1860

 

__________ 

“No, No. That’s not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And don’t forget to line them up.” 

Schoolteacher in Beloved, asking his students to describe a female slave.

__________

Lincoln once described a group of politicians as “a set of men…who, to say the most of them, are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from being honest men.” (10/176)

 

* 

John Bach McMaster provided this general description of America, on the eve of the Civil War:

 

About one sixth of the population in 1860 lived in cities, of which there were about 140 of 8000 or more people each. Most of them were ugly and poorly governed. The older ones, however, were much improved. The street pump had given way to waterworks; gas and plumbing were in general use; many cities had uninformed police, but the work of fighting fires was done by volunteer fire departments. Street cars (drawn by horses) now ran in all the chief cities, omnibus buses were in general use, and in New York City the great Central Park, the first of its kind in the country, had been laid out. Illustrated magazines, and weekly papers, Sunday newspapers, and trade journals had been established, and in some cities graded schools had been introduced.

 

In the country the district school was gradually being improved. The larger cities of the North now had high schools as well as common schools, and in a few instances separate high schools for girls. … Not even the largest college in 1860 had 800 students, and in but one (University of Iowa, 1856) were women admitted to all departments. (97-341)

 

*

 

“A catalog of slit throats, gunshot wounds and crushed skulls.”

 

California settlers decide to “clean out” the Yuki Indians, who live north of San Francisco. State archives reveal that this meant killing a ten-year-old girl for “stubbornness,” and that infants were “put out of their misery.” Between the 1840s, on into the 1870s, at least 5,617 natives were massacred in that area by state militia and federal forces. Often, the soldiers were urged on by land-hungry settlers, including Serranus Hastings. White vigilantes killed thousands more. Where the state had a part in organizing attacks, those who participated were paid for ammunition and travel expenses. Hastings led one expedition that wiped out 283 men, women, and children.

 

The New York Times adds detail:

 

According to the chronology…one set of killings was carried out by H.L. Hall, who was hired to look after Mr. Hastings’s cattle and horse ranches in 1858. When four or six — accounts differ — of the nearly 400 horses on the ranch were killed, Mr. Hall and three other men raided a Yuki village and killed nine or 11 tribespeople. During subsequent massacres, he rode into Yuki villages and killed women and children, including the girl he said he killed for “stubbornness.”

 

Later, Hastings donated $100,000 in gold coins, to found and fund the Hastings College of the Law.

 

The State of California is also coming to grips with the fact that as many as 20,000 natives were sold into slavery after 1850.

 

More generally, one historian has described the era as a bloody time, “a catalog of slit throats, gunshot wounds and crushed skulls.”

 

Not the “good old days.”

 

*

 

“The soldier who walked with God.”

 

An essay in The New York Times (9/17/17) had a number of interesting details.  Remember that the ultra-disciplined Robert E. Lee had zero demerits at West Point. He told a Congressional committee that he hoped his state would be “rid of them,” referring to blacks after the war. Frank Owsley, a Southern historian, called Lee “the soldier who walked with God.”

 

(Wesley Norris, one of Lee’s slaves, testified after the war to brutal treatment he had received.)

 

Freeman, in his four-volume biography of Lee has 53 index mentions for Traveler, Lee’s horse, only five for slavery, slave insurrection and emancipation. He won a Pulitzer in 1935 – the same year W.E.B. Dubois published Black Reconstruction in America. Dubois credited Lee for physical courage in his other writings, but not “the moral courage to stand up for justice to the Negro.”

 

Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens declared that slavery and “the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man” formed the “cornerstone” of the new nation’s policy.

Lee's boyhood home in Virginia.

 

*

 

March: Godey’s Lady’s Book pushes for purchase of Mount Vernon and protection by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union. Edward Everett began giving his “famous lecture” on George Washington. In four years his efforts netted the cause $68,295. The last payment on the property came in March 1860.

 

Sarah Joseph Hale, editor of Godey’s, announced, hopefully, “We consider the complete success of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union a great moral triumph, because it bears the true stamp of patriotism and is the happy harbinger of faith in the permanence of our National Union.” (189)

 

*

 

“The true cultivation of feminine talents.”

 

September 30: Hale writes to Matthew Vassar and offers support for his plan to open a college for women.

 

I feel you will excuse this application when I say that for the long period of my editorial life woman’s education…has been my constant study and theme. … I shall rejoice to aid in your good plan, by making the readers of the Lady’s Book your earnest friends as they cannot but honor a gentleman who is thus earnest to promote the true cultivation of feminine talents.

 

We want true women trained to the full arc of their powers of mind, heart and soul, and taught to devote all to their duties as women; then the world would be better as well as wiser. (209)

*

November: Walworth writes, of young Woodrow Wilson: 

At the age of three, standing at the door of the manse in Augusta, he heard a strident voice yell: “Mr. Lincoln’s elected. There’ll be war! Toddling into his father’s study, he asked: “What is war?” That was the first occurrence in his life that he could remember; and another experience of the war years – that of standing beside General Lee and looking up into his face – was one that Tommie Wilson was to treasure all his life. (10/7) 

*

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: Some years, when I had time, I used to read the following selections from Beloved, by Toni Morrison, to my classes. They were always engaged.

 

I don’t know if you could even risk it today; and I’ve been retired since 2008.

 

Slavery: In the first scene, Sethe, who was born into slavery, but has lived long enough to see it end, is thinking back over her life. She lived first on a plantation in “Carolina,” where slaves were cruelly treated, and she was sexually abused. Halle, mentioned in this scene, later becomes her husband.

 

She’d had seven children in her life. “What was left to hurt her now?” Sethe wondered.

 

Seven times she had done that: held a little foot; examined the fat fingertips with her own – fingers she never saw become the male or female hands a mother would recognize anywhere. She didn’t know to this day what their permanent teeth looked like; or how they held their heads when they walked. Did Patty lose her lisp? What color did Famous’ skin finally take? Was that a cleft in Johnny’s chin or just a dimple that would disappear soon’s his jawbone changed? Four girls, and the last time she saw them there was no hair under their arms. Does Ardella still love the burned bottom of bread? All seven were gone or dead. What would be the point of looking too hard at the youngest one? But for some reason they let her keep him. He was with her – everywhere.

 

When she hurt her hip in Carolina she was a real bargain…for Mr. Garner, who [bought Halle and Sethe and] took them both to Kentucky to a farm he called Sweet Home. Because of the hip she jerked like a three-legged dog when she walked. But at Sweet Home there wasn’t a rice field or tobacco patch in sight, and nobody, but nobody, knocked her down. Not once. Lillian Garner called her Jenny for some reason but she never pushed, hit or called her mean names. Even when she slipped in cow dung and broke every egg in her apron, nobody said you-black-bitch-what’s-the-matter-with-you and nobody knocked her down. (139)

 

As long as Mr. and Mrs. Garner were in control at Sweet Home, Sethe’s life was bearable. At times she was even happy.

 

*

 

Baby Suggs, another slave who worked on the Carolina plantation, considered her own life, and Sethe’s, before she and Sethe were sold. They talked about how little control they had.

 

Halle is her son:

 

… in all of Baby’s life, as well as Sethe’s own, men and women were moved around like checkers, anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized. So Baby’s eight children had six fathers. What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children. Halle she was able to keep the longest. Twenty years. A lifetime. Given to her, no doubt to make up for hearing that her two girls, neither of whom had their adult teeth, were sold and gone and she had not been able to wave goodbye. To make up for coupling with a straw boss for four months in exchange for keeping her third child, a boy, with her – only to have him traded for lumber in the spring of the next year and to find herself pregnant by the man who promised not to and did. That child she could not love and the rest she would not. “God take what He would,” she said. And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle… (23)

 

*

 

One day, Halle, comes to Sethe:

 

When he asked her to be his wife, Sethe happily agreed and then was stuck not knowing the next step. There should be a ceremony, shouldn’t there? A preacher, some dancing, a party, a something. She and Mrs. Garner were the only women [at Sweet Home], so she decided to ask her.

 

“Halle and me want to be married, Mrs. Garner.”

 

“So I heard.” She smiled. “He talked to Mr. Garner about it. Are you already expecting?”

 

“No, ma’am.”

 

“Well, you will be. You know that, don’t you?”

 

“Yes, ma’am.”

 

“Halle’s nice, Sethe. He’ll be good to you.”

 

“But I mean we want to get married.”

 

“You just said so. And I said alright.”

 

“Is there a wedding?”

 

Mrs. Garner put down her cooking spoon. Laughing a little, she touched Sethe on the head, saying, “You are one sweet child.” And then no more.

 

Sethe made a dress on the sly and Halle hung his hitching rope from a nail on the wall of her cabin. (26)

 

*

 

Sethe had a pair of earrings that Mrs. Garner had given her. Years later, Beloved, a mysterious woman who shows up later in the story, asked about them. Sethe, who rarely talked about her past, opened up.

 

“That lady I worked for in Kentucky gave them to me when I got married. What they called married back there and back then. I guess she saw how bad I felt when I found out there wasn’t going to be no ceremony, no preacher. Nothing. I thought there should be something – something to say it was right and true. I didn’t want it to be just me moving over a bit of pallet full of corn husks. Or just me bringing my night bucket into his cabin. I thought there should be some ceremony. Dancing maybe. A little sweet william [a flower] in my hair.” Sethe smiled. “I never saw a wedding, but I saw Mrs. Garner’s wedding gown in the press, and heard her go on about what it was like. Two pounds of currents in the cake, she said, and four whole sheep. The people were still eating the next day. That’s what I wanted. A meal maybe, where me and Halle and all the Sweet Home men sat down and ate something special. Invite some of the other coloredpeople from over by Covington or High Trees – those places Sixo [another slave at Sweet Home] used to sneak off too. But it wasn’t going to be nothing. They said it was alright for us to be husband and wife and that was it. All of it.” (58-59)

 

*

 

Mr. Garner dies, his wife can’t manage the farm alone, and a character named “schoolteacher” takes charge of running the place. Sethe is pregnant with a daughter, who she will later name Denver, when she runs off from Sweet Home. Years later, Denver why she ran away.

 

“You never told me all what happened. Just they whipped you and you run off, pregnant. With me.”

 

“Nothing to tell except schoolteacher. He was a little man. Short. Always wore a collar, even in the fields. A schoolteacher, [Mrs. Garner] said. That made her feel good that her husband’s sister’s husband had book learning and was willing to come farm Sweet Home after Mr. Garner passed. The men could have done it, even with Paul F sold [a slave]. But it was like Halle said. She didn’t want to be the only white person on the farm and a woman too. So she was satisfied when the schoolteacher agreed to come. He brought two boys with him. Sons or nephews. I don’t know. They called him Onka and had pretty manners, all of em. Talk soft and spit in handkerchiefs. Gentle in a lot of ways. You know, the kind who know Jesus by His first name, but out of politeness never use it even to His face. Pretty good farmer, Halle said. Not strong as Mr. Garner but smart enough. He liked the ink I made. It was [Mrs. Garner’s] recipe, but he preferred how I mixed it and it was important to him because at night he sat down to write in his book. It was a book about us but we didn’t know that right away. We just thought it was his manner to ask us questions. He commenced to carry a notebook and write down what we said.” (36-37)

 

At first, “schoolteacher” doesn’t seem so bad. One day Sethe overhears him talking to his students, his nephews or sons:

 

Schoolteacher made his pupils sit and learn books for a spell every afternoon. If it was nice enough weather, they’d sit on the side porch. All three of them. He’d talk and they’d write. Or he would read and they would write down what he said. I never told nobody this. Not your pap, not nobody. I almost told Mrs. Garner, but she was so weak then and getting weaker. … But I couldn’t help listening to what I heard that day. He was talking to his pupils and I heard him say, ‘Which one are you doing?’ And one of the boys said, ‘Sethe.” I stopped because I heard my name, and then I took a few steps to where I could see what they was doing. Schoolteacher was standing over one of them with one hand behind his back. He licked a forefinger a couple of times and turned a few pages. Slow. I was about to turn around and keep on my way to where the muslin was, when I heard him say, ‘No, No. That’s not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And don’t forget to line them up. (193)

 

Later, Halle makes an escape attempt. With her husband seemingly out of the picture, and Mrs. Garner no longer able to protect her, the two younger white men hold Sethe down in the barn and rape her, “their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up.”

 

Sethe doesn’t learn till later, but Halle is hiding in the hayloft, and dares not stop them, “hiding close by – the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I couldn’t look at at all. And not stopping them – looking and letting that happen.”

 

*

 

Paul D [at one time there were three slaves named Paul at Sweet Home, A, D and F), himself, had once had a device fitted and locked on his neck, which kept a iron piece inserted in his mouth. Sethe knew he wanted to talk about it, how it felt. She didn’t ask. She had seen it used herself.

 

…He wants me to ask him about what it was like for him – about how offended the tongue is, held down by iron, how the need to spit is so deep you cry for it. She already knew about it, had seen it time after time in the place before Sweet Home. Men, boys, little girls, women. The wildness that shot up into the eye the moment the lips were yanked back. Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to sooth the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye.

 

Sethe looked up into Paul D’ eyes to see if there was any trace left in them.

 

“People I saw as a child,” she said, “who’d had the bit always looked wild after that. Whatever they used it on them for, it couldn’t have worked, because it put a wildness where before there wasn’t any. (71)

 

*

 

This scene is set after the Civil War. One day, Beloved asks Sethe about “her woman,” meaning her mother. Sethe and Denver have been talking. “Your woman she never fix up your hair?” Beloved wondered.

 

Sethe replies:

 

“My woman? You mean my mother? If she did, I don’t remember. I didn’t see her but a few times out in the fields and once when she was working indigo. By the time I woke up in the morning, she was in line. If the moon was bright they worked by its light. Sunday she slept like a stick. She must have nursed me two or three weeks – that’s the way the others did. Then she went back in rice [fields] and I sucked from another woman whose job it was. So to answer you, no. I reckon not. She never fixed my hair nor nothing. She didn’t even sleep in the same cabin most nights, I remember. Too far from the line-up, I guess. One thing she did do. She picked me up and carried me behind the smokehouse. Back there she opened up her dress front and lifted her breast and pointed under it. Right on her rib cage was a circle and a cross burned right in the skin. She said, ‘This is your ma’am. This,’ and she pointed. ‘I am the only one got this mark now. The rest dead. If something happens to me and you can’t tell me by my face, you can know me by this mark.’ Scared me so. All I could think of was how important this was and how I needed to have something important to say back, but I couldn’t think of anything so I just said what I thought. ‘Yes, Ma’am,’ I said. ‘But how will you know me? How will you know me? Mark me, too,’ I said. ‘Mark the mark on me too.’” Sethe chuckled.

 

“Did she?” asked Denver

 

“She slapped my face.” (60-61)

 

Sethe tells Denver for the first time that her mother, Denver’s grandmother, had been hung. By the time they cut her body down, nobody could tell “if she had a circle and a cross,” and Sethe didn’t look. Denver asks, “Why’d they hang your ma’am?” Sethe rises nervously from her chair, and goes over and folds a sheet, refolds it, and double-folds it.

 

“I never found out. It was a lot of them,” she said, and then memories she barely knew she had came flooding back. Growing up, the woman she knew best was called Nan. She was around all day, “nursed babies, cooked, had one good arm and half of another.”

 

Nan spoke an African dialect, which Sethe understood as a child. Now, all these years later, she could no longer recall. Nan and Sethe’s mother spoke that same language.

 

One day, Nan told Sethe more about her mother

 

“Telling you. I am telling you, small girl Sethe,” and she did that. She told Sethe that her mother and Nan were together from the sea. Both were taken up many times by the crew. “She threw them all away but you. The one from the crew she threw away on the island. The others from more whites she also threw away. Without names, she threw them. You she gave the name of the black man. She put her arms around him. The others she did not put her arms around. Never. Never. Telling you. I am telling you, small girl, Sethe.” (62)

 

*

 

This scene is also set after slavery has been abolished. Paul D is trying to make sense of who Beloved really is. Where did she come from? What has her past been about?

 

This girl Beloved, homeless and without people, beat all, though he couldn’t say exactly why, considering the coloredpeople he had run into during the last twenty years. During, before and after the war he had seen Negroes so stunned, or hungry, or tired or bereft it was a wonder they recalled or said anything. Who, like him, had hidden in caves and fought owls for food; who, like him, stole from pigs; who, like him, slept in trees in the day and walked by night; who, like him, had buried themselves in slop and jumped in wells to avoid regulators, raiders, paterollers, veterans, hill men, posses and merrymakers. Once he met a Negro about fourteen years old who lived by himself in the woods and said he couldn’t remember living anywhere else. He saw a witless coloredwoman jailed and hanged for stealing ducks she believed were her own babies.

 

Move. Walk. Run. Hide. Steal and move on. Only once had it been possible for him to stay in one spot – with a woman, or a family – for longer than a few months. That once was almost two years with a weaver lady in Delaware, the meanest place for Negroes he had ever seen outside Pulaski County, Kentucky, and of course the prison camp in Georgia. (66)

 

Like many former slaves, Paul D carries both physical and emotional scars. Sethe stops him from saying more about his past.

 

Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn’t get back from. He would keep the rest in that tobacco tin buried in his chest were a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents it would shame him. And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as [a rooster’s comb] beating in him. (72-73)

 

Paul D. had once tried to kill a master, named Brandywine, after schoolteacher sold him. As punishment, he was sent to a special camp. There he was locked in a cage, just big enough for one, at the bottom of a long trench. There were forty-five other prisoners – and the job of the keepers was to break them in, break them down, teach them to follow commands. They were awakened every day by a rifle shot and let out of their cages. A second shot, and the prisoners climbed out of the trench. Three white men with rifles watched them line up. Before them stretched “1000 feet of the best hand-forged chain in Georgia.”

 

The slave at one end picked it up, and “threaded it through the loop on his leg iron.” Then he passed it on to the next man, on down the line. “Not one spoke to the other. At least not with words. The eyes had to tell what there was to tell: “Help me this mornin; ’s bad”; “I’m a make it”; “New man”; “Steady now steady.”

 

Chain-up completed, they knelt down. The dew, more likely than not, was mist by then. Heavy sometimes and if the dogs were quiet you could hear doves. Kneeling in the mist they waited for the whim of a guard, or two, or three. Or maybe all of them wanted it. Wanted it from one prisoner in particular or none – or all.

 

“Breakfast? Want some breakfast, nigger?”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“Hungry, nigger?

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“Here you go.”

 

Occasionally a kneeling man chose gunshot in the head as the price, maybe, of taking a bit of foreskin with him to Jesus. Paul D did not know that then. He was looking at his palsied hands, smelling the guard, listening to his soft grunts so like the doves’, as he stood before the man kneeling in the mist on his right. Convinced he was next, Paul retched – vomiting up nothing at all. An observing guard smashed his shoulder with the rifle and the engaged one decided to skip the new man for the time being lest his pants and shoes get soiled by nigger puke. (107-108)

 

Paul D was a big, powerful man – and looking at the guards, each one of them – he knew, “he could snap like a twig.”

 

Only they had guns.

 

*

 

The next story is based on a true story, of the slave Margaret Garner.

 

Sethe ran away once, and was “free” for 28 days. She remembered how she felt when she reached Ohio, and believed she and her children, who she had brought along, were safe. “I did it. I got us all out. Without Halle too,” she thought. She was proud.

 

Each and every one of my babies and me too. I birthed them and I got em out and it wasn’t no accident. I did that. I had help, of course, lots of that, but still it was me doing it…It felt good. Good and right. I was big Paul D, and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. I was that wide. Looked like I loved em more after I got here. Or maybe I couldn’t love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love. But when I got here, there wasn’t nobody in the world I couldn’t love if I wanted to. (162)

 

Her joy was short-lived. Slave catchers were on her trail. One day, they caught up with their prey. Sethe and her children were trapped in a house in the woods. One of the white men goes to a window and looks inside. The white men, schoolteacher, his nephews, a sheriff, and the rest of the posse surround the place. Out back they find an old black man with an axe. They take his axe away. A Negro woman looks as if she’s in shock, staring at a shed.

 

Schoolteacher and the others go for a look.

 

Inside, two boys [Sethe’s sons] bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels in the other. She did not look at them; she simply swung the baby toward the wall planks, missed and tried to connect a second time, when out of nowhere – in the ticking time the men spent staring at what there was to stare at – the old nigger boy ran through the door behind them and snatched the baby from the arch [six] of its mother’s swing.

Margaret Garner did kill her daughter rather than let her be taken back to slavery.

 

Right off it was clear, to schoolteacher especially that there was nothing there to claim. The three (now four – because she’d had the one coming when she cut) pickaninnies they had hoped were alive and well enough to take back to Kentucky, take back and raise properly to do the work Sweet Home desperately needed, we’re not. Two were lying open-eyed in sawdust; a third pumped blood down the dress of the main one – the woman schoolteacher bragged about, the one he said made fine ink, damn good soup, pressed his collars the way he liked besides having at least ten breeding years left. But now she’d gone wild, due to the mishandling of the nephew who’d overbeat her and made her cut and run. … The whole lot was lost now. Five [valuable slaves]. (149)

 

Schoolteacher considered his bad luck, as he and the slave catchers rode off, leaving the sheriff to attend to the mess. “All testimony to the results,” schoolteacher thought, “of a little so-called freedom imposed on people who needed every care and guidance in the world to keep them from the cannibal life they preferred.” (151)

 

(That last seems to be a passing reference to George Fitzhugh’s famous apology for slavery, Cannibals All, or Slaves without Masters, written in 1854. (See: Year 1854.)

 

On another occasion, Paul D, Sixo, and a third slave, Thirty-Mile Woman, try to make their own escape in the night. Schoolteacher, his nephews, and four white men catch up. Sixo tells the woman to run one way, and he and Paul D take off in the other, but are caught, and Paul is tied up “like a mule.” One of the white men is careless, however. Sixo’s hands are  tied, but he

 

…turns and grabs the mouth of the nearest pointing rifle. He begins to sing. Two others shove Paul D and tie him to a tree. Schoolteacher is saying, “Alive. Alive. I want him alive.” Sixo swings and cracks the ribs of one, but with bound hands cannot get the weapon in position to use it in any other way. All the white men have to do is wait. For his song, perhaps, to end? Five guns are trained on him while they listen. Paul D cannot see them when they step away from the lamplight. Finally one of them hits Sixo in the head with his rifle, and when he comes to, a hickory fire is in front of him and he is tied at the waist to a tree. Schoolteacher has changed his mind: “This one will never be suitable.” The song must have convinced him.

 

The fire keeps failing and the whitemen are put out with themselves at not being prepared for this emergency. They came to capture, not kill. What they can manage is only enough for cooking hominy. Dry faggots are scarce and the grass is slick with dew.

 

By the light of the hominy fire Sixo straightens. He’s through with his song. He laughs…His feet are cooking; the cloth of his trousers smokes. He laughs. Something is funny…Smokey, stubborn fire. They shoot him to shut him up. Have too.

 

Paul is led away. For the first time he learns his worth. He hears the white men talking. Mr. Garner, they agree, had spoiled his slaves, let them hire out and buy their freedom. Let them carry guns! Didn’t mate the niggers. “Hell no! He planned to let them marry!”

 

Schoolteacher says he thinks he can get $900 if he sells Paul. Then he can buy two young slaves, twelve or fifteen. Then he has Sethe. With luck he might soon have “seven niggers and Sweet Home would be worth the trouble it was causing him.” (225-227)

 

*

 

Even after slavery  ended, the fate of African Americans could be fraught. In a scene near the end of the book, Sethe and a character named Stamp Paid are trying to collect a dime Sethe is owed by a white family. “The white folks had tired her out at last,” Stamp Paid realizes.

 

And him. Eighteen seventy-four and white folks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken. He smelled skin, skin and hot blood. The skin was one thing, but human blood cooked in a lynch fire was a whole other thing. The stench stank. … But none of that had worn out his marrow. None of that. It was the ribbon. Tying his flatbed up on the bank of the Licking River, securing it the best he could, he caught sight of something red on its bottom. Reaching for it, he thought it was a cardinal feather stuck to his boat. He tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon knotted around a curl of wet woolly hair, clinging still too its bit of scalp. He untied the ribbon and put it in his pocket, dropped the curl in the weeds. On the way home, he stopped short of breath and dizzy. He waited until the spell passed before continuing on his way. A moment later, his breath left him again. This time he sat down by a fence. Rested, he got to his feet, but before he took a step he turned to look back down the road he was traveling and said, to its frozen mud and the river beyond, What are these people” You tell me, Jesus. What are they?” (180)

 

At one point, a character in the book puts it succinctly: “There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.”

 

“White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle.”

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I failed to note the page numbers for those last two quotes. I probably haven’t used these selections with students since the late 90s, because of scheduling changes, when I was still teaching.

 

Use what you can, I suppose.

 

*

 

The NYT notes that Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery in 1813 in North Carolina. Her mistress taught her to read and write. She was later “transferred to a brutal plantation owner ‘who began to whisper foul words in my ear,’ she wrote. ‘I turned from him with disgust and hatred. But he was my master.’”

 

She described the experience and her shame over her involvement (with a married man) in her stunning memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The work appeared in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, but was forgotten until authenticated in 1981.

 

After hiding for seven years in crawl spaces, she escaped to Boston. Her grave is in Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 

*

 

Nathan “Nearest” Green, a Tennessee slave, taught Jack Daniel how to make whiskey. Research now shows that Green was rented out by his owners to work on farms around Lynchburg. Dan Call, a wealthy landowner and preacher, also hired a teenager named Jack Daniel. Green, who already knew the process for distilling whiskey, taught the boy what he knew. Today, Jack Daniel’s has $3 billion in annual sales. Daniel himself never owned slaves and “spoke openly about Green’s role as his mentor.” The trail of Green right now dies out around 1884.

 

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From a Josiah Allen book, a poem called 

Slavery 

For many bond servants there are

Fair-faced, blue eyed, with silken hair.

How sweet, how pleasant to be sold

For notes in hand, or solid gold

To benefit a brother

Both children of one father,

With each a different mother.