by Tiya Miles
50. Marise Bachand, “A Season in Town: Plantation Women and the Urban South, 1790–1877” (PhD diss., University of Western Ontario, 2011), 28. The letters by women in the Best and Hext families of Aiken, S.C., include numerous examples of this regular travel between Charleston and rural farm and plantation country for seasonal respites, shopping, and social occasions; Best and Hext Family Papers, Manuscripts Annex Box 1, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina. Burke, Pleasure and Pain, 73. Although rural and urban zones were distant in a society dependent on horse-drawn conveyances, they were integrally linked by the movement of capital, people, and animals. As Edda Fields-Black has shown, relational networks connected enslaved people across the coast and the interior of the South Carolina and Georgia region. Edda L. Fields-Black, “Lowcountry Creoles: Coastal Georgia and South Carolina Environments and the Making of the Gullah Geechee,” in Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture: Environmental Histories of the Georgia Coast, ed. Paul S. Sutter and Paul M. Pressly (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018), 141.
51. Here I borrow from notions of “abundant histories” and “symbolic truths” articulated by Walter Johnson, who points to truths that are recognizable even as they “exceed the facts of events that entered the historical record.” Johnson cites his readings of scholars of divinity—Robert Orsi and Amy Hollywood—for his adoption of this idea. Walter Johnson, “Haunted by Slavery,” in Goodness and the Literary Imagination, ed. Davíd Carrasco, Stephanie Paulsell, and Mara Willard (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2019), 32, 34.
52. This evocative phrasing comes from the novelist Gayl Jones and her classic fictional work on women in slavery; I will return to it periodically throughout this book. Gayl Jones, Corregidora (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), 10, 22, 41, 90.
Chapter 3: Packing the Sack
1. Magnolia Cemetery, Lot 584 Old, Purchased 1854 -P/C F-23 March 31, 1955, by R. M. Means Trustee, Mrs. Milberry Serena Martin. Magnolia Ledger Sheet provided by Magnolia superintendent Beverly Donald to researcher Jesse Bustos-Nelson, January 2020. This grave plot diagram dates Robert Martin’s death as December 12, 1852, at age sixty-two. His wife, Milberry Serena Martin, is buried next to him, with her death noted as February 2, 1877, at age sixty-nine. Other members of the Martin, Aiken, Means, and Barnwell families are buried around the Martin grave. Robert Martin (1791–1852), Find a Grave memorial, findagrave.com/memorial/69820867/robert-martin.
2. Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (1995; repr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 59.
3. Return of Deaths within the City of Charleston, from the 12th to 18th December 1852, South Carolina Death Records, South Carolina Data Collections, Ancestry.com.
4. Edward Ball describes what he terms “the slave trail of tears” in detail, using, in the main, letters written to and from Virginia and Tennessee slave dealers. He also describes revealing interactions with descendants of dealers and the people once traded by them. He notes multiple times the attention paid to providing enslaved people with new clothing as part of their packaging for sale. He notes, as well, that Brooks Brothers was known for providing dressy clothing for enslaved people in high-level servant positions, such as coach drivers. Edward Ball, “Retracing Slavery’s Trail of Tears,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 2015.
5. Ophelia Settle Egypt et al., Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Accounts of Negro Ex-Slaves (Nashville, Tenn.: Fisk University, 1968), 41.
6. Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic, 2014), xxi.
7. Quoted in Baptist, The Half, xxi.
8. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio,” in A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader, ed. Frances Smith Foster (New York: Feminist Press, 1990), 84–86.
9. “Incapacitating uncertainty”: Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2008), 131. Faust uses this phrase to capture the social and cultural volatility that resulted from the Civil War and the common experience of widespread death and change. I use it to suggest that this was the state of the enslaved mother’s existence.
10. Nell Painter has argued that familial support and religious beliefs were the two means by which Black people survived the psychological and physical damage of enslavement. Nell Irvin Painter, “Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting,” in U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 139–40.
11. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81, 74.
12. Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 139, 62, 77.
13. Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), 28, 30.
14. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), 272.
15. Moses Grandy, “Life of Moses Grandy,” in North Carolina Slave Narratives: The Lives of Moses Roper, Lunsford Lane, Moses Grandy, and Thomas H. Jones, ed. William L. Andrews (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 159. Also cited in Berry, The Price, 27–28.
16. Mary White Ovington in John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 537.
17. Egypt, Unwritten History, 145. “Puss” was a nickname for this elder daughter bestowed by her mother, Fannie. Puss was also called Cornelia. Egypt, Unwritten History, 143.
18. For a biography of Margaret Garner, see Nikki M. Taylor, Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016). Garner was the model for Toni Morrison’s character Sethe in Beloved.
19. This sold sister’s name was Ellen. Egypt, Unwritten History, 53.
20. Lewis Hayden in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 696. Hayden says he was seven or eight when his mother accosted him.
21. Egypt, Unwritten History, 99–100.
22. Egypt, Unwritten History, 143.
23. Nell Irvin Painter addresses the psychological damage of slavery and enslaved parents’ beating of Black children to acclimate them to slavery. Painter, “Soul Murder and Slavery,” 133, 141. For more on religion as support, consolation, and resistance, see Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (1978; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 310–11. Erskine Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in Antebellum Georgia and the Carolina Low Country (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000), xxvii.
24. “Rescue their families”: Verena Theile and Marie Drews, “Introduction: African American and Afro-Caribbean Women Writers: Writing, Remembering, and ‘Being Human in the World,’ ” in Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History: African American and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature in the Twentieth Century, ed. Verena Theile and Marie Drews (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), xviii.
25. Charles Whiteside in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 597–98.
26. In a circumstance of dread and fear, Harriet Jacobs refers to her children as “ties” and “links” to life. Jacobs, Incidents, 58, 76.
27. For a history and analysis of reproductive slavery, see Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
28. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston (Chapel Hill: Universit
y of North Carolina Press, 2011), 51.
29. Agent John William De Forest quoted by Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 146.
30. Vilet Lester letter to Miss Patsey Patterson, August 29, 1857, Bullock County, Georgia, Joseph Allred Papers, Special Collections Library, Duke University, scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/lester/.
31. Vilet Lester letter to Miss Patsey Patterson, August 29, 1857. The historian Jessica Milward writes that “enslaved women existed in a constant state of mourning,” resulting in a field of Black women’s history that has also been characterized by the study—and felt impact—of this emotion. Jessica Milward, “Black Women’s History and the Labor of Mourning,” Souls 18, no. 1 (2016): 161–65, 162.
32. For a discussion of the use of feeling in Indigenous feminist historical interpretive practice, see Dian Million, “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 53–76.
33. Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 54–55. Myers, Forging Freedom, 49.
34. Myers, Forging Freedom, 47, 61, 54–59.
35. Baptist, The Half, 168.
36. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 74. As David Blight wrote in an analysis of Frederick Douglass’s view of Black spirituals: “Slaves were always making their own balm in Gilead.” Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), 33, italics in original. Saidiya Hartman points to the jeopardy Black mothers faced when they engaged in acts of care and provisioning. Saidiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors,” Souls 18, no. 1 (2016): 166–73, 171.
37. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983). Blood-relations quote: Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 74.
38. Egypt, Unwritten History, 133.
39. Jane Clark, narrative recorded by Julia C. Ferris, read at the banquet of the Cayuga County Historical Society, February 22, 1897. Jane Clark escaped in 1857, reached New York in 1859, and told her story to Julia Ferris in the 1890s. I am grateful to Robin Bernstein, who uncovered this narrative, transcribed it, and shared a copy with me before later publishing it in Common-Place: The Journal of Early American Life. Ira Berlin describes enslaved people who had acquired property attempting to sell items or give things away to kin when they learned they would be relocated westward; Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 218. Lauren Olamina, the protagonist of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, also packs two pillowcases, “a pair of old pillowcases, one inside the other for strength,” when she must escape an attack on her town. Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York: Warner Books, 1993), 71.
40. Legal historian Laura F. Edwards makes this point about clothing, identity, and escape. She has demonstrated how women of various backgrounds and classes owned, loaned, and traded fabric as a store of wealth. Edwards, “Textiles: Popular Culture and the Law,” Buffalo Law Review 64 (2016): 199, 196, 197. Also see Laura F. Edwards, “Sarah Allingham’s Sheet and Other Lessons from Legal History,” Journal of the Early Republic 38, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 121–47. For a discussion of wardrobe changes to mask or transmute gender in escapes, see C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 55–84.
41. Mark Auslander based this intriguing interpretation, which he acknowledges is tentative, on seven interviews with Black residents from the coast. He considers Rose to have been part of a Black ethnic group extending down the ricing coast from southern North Carolina to northern Florida that retained African-derived cultural practices during slavery and in the decades following, due to its isolation. Auslander, “Rose’s Gift: Slavery, Kinship, and the Fabric of Memory,” Present Pasts 8, no. 1 (2017): 4. While African Americans in this region are often referred to generally as Gullah (associated with the Carolinas) or Geechee (associated with Georgia), this group was not as culturally coherent in the nineteenth century as contemporary understandings would suggest. For a recent study of how Gullah Geechee took shape as a cultural identity and identifier, see Edda L. Fields-Black, “Lowcountry Creoles: Coastal Georgia and South Carolina Environments and the Making of the Gullah Geechee,” in Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture: Environmental Histories of the Georgia Coast, ed. Paul S. Sutter and Paul M. Pressly (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018). Fields-Black argues that “Gullah Geechee” is a twentieth-century term that names just one example and moment of creolization experienced by Blacks on the southeastern coast, pp. 129–31, 141. Albert Raboteau writes that hair, along with fingernails and other bodily fragments, was thought to have special power in “offensive charms”; Raboteau, Slave Religion, 34. Archaeologist Maude Wahlman has suggested that hair was viewed as a powerful element in charms because “it grows near the brain, and ‘a hand made of hair can sure effect the brain’ ”; Maude Southwell Wahlman, “African Charm Traditions Remembered in the Arts of the Americas,” African Impact on the Material Culture of the Americas: Conference Proceedings (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, 1996), 6.
42. Yvonne P. Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), Kindle loc. 826. Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 102, 104, 105. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 276, 278.
43. Chireau, Black Magic, Kindle loc. 807, 817. Fett, Working Cures, 102–3. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 237–38.
44. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 33, 35, 54–55; Raboteau, Slave Religion, 29–30, 45–46, 74, 212, 243.
45. Blight, Frederick Douglass, 64. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845; repr., Google Books version), 62, 65–66. Like Douglass, Henry Bibb, a man born into slavery in Kentucky who plotted several escapes, reported the use of rootwork in enslaved communities; Bibb notes that he did not have faith in roots protecting him. Henry Bibb, The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (1850; repr., Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 26–27. Raboteau, Slave Religion, 276–77. Fett, Working Cures, 102–3. Chireau, Black Magic, Kindle loc. 826, 107.
46. “Empowerment”: Fett, Working Cures, 102.
47. James H. Sweet, Domingo Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 182. Chireau, Black Magic, Kindle loc. 807.
48. Patricia Samford, “The Archaeology of African-American Slavery and Material Culture,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 53, no. 1 (1996): 87–114, 107.
49. Fett, Working Cures, 103.
50. Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 84. Shane White and Graham White, “Slave Hair and African American Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Journal of Southern History 61, no. 1 (1995): 45–76, 49, 50, 56, 69, 71, 72, 73.
51. White and White, “Slave Hair,” 73.
52. White and White, “Slave Hair,” 60.
53. See, for instance, Noliwe M. Rooks, Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 5, 8, 9.
54. Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 42, 38–40. Also see Edward E. Baptist, “ ‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men’: Rape, Commodificati
on, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States,” American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (2001): 1619–50.
55. Jacobs, Incidents, 77.
56. Louisa Picquet, The Octoroon: A Tale of Southern Life (New York: published by the author, 1861), 17, electronic ed., Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, docsouth.unc.edu/neh/picquet/picquet.html.
57. Egypt, Unwritten History, 67.
58. Quoted in White and White, “Slave Hair,” 58, 68.
59. Egypt, Unwritten History, 1.