Pontiac’s demand for a British evacuation and the exchange of one Black child said much about his clear understanding of how the balance of power was being reshaped in the Great Lakes. The British had expropriated, by military force and diplomatic fictions, massive swaths of lands and had acquired, by trade as well as by natural increase, thousands of enslaved people of African descent. Pontiac sought to reverse this order by calling for the British to depart, which would restore the most recent status quo, in which the less offensive French had occupied the inland forts. At the same time, he participated in the new order by attempting to muscle his way into Black slave ownership. By taking the boy for himself, the Ottawa leader would acquire not only a captive worker but also, and just as important, a visible status symbol in the form of a personal attendant of African descent.
Black boys and young men, though rare in Detroit and the upper Midwest, were highly sought after by members of the British merchant and military elite. By owning one, Pontiac could express without words his political and military equality to his European adversaries. After this moment, and especially during the Revolutionary War era that would soon follow, the enslavement of African-descended people as a specific group of racialized others would spread across a region where Indigenous slavery had formerly been the most common means of labor exploitation.
We do not know what became of this one Black boy. But we know that the British officers refused Pontiac’s offer, and that his siege of Detroit and bold bid to oust the British failed by the autumn of 1763. The child, we can presume, remained the property of a British officer within the palisaded town of Detroit, where approximately sixty-five others of (usually) Indigenous American or (sometimes) African descent were held captive in the mid-1760s. As former British officers and military personnel joined the ranks of the merchants, the Black men and boys they preferred to own were put to work alongside Indigenous men and boys transporting supplies and beaver hides hundreds of miles across the Great Lakes and into upstate New York. James Sterling, a British merchant who moved to Detroit in 1761, kept records that revealed a growing transregional network of merchant elites who shared the labor of a few enslaved Black boys and men and helped one another track down and secure runaways. Early Detroit was fueled by the labor of people of color twice contained, by the walls of the town and by a series of agreements between French, British, and later American leaders permitting slavery’s continuation.
The place that would eventually become the capital of the Michigan Territory grew practiced at confining and surveilling unfree people, ensuring the regular theft of their labor for economic, political, and symbolic ends. A century later the state of Michigan would perfect this practice of extractive entrapment. In 1838 the Michigan state legislature approved construction of the first state prison in Jackson. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Michigan had formally abolished racial slavery just one year prior, with the ratification of its new state constitution in 1837. By 1843, prisoners were working for private contractors to produce farm equipment, textiles, tools, saddles, steam engines, barrels, and more at no pay. Michigan expanded the facility until in 1882 the castle-like fortress was said to be the largest walled prison in the world. The state assigned inmates to mine coal on public lands and soon had farming activities and factories operating on sixty-five enclosed acres.
Michigan is still home to one of the most extreme human containment systems in the United States. Its prison population has increased by 450 percent since 1973, and the state maintains a higher rate of imprisonment than most countries. African Americans are the largest incarcerated group by far in Michigan, with a total population of 14 percent and a penal population of 49 percent. Latinos and Native Americans are incarcerated in Michigan at rates equal to their population percentage. However, white Michiganders, who make up 77 percent of the general population, are underrepresented in the prison population at 46 percent. Racialized sentencing policies have much to do with these statistics. Historians Heather Ann Thompson and Matthew Lassiter, the founding codirectors of the Carceral State Project at the University of Michigan, point to “draconian” state legislation that by the 1990s included the infamous “lifer laws,” which exacted life terms for narcotics possessions of over 650 grams and extinguished the opportunity for parole. As men and women were thrown behind bars for nonviolent offenses in the 1980s through the early 2000s, Detroit neighborhoods were gutted, children were orphaned, and voter rolls were depleted. And just as this Black prison population skyrocketed at the end of the twentieth century, the state loosened legislation to allow for an expansion of convict labor.
In the modern mass incarceration moment, the racialized “carceral landscape” of colonial Great Lakes slavery found an echo. The story of one Black boy foreshadowed the fate of too many Black prisoners.
1764–1769
PHILLIS WHEATLEY
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Winter solstice in New England, December 21, 1767. The date Phillis Wheatley’s first published poem saw the light of day was literally the day the sun shone least that year. So yes, let it be characterized by the potential of darkness. Let us consider the small flames of candles and whale oil lamps that the readers of the Newport Mercury would most likely have used to engage the first published poem by an African American, by an enslaved woman, by a daughter whose surviving memory was of her mother pouring water before the sun rose. Winter solstice and in the dark—what June Jordan would later call “the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America” was born.
We can imagine it was already cold when Phillis Wheatley sent the poem to post. Did she leave the house? Was some other person given the task to send her poem “On Messers Hussey and Coffin,” from Boston to Newport?
In winter, the artist known as Phillis, who had nearly died on the slave-trading ship Phillis, was almost always sick. Was it the physical impact of surviving in the hold as a young girl before her front teeth even came in? A Middle Passage–borne chronic illness? Was the climate of New England incompatible with her constitution? Was she physically homesick, ripped from the warmth of the Wolof territories where scholars now imagine she was born?
She was well enough to append a note to the printer contextualizing her first published poem. Or is the note a poem as well? It uses the poetic device of alliteration to set the minds of the publishers at ease. The editors pass it along, so it reassures the (white) readers that the poet belongs. That she belongs, to somebody. Which is to say, she is owned by the prominent Wheatley family. And that this poem came, how curious, out of her interpretation of an astonishing tale she heard while she was doing what enslaved women are supposed to do, “tending table” for her owners.
In this note, before anything else, before even her name, she declares that “these lines” were “composed by a Negro Girl.” Capital N capital G. And there it is. The absurd iteration of capitalism as capture: the object speaks. You know, from the perspective of the northern hemisphere of Earth, on the days surrounding the winter solstice, even the sun appears to stand still.
The Negro Girl, whom we now know as Phillis Wheatley, was very familiar with the New England audience who would be reading her first published poem. Like other enslaved people whose life and measure of safety depended on the absolute agency and control of their white captors, and who had no recourse to the law to protect themselves or each other, she had to know this audience better than they could bear to know themselves. And this, she tells the printer, who will print the telling, is the source of her poetry.
She was serving the characters in this poem dinner at the home of her captors. “Tending table” she says, abbreviating attendance and attuned to what she knows are the tendencies of the white readers she has access to in 1767, to underestimate the power, foresight, and layered use of voice available to a Negro Girl. How diminutive. Do not be threatened. How cute.
Though it was not yet published, earlier that year she had written a poem to her neig
hbors across the street, the loud young men of Cambridge. “Improve your privileges while they stay!” she admonishes. Is she referring to the bad behavior they demonstrated when there was a butter shortage on campus or the system of white privilege she wants to topple? Privileges don’t last always, her phrasing seems to imply. Years later, when she does publish that poem in her collection, it will be much revised. This poet knows how privileged white people are about their bread and butter, slave commerce and trade. And so she must reassure them that she is just a benign eavesdropper in rhyme, tending, not overturning, their table.
However, her use of alliteration in her contextualizing note also reads to those of us coming along later as a claim for what the poet known as Solange recently called a Seat at the Table, an intervention into a language and literature that had heretofore failed to imagine her to “insert these lines composed by a Negro Girl.”
Focusing on December 21, 1767, is already rereading the legacy of the Negro Girl known by multiple misspelled names. The poem that got her widespread acclaim and that was for years considered to be her first publication was an elegy for the famous Great Awakening evangelist George Whitefield. And indeed, much of her poetry is about death (“On death’s domain intent I place my eyes,” she says), mostly the deaths of white people. Prominent and powerful white people, or white people her prominent and powerful captors happened to entertain in their home.
But I find it significant that her first published poem is a poem of survival at sea—or almost dying at sea, a theme that she would write about for the rest of her life. Her later work returns to the gods of wind she references in this poem. Her most recently discovered poem, “Ocean,” recounts her own return from England through a storm.
Of course, we must remember that the young poet had already almost died at sea in her first journey to the Americas, as she nearly wasted away in the hold of the Phillis. Is it too much to imagine that she returns to these scenes of violent ocean journeys to imagine another possibility for herself?
As James Levernier has noted, much of the poetry this Negro Girl published under the name Phillis Wheatley is of the “extraterrestrial and the supernatural.” She writes about mythic characters, Greek gods, heaven and angels, the relevance of worlds beyond this world. She claims for herself the “tongue of a Seraphim,” divine speech beyond the human scale. And therefore we could read this first published poem, about almost dying at sea, and the note that contextualizes it as the first act of Black speculative writing in English in the Americas.
This means that the note written ostensibly to the printer and the poem imagines me, Solange, Octavia Butler, and the rest of us as future readers, but also that her ocean poetry in general is a fantastic time-traveling navigation of what she calls “the tumult of life’s tossing seas.” In her poem “Ode to Neptune,” she hails the sea god to keep “my Susannah” safe from a sea storm. An intimate prayer for her captor, Susannah Wheatley, syntactically reverses the logic of ownership. “[M]y Susannah” suggests her mistress belongs to her. In “To a Lady on her Coming to North America,” she imagines, in the image of a white friend of the Wheatleys, privileges she would never have, depicting a woman with access to a climate more conducive to her own health and a return voyage that culminates in a healing reunion with her loving family, a longing especially poignant for someone kidnapped by slavers as a child.
In “To a Lady on Her Remarkable Preservation in a Hurricane in North Carolina,” she describes a mother and daughter reunited after time separated by the sea. In “A Farewel to America,” she says, “I mourn for health deny’d” from the perspective of someone living in bondage in a climate that makes her sick. In “Ocean,” she voices her regret: “Oh had I staid!” This ostensibly refers to her fear that she will die during her return journey to Boston. It also could refer to the fact that Benjamin Franklin (to whom she planned to dedicate the book that this poem would have appeared in) suggested that she stay in England and live free from the Wheatley family. Does she regret the echoes of her second western transatlantic journey to care for the ailing Susannah Wheatley at the expense of her own autonomy?
Some scholars have noted that Phillis Wheatley’s frequent writing about sea voyages demonstrated not only the reality of her life in a port town serving a merchant family but also the sense of her own divided life. Her own experience of what in Wolof cosmology is the space of death, a watery space that separates the living from the ancestors. In this case, the poet is separated by an ocean from her lineage and community.
Navigating that space through the supernatural and extraterrestrial technology of her own poetry may have given her access not only to those of us waiting for her in the future but also to those whom she lost, who indeed may have “made their beds down in the shades below” the boat, to use the imagery of this solstice poem. In her death-focused poetry of elegy and survival, is she making space to do the ancestral work she needs to do to honor the people who did not survive the Middle Passage with her? Who jumped or were thrown overboard during the journey of the ship Phillis that substantiated the future poet into a Negro Girl? Family? Community members? Her own parents? Who is actually sleeping in those beds?
In her invocation with seraphic ardor of the ocean beds in the shades, or (s)hades below, she links herself to contemporary musicians and speculative authors (including myself) who imagine the social lives of the captives submerged in the Atlantic as an ongoing space of engagement and accountability. She claims the power to heal with her words, to reach beyond her time, place, condition, and realm.
Maybe there should be limits on the extent to which I speculate on the ongoing spiritual work of an artist whose very body was stolen in an act of capitalist speculative value. Maybe there should be no limits at all. But what we do know is that on Winter Solstice 1767 a young poet made space for her own work and a layered journey in multiple directions across and through the ocean, backward and forward in time. Her own offering in the dark, black words, claimed by a Negro Girl. An intervention in print, facile in the shadows of the language of commerce. On solstice. And yes. Even the sun would wait.
1769–1774
DAVID GEORGE
William J. Barber II
When David George was born in Essex County, Virginia, sometime around 1742, the man who claimed to own him and his parents was named Chapel. By his own testimony, George’s parents “had not the fear of God before their eyes.” But after his own religious conversion, George wrote as one who had both escaped bondage and learned the fear of the Lord that is, according to Proverbs 9:10, “the beginning of wisdom.”
If the enslaver who had claimed to own George in colonial Virginia bore the name of a house of worship, Chapel’s slaveholder religion did not define God for David George. A free man who was determined to free others through the good news he found in the Bible, George went on to establish the first Black Baptist church in the United States. In defiance of the first Chapel he had known, he established a chapel for freedom in the colonial South.
African Americans began to establish a shared religious life and culture in the late colonial period. While enslaved people from Africa had brought with them an array of cultures and religious practices, their Christian enslavers rationalized their use and abuse of enslaved people by investing in the salvation of their souls. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts sent missionaries to catechize children like George who had been born into slavery, teaching that it was the spiritual duty of Christian enslavers to provide for the religious education of the people they held in bondage. This top-down effort to Christianize enslaved Africans met with limited success.
But the First Great Awakening, which swept through the colonies just before George was born, popularized an evangelical form of Christianity that emphasized the individual’s decision to recognize their need for God’s grace and accept Christ for themselves. The fear of God that George said his parents lacked beca
me real to him through revivalist preaching that offered relief from that fear.
By the early 1760s, George had fled bondage in Virginia. He ventured south, negotiating a fugitive existence in and among Creek and Nautchee people as well as white settlers who were debating their loyalty to Britain. While Chapel’s family for a short time reclaimed George as property, he escaped again, and unlike many who would travel northward on the Underground Railroad, he kept heading south.
Though he was Black according to the law of the plantation, George found another identity in the evangelical faith he embraced while living in South Carolina. After marrying and starting a family, he met a Black Baptist preacher, George Liele, who worked with a white minister, Brother Palmer.
White historians believe that the church they established together in Georgia was the first Black Baptist church in America, but it is more accurate to say that George joined and established a freedom church that interrupted the lies of racism. While the circumstances of the Revolutionary War took George and his family to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, the testimony he left us makes clear that he joined an interracial evangelical movement in the Georgia colony that offered him a way toward freedom for the rest of his earthly journey.
I was introduced to the freedom church that George joined and helped spread by my parents, William and Eleanor Barber. Though they were born two centuries after George, they told me stories of my father’s family’s fugitive existence among Black, white, and Native people in eastern North Carolina that also stretches back to the colonial period. The day I was born in the hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana, where my father was in graduate school at the time, he argued with the hospital administration to insist that I was not simply “Negro.” He was not ashamed of our African American heritage; he was, instead, determined to tell the truth about the fusion history he knew we had inherited in our place.
Four Hundred Souls Page 13