Four Hundred Souls

by Four Hundred Souls (retail) (epub)

  But that was before. How my life has bloomed like a strange flower. Since I met my Mary. Skin of my skin. Soul of my soul. I was told of steel horses. But that is less pleasing to me than this: once my freedom earned, my term of service done, my freedom fee collected—no more lashes to drive me to the field before the cockerel’s crow—I bought Mary’s freedom and the contracts of five men to work my will. And in the way of the good laws of this land—King Charles’s laws—gathered a fifty-acre plot for each manservant. I claim this stretch of God’s land as my own. And I work as I please.

  Rising the path from the riverbank, I find a small bush. Not a bush but a deer melting back to earth. Feasted on. Nature’s way. But I gather a few leafy branches, cover the critter, and cross myself. My hand comes to the right side of the cross, where Jesus’s palm hung bleeding, when I freeze for leaves crunching behind. I don’t have my musket or my scythe. But I have hands. I clinch my fist.

  “Pap!” the voice says. My youngest, Walter, runs in the bramble, his knees bouncing in the dew. “Quick! Come see.”

  “Such a call!” I say, rubbing Walter’s head. “Respect your old father.” His mouth moves. His eyes dart. But he does not bend his head. I squeeze his shoulder in pride of him. His nerves ride him. That is his spirit. But his body is coming on strong, less bedeviled by bad humors in his lungs. The ones that took his older brothers when they were cubs.

  “That white man, one of the brothers Parker. He walking in the patch.” Walter leads along the creek trail, the beery nose scent of sassafras everywhere. Turtle climbs a log. Reeds and rushes brush my legs. Many acres. God’s land. My land. To be Walter’s land.

  My tobacco field with a ghost mist on it. The man stoops here and again. He touches my leaves as if they are born of his labor. Robert Parker. Some of these fields were his father’s. But today the Parkers have only one man under contract and a few hay acres upriver.

  John Casor, my third man, holds the rein of the Parker horse and holds a roped calf. John fears his old master, Robert. John stands on the path by the field, his look goes everywhere except to Robert.

  “You let a fox in my patch,” I say. I send Walter to the cornfield to give word.

  John dips his head. “He wouldn’t listen to the likes of Poor John.” We have the same outside color, but his insides are smoke to me. He shows dumb, but I know he is cunning. He shows weak, but he has a lion inside. He works less well than he can, so I task him to my fields longer.

  My hands on my sides, I say, “You come out from there.”

  “Look ye here,” Robert says, his sweaty hair dripping onto his shoulders, a long dagger in his belt. He has a false manner of speaking, a squire’s manner. They call Robert a freeboot who betrayed the crown during his journeys. Other men would be in stocks if not in servitude. But here he stands. Free as clover. “It’s my old mate, Antonio.”

  I step into my patch. When he came before, he did not smile as I picked at his body for flea beetles that eat tobacco. But that plague is gone, or I would pick again. “You know my chosen name is Anthony, after the saint.”

  “So it is,” he says.

  Colin, my best field man, gallops to the field’s edge and dismounts. White-skinned. A big man, a head above us.

  “I came as soon as I heard, Mr. Johnson. Now, this one wouldn’t be bothering you today, would he? I’ll toss him in the shuck if that’s the matter.”

  “If you would have your head cleaved from your shoulders, papist.” Robert spits in the dirt. Touches his dagger.

  “No,” I say. “I have need of an animal.” My oldest daughter, Eliza, is to be married to a freeman like myself called Wiltwyck of New Sweden. I chose a fatted calf as her gift. A fat calf would mean a strong union and hardy children. But disease spread among the many beasts of the colony last spring. Robert has the last ones.

  “I assure you this is finest of my stock, valiant Moor.”

  A fine calf announces itself the same as people, by temper. I run my hand across the babe’s glossy coat. I place my finger at its teeth, and the creature suckles, its ears moving. A fine calf. I give Robert a leather pouch of forty shillings. He counts each one.

  Colin passes to me a legal paper that I unroll. The village justice made this. I am not learned in the work of scribes, but my Mary, who has eyes of stars, is and smiled at it. My daughter Eliza, who is as learned of work of scribes, will also smile when she has her calf. I show the paper to Robert, who does not look at it.

  “I need not sign a deed for the likes of you!” Robert pushes the paper away. “Take the animal as he stands. That is your proof of possession.”

  “The Lord covers me and mine in eternity, and the king’s law covers me and mine here. I keep my papers.”

  Robert spits again. Part of it hits his own boot. He mounts his horse and pulls the calf behind. Down the path, he dismounts. His dagger flashes in the sun and disappears by the animal’s neck. The calf falls to dirt. Robert rides off. Colin shakes his head. John Casor shows his teeth. Colin says Robert has my shillings, and he is right. The calf’s tail twitches in the dirt.

  “What now, sir?” Colin says.

  I am back on the ship in the hold. But my sons and daughters and their sons and daughters are with me in the dark. Chains clink on their legs. We are on the shore. We are in the woods. A girl in the mist of tomorrows watches me from a coach tied to one of the steel horses I was told of. She laughs like she is happy to meet me. And behind her in the coach are her sons and daughters and their sons and daughters.

  “The calf dies,” I say, “but the law will always hold me. And my Eliza will have her calf.”

  1649–1654

  THE BLACK FAMILY

  Heather Andrea Williams

  In 1649 three hundred Black people lived in the English colony of Virginia. Even fewer Black people lived in the more northern Dutch town of New Amsterdam that later, under British rule, would become New York City.

  Slavery had not yet evolved into the pervasive institution that would devour the labor and lives of millions of people of African descent. Still, during these early years, among the small numbers of Black people who were free, enslaved, or lingering in some degree of unfreedom, it is possible to glimpse evidence of family formations and priorities that would become far more visible as slavery expanded.

  By the time they reached an American colony, most captives had already experienced forced separation from their families and communities, some of them more than once. They had been taken from families and communities in West and Central Africa and may have lost contact with a close shipmate after the Middle Passage journey. Some lost the family and community they created while they sojourned in the Caribbean or South America before being taken to North America.

  Once in America, some of these people created families through marriage, childbirth, and informal adoptions. They remained vulnerable to being sold or given away. Many of them struggled to keep their families intact, to provide protection for their loved ones, and to take advantage of loopholes that might extricate them and their family members from enslavement.

  Some Black people also responded to the era’s high mortality rates by taking responsibility for children who were not their own. In New Amsterdam, Emmanuel Pietersen and his wife, Dorothe Angola, raised a child of their deceased friends, and when the child reached the age of eighteen, Pietersen sought to gain legal protection for him. In his petition to officials of the colony, Pietersen asserted that his wife had stood as “godmother or witness at the Christian baptism” of Anthony, whose parents had died shortly thereafter. The petition asserted that Dorothe, “out of Christian affection, immediately on the death of his parents, hath adopted and reared him as her own child, without asking assistance from anyone in the world, but maintained him at her own expense from that time unto this day.” Pietersen said that he too wanted to promote the well-being of the boy and asked the auth
orities to officially recognize that Anthony was born the child of free parents, had been raised by free persons, and should therefore be declared free and capable of inheriting from Pietersen. Emmanuel Pietersen realized the tenuous status of Black people in the colony and sought to ensure that the child he and his wife had raised would always be recognized as a free person, despite also being Black. The council granted Pietersen’s petition.

  Pietersen used very deliberate language in his petition. He was careful to assert that Anthony had received a Christian baptism and that Dorothe Angola had cared for the child out of her “Christian affection.” These were consequential claims in those early years for Black people desiring to be acknowledged as free. After all, the Dutch, English, and other Europeans operated at the time under the belief that Christians should not be enslaved, and part of their stated justification for enslaving Africans was that they considered them heathens. If Black people could then prove their Christianity through baptism or marriage in the Christian church, as occurred in New Amsterdam, they might logically be exempted from slavery.

  It seems that the baptism loophole was effective for some time. Between 1639 and 1655, Black parents presented forty-nine children for baptism in the Dutch Reformed Church in New Netherland. But in a society become ever more dependent on the labor of enslaved people, laypeople as well as clergy grew concerned about the correspondence between baptism and freedom, and Christianity and freedom.

  What would later become New York closed this loophole for maneuvering out of slavery. By 1656, the Dutch Reformed Church, caring more about saving slavery than saving souls, had stopped baptizing Black people. “The Negroes occasionally request that we should baptize their children,” wrote a clergyman who ministered to the forty people Governor Peter Stuyvesant owned in Manhattan. “But we have refused to do so, partly on account of their lack of knowledge and of faith, and partly because of the worldly and perverse aims on the part of the said Negroes. They wanted nothing else than to deliver their children bodily from slavery, without striving for piety and Christian virtues.”

  Ironically, the minister deemed Black parents’ desires to free their children “worldly and perverse” because of their emphasis on physical freedom, presumably in contrast to the spiritual freedom of the Christian people who claimed ownership over them. Although the minister went on to say that when he deemed it appropriate, he did baptize a few enslaved youth, he also noted, “Not to administer baptism among them for the reasons given, is also the custom among our colleagues.”

  Over time, New Netherland and other colonies imposed more and more restrictions against Black freedom. When Virginia codified the fact that baptism would not free Black people from enslavement, the language of the statute focused on “children that are slaves by birth.” In that colony, too, policy makers blocked parents from using Christian baptism as a means of gaining freedom for their children.

  In Virginia, Emmanuel and Frances Driggus took care of two adopted children, one-year-old Jane and eight-year-old Elizabeth, in addition to Ann, Thomas, and Frances, the three children who were born to the couple. They all belonged to Captain Francis Pott, although Jane and Elizabeth were not enslaved but indentured for terms of several years. To cover his debts, Pott mortgaged Emmanuel and Frances and eventually was forced to turn them over to his creditor, who lived twenty miles away from Pott’s farm, where all the children remained. Emmanuel, who had been given a cow and a calf by Pott, was eventually able to save enough money to purchase Jane’s freedom in 1652, thereby releasing her from her indenture at age eight, twenty-three years earlier than scheduled.

  By the end of that same year, Pott prevailed in a lawsuit against his creditor, and Emmanuel and Frances Driggus returned to live on his property in Northampton. Seven years had elapsed since they had lived with their children. Upon their return to Northampton, Emmanuel Driggus faced a new threat to his ability to free himself and his family from slavery through the sale of his cattle—the county moved to prohibit enslaved people from engaging in trade. But Driggus was able to get Pott to put in writing the fact that Driggus legally owned the cattle and was allowed to sell them. Pott later restricted this prerogative, however, when he declared in court a few years later that no one should engage in trade with his slaves without his approval.

  Just as Emmanuel Pietersen in New Amsterdam petitioned to protect the free status of his adopted child, Driggus sought to protect his ability to sustain some limited degree of economic autonomy in order to free his family.

  More stunning for the Driggus family, though, was when Pott sold their eldest daughter, ten-year-old Ann, for five thousand pounds of tobacco. He also sold a younger son, Edward, four years old. These children were sold into lifetime enslavement.

  Frances Driggus died a few years after her children were sold. Emmanuel remarried, and several years later, as a free man, he gave to his daughters Frances and Jane a bay mare “out of the Naturall love and affection.” Jane was free and married; Frances’s status is not clear.

  Emmanuel Driggus was aware of the perilous lives of his daughters in the Virginia colony. His gift of a female horse who might produce other horses, he likely hoped, would provide his daughters, now in their twenties, with income that might render them a bit less vulnerable. After all, in the 1650s Virginia and other English colonies were racing toward full dependence on the forced labor of Black people.

  1654–1659

  UNFREE LABOR

  Nakia D. Parker

  In history textbooks and in popular memory, the enslavement of people of African descent is often depicted as an unfortunate yet unavoidable occurrence in the otherwise glorious history of the American republic. Echoing this common sentiment, Republican senator Tom Cotton called slavery “the necessary evil upon which the union was built” in his objection to adding The 1619 Project to school curriculums. The United States was indeed built on chattel slavery, which deemed people of African descent inferior to white people and defined Black people as commodities to be bought, sold, insured, and willed. That was certainly evil. It was not, however, “necessary” or inevitable. The system of racialized slavery that is now seared into the American public consciousness took centuries to metastasize and mature.

  The March 1655 court case of Johnson v. Parker in Northampton County, Virginia, exemplifies the insidious transformations in forced labor practices in the early American colonies. Anthony Johnson, the plaintiff in the case, was an African man who likely arrived in Virginia sometime around 1621 as a captive from Angola, transported across the Atlantic in the slave trade. In the course of thirty years, however, Johnson enjoyed a remarkable fate different from that of millions of African captives. Against insurmountable odds, Johnson survived the harrowing trek to the Americas known as the Middle Passage and eventually married, had children, secured his freedom, and acquired more than two hundred acres of land, livestock, and even indentured servants.

  John Casor, another African man, was one of these servants. At the time of the lawsuit, he was working for Johnson under a contract. Unlike Johnson, Casor claimed he’d first come to Virginia not in captivity but as an indentured servant, and he therefore demanded his freedom after he believed he had fulfilled his indenture contract with Johnson. According to Casor, “Johnson had kept him his servant seaven yeares longer than hee ought [sic].” Casor likely knew that as an African man, he would face challenges in winning his freedom. In fact, fifteen years before Casor brought his case, in 1640, a Black indentured servant named John Punch ran away from his Virginia owners along with two white servants. After they were recaptured, the court sentenced the two white servants to thirty lashes and one extra year of servitude. Punch’s punishment, however, was to “serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural Life here or elsewhere,” thereby becoming the first person of African descent considered a “slave for life.” Although the institution of chattel slavery had not yet been completely codified into
law and racist ideologies connecting Blackness with enslavement were not yet fully formed, it was nonetheless clear at this time that servants of African descent were viewed as different from their white counterparts, subject to being held in servitude for an undefined period of time, unlike white servants, who had clear terms of indenture and were never considered slaves for life.

  With the precedent that only people of African descent were held as slaves for life set before Casor, and with his claims of freedom apparently unheeded by Johnson, Casor eventually appealed to one of Johnson’s white neighbors, Robert Parker, for help in his quest for freedom. Parker took Casor’s side and, over Johnson’s objections, took Casor out of Johnson’s possession and to his own farm, “under pretense that the said Negro [Casor] is a free man.” Johnson, after consulting with his wife, two sons, and son-in-law, reluctantly acceded to Casor’s demands, even providing him “corne and leather,” as “freedom dues.” A few months later, however, Johnson reconsidered his choice and sued Parker in court for stealing Casor. Johnson asserted that Casor never had an indenture; on the contrary, “hee had him [Casor] for his life.” The court ruled in Johnson’s favor and ordered Casor to “returne unto the service of his said master Anthony Johnson,” decreeing that Robert Parker cover the costs of the court case.

  With the decision of the Northampton County Court, Casor became the first person of African descent in a civil case to be deemed a “slave for life.” Although Johnson initially agreed to free Casor from his contract, the loss of his labor apparently proved too much to accept. Perhaps thinking about ensuring his financial standing and the future of his family, Johnson decided that he needed to possess as much property, both human and inanimate, as possible. And though the court sided with him in this instance, Anthony Johnson and his family faced increasing harassment and threats to his property from his white neighbors. Around 1665, Johnson and his extended family moved to Maryland. Other people of African descent who were able to gain their freedom also bought land in the surrounding area and formed a tight-knit community that provided much-needed support in the face of rising discrimination and mistreatment of Black people. Two years later, in 1667, Johnson’s son, John, acquired forty-four acres of land in Maryland and named the estate Angola, after the African homeland his father had been torn away from over forty years before.