by Gail Collins
On plantations where the white people were not interested in their slaves’ personal affairs, the bride and groom could seek out a wise elder, usually a woman, to perform the ceremony. Often, husband and wife sealed their union by jumping over a broomstick—a ritual that some poor southern whites followed as well. “Didn’t have to ask Marsa or nothing,” said Caroline Johnson Harris. “Just go to Aunt Sue and tell her you want to get married.” When Harris and her intended went, Aunt Sue sent them home to think hard about it. “After two days Mose and I went back and say we done thought about it and still want to get married. Then she called all the slaves after tasks to pray for the union that God was gonna make. Pray we stay together and have lots of children and none of them get sold away from the parents. Then she lay a broomstick across the sill of the house we gonna live in and join our hands together. Before we step over it she asked us once more if we was sure we wanted to get married. Of course we say yes. Then she say, ‘In the eyes of Jesus step into Holy land of matrimony.’ When we step across the broomstick, we was married.”
Most slaves married and stayed married to the same person all their lives. But husbands were often a fleeting presence, living on another plantation, arriving on Saturday night and leaving the next evening. Hannah Chapman remembered that her father sometimes snuck an extra visit during the week. “Us would gather round him and crawl up in his lap, tickled slap to death, but he give us these pleasures at a painful risk,” she said. Sometimes her father was discovered by the “patrollers”—working-class whites who made extra money watching for slaves who were out at night without permission. When the patrollers caught her father, Chapman said, “us would track him the next day by the blood stains.” In a sense, slave families were matriarchies in which the women were the only stable element. But fathers often made heroic efforts to stay involved in their children’s lives. Mattie Jackson, a slave raised in Georgia, said her father and mother originally lived on neighboring plantations. When her mother’s owner moved twenty miles away, her father continued his weekly visits “walking the distance every Saturday evening and returning Sunday evening.” Charles Ingram ran away from his master and was living and working as a free man when his wife died and his sons were sold to Texas. Ingram gave himself up and voluntarily resumed life as a slave in order to take care of them.
“THE GREATEST ORATOR I EVER HEARD
WAS A WOMAN”
The threat of being sold hung over every family. On well-run plantations, slaves sometimes lived in housing that was better than the cabins of poor Southern whites or the tenements of Northern factory workers. And they probably had more food as well. But poor white Americans did not have to fear that their spouses, or children, would be taken away forever. Cornelius Garner, who had been a slave on a Virginia plantation, remembered times when the children would make too much noise on Sunday and disturb the people in the big house. “Finally, Old Master come clumping down to the quarters, pick out the family that got the most children and say: ‘For God, nigger, I’m going to sell all them children of yours less you keep them quiet.’ Everybody sure keep quiet after that.” One historian estimated that over a typical slave woman’s thirty-five-year life, she had a fifty-fifty chance of being sold at least once and would likely see the sale of several members of her immediate family. “‘Oh my mother! My mother!’ I kept saying to myself. ‘Oh my mammy and my sisters and my brothers, shall I never see you again!’” wrote Mary Prince, a former slave recalling the day she was sold away from her family. Sojourner Truth’s parents woke up one morning to find their owners bundling their five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter into a sleigh and driving them off to sale. The boy attempted to escape by hiding under his parents’ bed, but their owner dragged him out while his mother and father stood by, helpless. The episode haunted Truth’s childhood. Years later she discovered that she and her lost sister Nancy had been attending the same church in New York City. But Nancy died before they could be reunited.
Slaves who were being separated from their families begged their new owners to purchase their spouse or children as well. John Randolph, the Virginia politician who had known all the Founding Fathers, was once asked to name the most moving speaker he had ever known. “The greatest orator I ever heard was a woman,” he said. “She was a slave and a mother and her rostrum was an auction block.” When Delcia Patterson of Missouri was fifteen years old, she was brought to the local courthouse to be sold. When a man she recognized as one of the cruelest owners in the county bid on her, “I spoke right out on the auction block and told him ‘Old Judge Miller don’t you bid for me, because if you do, I would not live on your plantation. I will take a knife and cut my own throat from ear to ear before I would be owned by you.’” She was successful in discouraging Judge Miller, but she also undid a plan of her father’s, who had convinced his own master to bid on his daughter. “When father’s owner heard what I said to Judge Miller, he told my father he would not buy me because I was sassy and he never owned a sassy nigger and did not want one that was sassy. That broke my father’s heart.”
Many slave owners disapproved of breaking up families, and some went to great lengths to keep them intact. William Massie of Virginia, who fell into financial difficulties, chose to sell his most cherished property rather than any of his slaves. “To know that my little family, white and black, is to be fixed permanently together would be as near that thing happiness as I ever expect to get,” he wrote. “Elizabeth has raised and taught most of them, and having no children, like every other woman under like circumstances, has tender feelings toward them.” But the death of a “good” master or mistress often broke up an estate and led to the sale of the human property. Wills ordering that families be left intact, or freed, were routinely ignored. Southern widows often discovered that their husbands had left them deeply in debt, forcing them to sell their slaves to pay creditors. On some plantations, when the owner died, it was the custom for his children to put the names of the slaves in a hat and draw for them.
As the younger sons of Southern planters moved west, they took their share of the family slaves with them. “One morning we is all herded up and mammy am crying and say they going to Texas but can’t take papa,” recalled Josephine Howard, whose father was owned by a different family. “That the lastest time we ever seed Pappa.” Laura Clark remembered being taken off to the frontier by her master when she was a small girl and seeing her mother run after the wagon, fall down, and “roll over on the ground, just acryin’.”
During the Civil War, when slaves began escaping behind Union lines, nearly 20 percent said they had lost a husband or wife by “force.” Many went searching for their spouses, but the few who were successful often discovered that their old mate had remarried. “I love you just as well as I did the last time I saw you, and it will not do for you and I to meet. I am married and my wife have two children, and if you and I meets it would make a very dissatisfied family,” wrote Laura Spicer’s former husband in an anguished letter in which he begged her to find a new mate. In 1863, an ex-slave from Virginia who had been separated from her husband met him by accident in Norfolk. Both had remarried. “Twas like a stroke of death to me,” she told a Yankee teacher. “We threw ourselves into each other’s arms and cried…. White folks got a heap to answer for the way they’ve done to colored folks.”
“I WAS TOO YOUNG TO UNDERSTAND
RIGHTLY MY CONDITION”
Slave women were actually less likely to die in childbirth than their mistresses—probably because they got a lot of exercise, did not wear corsets, and were spared the services of nineteenth-century physicians. But their infants died at twice the rate of white babies because of poor prenatal care and bad nutrition. More than a third died before age ten. Nursing mothers were usually sent back to the fields and allowed to leave a few times a day to tend their babies. The process of dashing back and forth was so exhausting that many infants were weaned prematurely. While their parents were in the field, slave children were
tended by their siblings or elderly “grannies,” who might be in charge of a dozen or more very small youngsters. Mothers sometimes came back to find their babies left lying in the sun, covered with flies or ants. The older children were cared for like a herd of livestock. Octavia George, who had been a slave in Mississippi, said that while the mothers were in the field, children were “fed in boxes and troughs, under the house. They were fed corn meal mush and beans. When this was poured into their box they would gather around it the same as we see pigs, horses and cattle gather around troughs today.”
Small boys and girls frequently played with white children, unaware of their different status. “This was the happiest period of my life; for I was too young to understand rightly my condition as a slave,” wrote Mary Price. They played marbles, skipped rope, and pitched horseshoes. One ex-slave remembered holding make-believe auctions in which the children “sold” each other, taking pride in the high prices they imagined they might bring. But when white children began to learn to read, the black children went to work. Girls put on skirts and learned to light bedroom fires in the morning, make beds, polish shoes and silver, and carry food from the kitchen—which was usually separated from the house—to the dining room. They washed dishes, gathered eggs, and “minded flies” by brushing them from the white folk. Slave girls were sometimes assigned, at remarkably young ages, to care for white infants. Ellen Betts said that when she was a small eight-year-old, she was put in charge of babies “so big and fat I had to tote the feet while another girl tote the head.” Leah Garrett said one of her relatives was forced to tend the master’s grandchildren when she was very small. “The front steps was real high and one day this poor child fell down these steps with the baby,” she said. When the master came home and heard what had happened, “he picked up a board and hit this poor child across the head and killed her right there.”
Angelina Grimke remembered seeing slave children “kept the whole winter’s evening, sitting on the stair-case in a cold entry, just to be at hand to snuff candles or hand a tumbler of water from the sideboard.” Small children who tried to light fires, carry heavy loads down stairs, or peel vegetables with sharp knives were often injured. Even more frequently, they were beaten for falling asleep or stealing food. Young Henrietta King’s face was crushed when her mistress stuck her head under a rocker as a punishment for stealing a piece of candy. “She rock forward so as to hold my head and whip me some more,” King told a historian decades later. “Seems like that rocker pressing on my young bones had crushed them all to a soft pulp…. And I ain’t never growed no more teeth on that side. Ain’t never been able to chew nothing good since. Don’t even remember what it is to chew. Been eating liquid, stews and soup ever since that day, and that was 86 years ago.”
“A SAD EPOCH IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL”
Fannie Berry treasured the memory of Sukie, a slave who worked in Petersburg, Virginia, as a cook. Sukie was making soap when her owner, a Mr. Abbott, tried to rape her. “She took and punched old marsa and made him break loose and then she gave him a shove and push his hindparts down in a hot pot of soap,” Berry recalled. “Soap was near to boiling and it burned him near to death. He got up holding his hindparts and ran from the kitchen, not daring to yell because he didn’t want [his wife] to know about it.” Even though the story ends with Sukie being sold, it’s hard not to wonder whether her perfect revenge actually happened, or whether the story really expresses what female slaves wished they could do to white men who forced their attentions on them.
Next to the sale of their children or spouse, rape was perhaps the worst nightmare of slavery. We have no way of knowing how often it happened. At the end of the Civil War, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the slaves were believed to be part white, but how many of those mixed bloodlines resulted from voluntary couplings, and how many women were assaulted without becoming pregnant is impossible to calculate. We do know that white women were haunted by the fear that their husbands, fathers, or sons were having sex with their slaves. And we know that black mothers nervously watched their daughters to protect them from dangers they could not understand. Harriet Jacobs, who was sexually harassed by her master, called puberty “a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl.” Rather than warning their daughters against dangers they could not really avoid, mothers apparently preferred to shield girls from learning anything about sex at all for as long as possible. Anne Broome, a former slave from South Carolina, said she was ridiculed by her white playmates because she believed her mother’s story that she had been delivered by a railroad train. “People was very particular in them days. They wouldn’t let children know anything like they do now,” said another.
A woman who tried to repulse her master risked a beating, but one who gave in risked antagonizing the mistress of the household. One ex-slave told the story of a white woman who “slipped in a colored gal’s room and cut her baby’s head clean off because it belonged to her husband.” The white community tended to believe that every African American woman yearned “to bring a little mulatto into the world,” but in fact many slave communities resented the half-white children who reminded them that black men were unable to protect their wives and daughters. Masters seldom acknowledged their illegitimate children. Annie Burton, an ex-slave, said that her mistress often told her that her father was a planter who owned a nearby estate. “Whenever my mistress saw him going by she would take me by the hand and run out upon the piazza and exclaim ‘Stop there I say! Don’t you want to see and speak to and caress your darling child?’” Her father would then “whip up his horse and get out of sight and hearing as quickly as possible.”
A few white men stayed true to the slaves they had seduced. Thomas Foster, a married planter in Mississippi, had an affair with Susy, one of his slaves. When his wife tried to sell her off the estate, he abandoned his family and took Susy away. When Senator Richard Johnson of Kentucky was nominated to run as vice president in 1836, Southern delegates refused to ratify his selection because the unmarried Johnson lived openly with a slave named Julia, by whom he had two daughters. (Johnson’s critics were less concerned about the liaison than about the rumors that Johnson had attempted to take the girls into society as if they were white.) But very few of these stories ended happily. In Mississippi shortly before the war, a Mr. Carter attempted to provide in his will for Harriet, his daughter by the family house slave. The girl was given over to the care of a neighbor who was paid to treat her “as a free white person.” But Carter’s heirs objected, and a judge ruled that Harriet should be sold along with the other slaves. The judge wrote: “The example of a Negro, or mulatto, brought up in the…style specified…would necessarily exert a most baleful influence upon the surrounding Negro population.”
New Orleans had a “fancy girl” market in which young and beautiful—and light-skinned—female slaves were sold for very fancy prices. Simon Northrup, who wrote an account of his experiences as a slave, told a terrible story of meeting a woman named Eliza. She had been the concubine of a planter, who promised to free her and their son and daughter. He took them to New Orleans where Eliza believed the papers were to be executed. But instead, she and her children were sold—the small daughter to a man who predicted that in a few years someone would pay five thousand dollars “for such an extra, handsome, fancy piece as Emily would be.”
“IT’S ME, HARRIET. IT’S TIME TO GO NORTH.”
Slave women were much less likely to run away than men. Black men who escaped from their masters in the colonial era often ran away to sea, where most ships had mixed-race crews and captains were not too careful about checking the background of a potential seaman. But that was not open to women. Later on, when slavery was abolished in northern states, men were usually the ones who attempted to make their way north to freedom while women stayed behind, unwilling to leave their families.
The most famous runaway slave, however, was a woman. Harriet Tubman, the granddaughter of Africans, was born on a plantation in Maryland wher
e she worked in both the fields and house, although she preferred the relative freedom of fieldwork. When she was about thirteen, an impatient overseer accidentally fractured her skull with a heavy weight, leaving her subject to fits of narcolepsy throughout her life. But she developed unusual strength and stamina. In 1849, when she was about thirty years old, she heard rumors that she was about to be sold and escaped. Making her way to Philadelphia, she cleaned houses until she had enough saved to finance a return trip.
A year after her escape, a slave at her old plantation heard a noise at his cabin and saw a figure dressed like a man. “It’s me, Harriet,” the figure said. “It’s time to go North.” All in all, she made as many as nineteen trips over the border. In one, using a hired wagon, she retrieved her elderly parents. In another, she led eleven slaves to freedom. She continued going back to Maryland and shepherded more friends and relatives to the North—only her own husband, who had remarried, refused the offer of escape. She was expert at disguises, appearing as an old woman or a vagabond, or a mentally disturbed man. She carried paregoric to quiet crying babies, and if anyone showed signs of panicking, she ominously fingered the revolver she always carried. Maryland slaveholders offered a bounty of $40,000 for her capture.
