been emotionally isolated. We might picture her clutching a grimy cotton sack with all her mother had to give stowed away inside its folds. She might even have used that swath of cloth as a shield from probing stares, like a teenaged girl named Adeline, also sold in South Carolina, on the steps of the Columbia courthouse. Described by an eyewitness as possessing a “pleasing countenance” and holding a “light-colored, blue eyed, curly-silked-haried [sic] child,” Adeline was dressed in a hooded cloak, which she struggled to keep in place over her head and infant son. The auctioneer, intent on moving the sale of a girl “only 18 years old, and already…[with] a child” along, repeatedly drew down the hood to highlight Adeline’s attractions. Vulnerable and terrified under the glare of lust and greed, Adeline waged a silent contest with the auctioneer to maintain her cover. Ashley’s sack, versatile in its material makeup, could also have been used like a curtain, a means of creating physical and psychological distance between a girl and her purveyor.49 Even on the stage of the auction block, the things enslaved people could sometimes carry brought a measure of self-protection.
How could Ashley preserve an oversized sack amid the unrelenting conditions of sale and transport? The observations of onlookers and testimony of formerly enslaved people tell us that some were able to safeguard small tokens of past lives that “helped them to remember: a pair of gloves worn by a dead mother; a small blanket, split with a sister,” in the words of one prominent historian of slavery.50 For Louisa Picquet, whose story we only began to learn in a previous chapter, the moment of sale at the auction block and the years of separation from her mother were marked by the presences and absences of physical tokens. We may recall her treasured white muslin dress. In the auction room, a “gentleman buyer” was offered the opportunity to “strip” Louisa for closer inspection. He purchased her for $1,500, while a Texan bought Louisa’s mother and brother. She wanted to recover the garment, but “Mr. Williams,” her new owner, refused. As Louisa watched her mother cry and pray for “the Lord to go with her only daughter, and protect [her],” Louisa’s thoughts, disorganized by trauma, swam back to the muslin dress.
Louisa, a girl of around fourteen who had been shuttled from one sexual predator to another, reassured herself in the only way she knew how: by fixating on the white dress, still unstained by slavery, which she hoped her mother was saving to remember her by. During years of separation, Louisa’s mother repeatedly attempted to contact her daughter, penning or dictating letters, some of which made it to New Orleans, though many got waylaid in a Texas post office. In a first letter that Louisa never received but learned about years later, her mother had enclosed “a ring also a button” for “my little grandchildren,” the offspring of Louisa’s concubinage to Williams.
Just as her daughter, Louisa, had wanted her to have the dress as a keepsake, Elizabeth sought to knit a connection with grandchildren she had never met through tokens of remembrance. Realizing that her daughter was installed as the “housekeeper” in Williams’s home and may have had a degree of influence, Elizabeth begged Louisa to provide her with the small comforts of tea and sugar, and to convince Mr. Williams to buy her and her son so the family could be together. In a letter dated 1859, Louisa’s mother relates a heartbreaking offer of what her master will take for her: “Col. Horton would let you have me for 1000 dol. or a woman that could fill my place….I think you can change his Price by writing Kin
dly to him aske him in a kind manner to let you have me for less.” The recognition of self as a commodity and the devaluation of one’s worth is nearly unbearable in this passage. We feel, again, in this exchange between parent and child the unspeakability of slavery’s humiliations and corrupted relationships. Worse, Louisa did not possess the wherewithal to help her desperate mother. Louisa’s owner was not rich. He lived in a rented house and had borrowed money from his brother to buy her. “My feelings on this subject are in Expressible,” Louisa’s mother wrote in her appeal to be purchased. “I would giv this world to see you and my sweet little children.”51
Louisa Picquet carried the memory of her mother with her through two decades of sexual slavery, during which time her master, with whom she had four children, threatened to kill her if she tried to escape. Louisa prayed that Williams would die, and eventually he did. But a master’s death, though long desired, brought instability. Barely escaping Williams’s brother’s attempt to claim her, Louisa moved north and immediately launched a search for her mother. She took out an advertisement in the Cincinnati Daily Gazette newspaper, published her as-told-to memoir, delivered speeches across the region, and begged donations from churches and anti-slavery organizations. In the fall of 1860, Louisa succeeded in freeing her aged mother with the $900 she had raised. She learned, then, that her baby brother John’s slips had indeed been made “of Louisa’s pink dress bought with the half-dollars.” The white muslin dress with the pink floral print had been taken up by her mother’s hand and refashioned for new use as a keeper of memories. Twined with a mother’s love, the fabric of kinship sustained the wear and tear of slavery’s assault.52
Ashley would not be like Louisa in finding and holding her mother again, but she did manage to hold on to an object as special as Louisa’s dress. Ashley’s sack—her emergency pack, her cloak, and cover, and shield of dignity—was also her memory stone in the trying times to come. She had in it an heirloom, property of her own, a thing nested with still more things and unfathomable uses. In her possession of this item, she shared a link not only with other enslaved people but also with American women regardless of race, since women rarely had rights to land until the twentieth century. “Movables formed the core of a female inheritance,” wrote one eminent gender historian. “Women too used property to assert identities, build alliances, and reweave family bonds.”53
Ashley carried the bag and, we can presume, most of its contents into the Carolina interior, where slaveholders (rice planters’ sons, yeoman farmers, and new-money merchants seeking to make fortunes) were migrating from the coastline. There, in the uplands of Carolina and Georgia, planters and farmers started anew with land clearance and town-building projects, establishing plantations, mills, and eventually a railroad (in 1833) that would transport cotton back to the port city of Charleston. What began as a hinterland to coastal elites had exploded into a boom zone by the early 1800s.54 Like the coastal world it grew out of, this society held slavery and agriculture at its center. The “Midlands,” a swath of inland cotton plantations separated by vast acreages, was to be the place where Ashley matured and later had a family. Because her child and grandchild that we know of from the sack lived in Columbia, South Carolina, after the Civil War, we can assume that Ashley was sold to a plantation in the same region that also housed Milberry Place.55 Her descendants lived in this inner zone of rural Cotton Belt South Carolina until the unpredictable wave of the first Great Migration carried Ruth Middleton northward to Philadelphia.
Ashley was sold not far from the world she had known as a young child. The fast-running rivers, the remaining stands of “magnificent” pines and the scarred soil where they used to grow, and the acres of ghostly white-blossomed cotton might have been hauntingly familiar.56 She might have at first remained fairly close to her mother in terms of physical distance. But Rose may have been sold herself soon after Robert Martin’s death. Between 1853 and 1857, a woman named Rose passed away in a Charleston slave pen owned by Thomas Gadsden, a man to whom Milberry Martin had sold land. Robert Martin himself had done business with Thomas Gadsden in the past, purchasing from him a woman named Betty and her four children in 1851.57 It is not a stretch to wonder if, in a flurry of private property sales amid a regional slave-trade boom, Milberry Serena Martin requisitioned Rose into the hands of her family’s associate, a known slave dealer.
The scenes of forced parting that shadow slave narratives are difficult for us to absorb as twenty-first-century readers. Vivid descriptions of fathers begging and mothers wailing as children cried out for rescue are almost too much for us to bear, even with the distance of time, which operates as our emotional shield. Although we might like to believe that slaveholders and slave traders strove to keep families intact, this was not universally, or even usually, the case. Children and teenagers, whose monetary values were boosted by youth and strength, were often sold singly between the peak years of the antebellum era. Because states like Louisiana and Alabama forbade the sale of individual children under ten, many more children than seems credible were listed as ten to twelve years of age in slave traders’ business records.58 In a culture devoid of moral values and in which they were financial assets, children like Ashley were hand-selected for victimization.
If we can hardly contend with the enormity of despair that characterized these thousands of partings, how would a child cope with the sudden loss of family? In our modern era, the experience of another class of severed children offers heart-wrenching insight. In 2018, the U.S. federal administration began arresting and incarcerating undocumented immigrants at the southern border. The policy called for detention of parents and children in different facilities—in many cases, in human cages—forcing their separation for weeks and months at a time. In some instances, our government deported parents while assigning children to foster care indefinitely. According to clinical psychologists who work with these children and research psychologists who assess collected data on their condition, separation severely impacts migrant youth, many of whom are members of families seeking political asylum from harm previously experienced in Latin American nations. The research, detailed in the American Psychological Association’s public appeals to end this governmental policy, demonstrated an intensification of fear, a feeling of helplessness, and a sense of endangerment among these youths. Children taken away from their parents experienced increased symptoms of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder, enduring mental health effects “on par with beating and torture.” The psychological well-being of these already fragile children shatters when they are deprived of parental care, requiring the understanding and intervention of behavioral health specialists and educators over a long term.59
As a girl born to live in perpetual captivity and then torn away from her mother a century and a half ago, Ashley shared, to a certain extent, the condition of a present-day migrant child seeking asylum. The state from which she came was one of extreme threat, and parental separation would only deepen her pain and terror. How could a child—how could so many children caught in the jaws of slavery’s expansion—survive this ordeal of truncation? Where could a girl like Ashley turn for affirmation that life was worth living? We should not disillusion ourselves with the notion that full recovery was ever possible, or the idea that enslaved people did not carry psychic scars. But we can hope that in the wake of this severing, Ashley found in her mother’s sack a kind of sanctuary.
“Told her,” Ruth stitched onto the bag seventy years after the breach, “It be filled with my Love always. She never saw her again.”
ASHLEY’S SEEDS
Real progress is growth. It must begin in the seed.
—Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South, 1892
For over 200 years we were told where to live and where to work. We were given husbands, and we made children, and all these things could be taken away from us. The only real comfort came at the end of the day, when
we took either the food that we were given, or the food that we raised, or the food that we had caught, and we put it in the pot, and we sat with our own kind and talked and sang and ate.
—Ruth Gaskins, A Good Heart and a Light Hand: Ruth L. Gaskins’ Collection of Traditional Negro Recipes, 1968
Those who love us never leave us alone with our grief.
—Alice Walker, Foreword, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” 2018
Did Ashley know when her mother was loosed from the earth’s moorings, carried off to some unknown realm of spirit and light? Maybe she felt the shift inside her soul, the way some sense that a storm is coming. But Rose, whose actions demonstrate a planful nature, had not left her child to survive a world of cold captivity alone. She must have believed that whether she lived to see Ashley again or died before the two of them could be reunited, the things she packed would aid and comfort her daughter for some time to come. Rose imagined Ashley, or even a multigenerational family line, continuing beyond the breach that occurred in 1853–54. Propelled by what Black feminist theorists Stanlie James and Abena Busia call a “visionary pragmatism,” and in order to protect this radical vision of life sustained, Rose did something familiar to many mothers. She bundled extra food—and not just any food—into her care package.1 The edible items she tucked inside bore out a dictum known to anyone enslaved: survival is rooted in the land.2 Although Rose had no choice but to let Ashley go when their owners willed it, she released her child creatively provisioned with natural and cultural resources that seem to have made a difference—perhaps all the difference—in Ashley’s capacity for resilience.