Four Hundred Souls
Page 5
Like Johnson, other masters of indentured servants in Virginia also made calculated choices about which unfree laborers to manumit or retain. In October 1657, Anne Barnehouse, the sister of Christopher Stafford, a white planter from England, followed the wishes stated in his will to free his servant Mihill Gowen, a man of African descent, and his son William, promising “never to trouble or molest the said Mihill Gowen or his sone William or demand any service of the said Mahill or his said sone William.” Barnehouse, however, did not free her servant Prosta, who was William’s mother and perhaps the partner of Gowen. Evidently, Barnehouse had no qualms about obeying the manumission wishes of her brother but could not part with her own servant, who was likely acutely aware of the differences in status between herself, her son, and the father of her child. Five years before the 1662 Virginia law of partus sequitur ventrem declared that children followed the legal status of the mother, Barnehouse likely realized that the productive and reproductive labor she could extract from Prosta outweighed the morality of allowing her to enjoy freedom with her kin.
The English colonizers in the Chesapeake region were not the only Europeans to depend on Black people for labor. By the mid-seventeenth century, enslaved Africans comprised 20 percent of the population of New Netherland, the original homeland of the Lenape Indians—now occupied by Manhattan—making it the colony with the highest percentage of enslaved people at that time. Enslaved people of African descent performed all kinds of labor in the region for Dutch merchants of the West India Company. They cultivated small farms, built forts and churches, and protected the fledgling Dutch colony against Indian attacks.
Just like John Casor in Virginia, however, enslaved laborers of African descent in New Netherland used the labor they performed and the law as freedom strategies. Since enslaved Africans enjoyed the right to use the Dutch legal system, some individuals who participated on the side of the Dutch in conflicts with Indigenous nations petitioned—and often received—the status known as “half-freedom.” The Dutch understood early on that fostering divisions between African-descended peoples and Native people could serve their interests by forcibly removing Indigenous people from their lands to free it for slave-based cultivation. Half-freedom was an appropriate term: those who had this status could not pass it on to their children, unlike the enslaved people in the English colonies, and had to pay the West India Company an annual tribute in exchange for working for themselves. Despite the limitations of this standing, Africans made the most of their circumstances and never stopped pursuing complete freedom.
Africans in early America lived in a society that blurred the lines between freedom and unfreedom, a world of constrained possibilities, a world that could provide only “half-freedom.” And almost four hundred years later, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless others serve as a stark and painful reminder that for people of African descent, the United States is still a place of “half-freedom.”
UPON ARRIVAL
Jericho Brown
We’d like a list of what we lost
Think of those who landed in the Atlantic
The sharkiest of waters
Bonnetheads and thrashers
Spinners and blacktips
We are made of so much water
Bodies of water
Bodies walking upright on the mud at the bottom
The mud they must call nighttime
Oh there was some survival
Life
After life on the Atlantic—this present grief
So old we see through it
So thick we can touch it
And Jesus said of his wound Go on, touch it
I don’t have the reach
I’m not qualified
I can’t swim or walk or handle a hoe
I can’t kill a man
Or write it down
A list of what we lost
The history of the wound
The history of the wound
That somebody bought them
That somebody brought them
To the shore of Virginia and then
Inland
Into the land of cliché
I’d rather know their faces
Their names
My love yes you
Whether you pray or not
If I knew your name
I’d ask you to help me
Imagine even a single tooth
I’d ask you to write that down
But there’s not enough ink
I’d like to write a list of what we lost.
Think of those who landed in the Atlantic,
Think of life after life on the Atlantic—
Sweet Jesus. A grief so thick I could touch it.
And Jesus said of his wound, Go on, touch it.
But I don’t have the reach. I’m not qualified.
And you? How’s your reach? Are you qualified?
Don’t you know the history of the wound?
Here is the history of the wound:
Somebody brought them. Somebody bought them.
Though I know who caught them, sold them, bought them,
I’d rather focus on their faces, their names.
1659–1664
ELIZABETH KEYE
Jennifer L. Morgan
1662 Act XII [of the Virginia House of Burgesses]. Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman shall be slave or free, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother—partus sequitur ventrem. And that if any Christian shall commit fornication with a negro man or woman, hee or shee soe offending shall pay double the fines imposed by the former act.
Elizabeth Keye was an African American woman who lived in colonial Virginia in the seventeenth century. She was the daughter of an enslaved African woman and the Englishman who owned her. As is so often the case, we can know nothing of the nature of their relationship except that it produced a daughter. Elizabeth Keye would instigate the single most important legislative act concerning the history of enslavement, race, and reproduction in the colonial Atlantic world.
As a child, Keye found herself misidentified on the estate where she was indentured. At some point in the late 1620s, Thomas Keye, a free white Englishman and member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, had impregnated her mother, an enslaved African-born woman (whose name we do not know). What this woman (who appears in the archives as “woman slave”) hoped or believed about her daughter’s future is utterly lost in the documentary record. What is clear is that her father’s death threw that future into some confusion. Although Elizabeth had been placed in indenture as a child, after his death she (or her indenture) was sold to another Virginia landowner.
Selling the remaining term of an indenture was not uncommon, but because Elizabeth Keye was the daughter of an African woman, her race made her vulnerable to abuses that an Englishwoman would not have had to endure. Although the English embraced the system of African slavery elsewhere in the Atlantic, in Virginia they relied on indentured servants, the vast majority of whom were also themselves English. In the 1650s there were fewer than three hundred Africans in the colony, or about 1 percent of the population of English settlers. And yet Elizabeth understood that she was in danger, that her color could dictate her status.
Her status as Keye’s daughter was never a secret; it was widely known that this young woman’s father was a free Englishman. We learn from one witness that, out of ignorance or spite, Thomas Keye’s other child, John, called Elizabeth “Black Besse.” Mrs. Speke, the overseer’s wife, “checked him and said[,] Sirra you must call her Sister for s
hee is your Sister.” Whether or not Mrs. Speke’s intervention was meant to take John Keye down a peg, it was recognition of Elizabeth’s lineage. But her relative freedom, pinned as it was to a transgressive paternity that increasingly muddied the waters of property rights, was insufficient.
In 1655 Elizabeth Keye petitioned the courts for her freedom—and that of her new child—and thus became the first woman of African descent to do so in the English North American colonies. While we know very little about her, we can be confident that she had a precise understanding of the dangers that surrounded her as a result of the interrelated consequences of race and sex in colonial Virginia. She had been transferred, by then, to a third Englishman, whose executors listed her and her son among his “negroes” rather than his “servants.” She had, by that time, been held for at least ten years longer than the terms of her 1636 indenture had specified. Her original freedom suit was granted, then overturned, and finally won when the father of her child and common-law husband, William Grinsted, an indentured Englishman who was knowledgeable in the law, brought her case to the General Assembly. On the day that her case was finally decided, July 31, 1656, she and Grinsted posted their banns (publicly announcing their intention to marry), and she and her descendants remained legally free well into the eighteenth century.
Less than six years later, the Virginia Assembly revisited this case. Perhaps the lawmakers understood that granting freedom to the children of women raped by free property-owning Englishmen would fundamentally undermine the labor system they relied upon. In 1662 they decreed that a child born to an African woman slave, no matter who the father was, would follow that woman into slavery. This piece of legislation encapsulated the early modern understanding of racial slavery—that it was a category of labor that African people and their descendants inherited.
How much did Elizabeth Keye know about the tide of racial slavery that was engulfing the Atlantic world? Enough to act decisively in an effort to protect herself and her children from the claims that she should be enslaved. She recognized, on some level, that she was embedded in racialized structures of meaning and labor. Her freedom was not assured, despite her father’s prominence. When faced with the instability of her son’s future, she came to understand that her ties to her child were exposed to destruction by the economic logic of racial slavery.
In this regard, she was prescient. The child of an African woman whose freedom and that of her children were dependent upon English men, Elizabeth may not have understood the role that her case would have in propelling the 1662 legislative act, but she did understand that the atmosphere in which she lived put her and her kin in jeopardy. The forces that moved Keye and the father of her children in and out of court were precisely those that anticipated both Keye’s vulnerability and that of all Black women in a nascent slave society. The link between the Keye case and the 1662 act is evidence that legally sanctioned claims to lineage for Black Virginians were short-lived.
When racial slavery depended upon the transformation of children into property, Black women could not be legally allowed to produce kinship. The fact that they did, and that they would continue to do so despite the violations of slavery, is at the heart of the afterlife of reproductive slavery. Black women have struggled mightily to protect their children and, for that matter, their ability to give birth free of economic and racial violence. In the twenty-first century, African American women’s ability to safely navigate the intrusion of the state into their reproductive autonomy continues to be at risk.
1664–1669
THE VIRGINIA LAW ON BAPTISM
Jemar Tisby
How exactly did Christianity in the United States become white? Of course we know that’s not the reality. To this day, Black people remain the most Christian demographic in the country. But the statement, repeated in various ways throughout the centuries, that “Christianity is the white man’s religion” has a basis in historical fact. After all, white Christians deliberately retrofitted religion to accommodate the rising racial caste system.
In 1667 the Virginia Assembly, a group of white Anglican men, passed a law that Christian baptism would not free an enslaved person in the colonies. “It is enacted and declared by this grand assembly,” they wrote, “and the authority thereof, that the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of their person as to his bondage or freedom.”
In England it had been the custom that Christians could not enslave other Christians. Spiritual equality, if it meant anything, meant that Christians should promote and ensure the liberty of their religious sisters and brothers. In North America, however, the Anglican lawmakers had a dilemma. What would become of white supremacy and slavery if Christians insisted that they could not enslave other adherents to the faith?
The context for the new law was given in its preamble: “Whereas some doubts have risen whether children that are slaves by birth, and by the charity and piety of their owners made pertakers of the blessed sacrament of baptisme, should by virtue of their baptisme be made free.”
Apparently, some slaveholders had concerns that their “charity and piety” in sharing the Christian message with enslaved children would result in the loss of unfree labor and income. Such a practice would also disrupt the ideology of white supremacy. It would be harder to maintain the social, economic, and religious superiority of white people if spiritual liberty translated into physical and material liberty for enslaved people as well.
The new law would, in the judgment of the legislators, assuage the fears of plantation owners so they could “more carefully endeavor the propagation of Christianity by permitting the children, though slaves, or those of greater growth if capable to be admitted to that sacrament.” Under this law, white Christian missionaries could proselytize and the plantation owners could still have their profitable enslaved labor. The legislation helped harden the emerging racial hierarchy in the colonies.
These white Christian lawmakers chose to racialize religion and reinforce enslavement and white supremacy through religious laws and policies. While Christianity could have been a force for liberation and equality, under laws like the one passed by the Virginia Assembly in 1667, it became a cornerstone of white supremacy. According to many white Christians, their religion gave divine approbation to an emerging system of racial oppression and economic exploitation.
White Christian leaders made the double move of enshrining their bigotry in laws while simultaneously labeling the question of slavery as a “civil” or “political” issue outside the purview of the church. Not only did the religious, political, and economic establishment create policies to codify slavery and white supremacy, they also pushed those actions outside the realm of Christian ethics. To challenge slavery on moral grounds was to distract from the (selectively) spiritual mission of the church and impinge on the Christian liberty of white slaveholders.
White missionaries should not have been surprised, then, that they did not initially have much effectiveness in converting enslaved people to Christianity. Why would the enslaved adopt the religion of slave owners? What good to Black people was a foreign God preaching their perpetual bondage?
In spite of the hypocrisy of white Christian slave owners and missionaries, Black people still heard some of the dignifying and liberatory strains within the Christian message. The book of Exodus told of a God who delivered the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. Enslaved Africans nurtured the hope of emancipation, too. They heard about the Promised Land awaiting the faithful followers of God and envisioned their freedom in a land of equity and justice. Enslaved people expressed their liberatory theology in “hush arbors” beyond the sight of slave owners. Their churchless church became the invisible institution. They composed and sang spirituals, finding within Christianity not only a source of daily endurance but also the motivation for protest and resistance.
But the faith of enslaved people often came in spite of and not because of the theology of
white enslavers. The oppressed clearly saw the gap between Jesus Christ, who announced his ministry to “proclaim liberty to the captives,” and the religion of racism and abuse preached by many white Christians.
Oppressed people must either reform or reject a religion that preaches spiritual salvation but has little to say about their physical and material conditions. The hypocrisy of white Christians who said their religion condemned darker-skinned people to perpetual slavery even as they worshiped a brown-skinned Jewish man who was put to death by an imperial power could hardly be starker, both then and now.
* * *
—
Antiracist progress can only be realized if people treat race, religion, and politics as distinct but inseparable and interrelated factors. America will not see peace between different racial and ethnic groups without working for change in faith communities, as well as in politics and law. Racial inequities are the result of racist policies, which have been justified by religion, especially Christianity.