Girl in Black and White

by Jessie Morgan-Owens

  Conney’s eldest daughter Caty, the first entry on this list, acquired a meal sifter, worth 25 cents, and shortly afterward a lot of pewter dishes and eleven spoons worth $2. Charles Cornwell took one bed and bolster, worth $12, and Caty took the other, worth $11. Kitty did not come, and neither did her youngest sister, Lydia. Conney’s third daughter, Nancy, won Conney’s $4 embroidered counterpane, while Caty took the cotton one from the spare room. Her neighbors, the Lynn family, began a foray in the kitchens, taking a coffee mill, a clay pot, and thirty-one green dishes. Moses Lynn took a bridle and much more, while his wife took the loom. Constable Tansill took a couple of jugs. A Mr. Russell took the cowbell, while John Cornwell took the cow.

  John Cornwell, at sixteen, was accustomed to hard work, which accounts for the practicality of his choices. He took tools: cotton wheels and cards, two axes worth nothing and a saw worth $1.25. He took two tubs, a cupboard, a piggin—a small wooden pail with a tall handle sticking up from one side—and five barrels.

  The total worth of Conney’s nonhuman possessions at her death was $150.96. From that sum was subtracted $5.50, to pay for her coffin.20

  In preparation for this neighborly scramble for Conney’s property, the Prince William County Court had requested an estate list on December 6, 1825. The two-page appraisers’ list contains no niceties—no books, no art, no musical instruments, and no silver. The items on the first page are a succinct inventory of the sturdy goods required to run a small subsistence homestead in the early nineteenth century. Conney had two beds, a well-outfitted kitchen, and a full suite of tools for cloth and clothes making. She had one cow, one bull, one heifer, and a horse.

  On the second page of the list, the appraisers listed Prue, her three children, and her mother, between the entries for the three cows.21

  • 1 Cow and Bull $8

  • # Pruey, Elizabeth and Albert and one Infant, $450.00.

  • Lettice [Letty] $10.00

  • 1 Heifer $5, old cupboard $1.00, and 2 tubs 25 cents.

  A generous reading of this list would offer the conjecture that this family of five lived in a small slave cabin on the property near the field and paddock, or in a lean-to attached to the barn. Thus the list follows the logic of the appraisers’ tour: they started in the bedroom (beds, sheets, quilts, counterpanes, pillows), then moved to the kitchen (scales and weights, clay pot, stone pot, tinware, coffee mill, meal sifter, jug, earthen and pewter dishes, oven, griddle), then went out to the barn, where they might have come across Prue and her small children.

  The appraisers would have spoken to them to learn their names, asking property to name itself. Perhaps they spoke kindly to the children and asked them for their ages, as adults have always done to knee-high children. Albert and Elizabeth—the girl who would one day be Mary’s mother—were now five and three, respectively. Evelina was an infant, only days old, her mother still recovering from childbirth. Maybe the “old cupboard and two tubs” were found in Prue’s home. Maybe the heifer was under Prue’s care.

  It was more likely, however, that the appraisers inspected these chattel property as no different from cattle and cupboards. They might have stripped the women to examine their backs for scars and examined their limbs for lameness. Prue’s childbearing capacity was evidenced by the children around her. She was past her prime value; prices fetched for enslaved women peaked at age twenty-two.

  Prue’s mother Letty earned a low price. In his slave narrative, the abolitionist Henry Bibb describes a test that had likely been performed on her: “As it is hard to tell the ages of slaves, they look in their mouths at their teeth and prick up the skin on the back of their hands, and if the person is very far advanced in life, when the skin is pricked up, the pucker will stand for so many seconds on the back of the hand.”22 The small children, Elizabeth and Albert, now past the dangerous ages of infant mortality, were priced as a percentage of their future potential worth. Tests were made to determine their mental acuity. Questions would be asked concerning Prue and Letty’s skills as domestics, seamstresses, nurses, and cooks. The appraisers conversed back and forth. A low price was settled upon: $450. Then they moved on, to inspect the heifer.

  A quick computation in the margins subtracted Prue’s worth from Conney’s property. With Prue and her children valued at $450, her mother Letty at $10, and Conney’s horse worth $38.05, the clerk of court highlighted that Kitty’s son, John Cornwell, received the lion’s share of the family inheritance.23

  At Jesse’s death, Conney’s human property had included Juba (who was sold in 1810) and Abram (who was given to Caty at her wedding, and sold right away). Conney’s younger daughters had also received slaves from Jesse’s estate for their weddings: Nancy got Jerry, who shortly afterward “ran away and never was got,” and Lydia got a young man called Martin.24

  When Conney died, her property consisted of four women, Hannah, Betsey, Letty, and Prue; five small children, Albert, Elizabeth, the infant Evelina, Mahala, and Jane; and a young field hand named Frank, who was twenty-two, cross-eyed, and known for his singing voice. Most of this property belonged not to Conney herself but to her husband’s estate: Betsey and her daughters, Mahala and Jane, were appraised at $400, and Frank, at $325. The total worth of Jesse and Conney’s human possessions at her death: $1,185.

  Kitty did not receive her equal share. Conney had said she did not regard Kitty’s husband, Billy, fit to inherit Jesse’s property. Conney lent Betsey or Mahala to Kitty, but Kitty would have to knit her mother a pair of stockings or pay her a pound of wool per year in exchange for the hire of these women. Conney feared that if she gave Kitty property outright, Billy would sell these women at the first opportunity. Once Conney died, this arrangement of stockings for servants ended.

  The death of a mistress was a pregnant moment in slave life. The sites and rules of work and family life were certain to change. As Conney’s neighbors and relations dismantled the place that had been their home for fifteen years, the enslaved people at Powell’s Run speculated about which daughter’s home would offer them the safest place to see their babies grow.25 Family separation through sale threatened with every visit from lawyers, clerks, and appraisers. Which sister would expect the most reasonable labor? What work would fill their future days? They knew Kitty was in the habit of hiring or borrowing slaves from her family members and not returning them. Any promises the mistress had made, death had broken. Any goods and small comforts they had accumulated were taken back for Conney’s crying sale. Alliances that grew in the close quarters of domestic servitude were easily dissolved. Benefits and favors—Sundays off, Saturday visits from their husbands, the right to keep a cow or a garden, a steady supply of scraps for quilts, or opportunities to weave new fabric on the loom in the hall—these privileges went with Conney to her grave.

  Kitty kept Hannah at her home in Centreville, and when she was pressed to bring Hannah to court to be included in an inventory and assessment of Conney’s property, Kitty refused. One of the three appraisers who had been called in to assess the estate, remembered that he did not see Hannah that day. “I have some recollection of something being said by Caty” about Kitty, “finding fault for her not being brought to the appraisement.” When it came to Hannah, Kitty was “unwilling to give her up.” Hannah had had two children, but both had died. Kitty “lamented the loss of them.”26 Anyway, another appraiser, John Tansill, thought Hannah was not worth “one cent,” saying “I would not have owned her as a free gift.”27 Kitty’s neighbor remembered Hannah as “not worth more than her victuals and clothes.”28 After her mother’s estate was settled, Kitty complained that the childless Hannah was an insufficient inheritance.

  Kitty embarked on what would become a nearly continuous war with her sisters and her mother’s executor Capt. Thomas Nelson over what remained of her father’s estate. In December 1829, June 1835, January 1836, and June 1844, Kitty Cornwell attempted to force arbitration, in the hopes of disposing property in her favor.29 Year after year Caty and Kitty
fought over Jesse’s and Conney’s wills, until they were both old women. Their younger sisters, Lydia and Nancy, had their husbands sign agreements with Nelson to distribute what shares of property he could and call it finished. But Caty and Kitty depended on what property they might yet inherit and could not let it go.

  The first case recalled a drunken night in 1823, when Kitty’s husband, Billy King, was jailed for disturbing the peace. John Appleby, Caty’s fiancé, had put up Billy’s bail, but with no property of his own, Appleby was not “strong enough to become security to the commonwealth for Billy King’s keeping the peace.”30 This had been Billy’s second arrest in a year. Kitty had signed a recognizance for Betsey “and her increase” over to John Appleby, so that it would appear to the courts that Appleby had sufficient funds to stand as security for Billy King. Betsey was held in the county jail until the matter could be settled.

  Billy was found not guilty and released. Betsey was also released, to John Appleby. When Kitty came for Betsey, John showed her that in her time of need, Kitty had signed not a recognizance—as she believed—but a bill of sale, giving Betsey over to him.

  February 27th, 1823, then Received of John Appleby three hundred Dollars, Virginia money, it being in full fare for a negro Girl called and known by the name of Betsey, about the age of Twenty-two years of age of a yellow complexion, which Said negro I have bargained and sold and delivered up to the Said John Appleby and do further convert and defend the right will to say in him and his heirs and assigns forever, the Said John Appleby and no one else, as witnessed by my hand and seal this day and date above written.

  Kitty Cornwell [seal]

  Signed sealed and acknowledged in the Presence of Isaac Lynn

  —Bill of sale for Betsey, May 17, 182331

  Kitty could not read. When her attorney read aloud to her the above bill of sale in 1825, Kitty refused to acknowledge that she had signed it, insisting that she did not intend to sign any such paper or instrument. She demanded that John Appleby show how he paid for Betsey, to prove that the bill of sale was valid. Where was the $300 he said he had paid for this childbearing woman in her prime?

  Furious, Kitty and her friend Eliza Gosling went to Caty’s home, intending to retrieve Betsey, but they found no one to confront. To settle the score, she took the eldest of Betsey’s daughters, Mahala, but left unsatisfied.32 Kitty sued, but the court found in John Appleby’s favor.

  Ten years later, in 1835, Caty and John Appleby sold Betsey and her children (by then she had four) south. Caty’s attorney told the court in March 1836, that Caty “sold the Slaves for Fifteen hundred dollars, and she considers she had a right to do so, or to make any other disposition of them as she pleased.”33 It is unclear which sister retaliated first, but in the summer of 1835, Frank, who had been hired out by Kitty, had also disappeared. When she was confronted about Frank, outside the Brentsville courthouse, Kitty said, “I did not sell him, but I received the money.” When asked how much she had got for him, she equivocated: “I got the money for him.” Frank worked at Grigsby’s tavern and was well known in Centreville. He was thought to have sold for a thousand dollars. One witness reported he was headed south in a coffle.34

  Any amity between Kitty and her sisters left with Frank. The Cornwell women knew what dire circumstances met Frank, Betsey, Mahala, Jane, and the two younger children, whom they had known all of their lives, when they sold them south. The domestic slave trade was at its height in northern Virginia, as the voracious slave markets of the Deep South pulled living trains of fifty or more people chained at the feet and arms onto the seven-week-long march way away from all they knew and all who knew them. What happened to Frank and Betsey after they were sold south? Their records end here, with Caty holding a banknote for $1,500, and Kitty pretending not to. As white women of limited means, they could not be depended on for their constancy.

  2

  Prudence Nelson Bell

  Nelson’s Plantation and Mill, 1826

  In January 1826, Prue was sent to live at Captain Thomas Nelson’s plantation and mill. She was thirty-four years old and married to James Bell, the free man residing in Washington. (Nelson was forty-three and unmarried.) With her came her son Albert, and her two daughters by Nelson, Elizabeth and the infant Evelina. Her mother, Letty, came along, as well as her young master, John Cornwell.1

  Prue Bell was to live with Thomas Nelson for five years, until John Cornwell came into his majority. During this interval, if she sustained her alliances and did not get hired out, she could raise her young children. But then on September 12, 1826, two days shy of the anniversary of Conney’s will, John sold the horse his grandmother had bequeathed him and moved out on his own. Nine months later, shortly after his eighteenth birthday in June 1827, John traveled south, “to parts and places unknown.” Like his grandfather Jesse Cornwell, John left for North Carolina and did not come back.

  The law forbade him to return. Following Denmark Vesey’s Rebellion in 1822, a free black who left the state of Virginia, for any reason, could not return. The laws of North Carolina criminalized John’s arrival: the North Carolina Migration Law of 1826 forbade free blacks to enter the state. Violators would be penalized with a fine of $500 or ten years of enslaved labor. Free blacks were permitted to travel through Maryland, but only if their stay lasted less than two weeks. After two weeks, they would be charged $10 per week, and should the emigrant not pay that fine, he or she would be liable to imprisonment and reenslavement. A citizen of Maryland who “hired, employed, or harbored” a free black would be fined $5 for each day the emigrant was hired (sailors excepted).2 Born illegitimate, John Cornwell was now stateless and in danger of enslavement by law or by kidnapping.

  Soon afterward his mother, Kitty, concluded that “John Cornwell was dead, or gone where I never should see or hear from him again.” And as his next of kin, Kitty asserted that she had “a right to [his] negroes.”3 After John had been “absent for seven or eight years,” Kitty sued to retrieve Prue from Nelson. In the suit, Caty acknowledged that their mother, Conney, had not had the right to give Prue to John. Instead Prue and her children should be considered a part of the larger estate belonging to their father, Jesse Cornwell, which should now be distributed to his surviving children according to his will.

  Prue lived in fear of separation and sale to the South. She had learned that should she or her children become Kitty or Caty’s property, these women were likely to sell her, too.

  Year after year Captain Nelson fought to uphold an arbitration agreement the sisters had signed before their mother died, an agreement to leave things as they were. John’s whereabouts were unknown, a fact that Nelson used to his advantage. Any new arbitration would be invalid, he said, because John was not around to defend his rightful property. And since John could not participate in a new arbitration, it could not be enforced.

  Kitty demanded “several times” that Prue be given to her, but Captain Nelson always replied that he “would not deliver the negroes to [her], or any other person, until Cornwell returned and demanded them. They were there and ready for him.”4

  Nelson had engineered Prudence’s residence with him, and he maintained this arrangement against the wishes of the Cornwell sisters. This could be taken both as a legal act of sexual exploitation and as a sign of an alliance—sex for safety. Either way, Prue kept her family together on a knife’s edge. Her husband, James Bell, died in 1835, and at some point during this period, her mother, Letty, also died. She looked around for protection and took Nelson’s name, becoming Prudence Nelson Bell.

  The first ten years Prue spent living in bondage with Nelson could have been measured in trimesters. She bore Nelson three more surviving children who were given the last name Bell Nelson: Jesse in 1828, Ludwell in 1833, and Catherine in 1835, born when Prue was forty-four years old. She made the devil’s bargain, pleasing the master in the hope that John would return, weighing her hopes for freedom against the danger of passing year after year in bondage and under th
reat of sale.

  As an enslaved woman, Prue had little agency to refuse or resist his advances. In May 1830, Nelson married Eliza Jane Weedon, who had been born on Christmas Eve in 1801. She was ten years younger than Prue, but the bride was no young fool. Her groom was a middle-aged bachelor living with a woman who shared his family’s name and color but not status. I do not know how his new wife negotiated this common situation. She could have bitterly resented Prue, felt her presence as a raw exposed wound, and sought to exact domestic punishments. Or she could have compartmentalized, looked the other way, and accepted her husband’s infidelity and her rival’s pregnancies as a mode of economic growth.

  Eliza Jane had married late and was pregnant within the year. She went into labor with her firstborn son, Edwin, on Independence Day 1831. Like Prue, Eliza Jane would have three sons and three daughters. Her youngest son, Horatio Nelson, was born in 1845, when she was forty-four years old and her husband was sixty-two.

  Nelson visited both women’s beds openly, from the first day of his marriage to the last. Court documents note that “Pruey herself was a light mulatto [sic], and her children were very light mulattoes, some of them showing scarce a trace of negro blood; and it seemed that the children were the children of Nelson.”5 This exploitation was an open secret, openly disclosed. This arrangement of sexual slavery, so common to that time and place, was carried on with the hubris of permanence and inevitability common to patriarchal systems of oppression. When he left Prue’s bed, Nelson likely stepped over a pallet of sleeping white children on his way back to his wife.