Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  5

  Twymon

  About the last of August came in a dutch man of warre that sold us twenty Negars,” John Rolfe, a Virginia colonist, recorded laconically in 1619. The first blacks to enter an English settlement in the New World, their arrival marked the start of American slavery.

  The “Negars” were landed at Old Point Comfort, a sandy spit which divides the James River from the broad sweep of the Chesapeake Bay. Later the point was incorporated into Hampton, the village to which the English settlers repaired after they abandoned Jamestown in 1610. Over the next two centuries, Hampton became an unusual antebellum community, combining small-town intimacy with the refinement of Tidewater planter society. Living side by side for 250 years, master and slave reached a rough accommodation. Laws against teaching slaves to read and write were widely ignored. Many whites permitted their slaves to hire themselves out to factories or artisans, returning a fixed payment to their masters.

  But the Civil War put Hampton in immediate jeopardy. By then on Old Point Comfort reared Fortress Monroe, a powerful Union bastion manned by 6,000 Northern troops. In May 1861, command of the fort was assumed by Major General Benjamin Butler, later governor of Massachusetts and a great favorite of Charlestown’s Irish. Butler confronted a difficult situation. Only weeks after his arrival—and eighteen months before the Emancipation Proclamation—three slaves belonging to Colonel Charles Mallory of the Virginia militia escaped to the fort, claiming that their master wanted them to work on Confederate fortifications in North Carolina. Needing laborers of his own, Butler granted the Negroes asylum. When Colonel Mallory protested, invoking the Fugitive Slave Act, which required that slaves be returned to their rightful owners, Butler said he was seizing the slaves as “contraband of war.” Butler’s dictum raced through Hampton. Within days he was besieged by hundreds more “contraband” seeking refuge at what they called “Fort Freedom.” Slaveholders, realizing that they could no longer maintain their property in the shadow of the Union fortification, fled North with their valued chattel.

  Among the departing slaves were the Jenkinses—George and Amy, both in their mid-seventies; their son, Frederick, and his wife, Charlotte; and their grandchildren, James, Amanda, and Frederick Jr.—who in early 1861 set sail with their masters for Nova Scotia. Although 850 miles to the north, the peninsula was a logical refuge for Virginians. Trading ships had long shuttled between Nova Scotian and Tidewater ports. Moreover, though Canada had for many years been a haven for runaway slaves, it served Southern whites too as a shelter from the approaching apocalypse. Slavery had been abolished in Canada, but slaveholders could import their chattel as “servants.” In the months just before the Civil War, hundreds of Southern whites and their Negroes arrived in Canada.

  Landing on the Bay of Fundy, the Jenkinses and their masters soon settled thirteen miles to the south in the village of West Nictaux, which was populated by New Englanders who had arrived there soon after the British expelled the original French settlers. By 1861, West Nictaux was a tiny farming community, its hills dotted with orchards which produced apples for export to Boston, New York, even London.

  The Jenkinses were the only black family in town. Elsewhere in the Annapolis Valley were remnants of earlier waves of black immigration—“loyalist” blacks who had gone over to the British cause during the Revolution and were later settled in Nova Scotia; the slaves of American Tories, brought by their masters to the peninsula; and Negroes who had served in British units during the War of 1812—but these Negroes had clung together in tight little settlements.

  While remaining in the service of their “masters,” the Jenkinses didn’t feel free to join one of these black enclaves. Even after the master-servant relationship dissolved, they stayed on in West Nictaux, doing odd jobs for white farmers and orchardmen: butchering pigs, threshing buckwheat, sawing wood, splitting birches for the hoops on apple barrels. At first they lived on the Nictaux road next door to the two-room schoolhouse, where the Jenkins children were the only blacks. In class, they were regarded as quaint curiosities, the white kids chanting, “Thick lips, flat nose / On the head, the wool grows.” The family attended the Nictaux United Baptist Church, where they were assigned a special pew on the side aisle.

  Soon after George Jenkins died at ninety-one, his family moved from the schoolhouse site to the Middle Road, a desolate track where the village’s poorest residents lived in tar-paper shacks. But they retained a sense of their own uniqueness, their special relationship with white folks. They never mixed with the blacks of North Street in Middleton, a settlement barely four miles away. North Street was called “the bog,” partly because it was built on swampy ground, partly because it was the home of indigent 1812 refugees known for their drinking and other “low behavior.” Charlotte Jenkins would warn her kids, “Stay away from those niggers in the bog!” It was a strange life. Embraced by neither whites nor blacks, they occupied a sort of racial no-man’s-land in which conventional allegiances were suspended.

  By 1885, Frederick Jenkins, Jr.—then twenty-five—was growing restless. He had become a lumberman, cutting white ash, black birch, and rock maples, then riding the logs down the river to a sawmill in the valley. But there wasn’t much money in that, and other opportunities were scant. Black Nova Scotians had begun migrating to New England, where jobs were more plentiful, and when Frederick heard of a job with a Massachusetts lumber company, he packed his meager belongings and took the overnight ferry to Boston. When the job fell through, he worked successively at a tannery, a coal yard, and an asphalt company, while moonlighting as a janitor and rag merchant. Eventually, he settled in Lower Roxbury, where he married Rachel Baker, a recent migrant from Virginia. In 1905, their only child—Helen—was born.

  The Jenkinses lived in Lower Roxbury for more than thirty years, nineteen of them on Flagg Street. Predominantly Irish and Italian, their block had only a smattering of blacks, and the races lived side by side with little tension. On warm summer nights, the neighbors gathered on someone’s front stoop to drink beer and play cards. Maintaining his family’s tradition of association with whites, Frederick Jenkins exchanged visits with two Scottish families from Nova Scotia and often played the fiddle at Irish wakes.

  Helen was raised on sausage and sweet pastries which her mother sent her to buy at the Italian markets on Northampton Street. Only one childhood incident marred her sense of well-being. In 1923 her cousin Moses Baker was temporarily stationed as a seaman at the Charlestown Navy Yard. One night, walking the Charlestown waterfront on his way back to base, Moses was assaulted by several men and beaten so badly he spent weeks in the hospital and eventually had a kidney removed. Helen, then eighteen, was horrified and resolved to stay away from Charlestown.

  After graduating from the High School of Practical Arts in 1925, she went to work for the Marshalls, a Yankee family who lived in a big house in Jamaica Plain. She never regarded herself as a maid, more as a companion and helper. In the summers, Helen accompanied the family to their house in New Hampshire, where she had her own room all through the hot weather. They were good to her.

  One Sunday in 1930, when Helen was twenty-five, she was walking down Camden Street, coming home from the Zion Methodist Church, when someone hailed her from across the street. It was Jim the laundryman, but Helen noticed he had another man with him, a nice-looking fellow. So she said, “You come over here to talk with me and leave your friend over there?”

  “Well, he’s single, so I didn’t bring him over,” Jim said. It wasn’t considered proper for single men and women to meet in such circumstances. But later that afternoon, Jim came by the house and introduced Helen to his friend Quinnie Walker, who had found his way to Boston by a very different route from the one the Jenkinses had taken.

  • • •

  If Hampton’s slaves enjoyed certain dispensations, seventy miles upriver at Richmond many blacks were at least nominally free. Many Virginians, taking the rhetoric of independence with utmost seriousness, had recogniz
ed the irony of fighting for freedom while denying it to others. “The glorious and ever memorable Revolution can be justified on no other principles but what do plead with still greater force for the emancipation of our slaves,” said a petition from Hanover County in 1785. Although Thomas Jefferson retained 150 slaves, many of his neighbors invoked his ringing phrases to justify the liberation of thousands of their own chattel between 1785 and 1800.

  But soon this fervor cooled. After a number of free Negroes joined Gabriel Prosser’s and Nat Turner’s rebellions, they were denounced as “degraded, profligate, vicious, turbulent, and discontented” persons whose “locomotive habits fit them for a dangerous agency in schemes wild and visionary.” Although they continued to work as tobacco processors, coal miners, iron forgers, and draymen, the legislature imposed stern new restrictions on their religious and educational activities, and vigilante bands made sure that they knew the penalty for violating such regulations.

  Free blacks had to remain alert for another breed of freebooter—the kidnapper. For, with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, “cotton fever” had seized the Deep South, sharply raising the price of slaves needed to pick the crop. By the 1830s, Virginia’s depleted soil was no longer suitable for large-scale cotton production and slaves themselves became the state’s most valuable crop. Pressed by creditors, many old families turned their plantations into giant breeding farms, until the state resembled “one grand menagerie where men are reared for the market like oxen for the shambles.” Between 1830 and 1840, no fewer than 117,000 slaves were sold into other states. Virginia Negroes were in particular demand along the frontiers of Georgia and Mississippi, where every rustic seemed to hanker after a Virginia-bred black as his coachman, a Virginia slave as his lady’s maid. Bands of kidnappers roamed the state, seizing free Negroes and selling them into slavery in the Deep South. Richmond’s 2,000 free Negroes—feared, despised, and now particularly vulnerable—were prime targets for such raiders.

  Late in November 1833, an eight-year-old girl named Fanny—the daughter of a free black man and a Cherokee Indian woman—was playing on the dusty roadway in front of her Richmond home when she heard the strains of a popular tune drifting down the street. Looking up, she saw a pair of horses drawing a flatbed wagon in which a band of white musicians were scraping on fiddles and tooting on horns. As the wagon drew abreast of her house, it stopped. The driver looked down and asked if she wanted a ride. Fanny hesitated. Her mother had warned her about going off with strange whites, but the tune was so enchanting that Fanny couldn’t resist. She hopped up beside the driver and the wagon clattered off down the street.

  One can only imagine what Fanny must have felt when she realized some hours later that the musicians were kidnappers, part of a gang which had been snatching Negro children off Richmond’s streets. But the loss of a freedom then enjoyed by barely 180,000 blacks among 2.5 million in the slave states must have brought with it a special sense of anguish. That day could only have bequeathed a grievance against white people which would linger in Fanny’s family for generations to come.

  Fanny and the other captives were formed into a “coffle,” a long train of slaves fastened together for the march south. The women and girls were tied to one another by ropes wound like halters around their necks, while the men and boys wore iron collars linked by a thick chain, their wrists cuffed behind their backs. The white drivers rode on horseback alongside, carrying whips which they cracked in the air whenever the coffle lagged. The slaves walked twenty-five miles a day, pausing in the morning and evening for meals of corn mush and boiled herring. At the day’s end, still wearing their shackles, they lay down by the roadside to sleep.

  After two weeks, Fanny’s coffle reached Augusta, a center of the slave trade for the Savannah River basin. Augusta held its major auction on the first day of every month, when the slaves were led through the crowded streets to the city market, a gleaming white structure topped by a gold cupola. Its ground floor, which opened to the street through rows of Doric columns, was jammed with butcher stalls and fruit stands. In the rear, farmers sold cows, horses, and pigs. Out front stood a large wooden slave block to which, on auction days, the bell in the clock tower summoned a throng of prosperous planters, small farmers, overseers, commission agents, hackmen, gamblers, and blacklegs.

  In the crowd that day in early 1834 was Job Gresham, a middle-aged planter from nearby Burke County who had come to the city to stock up on provisions. His wife had long wanted a lady’s maid, and when he spotted little Fanny on the block, he resolved to take her home as a surprise.

  Job Gresham was a native Virginian too, but by age twenty-four he’d found his way to Burke County, where he married into a pioneer family. The colonists who had settled that portion of eastern Georgia in the 1740s were drawn by its astonishingly rich soil, ideally suited to the Southern plantation system. “I don’t know exactly what the Good Lord was thinking when he made Burke County,” one early planter said, “but I believe he was thinking about cotton.”

  But while King Cotton thrived in Burke’s intense heat, white men working the fields suffered “wasting and tormenting Fluxes, most excruciating Cholicks.” To elude these fevers, Burke’s planters worked out a pleasing accommodation to the climate. Turning the cultivation of their cotton lands over to resident overseers, they arranged to spend much of the year just across the line in Richmond County. There, on a high plateau covered with oak and pine, they founded a resort colony called Brothersville, replete with gleaming bungalows, lush lawns, and picnic grounds. Job Gresham had a house in Brothersville, where he stayed from June through October, returning to his plantation on Briar Creek in November and remaining through the spring planting. As the housemaid, Fanny accompanied the family wherever it went: first cleaning, washing dishes, and polishing silver, later cooking and waiting on table.

  Several years after she came to the Greshams’, she accepted the attentions of a field slave named Jack Bennefield, five years her elder. One spring they were married in the traditional slave wedding ceremony: jumping over a broom. Since Fanny was a house slave and Jack a field slave, they held different social positions on the plantation. Normally, Jack would have lived with the other field hands in an Indian-style lean-to. But since he was married to Fanny, the master gave them permission to share one of the little huts behind the Big House.

  When Job Gresham died in 1846, his slaves were divided between his two sons—John Jones, then practicing law in Macon, where he twice served as mayor of the city, and Edmund Byne, who remained at home to run the family estate. John received thirteen blacks. Edmund took twenty-two—among them, Fanny and Jack Bennefield.

  By 1860, Edmund owned ninety-nine slaves, ranking him tenth in the county. He and his wife, Sarah, treated their slaves with some consideration. But like his father, Edmund spent much of his time in the pine-scented cool of Brothersville, leaving personal supervision of the plantation to his overseer, Henry Ward. Ward was a hard man who drove the slaves relentlessly, and his wife was even harder. Once, when a cook burned the biscuits, Mrs. Ward made her strip to the waist and—as Fanny watched in horror—beat her with a willow branch until the blood ran down her back.

  As war drew near, Edmund played a growing role in the county’s affairs. One of three delegates from Burke to Georgia’s Secession Convention, he sat down in his hotel room at Milledgeville on January 9, 1861, and wrote his wife: “This day will be long remembered by Georgia. We have passed the ordinance of secession by a vote of 208 to 89. The ordinance will be signed on Monday at 12 o’clock and now, while I am writing, the cannon is firing, the bells are ringing and every other demonstration of joy you can conceive of is going on.” Once the fighting began, the Greshams did their part. At age fifty-two, Edmund was too old for active duty, but both his sons saw service.

  After the Confederacy’s capitulation in April 1865, Augusta’s ex-slaves petitioned the government for some means of marking their emancipation. Authorities scheduled a massive parade on Jul
y 4, the date most closely identified with American freedom. Before dawn that day thousands of former slaves from surrounding counties—Fanny and Jack Bennefield among them—set out on foot for Augusta. Whites retreated behind shuttered windows, leaving the streets to the Negroes, who lined the parade route ten deep. At noon a detachment of the Thirty-third United States Colored Troops proudly stepped off, leading a procession of 4,000 wildly exultant Negroes. Later, some 10,000 blacks assembled before the city market—where thirty-one years before Fanny had been auctioned on the slave block—to hear the Reverend James Lynch deliver his “liberation sermon.”

  In those first months after the war, thousands of freed slaves descended on Waynesboro and Augusta to agitate for change. To Fanny and Jack Bennefield, emancipation meant sweet revenge on their overseer, Henry Ward, and especially on his terrible wife. When Union soldiers heard about Mrs. Ward, they made her “dance the jig” all the way to Waynesboro, more than twelve miles. On the outskirts of town she collapsed in the dusty road.

  With the Wards gone, Edmund and Sarah Gresham spent more time at the “Home Place,” bringing their more benevolent style to the fields. The Freedmen’s Bureau, charged with protecting the rights of freed slaves, established a “contract” system with minimum wages, stipulated rations and sick time—able-bodied males like Jack received $8.00 a month, a woman hand like Fanny $4.00. But the relationship between employers and laborers hadn’t changed greatly from prewar days. The “hands” still lived in the slave quarters, drew rations from the smokehouse, worked in gangs under white “managers.” The Greshams provided virtually everything Fanny and Jack needed for their daily lives, subtracting the value of those goods and services from their wages: $3.00 for a pair of shoes, 75 cents for two plugs of tobacco, 25 cents for a dose of castor oil. At month’s end most hands had little, if anything, coming to them.