Four Hundred Souls

by Four Hundred Souls (retail) (epub)

  Davis was not whipped because he had polluted a Black woman. There was no record of the Black woman in question being punished for polluting herself with whiteness. Davis was whipped for polluting whiteness—his own and that of his community. This was the first recorded case of its kind in the United States, establishing that whiteness was susceptible to pollution from sexual contact with Blackness, and that “pure” whiteness must be protected through law.

  I remember my mother asking me a few years ago why I did not call myself half-white. I explained to her: “You cannot become part-white.”

  Whiteness is a ledge you can only fall from.

  The fact that whiteness was something that could exist only in purity, not in percentages, was something reinforced throughout my entire life. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of other children asking me if I was adopted. After answering that no, I was not adopted, the white lady they saw with me was my mother, they would still stare at me confused, unable to comprehend how I came to be. As I grew older, teachers, bosses, and police officers would see only my Blackness. When people met my mother, they would look at her with pity, imagining the story of a white woman lost—lured and abandoned by Blackness and left with two Black children to forever remind her of her fall.

  To many, my mother represented the fears of those white colonial Virginians who had ordered Hugh Davis whipped brought to life. Purity forever tainted, bloodlines lost. Establishing whiteness as a race of purity meant it was not something that could be mixed, it could only be turned into something else—removing it from whiteness altogether. The idea that racial mixing would not spread whiteness or even alter it but would destroy it would become a primary motivation for many racist laws and attitudes.

  With the whipping of Hugh Davis, we saw the first separation of Black from white in the North American colonies as an issue of white survival instead of racial preference. This fear would lead to violence far beyond the whipping of a white man for lying with a Black woman. Shortly after establishing the legal need to protect whiteness from contamination, the consequences for such contamination were shifted from the white participant to the Black person who dared pollute whiteness. By 1640, when another white man was brought before Virginia law for impregnating a Black woman, it was the Black woman who was whipped, while the white man was sentenced to church service.

  By the 1800s, this fear and anger over the possible destruction of whiteness justified the segregation of cities and towns, workplaces and schools, that would consign Black Americans to substandard living, working, and educational conditions. It justified the arrests, beatings, and lynching of Black Americans. Even today the fear of racial destruction heard in warnings of “white genocide” made by white hate groups rationalizes violence against Black Americans.

  The idea of white purity not only served to narrowly define whiteness for over four hundred years, it also ensured that Blackness could hardly benefit socially, politically, or financially from proximity to whiteness in any meaningful way. If a white parent’s offspring ceased to be white because the other parent was Black, then those offspring were cut off from all opportunities that whiteness afforded, and so were their offspring for generations to come. If we cannot always recognize Blackness in skin tone, we can recognize Blackness in unemployment rates, poverty rates, school suspension rates, arrest rates, and life expectancy.

  And so today I am Black, and my mother is white. I am Black because I have no choice but to be, and I am Black because I choose to be. While I may always be Black to the cop who pulls me over, and to the manager evaluating my work performance, I also choose to be Black with my friends and family. I choose to look in the mirror and see Black.

  I have been accused of allowing white supremacist notions of race to dictate how I see myself. I have been told that in this day and age, over fifty years since antimiscegenation laws were deemed unconstitutional, I have the freedom to claim the whiteness of my mother.

  Every time I was told that my hair was too kinky, it was my Black hair that was disparaged. Every time I was told that my nose was too wide, it was my Black nose that was rejected. Every time I was called a monkey or a gorilla, it was my Blackness that was hated. Every time I was called loud or angry, it was my Blackness that was feared.

  And it is my Blackness that has fought back. My Blackness that has survived. The vast majority of Black Americans, often through the rape of Black ancestors by white enslavers, have the ancestry of white Americans running through them. But when the privileges of whiteness were kept from us, it was our Blackness that persevered. I am so very proud of that.

  I love my mother. I see her face when I look in the mirror. But whiteness, as a political and social construct, exists because of the fear of my very existence, and it functions to this day to aid in my oppression and exploitation.

  Until the systemic functions of whiteness that began with the whipping of Hugh Davis are dismantled, I cannot claim whiteness. And as long as my survival is tied to my ability to resist the oppression of white supremacy, I’ll be damned if I’ll let whiteness claim me.

  1634–1639

  TOBACCO

  DaMaris B. Hill

  Before he became a planter, Rolfe told Go-Go that stalagmite was a diamond. He had never seen any actual diamonds but couldn’t admit it.

  Diamonds in the colonies were travelers’ lies, like the streets of gold and the mercy of missionaries. The only real thing in his life was an African girl he plucked from Bermuda, the one twin who wasn’t traded for Spanish tobacco seeds on the high seas off the legal coast of what used to be called Virginola. That girl was carried into Jamestown and appeared as a speck of wonder to the eye of a young Indian princess called Pocahontas. This girl’s skin with its brush of indigo was a lush wonder among the pale settlers the Indian princess witnessed.

  And now Rolfe loved her. He showed her how to find the veins in each tobacco leaf, showed her how to crawl between the rows and look for parasites. Ever since the enslaved African and tobacco appeared in Jamestown, English colonists found ways to trade for food and plant tobacco after the last frost. Pocahontas was young and sure that this little girl was a Jogahoh, a trickster who knew the secrets of the earth. And that became the name they started calling her, Go-Go. What power did Rolfe have to make the magic people do his bidding?

  No one was left to tell the record keepers about Go-Go’s sister, the one Rolfe traded for the sweetest tobacco seeds a Spanish conquistador could smuggle. He quickly pacified his anxiety about leaving the other twin with the conquistadors sailing back to Portugal, because they were on their way to their wives. Why worry about the girl? Where was the room for worry in the New World? The anxiety about a lost twin? Where was space to remember any of them?

  It is August 1635. Rolfe is long dead, and the indigo girl Go-Go is an old woman who has made generations in the marshes of Virginia, while the English cycle in on sponsored passage to the Americas, dreaming about a better life than London had to offer. In the squalor of London, they were nursed at poverty’s breasts, especially the women. Even with the odds of three men to one woman, none of them found fortune on the passage. No man had a penny to pay. After a few weeks at sea and as the rations got low, few of the men honored English law or cared how some hoity man lost his head for raping his rich wife, as was the punishment. The men were tired of taking turns on one another and began to reason about raping women. This was not the only abuse these English women would come to know. Their bodies would come to know how a snake is wicked only if it is under your foot and how a leech can become an anchor. They came to know that either could drown you in a few inches of water and that the lush leaves of tobacco did not provide shade. They came to know the work without boundaries.

  Before and after 1636, ships come from Angola and the Caribbean carrying Africans who add life to the scourge of death in the colonies. When they arrive, the Indians and indentured whites who speak to them
tell them about the ten colonists who became two in the first year. Then they tell them about the packs of English who creep up like wild crops in the forest and always with a woman running away. Then they say that everything was new when the Rolfe showed up with seeds and the indigo girl, the Jogahoh, who grew up without sickness and became the woman Go-Go. Then they count her children and grandchildren aloud. They explain how to know her. Her hands and skin stained blue with other-world Godliness. The Indians tell the Africans that Go-Go was the one who made this tobacco spring from the earth. The Indians tell the Africans that the English have proven to be liars since the first lot, and that the latest lie is: “Only the African can keep the Spanish tobacco alive.” The lie is that the Africans are the only ones who can cut tobacco at the base and survive the stalk.

  The truth is that King Charles can’t get enough of taxes. By 1639, he divides Virginia into shires, and everyone needs to count every body to calculate the assessment owed to the king for his armies. It is in this year that Go-Go calls out her sister’s sacred name as she watches her pale-eyed granddaughter sold across the river to cover the tax on tobacco.

  1639–1644

  BLACK WOMEN’S LABOR

  Brenda E. Stevenson

  Enslavement in the Americas wrought multiple, complex horrors in the lives, families, communities, and cultures of the millions of Africans who fell captive to the inhumane system of the Atlantic slave trade. Those who arrived in British North America were hardly immune to these brutalities. Not the least of these abuses was the persistent assault on gendered identities as part of the effort to erase captives’ humanity, self-worth, and traditional roles within their Indigenous cultures and communities.

  One of the first attempts to codify these practices took place in March 1643, when Virginia’s General Assembly passed the following measure:

  Be it also enacted and confirmed that there be four pounds of tobacco…and a bushel of corn…paid to the Ministers within the several parishes of the colony for all titheable persons, that is to say as well for all youths of sixteen years of age as [upwards?] and also for all negro women at the age of sixteen year.

  These few words designated a Black female of sixteen years or older as a “tithable”—meaning that taxes paid to the church would be assessed on these women. Neither white nor Indigenous women had that distinction. In that way, Virginia’s earliest leaders legally equated African women with men, erasing these women’s public claim to feminine equality with other women. These elite white men did so through British colonial society’s most important legal institution, their elected governance body. Their justification was that taxing Black women was a necessary part of the financial support structure for the colony’s most important sociocultural establishment, the Church of England.

  The impact on the lives of African women in the colony, whether they were indentured, enslaved, or free, was immediate. Enslavers passed the pressure of having to provide the taxes assessed for their Black bonded women directly onto these women. The legal designation of Black women as fundamentally different, in body and character, from other women in colonial society directly influenced African women’s workloads and the punishments they endured if they could not meet these expectations. These enhanced labor assignments, in turn, damaged women’s health, prenatal care, and the amount of attention that they could give their dependent kin. Single, free Black women struggled to make their own tax payments, a financial obligation that contributed to the likelihood of their impoverishment and dependency. They also suffered the consequences of being viewed as less desirable spouses in the eyes of other free Blacks who were reluctant to take on their additional financial responsibilities. This “othering” of Black women in colonial American society was foundational in the assault on Black femininity, masculinity, the Black family, and the sociocultural roles of Black adults.

  From this initial effort, and from many more that were rapidly legalized or customarily practiced in the seventeenth century, an image of Black womanhood emerged that adhered to female gender prescriptions neither of Africans nor of Europeans. It was a womanhood synonymous with market productivity, not motherhood; with physical prowess instead of feminine vulnerability; and with promiscuity rather than modesty or a heightened moral sensibility. Such a distortion of Black women’s physical, emotional, cultural, gendered, and spiritual selves led to the broad public’s imagining of Black women as workhorses, whores, and emasculating matriarchs. Today this historical misrepresentation remains a common “justification” for the theft of our children; our physical, medical, political, and sexual exploitation; and our broad criminalization.

  The timing of the 1643 legislation was neither accidental nor incidental. It occurred once it was clear that the colony would survive and could turn a profit with sufficient labor resources. By the third decade of British residence, African female workers were a part of the formula for colonial settler success. The fledgling British mainland colony’s 1620 census counted fifteen such female workers that year, all thought to have arrived on the White Lion and the Treasurer in 1619. While more than a few perished in the Anglo-Powhatan War of 1622 or other military hostilities, as well as from disease, exposure, malnutrition, random acts of violence, poor medical attention, and accidents, the cargoes of bound Black female workers continued to arrive. Although no population enumerations have been recovered for 1640, ten years later Virginia was home to three hundred Africans, many female laborers among them.

  The skills that the first arrivals brought with them prepared them to be productive farmers and livestock keepers. Many who arrived from Angola, for example—like many of the earliest captives in British North America—were skilled farmers. In their home communities, they had cultivated a variety of crops, some for many generations. The crops included various types of corn and grains such as millet and sorghum, as well as bananas, plantains, beans, peanuts, pineapples, rice, pepper, yams, sweet potatoes, sugarcane, palm oil, and citrus fruits. They were accustomed to clearing land by using slash-and-burn methods, and they used hoes to prepare soil and to remove weeds. They practiced crop rotation. Many also had raised, butchered, traded, and prepared for the table cattle, goats, chickens, sheep, pigs, and other livestock.

  Labor in their West-Central African homes was gender distinct, unlike their experiences in early-seventeenth-century Virginia and other British settler colonies. Among farming peoples, men cleared the brush and cultivated tree crops such as those that produced palm oil and wine and from which they made medicines and sculpted. Women planted, weeded, and harvested other crops. Men were responsible for building houses, making cloth, sculpting, working iron, and long-distance trading and hunting. Women cooked, cared for their children, and performed other domestic tasks. Women in seaside communities also dived for marketable seashells and boiled salt water in order to produce salt, another highly sought-after market item.

  It did not take long before their skills as livestock keepers, domestics, and especially agriculturalists were recognized, prompting one mid-seventeenth-century Virginia governor to note that the planting of crops would occur “on the advice of our Negroes.” Settlers, however, demanded that Black women perform the same tasks as Black men. These women, like Black and white indentured men, had to clear their owners’ heavily wooded frontier lands, carry wood, and help construct dwellings, outhouses, and fences. Archaeological records from the seventeenth-century Chesapeake, for example, document the kinds of upper skeletal damage that young Black women sustained, probably by carrying heavy loads of wood on their heads or shoulders. They routinely planted, nurtured, weeded, and harvested corn and other plants, in addition to caring for tobacco—the most important cash crop of the era, and a very labor-intensive one. As early as five years after the first known captive arrivals, one planter could boast that his Black and white laborers produced a tobacco crop valued at ten thousand English pounds.

  When not working outside under the super
vision of men, African women worked for their mistresses. Their assigned domestic tasks included barnyard labor, tending to livestock, cooking, butchering, salting and preserving meat, making soap and candles, housecleaning, laundry, sewing, carding, spinning, weaving, bathing, dressing and dressing the hair of their mistresses, and caring for children—their owners’ and their own. Many also had to perform sexual labor.

  Between 1639 and 1644, work defined Black women’s lives, and the law of 1643 codified their differentiation from other women. This law led to a host of inhumane, defeminizing consequences for African and African-descended women. The endorsement by British North America’s first permanent colony’s two essential bodies of influence, the General Assembly and the Church of England, proved unshakable.

  1644–1649

  ANTHONY JOHNSON, COLONY OF VIRGINIA

  Maurice Carlos Ruffin

  I come down to my water on mornings such as these. Sunrise breaks through fog and tree limb like skin beneath skin, the smell of another’s fire. This is what the memory of my own death and rebirth has done. Killed my sleep and woke my spirit so that rest is not possible. So many mornings, I wander as a sick bear cub does. It’s fog, a dream to my mind. But clear as this gnarled branch under my boot.

  In the hold of the small ship that stole me from my home. Tall but not yet strong I crouched in the dark with others like me, six men and two women between barrels of red palm oil and what bolts of Europe wool and silk went unsold. We shared skin, but not tongue. One woman’s eye never blinked during her hand motions that showed when she was taken three children of her flesh became orphans.

  Lashed to the underdeck in chains, we gaped like mud fish when water pooled in the hull not well sealed by pitch. I never left the green hills of my homeland, which the Portuguese men had taken to hunting as their own. But we were on the vast water, and I knew our pomegranate husk would sink if sea came. After starving on rope-tough meat and sitting in my own leavings for endless days, I liked to dive deep and never rise. But not so. We landed ashore. My rebirth and years of forced work followed.