by Tiya Miles
60. Camp, Closer to Freedom, 84. White and White, “Slave Hair,” 46, 48. Mark Auslander offers an intriguing interpretation of Ashley’s sack as a religious ritual in which he notes the spiritual power of hair in African American protective bundles or conjure bags as influenced by West African faith practices. Auslander, “Rose’s Gift,” 4.
61. Ira Berlin, Steven F. Miller, and Leslie S. Rowland “Afro-American Families in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Radical History Review 42 (1988): 89–121, 105. I am grateful to Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham for informing me of this example. Helen Sheumaker found in her research on hair tokens of the dead that Black families separated by the slave trade in the antebellum era sometimes requested cuttings of a child’s hair as proof that the child still lived. Though this hypothesis warrants corroboration through further research, Black families may have treasured severed hair as a sign of life rather than as a token of death. Helen Sheumaker, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), xiii, xii.
62. Phebe Brownrigg to Amy Nixon in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 22.
63. Siri Hustvedt, “Notes Toward a Theory of Hair,” New Republic, September 23, 2015, 2; also see her analysis of the Rapunzel story and “maternal love,” 11–12.
64. Sheumaker, Love Entwined, x. Ellen Parker, “The Vogue of Hair Jewelry and Ornaments Made of Hair,” opening lecture of the hair jewelry exhibit, Gibbes Gallery of Art, Charleston, S.C., 1945, Hinson Audio/Visual Collection: Hinson Clippings, Box 1, Arts and Crafts, Charleston Library Society.
65. Sheumaker, Love Entwined, ix.
66. Parker, “Vogue of Hair Jewelry,” 1.
67. Sheumaker, Love Entwined, xiii, xii. Men also worked in this craft, but in smaller numbers. In Charleston, men advertised in local newspapers for hairwork business as early as the 1780s. Charleston also continued a hairwork trade into the early 1900s, longer than many locations; Parker, “Vogue of Hair Jewelry,” 6.
68. Sonya Clark, The Hair Craft Project, exhibit catalog (Richmond, Va.: Sonya Clark, 2016).
69. Sonya Clark, email interview with Tiya Miles, October 21, 2018.
70. Potter, A Hairdresser’s Experience, 27, 45.
71. Sharon G. Dean, “Introduction,” Potter, A Hairdresser’s Experience, xliii–xlv.
72. Potter, A Hairdresser’s Experience, 145, 186.
73. Dean, “Introduction,” Potter, A Hairdresser’s Experience, xlvii.
74. Potter, A Hairdresser’s Experience, 212, 64–65, 71, 151.
75. Potter, A Hairdresser’s Experience, iv, 4. Potter uses this term for herself when describing the Palace of Versailles.
76. Myers, Forging Freedom, 53.
77. [John] Sella Martin, 1867 narrative, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 712–13. Heather Williams recounts this story in Help Me to Find My People, 124.
78. Many scholars of slavery note how enslaved people used the night; see, for instance, Camp, Closer to Freedom, 80; and Baptist, The Half, 144. “Part of the night”: Kathleen Dean Moore, “The Gifts of Darkness,” in Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark, ed. Paul Bogard (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2008), 12.
79. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 2, 48, image inset, caption 1 below advertisement for slaves. Another typical time for the sale of enslaved people directly off plantations was New Year’s Day, immediately following the Christmas holiday, which enslaved people looked forward to as a highlight of the year. Jacobs, Incidents, 15–17.
80. My notion of Rose’s statement as “last words” is inspired by Drew Gilpin Faust’s work on emotion during the Civil War. Faust describes the culturally important role of the deathbed scene in Victorian America and the way in which soldiers in the field and in hospitals, and compatriots of dead soldiers in letters back to the families of the deceased, attempted to produce the sentiment and effect of last-words moments that suggested the person died in peace and with God. Drew Faust, Republic of Suffering, 10–13.
81. Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction, Emotions in History series (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), 56.
82. Certainly, there were many and complex ways that enslaved mothers behaved toward their children. Not all mothers saw enslaved persistence as a form of acceptable life. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross point to the practice of infanticide as resistance in A Black Women’s History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2020), 37, 53, 60, 61, 63. Mothers of living children engaged in distancing and violent behaviors. Like any relationship between two people, and all relationships between parents and children, an enslaved mother’s reactions to a child were not predestined. See Maria Mårdberg, “ ‘A Bleak, Black Wind’: Motherlessness and Emotional Exile in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother,” in Theile and Drews, eds., Reclaiming Home, 6. In this mode of mother love, Black enslaved women—and those who follow in their tradition of visionary love and radical hope—expand the act of mothering to a form of social action, building on what the feminist theorist Stanlie James has called “the indigenous African” foundation of motherhood characterized by “creativity and continuity.” A term offered by James for this type of maternal action is “motherwork,” a particular “model of resistance.” Stanlie M. James, “Mothering: A Possible Black Feminist Link to Social Transformation?,” in Theorizing Black Feminisms, ed. Stanlie M. James and Abena P. A. Busia (London: Routledge, 1993), 45. For a nuanced study of the many, and at times fraught, ways in which Black women strove to build and defend kin networks in the eighteenth century, see Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
83. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 155. Hartman writes, strikingly, that “the stamp of the commodity haunts the maternal line,” 80.
84. Jones, Corregidora, 10, 22.
Chapter 4: Rose’s Inventory
1. Robert Martin, Property Appraisement, Charleston, South Carolina Department of Archives and History (SCDAH). The commas in brackets have been added for clarity in the list.
2. Hortense Spillers takes careful stock of this moment in documents of slavery—in her example, a Maryland slave code—when “slave” appears in a list with animals and “a virtually endless profusion of domestic content.” Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 79.
3. Daina Ramey Berry and Stephanie Jones-Rogers make the point that unfree people knew what they were “worth” in the marketplace of slavery and reacted to these assigned values. Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), 2; Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), Kindle loc. 1095. Berry proposes that enslaved people and their families countered these commercial values with the understanding of a “soul value,” 6.
4. Enslaved people could not legally write wills or pass on possessions. Joan R. Gundersen, “Women and Inheritance in America: Virginia and New York City as a Case Study, 1700–1860,” in Inheritance and Wealth in America, ed. Robert K. Miller, Jr., and Stephen J. McNamee (New York: Plenum, 1998), 100.
5. Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 12, 61, 76, 77, 86, 90, 91.
6. Quoted in Penningroth, Claims of Kinfolk, 79, 223. Maria Perkins to Richard Perkins, October 8, 1852, quoted in Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1929), 212. Penningroth writes in interpreting this letter: “Both fami
ly and property mattered to enslaved people” (79). Noting the emotional dimension of property ownership, Philip Morgan quotes a formerly enslaved woman who says she cried when Union soldiers took her property; Philip D. Morgan, “The Ownership of Property by Slaves in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Low Country,” Journal of Southern History 49, no. 3 (1983): 399–420, 409.
7. Philip Morgan notes the personal responsibility and pride in one’s accomplishments and the accomplishments of ancestors that stemmed from the Lowcountry task system of labor that allowed enslaved people to save time and acquire property; Morgan, “Ownership of Property,” 401, 403. Morgan also notes ways in which kin groups pooled resources and bequeathed property after deaths; Morgan, “Ownership of Property,” 403, 416–17. He argues that the federal government’s recognition of some property claims by formerly enslaved people after the Civil War indicates that they were recognized property holders; at the same time, he recognizes that during slavery, individual masters had the power to determine whether unfree people could hold property. The extent to which slaveholders exercised that power varied; Morgan, “Ownership of Property,” 409–10. Twenty years after Morgan, Dylan Penningroth discusses the illegality of property ownership among the enslaved, while also acknowledging that enslaved people practiced a de facto kind of ownership that was often recognized in local contexts and in direct interactions; Penningroth, Claims of Kinfolk, 7, 11, 45.
8. This interviewee is not named in the record, which is the case for most of these interviews conducted by researchers at Fisk University in 1929 and 1930 in Kentucky and Tennessee. Notably, the head of this research team was an African American woman, which would have affected the dynamics of the interviews she conducted, likely leading to greater (though, of course, not total) comfort and disclosure on the part of the African American interviewees. In contrast, most interviews conducted by the WPA Federal Writers’ Project in this same period were recorded by whites. Ophelia Settle Egypt et al., Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographical Accounts of Negro Ex-Slaves (Nashville, Tenn.: Fisk University, 1968), 108.
9. Penningroth, Claims of Kinfolk, 90, 91.
10. Egypt, Unwritten History, 124.
11. As Dylan Penningroth notes, things could also “make family,” drawing people who might not have been blood-related into close and enduring connection as they worked together to acquire and share possessions. Penningroth, Claims of Kinfolk, 86, 87.
12. Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years; Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 128.
13. Women have been the primary makers of cloth across time, a product and art shaped out of the interlacing of fibers. A fiber is any kind of minute strand that can be used to make thread or yarn. These strands (derived from animals or plants in the past, but now often from synthetic materials) can be twined around themselves, or spun, to create thread. Thread of various thicknesses and lengths are then woven into and through one another to create cloth. The loom, an ancient and effective weaving tool, is made up of a vertical set of thick strands (called a warp) and a horizontal set of thick strands (called a weft). Four kinds of natural fibers have predominated in cloth-making: wool (sheared from sheep), flax (a plant woven into linen), and silk (spun by silkworms), and cotton. Wool and linen are the world’s oldest fabric types. Cotton has been the most commonly worn fabric since the nineteenth century, a direct result of increased production in the U.S. South through slave labor and the industrialization of cotton production. Jane Schneider and Annette B. Weiner, “Introduction,” in Cloth and the Human Experience, Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider, eds. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 1. Barber, Women’s Work, 34, 35, 39. Ellsworth Newcomb and Hugh Kenny, Miracle Fabrics (New York: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1957), 13, 38–39, 60. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage, 2014), xvi, xix, 100, 119, 431.
14. This full quote reads: “Dress became a language and scholars can turn to clothing as revealing materials akin to documents.” Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 221. Viewing clothes like documents: Celia Naylor, “ ‘Born and Raised Among These People, I Don’t Want to Know Any Other’: Slaves’ Acculturation in Nineteenth-Century Indian Territory,” in Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in North America, ed. James F. Brooks (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 166.
15. An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes, No. 57, 1690, David J. McCord, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, vol. 7, Containing the Acts Relating to Charleston, Courts, Slaves, and Rivers (Columbia, S.C.: A. S. Johnston, 1840), 343–47, Addlestone Library. An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes, No. 586, 1735, McCord, ed., Statutes at Large, 385–97. An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes, No. 670, 1740, McCord, ed., Statutes at Large, 397–416. The 1740 law repeated the language of the 1735 text.
16. Michael Zakim argues, for instance, that homespun clothing represented a particular kind of American “political imagination” in the pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary War period. Notions of simplicity, frugality, industriousness, and democracy were associated with this homemade cloth, which was set in opposition to British luxury. Michael Zakim, “Sartorial Ideologies: From Homespun to Ready-Made,” American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (2001): 1553–85, 1554, 1562, 1564, 1570. Elite Charlestonians, however, embraced a notion of European elegance rather than simplicity in apparel. The lavish quality of women’s dress in particular gained special notice from critical northern observers. Julia Bryan-Wilson uses the term “textile politics” as an indication of “how textiles have been used to advance political agendas” as well as “a procedure of making politics material.” Her first example in support of this argument is women in New England in, again, the pre–Revolutionary War moment who gathered in spinning bees as a way to express anti-British sentiment as well as produce practical necessities. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 7. Bryan-Wilson cites Laurel Thatcher Ulrich on this point, as Ulrich was the first to explore in detail the politics and myth of women’s production of homespun in early America; see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).
17. For more on the use of secondhand shops to acquire cloth by women who were Black or white, enslaved or free, see Laura F. Edwards, “Textiles: Popular Culture and the Law,” Buffalo Law Review 64 (2016): 193–214, 202.
18. Emily Burke, Pleasure and Pain: Reminiscences of Georgia in the 1840s (1850; repr., Savannah: Beehive Press, Library of Georgia, 1991), 24, 33.
19. Faust, Mothers of Invention, 221.
20. For fascinating readings of gender, social power, and material culture among merchant elites, see Jennifer Van Horn, The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2017). The Stranger, “Mr. Fowell,” South-Carolina Gazette, August 27, 1772, Addlestone Library.
21. The Stranger, “Mr. Fowell.” Faust, Mothers of Invention, 226. “Defensive costume”: Alison Lurie, The Language of Clothes (1981; repr., New York: Henry Holt, 2000), xiv.
22. The Stranger, “Mr. Fowell.” Lurie, Language of Clothes. “An Ordinance to Amend ‘An Ordinance for the Government of Negroes and Other Persons of Color, Within the City of Charleston,’ ” in A Digest of the Ordinances of the City Council of Charleston from the Year 1783 to Oct. 1844, ed. George B. Eckhard (Charleston: Walker & Burke, 1844), Addlestone Library.
23. Robert Martin, who recognized the riches involved in cotton processing, bought $1,000 worth of stock in an early South Carolina cotton manufacturer called Graniteville that mainly employed poor
white children. Ernest McPherson Lander, Jr., The Textile Industry in Antebellum South Carolina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 63. Robert Martin, Property Appraisement, Charleston, SCDAH.
24. Madelyn Shaw, “Slave Cloth and Clothing Slaves: Craftsmanship, Commerce, and Industry,” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 41 (2012): 1, 3, 4, 5. Eulanda A. Sanders, “The Politics of Textiles Used in African American Slave Clothing,” Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings, 740 (2012), Digital Commons, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, digitalcommons.unl.edu/tsaconf/740, 1, 2, charts pp. 3–4. Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 215. Louis Harmuth, Dictionary of Textiles (New York: Fairchild Publishing Company, 1915), 93. Mary Madison, Plantation Slave Weavers Remember: An Oral History (Middletown, Del.: Create Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2015), 133. Alison Kinney, Hood, Object Lessons Series (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), Kindle loc. 433, 758. Kinney notes that even as forced hooding is used to hide the individuality and suffering of the wearer, voluntary hooding, such as that employed by the Ku Klux Klan, is used to anonymize perpetrators of violence and to project a sense of mysterious and frightening power (loc. 758). I am grateful to Megan Sweeney for informing me of this Object Lessons Series and for making this connection between slave dress and prison garb.
25. Florence M. Montgomery, Textiles in America, 1650–1870 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 309. Shaw, “Slave Cloth,” 3. Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 81.
26. As Ed Baptist writes: “Lowell consumed 100,000 days of enslaved people’s labor every year”; Baptist, The Half, 319. Sven Beckert notes that the term “Lowell Cloth” became a generic term for coarse fabric among enslaved people; Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 147. Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit, 215.
