The Half Has Never Been Told

by Edward E. Baptist

  To alienate one’s hands and rewire them for someone else was torment. Enslaved people, however, discovered how to do it. They had no choice. So they watched and talked to others, learning from their speed. They created, on their own, new efficiencies that shortened the path from plant to sack and back in space and time. And above all, they shut down pathways in the brain so that the body could dance like a Patsey, could become for a time the disembodied “hand” of enslavers’ fantastic language. The whole effort left permanent scars. Years after she learned to pick cotton in Alabama in the 1850s, an elderly woman named Adeline still couldn’t stand to watch clerks weighing the meat she bought at the grocery store: “Cause I remembers so well that each day that the slaves was given a certain number of pounds to pick. When weighing up time come and you didn’t have the number of pounds set aside, you may be sure that you was going to be whipped.”51

  The threat of torture drove enslaved people to inflict this creation and destruction on themselves. Torture walked right behind them. But neither their contemporaries then nor historians since have used “torture” to describe the violence applied by enslavers. Some historians have called lashings “discipline,” the term offered by slavery’s lawgivers and the laws they wrote, which pretended that masters who whipped were calmly administering “punishment” to “correct” lazy subordinates’ reluctance to work. Even white abolitionist critics of slavery and their heirs among the ranks of historians were reluctant to say that it was torture to beat a bound victim with a weapon until the victim bled profusely, did what was wanted, or both. Perhaps one unspoken reason why many have been so reluctant to apply the term “torture” to slavery is that even though they denied slavery’s economic dynamism, they knew that slavery on the cotton frontier made a lot of product. No one was willing, in other words, to admit that they lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture.52

  Yet we should call torture by its name. Historians of torture have defined the term as extreme torment that is part of a judicial or inquisitorial process. The key feature that distinguishes it from mere sadistic behavior is supposedly that torture aims to extract “truth.” But the scale and slate and lash did, in fact, continually extract a truth: the maximum poundage that a man, woman, or child could pick. Once the victim surrendered that fact—opened up his or her left hand and revealed it, as it were—the torturer then challenged the enslaved person’s reason once again, to force the creation of an even greater capacity to pick.53

  Enslavers used torture to exert continuous pressure on all hands to find ways to split the self and become disembodied as a left hand at work. This was why many planters and overseers whipped even—or perhaps especially—their fastest pickers. In 1840–1841, Bennett Barrow, owner of a slave labor camp in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, kept a journal that he called his “Record of Punishment.” In this ledger, which records both whipping and picking, Barrow revealed how he calibrated torture. Three-quarters of the 1840–1841 instances of torture were directed at those who did not meet their weight. Sometimes he focused on those who failed to meet a relatively low quota, as he did on the October day when he directed a “whipping frollick.” He “whiped 8 or 10 for weight to day—those that pick least weights.” But he actually beat the most productive cotton pickers more frequently than he did the least productive ones. He tortured his fastest male picker twice, and his three fastest women nine times between them, just as Edwin Epps beat Solomon Northup’s friend Patsey until “her back bore the scars of a thousand stripes.” This was how clever entrepreneurs extorted new efficiencies that they themselves could not imagine. They pressed their most skillful hands and contriving minds ever harder.54

  Using torture, slavery’s entrepreneurs extracted an amount of innovation virtually equal in numerical measure to all the mechanical ingenuity in all the textile mills in the Western world. The enslavers’ choice was a rational one, if that which increases profitability and productivity is by definition rational. On the cotton frontier, Charles Ball said, torture was “practised with . . . order, regularity, and system” designed to convert “insufficient” production into sufficient production—sufficient, that is, until the next day, when it would be repeated. Henry Bibb’s owner said “that he was no better pleased than when he could hear . . . the sound of the driver’s lash among the toiling slaves,” for then he knew that his system was working.55

  Of course, not all of the benefits of torture for profit appeared in black and red ink. Some enslavers beat captives who lied, and then again, as one formerly enslaved person said, “when you tell them the truth, they whip you to make [you] lie.” They beat captives who resisted. They beat those who did not. Enslavers beat the enslaved to assuage jealousy—yes, jealousy of a field hand who had to pick three hundred pounds a day. Edwin Epps envied the narrow transcendence of his power that Patsey’s unconscious grace in the field revealed. Beyond the body he raped, the womb whose children he could sell, the back he flayed, there was part of her that danced, and he hated it. Meanwhile, “Captain Davis,” the father of James Fisher’s Alabama owner, carried a whip he named “The Negro Ruler.” Making it a point to “conquer or kill every one he undertook to flog,” he beat one man until brain damage prevented the victim from walking. He was eager to beat Fisher, too, but James managed to run away before the white woman consented to let her father do so.56

  For many southwestern whites, whipping was a gateway form of violence that led to bizarrely creative levels of sadism. In the sources that document the expansion of cotton production, you can find at one point or another almost every product sold in New Orleans stores converted into an instrument of torture: carpenters’ tools, chains, cotton presses, hackles, handsaws, hoe handles, irons for branding livestock, nails, pokers, smoothing irons, singletrees, steelyards, tongs. Every modern method of torture was used at one time or another: sexual humiliation, mutilation, electric shocks, solitary confinement in “stress positions,” burning, even waterboarding. And descriptions of runaways posted by enslavers were festooned with descriptions of scars, burns, mutilations, brands, and wounds. Yet even slave owners’ more “irrational” forms of torture could have “rational” outcomes. As ex-slave Henry Gowens pointed out, wild assaults “cramp[ed] down [the] minds” of their targets (if they survived) and other witnesses, who now acted as much like hands as they could.57

  We don’t usually see torture as a factor of production. Economics teachers don’t put it on the chalkboard as a variable in a graph (“T” stands for torture, one component of “S,” or supply). But here is something that may help reveal how crucial systematized torture was to the industrial revolution, and thus to the birth of the modern world. It’s a metaphor offered by a man named Henry Clay, after the architect of the “American system.” Born into slavery in the Carolinas, moved west as a boy, Clay recalled after slavery ended that his Louisiana owner had once possessed a machine which by his account made cotton cultivation and harvesting mechanical, rapid, and efficient. This contraption was “a big wooden wheel with a treadle to it, and when you tromp the treadle the big wheel go round. On that wheel was four or five leather straps with holes cut in them to make blisters, and you lay the negro down on his face on a bench and tie him to it.” When the operator pumped the treadle to turn the wheel, the straps thrashed the back of the man or woman tied to the bench into blistered, bloody jelly. According to Clay, the mere threat of this whipping-machine was enough to speed his own hands.58

  The contraption may have actually existed. More likely, however, the whipping-machine was not a material thing of wood and leather but a telling tale. Clay was using a metaphorical argument to say that every cotton labor camp carved out of the southwestern woods used torture as its central technology. Every single day, calibrated pain, regular as a turning gear, challenged enslaved people to exceed the previous day’s gains in production. Planters and entrepreneurs rarely talked about how other human beings actually picked cotton, but they didn’t need to. They had only to deploy and tu
ne the technology of the whip, steelyard, and slate in order to force people to focus their minds on inventing new ways to perform repetitive and mind-numbing labor at nearly impossible speed. Fingertips hardened, but also became more subtle and swift. Enslaved people developed different tricks, ways to get down the row with as little wasted movement as possible. Some of the new discoveries they could teach to each other, but ultimately one also had to split one’s own consciousness in half in order to generate unseen creativities of movement, new graces of speed.

  Thus torture compelled and then exposed left-handed capacities, subordinated them to the power of the enslaver, turned them against people themselves. And thus untold amounts of mental labor, unknown breakthroughs of human creativity, were the keys to an astonishing increase in cotton production that required no machinery—save the whipping-machine, of course. With it, enslavers looted the riches of black folk’s minds, stole days and months and years and lifetimes, turned sweat, blood, and flesh into gold. They forced people to behave in the fields as if they themselves were disembodied, mechanical hands that moved ever more swiftly over the cotton plant at the wave of the enslaver’s hand. Enslavers forced the sleight of the left hand to yield to the service of their own right-handed power.

  It was true that when entrepreneurs made plans, their desires sometimes ran away with them, and they counted on grandiose futures that might never come to pass. They looked at people with heads and arms and legs and could not “see anything but cotton bales,” ex-slaves said. Mississippi enslaver Daniel Jordan, for example, made the wild prediction in 1833 that he would get “ten bales to the hand,” speaking as if the people who picked his cotton were bizarrely disembodied “hands.” Yet some of these plans did come to pass. The whipping-machine that enslavers built in the southwestern slave labor camps enabled them to reshape the world along the lines of their own fanciful calculations of people into hands, hands into bales, bales into money, money into hands again. Hard forced labor multiplied US cotton production to 130 times its 1800 level by 1860. Slave labor camps were more efficient producers of revenue than free farms in the North. Planter-entrepreneurs conquered a subcontinent in a lifetime, created from nothing the most significant staple-commodity stream in the world economy. They became the richest class of white people in the United States, and perhaps the world.59

  ON THAT FIRST 1805 evening, Charles Ball still stood uncertainly outside the lantern-light’s circle. The overseer had called out his thirty-eight pounds of cotton and warned him about the second day’s number. The drivers took several others off to the side. Ball “stood by, with feelings of despondence and terror, whilst the other people were getting their cotton weighed.” But when the overseer walked over to where Ball stood, he simply examined Ball’s hands and then said, “You have a pair of good hands—you will make a good picker.” This was both reassurance and threat. Your hands, he was telling Ball, will allow you to become a hand. We will make you make yourself into a good picker.

  In the days that followed, Ball pushed himself frantically, willing his hands to move faster. After a couple of weeks he had reached an average level. The next day he increased his total by a few pounds, and then the white men who drove and measured him established a new, higher minimum. But Ball never excelled. He complained that he “was hardly regarded as a prime hand.” In Maryland, though he was not free, Ball had taken pride in the good things his brain and body could do together. They made him a man, in his view, and an individual as well. They brought him a family. In South Carolina, he was never comfortable with the way cotton-picking required him to subordinate his inventive mind, and his muscles that were the product of ten thousand hours of hard labor, to the endless repetition of his hands. And it brought him nothing but an unwhipped back for one more day.60

  The left-handed innovations that Ball had to surrender, imposing self-torture to avoid that done by others, was in 1805 a future through which millions of people would be compelled to pass. The woods that shadowed Ball at the end of the day stretched a thousand miles away west, finally running out in central Texas. Everything in between, and even beyond, was potentially cotton land. For the next half-century new fields ran west and south like wildfire from the Congaree, changing the world—one tree cut down, one field plowed, one bag picked at a time. Slave labor camps spread more quickly than any agricultural frontier had expanded in human history. Felled logs smoldered in countless new grounds. Fields widened. The processes of hand-making churned in a vast and ever-widening and thickening circle.

  By the time William from Baltimore came to James Stille’s place, which just happened to be right across the Mississippi River from Wade Hampton’s new Louisiana slave labor camp, everything Charles Ball had to produce in South Carolina had raised the ante for what William would have to do. A few months after his sale, William woke up and found that he, too, would have to make his hands learn to pick cotton. Of course, learning how to meet the daily demands of the overseers was measurably harder in 1819 than it had been in 1805.

  Yet “hands” were not only white entrepreneurs’ disembodied appendages. James Stille had bought men who had been transformed into commodities. He drove them hard, and by the beginning of August 1819, they had their first taste of cotton-picking and, no doubt, the brutality of the southwestern “negro whip.” A few days into the picking season, however, four of Stille’s “hands” crossed the river and went south fifty miles into the German Coast’s sugar country. At William McCutcheon’s slave labor camp—the same camp that in 1811 had been the source of many rebels—they tried to break into the storeroom. McCutcheon heard a noise, came out, and surprised the escaped captives. Two pointed guns at him. From five yards away, they snapped their triggers. But the powder was wet. The guns misfired, and McCutcheon sounded the alarm. Enslavers soon captured two of the runaways and killed a third. The fourth escaped into the tall August sugarcane.61

  The whip drove men and women to turn all of their bodies and much of their minds to the task of picking faster and faster. But gang labor could never occupy every corner of every person’s brain. There was always nighttime. So Charles Ball walked back to the small village of huts where the exhausted and bruised people among whom he had found himself were trying to survive. And a man—for all we know, Rachel’s shipmate William—crouched in McCutcheon’s cane field, trying to still his wildly thumping heart lest his pursuers hear.

  5

  TONGUES

  1819–1824

  SHE HAD COME FROM far away. Her journey down from Kentucky, all the tears she had cried when Robert Dickey bought her and left her mother at New Orleans—they had drained her. Now she was dead. But her body could not settle into death on a cooling board, couldn’t take the slow bumpy ride on the mule cart. Instead, morning after Louisiana morning, her body shuffled into a sea of cotton. Her hoe rose and fell, rose and fell with the others. The sun that beat on her was gray, not gold, though the sky burned white-hot at three in the afternoon. Dust coated her legs and arms until they looked as gray as the underworld that her vacant stare took in. Water from the dipper scratched her tongue like sand. Her corpse grew thinner. Men tried to speak to her. Their voices sounded far away, as if she lay at the bottom of the sea. Their faces shimmered over a surface she could not breach. Some looked kind; some greedy for a new woman; some waiting to see if she would gasp for help. But her dry tongue clove to the roof of her mouth.1

  Wordless haunts like her wandered the landscape of slavery’s southwestern frontier. They hid in abandoned corncribs, waited at crossroads, chased children from places where blood had spilled. They were girls who killed themselves after being beaten for leaving the onions out of the stew. They were men who disappeared after the master caught them praying that slavery would end. Slaves born in Africa told others that if you died outside God’s presence, perhaps because you were the victim of violence so horrifying that even a deity couldn’t bear to watch, half of your spirit might remain behind—wandering the crime site, thirsty for peace.2
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  Soon she would be another wisp on the night breeze. But as long as her working body inched up one furrow after another, she was also another story of the undead. Before the Haitian Revolution, Africans toiling in the sugar fields of Saint-Domingue spread the story of the zombi. This was a living-dead person who had been captured by white wizards. Intellect and personality fled home, but the ghost-spirit and body remained in the land of the dead, working at the will of the sorcerer-planters. Any slave could be a zombi. She already was one, in fact. And after the spirit departed, the individual body that remained behind might not last much longer. It might shake to death with the country fever, or be beaten and killed by a furious overseer. She might waste away in the gray country until one morning the threat of whip couldn’t rouse her, one more uncounted ghost whose spirit and body had wilted and died in the new ground of the southwestern frontier. But if individual bodies died, more kept coming. In the broader sense, the body of slavery, the system of slave trades and whipping-machines, of right- and left-handed power that enslavers were assembling—this kept growing.

  Years later, she remembered her zombie days. And she never forgot the living men who called to her. They fished for her spirit, down in dark oceans of their own. Daughter sister wife lover they named her, for faces they remembered. Nights at the fire, they talked about her. They knew the cold terrain of the submerged city where she wandered. When they lay down, they wondered about her to themselves. Then they dreamed of their own lost people.