Four Hundred Souls

by Four Hundred Souls (retail) (epub)

  And be it further enacted, That any person who shall knowingly and willingly obstruct or hinder such claimant, his agent, or attorney, in so seizing or arresting such fugitive from labor, or shall rescue such fugitive from such claimant, his agent or attorney, when so arrested pursuant to the authority herein given and declared; or shall harbor or conceal such person after notice that he or she was a fugitive from labor, as aforesaid, shall, for either of the said offences, forfeit and pay the sum of five hundred dollars. Which penalty may be recovered by and for the benefit of such claimant, by action of debt, in any Court proper to try the same, saving moreover to the person claiming such labor or service his right of action for or on account of the said injuries, or either of them.

  Anyone who provided assistance to a fugitive risked a hefty fine and whatever other punishment local officials decided to mete out. Fugitives would then be re-enslaved. The nation’s leaders were responding to the proliferation of abolitionist societies in northern states. They were also responding to the Black men, women, and children who decided to live in freedom rather than in slavery.

  For George Washington, the very act he signed into being haunted him until death. Ona Judge, a twenty-two-year-old enslaved woman, owned by Washington, ran away from his household in the summer of 1793, when Washington signed the nation’s most powerful Fugitive Slave Act. Washington immediately placed an ad for her recapture, and insinuated in the ad that he did not know what provocation caused Judge to run away. He seemed to not imagine that a human being held in lifelong bondage might desire freedom, especially from his plantation. Ona Judge remained in the free state of New Hampshire as a fugitive from slavery until her death in 1848.

  Washington would have been in the middle of a political maelstrom, had he re-enslaved a poor bondwoman who simply wanted freedom in a nation that had prioritized that value in its own fight for freedom from Britain. Although the existence of slavery and powerful laws to protect those invested in maintaining the system were in place, the Fugitive Slave Act amplified the role of the fugitive slave catcher.

  In the aftermath of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act, slave catchers proliferated. The men who patrolled slave states, free states, and territories created even more fear in the hearts of enslaved people thinking of running away. If a fugitive slave was caught and re-enslaved, the emotional and physical costs would be dire. Slave catchers were motivated by money and also performed a civic duty to a slaveholding nation that protected slavery at any cost. This constitutional protection of slavery helped to create a cottage industry where white duplicity, anti-Black violence, and the privileging of property rights over human rights reigned.

  African Americans, especially those who were free, immediately responded to the Fugitive Slave Act. They created political abolitionist organizations that addressed the need for discretion in their liberation work, raised funds for runaways, and advocated the use of armed tactical violence in the name of self-defense. Black abolitionists recognized violence as an inherently American language that white supporters of slavery understood quite well. Although white abolitionists advanced moral suasion as the central tenet in dismantling slavery, Black abolitionists understood that white America would need more than fiery speeches to dissuade them from supporting slavery.

  These leaders were also emboldened by leaders of the Haitian Revolution that began in August 1791. Black people in Haiti, who were engaged in a bloody fight for freedom from their French slave masters, used tactical violence as a means for liberation. Enslaved people in the United States were inspired by the Haitian example. In 1795 in Louisiana, still a Spanish colony, African-born slaves, mainly men, developed a plan to revolt. In Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, fifty-seven slaves and three white men dedicated themselves to destroying slave owners’ property, seizing arms, and killing white slave masters. As happened with most slave rebellions, they were betrayed by informants, in this case by Indian people of the Tunica tribe, and almost half of the enslaved conspirators were beheaded. Although the revolt did not happen, the Pointe Coupée Conspiracy served as a potent reminder for white people that enslaved people would fight back. Despite reigning ideologies that espoused so-called truths about Black people’s docility and intellectual inferiority, slave conspiracies not only confirmed white people’s fear of an impending “race war” between angry Blacks and defensive whites but also showed the nation that people of African descent would fight for their right to live and die as free people.

  The 1793 Fugitive Slave Act was one of the first federal laws to provide universal protection for slave owners against loss of property in enslaved people. It codified anti-Blackness and white supremacy because it signaled that a white person’s claim to stolen property was inherently more important than a Black person’s right to freedom and liberty. It reified that the United States was a nation divided, one that established freedom with whiteness and servitude with Blackness. Most critically for Black people, whether enslaved or free, the United States proved to be hostile to their freedom and hypocritical in its claims for justice and liberty.

  In 1850 Congress passed an even more restrictive Fugitive Slave Act, and in the 1860s a violent and bloody civil war exposed the nation’s deep history of anti-Blackness and its commitment to honoring the propertied rather than all its people, especially those of African descent. For African Americans, the Fugitive Slave Acts meant that their fight for freedom and civil rights would be a long and dangerous one. Yet they forged a political consciousness in Black America that extended beyond the borders of the United States and had ties in a developing Black diaspora.

  1799–1804

  HIGHER EDUCATION

  Craig Steven Wilder

  At the end of the American Revolution, Francisco de Miranda—a mercenary and future dictator of Venezuela—visited the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) during a journey through the United States. He found it to be a “well regulated” college despite the absence of President John Witherspoon, who was off fundraising. He approvingly examined the model solar system, which was not working, and then toured the town. However, when he reached nearby New Brunswick, de Miranda wrote nothing about Queen’s College (now Rutgers University).

  One might dismiss that as an oversight if it had not happened repeatedly. In 1794 Moreau de Saint-Méry—a Martiniquais lawyer who had practiced in Cap François (Cap-Haïtien) before the Haitian Revolution—visited Princeton. He was disappointed with Nassau Hall, the main campus building that was once the architectural jewel of the British American colonies. He offered modest compliments to the library and still-broken orrery, recorded the tuition and fees, and even took an informal census of students from the South and the West Indies. In New Brunswick, Saint-Méry noticed that a bridge had collapsed across the Raritan River, but he too made no mention of Queen’s College.

  A couple of years later, Isaac Weld, a topographer from Ireland, surveyed the region. He ridiculed the College of New Jersey: the main building was a plain stone structure, the museum but a couple of display cases, the vaunted orrery useless, and the library just a collection of old theology texts in no graceful order. All colleges in the United States were really grammar schools, he judged. His stage ride into New Brunswick seemed to confirm that verdict. “There is nothing deserving attention in it,” Weld concluded of the village, “excepting it be the very neat and commodious wooden bridge that has been thrown across the Raritan River.”

  There was a reason Rutgers wasn’t even on the radar for visitors. The Revolutionary War had left the campus “wasted & destroyed” and scattered the students, as a Rutgers president appealed to the New Jersey legislature, and the whole college was but “a naked charter and little else.”

  The Revolution had strained and fractured the new country’s educational infrastructure. British and American forces had used college campuses for headquarters, barracks, and hospitals. The governors of Harvard in Cambridge, Yale in New Haven, King’s Colle
ge (now Columbia University) in New York City, the College of Philadelphia (now the University of Pennsylvania), and the College of Rhode Island (now Brown University) in Providence had had to close their schools or relocate to interior towns as British forces attacked vulnerable port cities. The officers of Rutgers and Princeton dispersed their students and faculties as the fighting approached their gates. British troops targeted the College of William and Mary in Virginia and burned a portion of the campus while French soldiers camped there. Because of its remote location, Dartmouth College in New Hampshire was spared physical damage but emerged from the Revolution in fiscal crisis.

  But a renaissance was near. The revival of the slave trade in New England and the mid-Atlantic and the expansion of plantation slavery in the South allowed white Americans to rescue the old colonial colleges from the wreckage of war and raise eighteen new colleges before the turn of the century. In less than two decades, the slave economy underwrote an academic revolution that tripled the number of colleges and transformed the nation’s intellectual geography.

  The expansion of higher education tracked the southward and westward movements of plantation slavery. The Presbyterians founded seven new schools, five of them in the South. The Episcopalians built three Southern colleges. North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee established public universities. Governor Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia legislature chartered Transylvania College in Kentucky, the first college west of the Alleghenies.

  Early American colleges preyed upon the bodies, labor, and lives of enslaved Black people. In 1789 Bishop John Carroll and the Roman Catholic clergy founded Georgetown College (now Georgetown University) in what would soon become the new federal district. Carroll’s small community of Catholic priests began planning a church with national reach, administered from Georgetown and funded by slavery.

  Catholic clerics and families, emboldened by the promise of religious freedom, had ventured into Kentucky after the Revolution, where they established a base for the church’s southern and western expansion. A few years later Father Patrick Smyth, a visitor from Ireland, published a scathing account of his tenure in the United States that revealed the brutal realities of “institutional slavery.” The Maryland slave plantations were sources and sites of clerical immorality and improvidence, he warned. The Irish priest detailed multiple abuses. A contemporary offered some additional insight into Father Smyth’s urgent protests. During his tour of Maryland, the French republican Brissot de Warville exposed the public secret of systemic rape on the church’s plantations. The priests were “keeping harems of Negro women, from whom was born a mixed race,” Warville charged, while pleading for the abolition of slavery and the cultivation of some “more moral and profitable crop” than tobacco.

  In the decades after the Revolution, human slavery allowed the United States to establish a system of public and private colleges and universities, and the inhumanities of that relationship would echo through the history of American higher education.

  1804–1809

  COTTON

  Kiese Laymon

  I blame cotton.

  Grandmama is massaging the tummies of teacakes in her kitchen. The smell, and only the smell, will make it to tomorrow. I’m watching Walter Payton run to and from yesterday on CBS.

  Everyone on Grandmama’s TV, in Grandmama’s kitchen, is wearing cotton.

  I hear a Black man stomp his butter brown boots onto her porch.

  I am eight years old, wearing a cotton V-neck, and I feel good.

  There are four bangs outside Grandmama’s screen door. No one who knocks on Grandmama’s screen in the summer knocks more than three times. Most folks don’t knock at all. They simply press their faces as close to the screen as possible and say, “Hey, Ms. Cat. Y’all good?”

  On this summer day, Grandmama is asking who in the world is up in there banging on her door like the police.

  No one in the world is banging on Grandmama’s door like the police.

  Outside the screen door stands an old Black man with frown lines even deeper than Grandmama’s. The depth of those frown lines, the heavy hang of both lips, the creases beneath his graying eyes, give this old Black man’s familiar face a symmetry I find sexy. In addition to his butter brown boots, his lean ashen body is held up in these sky-blue overalls. Tucked under his right armpit is a huge wrinkled paper sack. And as with most of the old Black men of Forest, Mississippi, I can see the imprint of what I assume is a small .22 in his front bib pocket.

  Over a supper of collard greens, black-eyed peas, and squirrel dumplings that I just refuse to eat because the squirrel in the dumpling looks just like the squirrels on her pecan trees, Grandmama tells me not to dare call this man my great-granddaddy. “Call him Albert Payton,” Grandmama says right in front of his face. “That’s who he always been to me. Albert. Payton.”

  I usually sleep in Grandmama’s bed, but that night she asks me to sleep in one of the two beds in what she calls her back bedroom.

  “Why I gotta sleep in the same room with that man?” I whisper to her. “I don’t even know that joker. And he smell funny.”

  “Because I said so.” Grandmama laughs. “He liable to steal everything that ain’t nailed down if he don’t…” She trails off.

  “If he don’t what?”

  “If he don’t have as many good folks watching him as he can find, if you know what I mean.” Whenever Grandmama says “if you know what I mean,” I always feel grown. And like most grown folks, I never ask her to clarify what she actually means. I just smirk and nod up and down super slowly.

  That night, while Grandmama sleeps in the bedroom next to ours, I watch Albert Payton, lying on his back, go in the bib pocket of his overalls, and take out his gun and a bulb of cotton. I watch him place this gun and bulb of cotton on the ironing board next to his bed.

  I’d never felt on cotton. I’d felt cotton on my body. I’d seen cotton a few times driving from Jackson to the Delta. But I’d never felt on cotton.

  So while my grandmama’s father sleeps, I get up and I grab the bulb of cotton. I gently feel the seeds. The nearly crumbling brown flower holding the actual cloud is twisted in more ways than one. I smell it. I can’t smell anything. I smell it again. I smell Grandmama. But it’s her house.

  Over the next few days, I learn that my great-grandfather, who was a shitty father to every child he fathered, was a wizard at picking cotton. He doesn’t talk, so when I ask questions, Grandmama answers them.

  Why are your hands so rough?

  “All that cotton.”

  Why do the joints in your fingers look swole?

  “All that cotton.”

  Why don’t he talk to us?

  “All that cotton.”

  When Grandmama and her father go to bed, I look through these old encyclopedias Grandmama bought for my mama and them when they were children. I’m confused about how or when my great-grandfather could have picked cotton. I don’t find much in the encyclopedias, but my mama has a book called Slavery in the United States by Charles Ball. She’s using the book published in the 1800s to finish her dissertation on Poverty, Politics, and Public Policy in the South.

  This is usually the kind of book Mama won’t let me read because she thinks it will give me nightmares.

  Ball writes,

  Surely if anything can justify a man in taking his life into his own hands, and terminating his existence, no one can attach blame to the slaves on many of the cotton plantations of the south, when they cut short their breath, and the agonies of the present being, by a single stroke. What is life worth, amidst hunger, nakedness and excessive toil, under the continually uplifted lash?

  I’m not sure what he means by “cut short their breath.” But I understand the question “What is life worth?”

  My grandmama hates her father because of his inability to be there with her. That night I blame cotton. Eve
n though Grandmama hates her father, she lets him in, offers him food, gives him a bed.

  I blame cotton.

  There is a gun and a bulb of cotton in my great-grandfather’s overall bib. I don’t really even notice the gun.

  I blame cotton.

  I ask Grandmama the next day if her father really picked cotton.

  “That’s the only reason he here,” she says.

  I don’t know what she means. But I know we are in a seven-hundred-square-foot pink shotgun house surrounded by a garden we eat out of every day. I know there are a father and child in my house who were never paid fairly for work they did in houses, in chicken plants, and in cotton fields.

  I blame cotton.

  Thirty years later, when I drive to the University of Mississippi to accept a fellowship, I will see acres and acres of cotton on Highway 6, right down the road from where I’m supposed to stay that year.

  I will accept the fellowship because of cotton.

  When the land is freed, so will be all the cotton and all the money made off the suffering that white folks made cotton bring to Black folks in Mississippi and the entire South.

  I go to sleep every night with a bulb of cotton on the dresser next to my bed, not because I want to remember. I will always remember. But the cotton helps me imagine. It helps me wake up. It helps me fight. It helps me realize that there are millions of ways to win. But in this country, they’re all rooted in Black bodies, Black deaths, Black imaginations, Black families.

  And cotton.

  1809–1814

  THE LOUISIANA REBELLION

  Clint Smith