Four Hundred Souls

by Four Hundred Souls (retail) (epub)

  In Wallace, Louisiana, at the far edge of the Whitney Plantation, between the wooden white fence demarcating ownership of the land and the red brick path leading you through it, is a plot of earth where the dark heads of fifty-five Black men sit on metal stakes, robust silver beams that push their necks toward the sky.

  The heads are not real. They are ceramic renderings of a violent past, but from a distance the human likeness is so unsettling that you need to get closer just to be sure. In the warmer months, gnats and flies swarm around them, while wasps begin nesting on the underside of their open necks. The bugs hum together around the decapitated figurines like an army of small drones. The area beneath the rows of heads is an interspersing of brown and red mulch, creating the illusion that the land beneath these skulls is, similar to the faces, covered in dry blood. Each of the faces is nameless, with the exception of the ten that rest at the front. Mathurin. Cook. Gilbert. Amar. Lindor. Joseph. Dagobert. Komina. Hippolite. Charles. These were the leaders of the largest slave rebellion in American history. These were the people who decided that enough was enough.

  On a rainy southern Louisiana evening in January 1811, Charles Deslondes, a mixed-race slave driver, led the rebellion.

  Composed of hundreds of people, Deslondes’s army advanced along the serpentine path of southern Louisiana’s River Road to New Orleans with a military discipline that surprised many of its adversaries. It is remarkable to consider that hundreds of enslaved people—people who came from different countries, with different native languages, who had different tribal affiliations—were able to organize themselves as effectively as they did. The layered cacophony of their languages merged together into a single organized voice.

  On the German Coast of Louisiana—named for the German immigrants who settled there—where the rebellion was taking place, roughly 60 percent of the total population was enslaved. The fear of armed insurrection had long been in the air.

  That fear escalated over the course of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), in which Haitian slaves rose up against the French to create the first Black-led republic in the world. The successful uprising had both political and social import. The French army was defeated so badly—80 percent of the soldiers sent to the island died—that Napoleon, looking to cut his losses and refocus his attention on his military battles in Europe, sold the entire Louisiana territory to Thomas Jefferson’s negotiators for a paltry $15 million, about four cents an acre. Without the success of the Haitian Revolution, Napoleon would not likely have sold a landmass that doubled the size of the then–United States. Jefferson was simply looking to purchase New Orleans in order to gain access to the heart of the Mississippi River. For enslaved people throughout the rest of the New World, the victory in Haiti served as inspiration for what was possible.

  Even William C. C. Claiborne, the governor of the territory that would become the state of Louisiana in 1812, wanted the territory to stop importing enslaved people from Haiti, fearing that some of them might have taken part in the Haitian Revolution. He didn’t want to run the risk of bringing that revolutionary ideology to his state. In 1804 he wrote to then–Secretary of State James Madison to share his concern. “At present I am well assured, there is nothing to fear either from the Mulatto or Negro population,” he began, attempting to assuage any immediate fears the president may have had, “but at some future period, this quarter of Union must (I fear) experience in some degree the Misfortunes of St. Domingue [Haiti], and that period will be hastened if the people should be indulged by Congress with a continuance of the African trade.” Claiborne said that he would attempt “to prevent the bringing in, of slaves that have been concerned in the insurrections of St. Domingo.”

  As the men marched along the bends of the river—drums rumbling, flags held high above their heads—they attacked several plantations with an assortment of knives, machetes, muskets, and other scavenged weapons, killing white men and destroying property in their wake. The groundwork for the uprising had been laid for several months through careful and secretive planning, the planners even using code language so as not to tip off anyone unsympathetic to their cause. At first, the surprise held. The farther along the river they marched, the more men joined and the more weapons they were able to accrue. They wielded clubs and farm tools and the knives that they used to slice sugarcane in the fields. Still, not all the enslaved fighters had guns, and because of that, it would take only a small number of armed troops to put them down. And ultimately that was what happened.

  Within forty-eight hours, local militia and federal troops suppressed the rebellion. Many of the rebels were slaughtered on site, decapitated and their heads posted on stakes that lined the levee as a warning to other enslaved people that this was the price of rebellion. Naval officer Samuel Hambleton wrote: “They were brung here for the sake of their Heads, which decorate our Levee, all the way up the coast. I am told they look like crows sitting on long poles.”

  Deslondes briefly escaped the initial wave of slaughter by hiding in the swamp, but he was quickly captured and executed—his hands were chopped off, the femur bone in his leg was shattered by bullets, and he was burned atop a bale of straw.

  Compared to other rebellions, like those of Nat Turner and John Brown, the 1811 slave revolt has received little historical attention. There are no notes of what was said between the co-conspirators, little that gives us insight into what Charles may have been thinking. But what is undoubtedly true is that each of the people assembled that evening knew the risk of their involvement.

  In the immediate aftermath of the uprising, now that slave owners’ worst fears had come to fruition, the backlash was brutal. Alarmed slaveholders in Louisiana invested resources in training local militia, and slave patrols began surveying slave quarters with increasing frequency and violence. Commodore John Shaw captured the planters’ sense of fear that pushed them to respond with such violence against those who participated in the insurrection, and make them an example to the larger enslaved population: “Had not the most prompt and energetic measures been thus taken, the whole coast would have exhibited a general sense of devastation; every description of property would have been consumed; and the country laid waste by Rioters.”

  Meanwhile, the federal government committed to defending the institution of slavery by officially granting Louisiana statehood, as a slave state, in 1812. Louisiana remained a state until 1861, when it seceded from the Union. In a speech at the time, Louisiana’s commissioner made the state’s priorities clear: “Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery.”

  My mind wanders back to the exhibit in front of me. I look at Charles’s floating head and imagine the smell of his charred flesh lacing the air, the cackle of dissolving skin melting into the earth. The wind blows, and I can almost taste the mingling of burned flesh and scorched soil, the mix of sweat and swamp water that lathered his body before he was captured by the bloodhounds who chased him down. I look at the rest of the bodiless figurines, observing the ridges in their tortured faces and adjusting my feet along the uneven brick path to find comfort where none would be found.

  1814–1819

  QUEER SEXUALITY

  Raquel Willis

  To be Black and to be a gender or sexual minority is to carry a mixture of identities that have been chronicled historically in a piecemeal manner. This makes it difficult to acquire records that clearly reveal the existence of queer identities and experiences in the United States during the nineteenth century. After all, terms like gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer did not exist then or weren’t being used in the manner they are used today.

  But by examining the history of queerness in West and Central Africa, uncovering the dominant cisgender and heterosexual mores of the time (and why that social order needed to be maintained), and exploring the concepts of fugitivity and surveillance, we can surmise a great deal about queer Black
ness during this era.

  First, in attempting to uncover the lives of Black queer folks in the 1810s, we must look to the origin cultures of their groups. Between 1720 and 1770, while the North American colonies received shipments of enslaved Africans from at least eight coastal regions of the continent, at least 60 percent came from West and Central Africa. Another snapshot figure of shipments of enslaved Africans from the first decade of the nineteenth century reveals that at least 35 percent were still coming from West and Central Africa. In examining the existence of queer behaviors and identities in these African regions, we may find that early examples of Black queerness were also imported into the United States.

  As Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe assert, “African homosexuality is neither random nor incidental—it is a consistent and logical feature of African societies and belief systems.” Going further, they share documentation, from as early as the 1600s to the early twentieth century, of what by today’s standards Western cultures would refer to as queerness. In West Africa, there was the traditionally feminine dress and sexual behavior of young men of Sudan’s Mossi tribe’s royal court, and homosexual behavior among enslaved millet farmers in present-day Mali. The Dagara society of southern Burkina Faso had a role for gender-nonconforming mediation. Homosexual behaviors are documented within both Hausa and Yoruba communities, and interviews and local lore describe multigendered societal roles and sexually fluid behaviors in Central Africa, especially in present-day Congo and Sudan.

  Even with limited documentation of their potential origin cultures and the cultural aspects that later evolved in the same regions, enslaved Africans could have brought hidden alternative gender and sexual behaviors and identities with them to the United States. In the absence of first-person accounts from the antebellum period, it may be useful to employ the approach of historians like Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris: examining runaway advertisements for evidence of how enslaved people’s intimate relationships thrived and survived. They also offer a definition of sexuality to ground their understanding of it: “the range of emotional and physical practices that have grown up around human reproduction and non-reproductive intimate expression, practices rooted in cultural beliefs and reflective and expressive of love but also of oppressive power.”

  Berry and Harris’s volume emphasizes the importance of the documentation of enslaved people running away from their enslaved circumstances, as a viable means to preserve relationships and “evade capture and to subvert capitalistic control over their bodies.” Those who ran away employed other methods, such as masquerading as a different class or even as another person, to evade capture. In the Raleigh Register’s September 9, 1814, issue, an enslaver, Laurence Battle, shared that an enslaved man he owned named Spencer had the “intention to pass for a free man, and may perhaps change his clothes and alter his name; and may have procured from some villain a free pass.” Historian Sharon Block deduces that this method could be used by runaways to “transcend their laboring status” and more freely navigate society undetected.

  Runaway advertisements are not the only sources that offer a glimpse into the lives of enslaved fugitives, and by proxy, gender and sexual minorities whose status would have been criminalized in American society. However, most documentation of these individuals deemed society’s undesirables would have been connected to attempts to reprimand them punitively. “One of the unfortunate things is that a lot of the ways queer and trans bodies appear in the archives is through surveillance and moments of institutional crisis due to their identities,” said Jessica Marie Johnson, a Johns Hopkins University historian. Run-ins with the law offer some of the few markers of their lives.

  There are other instances of gender-nonconforming figures during the nineteenth century. On June 11, 1836, Mary Jones (also known as Peter Sewally) testified in court after being arrested for stealing one of her sex work clients’ wallet and money. She testified:

  I have been in the practice of waiting upon Girls of ill fame and made up their Beds and received the Company at the door and received the money for rooms and they induced me to dress in Women’s Clothes, saying I looked so much better in them and I have always attended parties among the people of my own Colour dressed in this way—and in New Orleans I always dressed in this way.

  “Folks like Mary Waters, Mary Jones, and Thomasina Hall come up in court records in explosions of conversations that fixate on their gender and race,” Johnson says. “It’s probably one of the biggest similarities we have in how women of color are treated now, especially being policed, scrutinized, surveilled, and possibly not given justice in court. That’s a legacy of an earlier preoccupation.”

  The existence of queer behaviors and modes of expression, and the larger white society’s need to police these expressions by Black gender and sexual minorities, have long existed on this soil. As Johnson explains, “Policing gender, race, and the boundaries of these things has always been the work of creating laborers, separating communities and people from their humanity. A lot of categories we’re dealing with in present-day are legacies of that period.”

  REMEMBERING THE ALBANY 3

  Ishmael Reed

  For Edwidge

  Like Caonabo

  Anacaona

  Padre Jean

  And Macandal before

  Boukman got his

  Guabancex and Ogun on

  Saint-Domingue flowed with the blood of France

  Dread spread to Guadalupe, Jamaica and

  The slaveholding North

  Not only in the South but Albany, New York

  Virginia masters slept with their lights turned

  On

  They feared that it might happen up here

  Slaves roaming from plantation to plantation

  Their minds set on decapitation

  Said Jefferson’s man

  Jupiter: There wasn’t no

  Sword of Damocles over the enslavers’ beds

  It was a machete that Iman Boukman held

  I overheard Tom talking to his friends

  About how they could wrench the

  Settler French from danger

  Wasn’t gone be no cinch. Ha!

  He was all for the French having their liberty

  But condemned his “property” to a life of slavery

  They was afraid that Boukman would cross the sea

  And interrupt their lives of comfort and ease

  While we lived on pork, cornmeal and day old fish

  They recruited French chefs to

  Prepare their dish

  Had all the pretty women at their

  Beck and call

  Said Monsieur La Rochefoucauld

  After visiting Monticello

  Tom’s Greco Roman involuntary

  Bordello

  “I have even seen, and particularly at Mr. Jefferson’s, slaves

  Who have neither in their color nor features a single

  Trace of their origins.”

  Tom couldn’t keep his children out of sight

  He was a founding father all right

  Sally Hemings wasn’t the only one

  There were at least two others by whom

  He had daughters and sons

  They weren’t treated like the other

  Slaves whose wounds were

  Smeared with brine

  After his overseers got

  Drunk on Tom’s imported wine

  He and his friends thought that

  Haitian rebels would rob them

  Of their gains

  The ones they stole from Indians whom

  They murdered and maimed

  Tom called the rebels “Cannibals”

  When it seems to me that

  He was th
e one who was a

  Consumer of men

  Worked them 24/7 without a fee

  While he studied Plato’s philosophy

  The Albany Dutch shared the planters’ fears

  The Schuylers, the Ten Eycks and

  The Rensselaers

  When arson broke out

  They blamed the Haitians

  Saw Haitians under their beds

  Behind the door and

  In the basement

  But finding none arrested their

  Slaves

  Pompey was the first who was taken in

  He was grilled until he finally bent

  If you name the conspirators we’ll

  Set you free, they lied

  Just like they lied to the Central Park 5

  He named two teenage girls Bet and

  Dinah

  Said that they helped him burn a

  Barn that belonged to Gansevoort

  Another Dutchman who prospered

  From stolen loot

  They were found and jailed

  For the Albany conflagration

  All three were sent to the gallows

  By the kind of Albany jury

  That acquitted the

  Murderers of Amadou Diallo

  The Gov. said the facts of the

  Case didn’t make sense

  And tried to postpone their sentence

  But the Albany mob was lusting for a kill

  The girls were hanged on Pinkster hill

  And Pompey was hanged a little later

  Pompey was called a rogue

  The girls were called “wenches”

  But for others they were liberators

  Their arson sparked

  Fires in other places

  Boston, New York, Georgia and Ohio

  Their owners learned

  That it’s not only Gabriel’s

  Army from whom you have to scurry