But as the narratives in Four Hundred Souls reveal, Black people have never stopped dreaming, or fighting for those dreams to become a reality. Elizabeth Keye, for example, fought to secure her freedom in 1656—becoming one of the first Black people in British North America to successfully sue for freedom and win. During the eighteenth century, American maroons skillfully resisted their enslavement, hiding out in faraway places to maintain some measure of control over their lives. In Boston during the 1830s, Maria Stewart stood boldly to demand the rights and freedom of Black people, becoming the first woman in the United States to speak publicly to a mixed audience of men and women. These stories and many others, highlighted in Four Hundred Souls, capture the spirit of determination that guided Black people in the United States—every step of the way.
Together, despite the odds, we have made it this far. The powerful essays and poetry in Four Hundred Souls are a testament to how much we have overcome, and how we have managed to do it together, despite our differences and diverse perspectives.
Yet I am not convinced we are our ancestors’ wildest dreams. At least not yet.
I’ll never know what ran through my great-grandmother Felicity’s mind as she rested quietly in the evenings. But I suspect that her wildest dream for herself and for me mirrors my own. In this dream, Black people have “full freedom”—equal access to all the rights and privileges afforded to others. In this dream, Black people, regardless of gender, religion, sexuality, and class, are living their lives uninhibited by the chains of racism and white supremacy that bind us still.
This dream is not yet a reality. We have much work left to do.
While I remain doubtful that we are our ancestors’ wildest dreams, I believe we can be. More than four hundred years since the symbolic birthdate of Black America, we still have the unique opportunity to shape our current dreams into future realities.
The task ahead is not an easy one. But we can help chart out a path that leads us all to a better future—the kind of future that will more closely resemble our ancestors’ wildest dreams.
To all the souls taken by COVID-19
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am enormously grateful for the kindness of so many individuals. My husband, Jay, and our son, “Little Jay,” have been an unwavering source of love and support. I am also grateful for the other members of my family, especially my mom for her invaluable help and understanding. Many thanks to Ibram for being a wonderful friend and collaborator, and thank you to our amazing editor, Chris, for carefully guiding this project—and enthusiastically supporting our vision. I am grateful to the brilliant writers who entrusted us with their work. Last, but not least, thank you to the research assistants who helped us with this project. I owe a debt of gratitude to Adam, Richard, and Tiana.
—Keisha N. Blain, October 2020
I want to first and foremost acknowledge and thank Keisha Blain. When I embarked on this editorial project, I knew I could not do it alone. I knew I should not do it alone. And I’m so glad we came together to co-edit this historic tome. You made the enormity of this project seem manageable. Your exceptional expertise, experience, determination, and insight have been invaluable to everyone involved in putting together Four Hundred Souls. I’m thankful we walked this long and winding editorial process together.
This has been a grueling, thrilling, and rewarding process, working closely with Professor Blain to make history and compose history by bringing together ninety Black writers. I want to thank each and every writer and poet for taking some time out of their busy schedules to contribute a piece. Not just any kind of piece. Moving and informative and relevant pieces and poems that were almost meant to be together. I don’t see this as my book, or Professor Blain’s book, or our book, but your book. The community’s book. The book of the community of writers, and the deceased and living community we are writing for. I want to thank you for sharing with the world and with history a sense of this community.
I must thank the incomparable literary agent who loved this book on first sight of the idea. Thank you, Ayesha Pande, for instantly seeing our vision for this book, for paving the way for the dream to once again become a beautiful reality that stands time’s test.
And we knew it would take a special editor to seamlessly edit fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—to fuse so many distinctive writing voices into one voice and many voices simultaneously. Editing a single writer is hardly easy. Try editing ninety writers and two editors for a single volume. Try editing a sweeping history of four hundred years. I don’t know how Chris Jackson pulled it off, but for history’s sake, I’m so glad that he did. Thank you, as always, Chris, for your greatness as an editor.
To the entire team at One World, especially Maria Braeckel, Nicole Counts, Stacey Stein, and Ayelet Gruenspecht, you know I’m forever grateful for your wisdom, your grace, your hard work, your determination to ensure every human being is reading this history, this community history.
To my partner, Sadiqa, and my daughter, Imani, thank you for being the rock and north star and loves of my existence. To my parents, Larry and Carol, and second parents, Nyota and B.T.; to my brother, Akil, and second brother, Macharia—thank you for your love. To all my family and friends, I learn love from you each day, and I strive to love you each day—as I do the Black community, as I do the American community, as I do the human community.
When we were putting the finishing touches on this book in the spring and summer of 2020, the human community, the American community, and especially the Black American community were facing one of the deadliest pandemics humanity has ever known. Between 9 April 2020, when states started releasing racial demographic data of coronavirus patients, and October, Black people have consistently died at more than twice the rate of white people from COVID-19. I want to acknowledge the already forty thousand Black lives lost, many of whom would still be with us if not for racism. You will never be forgotten. Your souls will always be cherished. This book is dedicated to you.
—Ibram X. Kendi, October 2020
NOTES
A Community of Souls
“A muster roll”: Thomas C. Holt, Children of Fire: A History of African Americans (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011), 3.
“a Dutch man”: John Rolfe to Sir Edwin Sandys, January 1619/1620, Encyclopedia Virginia, www.encyclopediavirginia.org.
1619–1624: Arrival
sixty-six grueling days: “Mayflower and Mayflower Compact,” Plimoth Patuxet, www.plimoth.org/learn/just-kids/homework-help/mayflower-and-mayflower-compact.
its 102 passengers: Patricia Scott Deetz and James F. Deetz, “Passengers on the Mayflower: Ages & Occupations, Origins & Connections,” Plymouth Colony Archive Project (2000), www.histarch.illinois.edu/plymouth/Maysource.html.
We know all their names: “Find Your Mayflower Ancestors,” American Ancestors, New England Historic Genealogical Society, mayflower.americanancestors.org/pilgrim-database.
“one of the most”: Rebecca Beatrice Brooks, “History of the Mayflower Ship,” History of Massachusetts, August 12, 2011, historyofmassachusetts.org/the-mayflower/.
“20 and odd”: Beth Austin, “1619: Virginia’s First Africans,” Hampton History Museum, December 2018, 9.
“No one sensed”: Lerone Bennett, Jr., Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619–1964 (1962; New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 29.
Some 40 percent: Austin, “1619,” 8.
“back alley”: Bennett, Before the Mayflower, 87.
“It is indeed extremely”: W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1935; New York: Russell & Russell, 1956), 711, 714.
“This, for the purpose”: Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” July 5, 1852, Teaching American History, teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july/.
“Your country?�
�: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 128.
“Nations reel and stagger”: Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 714.
1629–1634: Whipped for Lying with a Black Woman
“abusing himself”: William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619 (New York, 1823), 1:146.
Africans as heathens: Paul Lovejoy, “The Abolition of the Slave Trade,” New York Public Library, abolition.nypl.org/print/us_slave_trade/.
when another white man: Crandall Shifflett, “The Practise of Slavery,” Virtual Jamestown, www.virtualjamestown.org/praclink.html.
1634–1639: Tobacco
a woman running away: Lerone Bennett, Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, 8th ed. (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 1987), 36.
The lie is that the Africans: On gender and slavery, see Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in the Making of New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). For a broad overview of slavery in the United States, see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).
1639–1644: Black Women’s Labor
Neither white nor Indigenous women: Indigenous female servants above the age of sixteen became tithables in 1658. “Tithables: Everything You Wanted to Know,” Bob’s Genealogy Filing Cabinet: Southern and Colonial Genealogies, genfiles.com/articles/tithables.
many female laborers among them: Martha McCartney, A Study of the Africans and African Americans on Jamestown Island and at Green Springs (Williamsburg, VA: National Parks Service, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2003), 56.
practiced crop rotation: Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), Kindle loc. 3082–88.
pigs, and other livestock: John Thornton, “Notes and Documents: The African Experience of the ‘20 and Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia in 1619,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 55, no. 3 (1998): 421–34; James Deetz, Flowerdew Hundred: The Archaeology of a Virginia Plantation, 1619–1864 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995), 20–22; T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore (1980; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 71; William Thorndale, “The Virginia Census of 1619,” Magazine of Virginia Genealogy 33 (1995): 155–70; Linda Heywood and John K. Thornton, “In Search of the 1619 African Arrivals: Enslavement and Middle Passage,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 127, no. 3 (2019): 204–5.
sought-after market item: Anne Hilton, The Kingdom of Kongo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 90–103.
“on the advice of our Negroes”: “Angela, Brought to Virginia 1619,” Jamestown Chronicles, n.d., www.historyisfun.org/sites/jamestown-chronicles/angela_more1.html.
Archaeological records: “The Young Woman from Harleigh Knoll: Unearthing Untold Stories,” National Museum of Natural History, naturalhistory.si.edu/education/teaching-resources/written-bone/forensic-case-files/young-woman-harleigh-knoll; “Young Woman from Harleigh Knoll,” Clippix ETC, etc.usf.edu/clippix/picture/young-woman-from-harleigh-knoll.html.
ten thousand English pounds: Deetz, Flowerdew Hundred, 20, 46.
1649–1654: The Black Family
In 1649 three hundred: Warren M. Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1689 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 148.
New Amsterdam: Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 15.
Many of them struggled: Regarding the sale of people in New Netherland and Virginia in this period, see Joyce D. Goodfriend, “Black Families in New Netherland,” Selected Renssalaerswijc Seminar Papers, 148, www.newnetherlandinstitute.org/files/3513/5067/3660/6.1.pdf; and J. Douglas Deal, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia: Indians, Englishmen, and Africans on the Eastern Shore During the Seventeenth Century (New York: Garland, 1993), 168–69, 280–81.
Emmanuel Pietersen: “Slavery in New Netherland,” New Netherland Institute, www.newnetherlandinstitute.org/history-and-heritage/digital-exhibitions/slavery-exhibit/family-and-community.
through baptism or marriage: Regarding marriage in the Dutch Reformed Church, see Goodfriend, “Black Families in New Netherland,” 149.
forty-nine children for baptism: Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 16.
By 1656, the Dutch Reformed: Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 17; Hodges, Root and Branch, 18–24; Goodfriend, “Black Families in New Netherland,” 151–52.
“The Negroes occasionally”: Hodges, Root and Branch, 21; Rev. Henricus Selyns to the Classis of Amsterdam, June 9, 1664, in John Franklin Jameson, ed., Narratives of Early American History, vol. 8, Narratives of New Netherland (New York: Scribner, 1909), 409.
“children that are slaves”: “An Act Declaring That Baptisme of Slaves Doth Not Exempt Them from Bondage” (September 1667), in William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619 (New York, 1823), 2:260.
“out of the Naturall love”: Quoted in T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676 (1980; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 85.
racing toward full dependence: Deal, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia, 279–87; Breen and Innes, “Myne Owne Ground,” 75–79.
1654–1659: Unfree Labor
“the necessary evil upon which”: Frank E. Lockwood, “Bill by Sen. Tom Cotton Targets Curriculum on Slavery,” Arkansas Democrat Gazette, July 26, 2020, www.arkansasonline.com/news/2020/jul/26/bill-by-cotton-targets-curriculum-on-slavery/.
fulfilled his indenture contract: Indentured servitude, the prevalent labor system in the early days of British colonization, required that a person contract to serve a “master” from five to seven years before they gained freedom and land.
“Johnson had kept him”: “Court Ruling on Anthony Johnson and His Servant (1655),” Encyclopedia Virginia, www.encyclopediavirginia.org/court_ruling_on_anthony_johnson_and_his_servant_1655.
“serve his said master”: “Meeting Minutes July 9, 1640,” Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia (Richmond, VA: Colonial Press, 1924), 466.
“under pretense that the said”: “Court Ruling,” Encyclopedia Virginia.
“corne and leather”: T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676 (1980; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 14.
“hee had him”: “Court Ruling,” Encyclopedia Virginia.
“returne unto the service”: Ibid.
named the estate Angola: John K. Thornton and Linda M. Heywood, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 283.
“never to trouble or molest”: “York County Deeds, Orders, and Wills, Selected Virginia Records Relating to Slavery,” Virtual Jamestown, www.virtualjamestown.org/practise.html.
all kinds of labor in the region: Thelma Wills Foote, Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 40.
working for themselves: Ibid., 39.
1659–1664: Elizabeth Keye
“1662 Act XII”: In the nineteenth-centu
ry reproduction of the law, the Latin phrase is inserted. “Negro Womens Children to Serve According to the Condition of the Mother” (1662), in William Waller Henig, ed., The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619 (New York, 1823), 2:170.
“Black Besse”: Warren M. Billings, “The Cases of Fernando and Elizabeth Key: A Note on the Status of Blacks in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 30, no. 3 (1973): 467–74. The last name is variously rendered Key, Keye, and Keyes in the documents; I have unified the spelling as Keye.
at least ten years longer: Brent Tarter and the Dictionary of Virginia Biography, “Elizabeth Key (fl. 1655–1660),” Encyclopedia Virginia, www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Key_Elizabeth_fl_1655-1660.
free of economic and racial violence: Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998); Alys Weinbaum, The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
1664–1669: The Virginia Law on Baptism
Four Hundred Souls Page 37