Four Hundred Souls
Page 8
European slavers such as Jean Barbot called Gold Coast canoemen “the fittest and most experienced men to manage [to] paddle the canoes over the bars and breakings.” Though at the behest of slaving ship captains and merchants, these laborers were not without leverage. They bargained for higher wages and used their proximity to transatlantic commerce to deal on their own behalf. As one European trader noted, “It was customary for Mina fishermen [canoemen] to go out in their canoes and contact ships from Portugal before they reached the [trading] castle. Out at sea they conducted private trade to the detriment of the [Portuguese] crown.”
Maritime middlemen were vectors between avaricious European and American merchants and the West African brokers who sold them Black people. These middlemen occupied a paradoxical position within the transatlantic slave trade. They bore witness to and participated in heart-wrenching scenes of violence: enslaved peoples being shackled, branded, and forcibly moved aboard ships. Facing these disturbing scenes, as well as the inherent dangers of the Gold Coast’s tumultuous waters, they carved out individual benefits for themselves on the margins of the infamous trade. Like many participants in the Middle Passage, the individual inducements for cooperation bound them to a ruthless process that enriched the few at the expense of many.
MAMA, WHERE YOU KEEP YOUR GUN?
Phillip B. Williams
If I had my way I’d have been a killer
—Nina Simone
In a box of baby pictures and green books,
old issues of Jet grave-stacked above.
Death at bay or death come close.
Next to the Bible full of obituaries haints ride
from here to Virginia, from now to 1676.
At the temple of my enemies wearing the face
of my enemies wearing the face of their fathers.
At the bay where the last indentured servant
kissed saltwater before taking notice, taking aim.
As a gris-gris between banknotes and abandoned bras.
Didn’t know when but knew I would.
In the closet, beneath cobwebs wide as sails
above the first ships carrying the thirst of us.
Death at the bay. Death come close.
Where I mind my Black-ass business at.
A breeze the smell of salt seeps from the muzzle.
I keep it thus I is the crime.
Where rebellion evolves the tantrum.
In a lockbox under my bed
where the past writhes and births our semblant present-future
where to reach for the gun
is to reach for safety
in retrograde.
1699–1704
THE SELLING OF JOSEPH
Brandon R. Byrd
Samuel Sewall, a white businessman, recorded the transaction in his typical fashion: “October 12. Shipped by Samuel Sewall, in the James, Job Prince, master, for Jamaica: ‘Eight hogsheads of Bass Fish.’ ” The date of departure. The ship carrying his specified goods. The captain ensuring their safe arrival. Their final destination. His book of receipts repeated the mundane rhythms of his ships, of the seas.
The insatiable hunger for slaves lurked in its banality.
The whole business with the West Indies was simply unfortunate, Samuel thought. He had “been long and much dissatisfied with the Trade of fetching Negros from Guinea.” He even “had a strong inclination to Write something about it.” That the feeling “wore off” was no indictment of his godliness. Weren’t “these Blackamores…of the Posterity of Cham, and therefore…under the curse of slavery”? Did their masters not bring them “out of a Pagan Country, into places where the Gospel is Preached”? Samuel felt some relief when his West Indian partners reminded him that there were reasons, both divine and natural, for the enslavement of Black people. A part of him wanted, all of him needed, to accept that “the Africans have Wars with one another: our Ships bring lawful Captives taken in those Wars,” and to take comfort in the knowledge that “Abraham had servants bought with his Money, and born in his House.” The idea of bondage as ancient and foretold, as divine and redemptive, quieted more troubling thoughts. It put his mind momentarily at ease.
The opening of the African trade, the breaking of the Royal African Company’s monopoly, removed the comfort of abstraction. The growing number of enslaved people made Samuel recoil. “There is such a disparity in their Conditions, Color & Hair, that they can never embody with us, and grow up into orderly Families, to the Peopling of the Land,” he wrote in his diary. These strangers will be the end of our experiment, he predicted.
But were they not men, “sons of Adam,” too? Up close, Samuel could not help but notice enslaved people’s “continual aspiring after their forbidden Liberty.” His doubt resurfaced, the questions rose, until he began to buckle under the weight bearing down on his conscience. Had men misinterpreted the Scriptures, manipulated the stories of curses wrought and servants bought by the ancient prophets? Was the promise of conversion merely an apology for maintaining property in men? He suspected that the defenses of slavery might not hold up to scrutiny, that “the Numerousness of Slaves at this day in the Province, and the Uneasiness of them under their Slavery, hath put many upon thinking whether the Foundation of it be firmly and well laid.” He had the feeling, the budding hope, that he was not alone in his suspicions.
He was thinking of ships laden with human souls, of the hundreds of lives bought and sold in Boston, when someone named Brother Belknap rushed in with a path to salvation. The petition being prepared for his General Court called “for the freeing of a Negro and his wife, who were unjustly held in Bondage.” It was a portent. Providence. I am called of God, Samuel knew at once. He began writing his apology—the defense of the negroes that no colonist had dared to write before.
Samuel’s plea for the slaves, his admonition to any freeman who would hold their fellow men as slaves, came as it had to, in the form of a sermon. Like any good preacher, he began with his argument: “FOR AS MUCH as Liberty is in real value next unto Life: None ought to part with it themselves, or deprive others of it, but upon most mature Consideration.” His elaboration called on scripture to show that “all Men, as they are the Sons of Adam, are Coheirs; and have equal Right unto Liberty, and all other outward Comforts of Life.” He reminded his fellow Christians that “GOD hath given the Earth [with all Commodities] unto the sons of Adam…And hath made of One Blood, all Nations of Men, for to dwell on all the face of the Earth.” He summoned the story of Joseph, sold into slavery by his brothers although he “was rightfully no more a Slave to his Brethren, than they were to him.” He lamented that “there should be more Caution used in buying a Horse, a little lifeless dust; than there is in purchasing Men and Women: Whenas they are the Offspring of GOD, and their Liberty is, Auro pretiosior Omni.” More precious than gold.
Samuel understood the terrible doubts that plagued the minds of the men he hoped to sway. He remembered his own willingness to accept that God had made slaves of negroes, pagans, and the posterity of Ham. So he answered the objections of the skeptics to his attack on slavery. He showed the way to their own salvation, toward that elusive state of grace. Repent. Release your slaves. Stop the trade in men. “To persist in holding their Neighbours and Brethren under the Rigor of perpetual Bondage, seems to be no proper way of gaining Assurance that God ha’s given them Spiritual Freedom.” Man-stealing was assuredly a path away from Heaven.
* * *
—
Samuel Sewall wrote the advertisement in his typical fashion.
Several Irish Maid Servants
time most of them for Five Years one
Irish man Servant who is a good
Barber and Wiggmaker, also Four
Or Five Likely Negro Boys
He knew his business dismayed his uncle. B
etrayed his namesake. He had read The Selling of Joseph, of course; the old man had seen to that. But he had also read the rebuttal from Judge John Saffin. He had been comforted by the argument that hierarchies were necessary, that bondage was natural, that the enslavement of negroes was part of an orderly, divine world. He had been convinced of his own godliness by the idea that “Cowardly and cruel are those Blacks innate.”
He had made peace with what the province, with what his place in it, required. The doubts, the troubling idea that he was a man-stealer, a seller of his own brethren, had faded with each successful sale of a negro slave. Apprehension gave way to conviction. To self-assurance. To the unassailable belief that liberty required slavery. Capital was the real god of this new world, he thought. The future belonged to him; his uncle’s protest was already forgotten.
1704–1709
THE VIRGINIA SLAVE CODES
Kai Wright
It is hereby enacted, That all servants imported and brought into this country, by sea or land, who were not christians in their native country…shall be accounted and be slaves.
—Act Concerning Servants and Slaves, section 4
It’s a truism that we see the past as far more distant than it is in reality: my parents were adults before they could share bathrooms with white people; my grandmother was middle-aged before she could confidently enter a voting booth in Alabama. Yet these images fade easily into gentle sepia tones for me today. That’s because it’s safety, not wisdom, we’re after when we look backward. We picture ugly things at a comfortable distance.
But Americans distort the past in other ways, too. We see horrible people as exceptional, and their many accomplices as mere captives of their times. We tell ourselves we would contain such wickedness if it arose today, because now we know better. We’ve learned. In our illusory past, progress has come in decisive and irrevocable strokes.
I wonder if that’s how Mary and Anthony Johnson felt in 1652 when they petitioned the court for tax relief in Northampton County, Virginia. They had both been enslaved in their youth, but by midcentury they were free landowners, with four children and servants of their own. They were part of a small Black population that had been in Virginia since colonists arrived in Jamestown, and they must have been optimistic, though they would’ve seen a lot of change in their lives.
They would have witnessed a developing debate among white Christians about whether Africans were fully human and thus entitled to the protection of God’s love. They would have heard about each new law that came down from the legislature, as lawmakers tried to break up the colony’s multiracial class of indentured servants. The Johnsons probably would have felt the shift as the colony reordered its mixed servant class into two distinct racial castes. They surely would have felt the cultural and economic space for free or indentured Black people steadily shrinking, as law after law codified who could have sex with whom; who had the legal standing to appeal to the courts when wronged and who had none; who could work or buy or pray their way out of servitude and who couldn’t.
What would the Johnsons have thought about the future as this social reordering unfolded? Anthony and Mary did not live to see the Virginia General Assembly hand down the omnibus legislation that would define their heirs’ lives and the next century and a half of American life:
It is hereby enacted and declared, That baptism of slaves doth not exempt them from bondage; and that all children shall be bond or free, according to the condition of their mothers. —Act Concerning Servants and Slaves, section 36
Known colloquially as the “slave codes,” the 1705 Act Concerning Servants and Slaves was an effort at finality. It put an end to decades of debating over how to make it clear that Virginia was a white man’s colony, one in which a white man’s colonial investment was secure, and one in which the law protected the white man’s right to enslave Black people. It became the model for all the British colonies in North America. One colony after another codified its racial caste systems and assured white planters that they could enslave increasing numbers of Black people.
What’s striking is the care that was taken to make it so. In the comfortingly distorted view of the past, American slavery came about in the passive tense. That’s just the way things were back then. Slavery was an inherited reality, a long-standing if unsavory fact of trade and war. In reality, colonial legislatures consciously conceived American chattel slavery at the turn of the eighteenth century, and they spelled out its terms in painstaking regulatory detail. Virginia’s slave codes contained forty-one sections and more than four thousand words.
No master, mistress, or overseer of a family, shall knowingly permit any slave, not belonging to him or her, to be and remain upon his or her plantation, above four hours at any one time, without the leave of such slave’s master, mistress, or overseer, on penalty of one hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco to the informer. —Act Concerning Servants and Slaves, section 32
The slave codes of 1705 are among American history’s most striking evidence that our nation’s greatest sins were achieved with clear forethought and determined maintenance. And in this case as in many others, white elites were incited to act by their fears.
Between 1680 and 1700, Virginia’s enslaved Black population increased from 3,000 to 16,380, driven by a decreasing flow of white indentured servants from England and the fact that Africans had better survival rates on the colony’s plantations. In the neighboring Carolinas, Black people were nearly a third of the population by 1672, a growth driven by the need for labor on the colony’s booming rice plantations.
These demographics presented real threats to white planters, including a potential cross-racial labor movement. Plantation work was close and intimate, and it fostered a troubling solidarity between the growing Black population and white indentured servants. White planters could not afford for such a dangerous bond to form—which is why in 1705 Virginia’s legislature did as much to codify white privilege as it did to establish Black subjugation.
All masters and owners of servants, shall find and provide for their servants, wholesome and competent diet, clothing, and lodging, by the discretion of the county court; and shall not, at any time, give immoderate correction; neither shall, at any time, whip a christian white servant naked, without an order from a justice of the peace. —Act Concerning Servants and Slaves, section 7
Still, there were just too many Black people, and they did not accept bondage. In the years leading up to and surrounding the slave codes, Black defiance was widespread, with unrest stretching from the plantations themselves all the way back to West Africa’s Slave Coast. New York passed its own code in 1705, motivated in part by the size of its Black population.
White planters needed legal order to control the unruly and growing Black workforce upon which the colonies’ wealth extraction depended. The slave codes provided it. They were among the first American laws to carefully detail the terms and conditions for brutalizing Black people.
If any slave resist his master, or owner, or other person, by his or her order, correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction, it shall not be accounted felony; but the master, owner, and every such other person so giving correction, shall be free and acquit of all punishment and accusation for the same, as if such incident had never happened. —Act Concerning Servants and Slaves, section 34
The 1705 slave codes would not be the final word on anti-Black violence. There would be many more laws: the Fugitive Slave Acts, the post-Reconstruction “Black codes,” the Jim Crow court rulings offering impunity for vigilante justice, the sentencing laws of the 1980s, the police militarization of the 1994 Crime Bill, and today’s ongoing legal deference to cops who feel threatened by the unarmed Black children they kill.
The myths Americans tell themselves about the past—that it is distant, that people did bad things out of ignorance rather than malice, that the good guys wo
n in the end—encourage a false faith in the present. They allow us to believe our norms are fixed and that the forward march of progress may sometimes be delayed but never reversed. Bad times will get better, because they always have. We’ll be safe.
But the past is close. The slave codes of 1705 are close. The past is filled with people who carried out evil acts with foresight and determination, supported by the complicity of their peers. It contains progress but just as many reactionary entrenchments of old power. White supremacy became the norm in America because white men who felt threatened wrote laws to foster it, then codified the violence necessary to maintain it. They can maintain it with the same intention today, if we allow it.
1709–1714
THE REVOLT IN NEW YORK
Herb Boyd
On April 6 or 7, 1712, less than a year after New York City’s municipal slave market opened for business, two dozen enslaved Africans “gathered in an orchard of Mr. Crook ‘in the middle of town,’ ” according to Governor Robert Hunter.
They “had resolved to revenge themselves,” the governor explained, “for some hard usage, they apprehended to have received from their masters.” Harsher restrictions on the growing number of enslaved Africans in New York City had led to more resistance.
From the eleven captives brought to New York City in 1626, by 1700 the Black population had increased to more than six thousand, of whom approximately one thousand were enslaved to British owners. In the eighteenth century, depending on the time and place, there were more enslaved African Americans in New York than in some Southern states; more in New York City than in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1800 there were 20,613 enslaved Blacks in New York and 13,584 in Tennessee.