All That She Carried
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26. On place-names see King, Stolen Childhood, 49; Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 217–21. We should note that some place-names given as personal names were the work of slave owners, given the specificity of certain European cities with which enslaved people were less likely to have had a sense of aspirational connection. The Middleton Place slave lists include, for example, a Glasgow, Bristol, London, Belfast, Sheffield, and York. For more on African American naming ceremonies and theories of African connections, see Stuckey, Slave Culture, 194–98.
27. Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 78.
28. A survey of places and natural features named Ashley in the state of South Carolina yielded few results besides the Ashley River; however, it did reveal a town called Ashley in the Barnwell District (or County) where the Martins had a plantation. I do not see this town being of the size or stature that would inspire either a slave owner or a Black family member to take it as a namesake. I am grateful to my research assistant Dylan Nelson for conducting this survey.
29. Mark Auslander, “Slavery’s Traces: In Search of Ashley’s Sack,” Southern Spaces blog, November 29, 2016, southernspaces.org/2016/slaverys-traces-search-ashleys-sack, 4–5. The overseer of Milberry Place Plantation was Robert Harper; Auslander, “Slavery’s Traces,” 4.
30. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We, 51. Also see p. 54.
31. Mark Auslander first made this argument about Ashley’s possible grandparents; Auslander, “Slavery’s Traces,” 4.
32. Katherine McKittrick originated the ideas I am presenting here about the spatial nature of the auction block and the social and economic work such use of space performed. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 72, 73, 75.
33. Walter Johnson has argued the point I am borrowing here about the psychological and social dimensions of buying people, including the feeling slave buyers had that their purchases could present opportunities to act out the principles of paternalism; Johnson, Soul by Soul, 78–79, 108, 113.
34. For a study of plantation soil depletion, see Drew Swanson, A Golden Weed: Tobacco and Environment in the Piedmont South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 102–3, 107–8. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 6, 8. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 40–45. Baptist, The Half, 112–13, 116–17, 119–22.
35. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 23, 7.
36. Thomas More Downey, “Planting a Capitalist South: The Transformation of Western South Carolina, 1790–1860” (PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 2000), South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, 16–17.
37. Ruffin, quoted in Joseph P. Madden, A History of Old Barnwell District, SC, to 1860 (Blackville, S.C.: Historical Business Ventures, 2001), 11, 10 (“pine barren”), South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia. Downey, “Planting a Capitalist South,” 17.
38. James W. Gray (Master in Equity) to James Carroll, 414(1), pp. 263–64, Charleston County Register of Mesne Conveyance. Property disputes engaged in by M. Martin after R. Martin’s death: Milberry S. Martin v. James B. Campbell, Charleston District, Court of Equity Decree Books L 1092, 1858–61 pp. 64–76, 183H06. M. S. Martin v. E. W. Pettit, et al., Charleston District, Court of Equity Decree Books L 1092, 1858–61, pp. 223–27, 183H06. Mrs. M. S. Martin v. E. W. & L. F. Petit, Charleston District, Court of Equity Bills, 1858, No. 65, L10090. Milberry S. Martin, executrix of Robert Martin v. James B. Campbell, Charleston District, Court of Equity Bills, 1858, No. 65, L10090.
39. Examples of several land transactions carried out by Milberry Martin in the 1850s: Milberry Serena Martin, lessor to City Council of Charleston, lessee, July 22, 1855, Book Q13, p. 389; M. S. Martin to Jos Aiken, August 2, 1858, Book E14, p. 198; MSM to Thomas Gadsden, July 6, 1854, Book V12, p. 209; MSM to James Gadsden, March 18, 1857, Book XB, p. 158; MSM to James Doolan, June 22, 1859, Book L14, p. 23; MSM to R. G. Stone, June 3, 1854, Book L13, p. 26. Js Bee, May 19, 1854, Book HB, p. 193, Charleston County Register of Mesne Conveyance. Milberry Martin continued to conduct various transactions into the 1860s. Announcement for Barnwell plantation sale: Under Decree in Equity, Martin v. Aiken et al., Charleston Courier, February 6, 1854.
40. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 23–34.
41. The historian Heather Williams makes this argument about the psychological toll of loved ones being sold away into ambiguous futures in comparison to the finality of death; 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), 122. For a detailed account of one enslaved mother’s long-term emotional distress at separation from her children, see Sydney Nathans, To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012).
42. Picquet, The Octoroon, 18.
43. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 22. 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), 61. Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, 133.
44. Berry, The Price, 35–36. “A person with a price”: Johnson, Soul by Soul, 1, 2.
45. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 113–15; Berry, The Price, 72.
46. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 2.
47. Kytle and Roberts, Denmark Vesey’s Garden, 19, 176, 246. Robert Behre, “80 Years After Opening, Charleston’s Old Slave Mart Museum Adds New Layers of History,” Post and Courier, February 23, 2018. Edward Rothstein, “Emancipating History,” The New York Times, March 11, 2011. The open exhibition of partially nude Blacks in public was to some unseemly, especially as visitors to the state observed these scenes and published accounts that fed northern radicals’ call for abolition in the 1830s. Concerned with outward appearances, Charleston officials mandated in 1856 that slave sales be moved off the public streets.
48. Hodgson, Letters from North America, 55–58; italics in original. McInnis, Politics of Taste, 15–16.
49. Quoted in Berry, The Price, 10–11.
50. “Helped them to”: Baptist, The Half, 108–9. Pamela Newkirk, A Love No Less: More Than Two Centuries of African American Love Letters (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 9. Beads, especially in the color blue, seem to have been used to convey spiritual protection. Buttons could be used in the fashioning of rattle-like instruments out of gourds. For more on archaeological excavations that have uncovered beads and buttons in slave quarters, and on the range of spiritual and creative uses for these items, see Patricia Samford, “The Archaeology of African-American Slavery and Material Culture,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 53, no. 1 (1996): 102, 111.
51. Picquet, The Octoroon, 18, 30–31, 25.
52. Picquet, The Octoroon, 25, 23, 24, 20, 31.
53. Ulrich, Age of Homespun, 111, 133.
54. Downey, “Planting a Capitalist South,” 23–24.
55. Auslander, “Slavery’s Traces,” 6.
56. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin quoted in Madden, A History of Old Barnwell District, SC, to 1860 (Blackville, S.C.: Historical Business Ventures, 2001), 11.
57. Barnwell, S.C., Record of Deeds, Vols. AA–BB, 1842–47, Box 11, BW 18, Deed Book BB, pp. 6, 75, 136, 215, 400, South Carolina Department of Archives and History (SCDAH); Deed Book HH, pp. 183, 184, 543, 544, SCDAH. The Rose listed in Thomas Gadsden’s holdings was not explicitly tied to the Martins in the records. Thomas Gadsden’s firm was located at No. 2 Chalmers Street. The death
of an enslaved woman named Rose is listed in the City of Charleston Health Department Death Records, January 1853–December 1857, p. 40. Thomas Gadsden’s incomplete set of papers at the South Carolina Historical Society do not include a bill of sale for Ashley or Rose; however, such records could have been lost. While it is clear that Milberry Martin sold the bulk of her property in 1854, none of these transactions (as recorded in the Charleston Mesne Conveyance records and Barnwell District deeds) mention enslaved people. Thomas Gadsden, Slave Bills of Sale; Gadsden Family, Gadsden Family Papers, 1701-ca.–1955, South Carolina Historical Society, Addlestone Library. I am grateful to genealogist Jesse Bustos-Nelson, who realized the Martins’ proximity to this major slave-trading family, identified a Rose in the traders’ holdings as well as names that overlapped with other slaves formerly owned by the Martins, and arrived at the supposition that Rose was sold and died in the pen. Jesse Bustos-Nelson surmises that at thirty-five, this woman is the right age to have been the Rose we first picked out among so many others in slavery’s garden. This Rose may have been sold soon after Ashley. She might have contracted a fatal illness in the cell overcrowded with other chattel-people, or she may have been sold because she exhibited prior symptoms of smallpox, an epidemic of which swept through Charleston in 1854.
58. King, Stolen Childhood, 234–35. Ball, “Retracing Slavery’s Trail of Tears.” The documents referred to here that identify children’s ages consist mainly of ship manifests for the domestic trade that list enslaved people being transported.
59. “Statement of APA President Regarding the Traumatic Effects of Separating Immigrant Families,” press release, American Psychological Association, May 29, 2018, apa.org/news/press/releases/2018/05/separating-immigrant-families. “Immigrant Family Separations Must End, Psychologist Tells Congressional Panel,” press release, American Psychological Association, February 7, 2019, apa.org/news/press/releases/2019/02/immigrant-family-separations. “Beating and torture” quote: Heather Stringer, “Psychologists Respond to a Mental Health Crisis at the Border,” APA Monitor on Psychology (September 2018), apa.org/news/apa/2018/border-family-separation.
Chapter 6: Ashley’s Seeds
1. Stanlie M. James, “Introduction,” in Theorizing Black Feminisms, eds. Stanlie M. James and Abena P. A. Busia (London: Routledge, 1993), 4. James suggests that Black motherhood, as influenced by African cultural roots, was characterized by the qualities of “creativity and continuity.” See also, in the same volume, James, “Mothering,” 45.
2. For discussions of enslaved people and ecological resistance, see J. T. Roane, “Plotting the Black Commons,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 20, no. 3 (2019): 239–66. Tiffany Lethabo King, “Racial Ecologies: Black Landscapes in Flux,” in Racial Ecologies, ed. Leilani Nishime and Kim D. Hester Williams (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018). Tiffany Lethabo King, “The Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(ly),” Antipode, 2016.
3. I am grateful to the members of the environmental history workshop at Harvard University, who shared feedback on this chapter in the fall of 2019. In this discussion, Andy Robichaud, a professor of history at Boston University, suggested that the handfuls here sounded like a measurement for cooking. Others suggested that the pecans might have been tradeable as a nonperishable luxury items, or, if they were actually another variety of nut that included natural toxins, they might have been taken like cyanide pills.
4. David S. Shields, “The Pecan (Carya illinoinensis),” unpublished paper, shared with Tiya Miles, April 22, 2019.
5. Texas pecans were transported in barrels to the Charleston harbor and would have required smaller storage containers for carrying back to private homes. References to and quotes from antebellum Charleston menus are taken from Shields, “The Pecan (Carya illinoinensis).”
6. Shields, “The Pecan (Carya illinoinensis).”
7. The Boone Hall Avenue of the Oaks had been planted around fifteen years before the pecan cuttings, in 1843. David S. Shields, “Major John Horlbeck’s Pecan Grove at Boone Hall Plantation,” paper shared with Tiya Miles, April 22, 2019. Also published as “Going Nuts,” Charleston Magazine, October 2018, charlestonmag.com/features/going_nuts.
8. Shields, “The Pecan (Carya illinoinensis).” David Shields emphasizes that the pecan pie, famously associated with Charleston and the broader South, was not invented until the 1880s—in Texas. David S. Shields, untitled, unpublished paper on pecan pie, shared with Tiya Miles, April 22, 2019. Shields notes that his argument about the origins of the pecan pie confirmed the finding of Andrew F. Smith, stated in a Charleston lecture titled “The Pecan: A Culinary History,” February 21, 2012.
9. Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 10. Lenny Wells, Pecan: America’s Native Nut Tree (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017), 34.
10. Abner Landrum quoted in Wells, Pecan, 37.
11. Abner Landrum, “Fruit Trees,” American Farmer, February 28, 1822, 8.
12. Wells, Pecan, 37. A prototypical Renaissance man, Landrum worked in numerous fields of endeavor; he was a physician, newspaper editor, natural scientist, and artist. His innovative pottery manufacturing plant in central South Carolina made use of both enslaved and free Black labor. Abner Landrum’s nephew and pottery-manufacturing business partner, Harvey Drake, owned Dave Drake. Thomas More Downey, “Planting a Capitalist South: The Transformation of Western South Carolina, 1790–1860” (PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 2000), 147, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia. Leonard Todd, Carolina Clay: The Life and Legend of the Slave Potter Dave (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 16, 30–31, 36–37, 95, 262n14. Mark Newell, “Lives in Clay: Lewis Miles,” Tag Archives: Lewis Miles, February 3, 2019, The Archaelogy Hour Podcast Blog, archaeologyhour.com.
13. Whitehead writes of the character Terrance Randall, the brutal owner of a plantation split with his brother, James Randall: “Content to leer at his brother’s women, he grazed heartily upon the women of his own half. ‘I like to taste my plums,’ Terrance said, prowling the rows of cabins to see what struck his fancy. He violated the bonds of affection, sometimes visiting slaves on their wedding night to show the husband the proper way to discharge his marital duty. He tasted his plums, and broke the skin, and left his mark.” Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad (New York: Doubleday, 2016), 30.
14. Landrum, “Fruit Trees,” American Farmer, 6, 7, 8.
15. The doctor who attempted to grow pecans was A. E. Colomb; the owner of Oak Alley Plantation who received the cuttings was J. T. Roman. Wells, Pecan, 38–40. James McWilliams, The Pecan: A History of America’s Native Nut (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013), 61–62. Lenny Wells, “The Slave Gardener Who Turned the Pecan into a Cash Crop,” What It Means to Be American: A National Conversation Hosted by the Smithsonian and Arizona State University, December 14, 2017, whatitmeanstobeamerican.org/ideas/the-slave-gardener-who-turned-the-pecan-into-a-cash-crop. David S. Shields, “The Big Four Pecans & 3 Others of Note,” unpublished paper, shared with Tiya Miles, April 22, 2019.
16. Frederic Rosengarten, Jr., The Book of Edible Nuts (New York: Walker, 1984), 182. Quoted in Wells, Pecan, 34.
17. Wells, Pecan, 39, 40, 46. The Yale scientist was William H. Brewer; Brewer quoted in Wells, Pecan, 40.
18. “Much longer”: McWilliams, The Pecan, 52. McWilliams, The Pecan, 69–70, Rosengarten, Book of Edible Nuts, 177.
19. McWilliams, The Pecan, 4.
20. Lauret Savoy, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2015), 29.
21. “The Old Woman Who Kept All the Pecans,” George A. Dorsey, Traditions of the Caddo (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washing
ton, 1905), 27, accessed at Louisiana Anthology, www2.latech.edu/~bmagee/louisiana_anthology/texts/dorsey/dorsey--caddo_traditions.html. Wells, Pecan, 17.
22. McWilliams, The Pecan, 18. Grant D. Hall, “Pecan Food Potential in Prehistoric North America,” Economic Botany 54, no. 1 (2000): 105. “An Act to Amend the Law Passed 24th September, 1839, Regulating the Public Domain,” Cherokee Executive Committee, Constitution and Laws of the Cherokee Nation: Passed at Tahlequah, Cherokee Nation, 1839–51 (Tahlequah, Okla.: Cherokee Nation, 1852), 48. “An Act Against Destroying Pecan and Other Trees,” Davis A. Homer, published by the Authority of the Chickasaw Legislature, Constitution and Laws of the Chickasaw Nation, Together with the Treaties of 1832, 1833, 1834, 1837, 1852, 1855, 1856 (Parsons, Kans.: Foley Railway Printing Company, 1899), 91. A similar Seminole law is quoted in McWilliams, The Pecan, 18.
23. Kay Shaw Nelson, “A Paean to the Popular Pecan: Saga of an American Native,” Special to The Washington Post, F14.
24. Susan Tucker, “Not Forgotten: Twenty-five Years Out from Telling Memories: Conversations Between Mary Yelling and Susan Tucker,” Southern Cultures (Spring 2014): 93–101, 97.
25. Tiya Miles, “The Black Gun Owner Next Door,” The New York Times, March 9, 2019.
26. A Google search for “survival foods” in 2019 turned up 123,000 results, especially of disaster preparedness and prepper websites, such as: skilledsurvival.com/5-things-to-consider-for-the-best-survival-foods/, primalsurvivor.net/survival-foods-list/, and “Plan Ahead for Disasters: Food,” ready.gov/food. Jackie Mansky, “Food Historian Reckons with the Black Roots of Southern Food,” Smithsonian.com, August 1, 2017. See also Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South (New York: HarperCollins, 2017).