All That She Carried

by Tiya Miles

  27. In her study of textile use among enslaved Blacks, Eulanda A. Sanders finds that in enslaved people’s descriptions of how slave clothing made them feel, joint themes of conspicuousness and inconspicuousness prevailed. I am referring to the same idea as hypervisibility and invisibility. Sanders, “Politics of Textiles,” 740.

  28. Shaw, “Slave Cloth,” 1. “Sort of sack”: quoted in Shaw, “Slave Cloth,” 2.

  29. Baptist, The Half, 114, 122.

  30. Louisa Picquet, The Octoroon: A Tale of Southern Life (New York: published by the author, 1861), 12, electronic ed., Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, docsouth.unc.edu/​neh/​picquet/​picquet.html. Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998), 97. Shaw, “Slave Cloth.” Henry Middleton, Clothing Lists, Weehaw Plantation Journal, Addlestone Library.

  31. Egypt, Unwritten History, 3, 24.

  32. Wilma King discusses the uncomfortable texture and fit of clothing for unfree children as well as the negative commentary about these children’s clothes by observers visiting the South. Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (1995; repr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 64–65.

  33. Eliza Potter, A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life (1859; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 18–19, 182, 192.

  34. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (New York: Mason Brothers, 1861), 432.

  35. Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, vol. 1 (1838; repr., Bedford, Mass.: Applewood), 218.

  36. Shaw, “Slave Cloth,” 3. In contrast to plantation labor relations in the old coastal Southeast, characterized by a task system of organization and at times a paternalistic ethos, planters of the westward-expanding cotton kingdom of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and so on, would reach new degrees of brutality as a mechanism for labor extraction. For more on this see Baptist, The Half; also see Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013).

  37. “Cheap calico”: quoted in Shaw, “Slave Cloth,” 2. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 255–56. South Carolina slaveholder and statesman James Hammond distributed extra clothes to mothers of infants as an incentive for “fecundity”; see Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 88.

  38. Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 11.

  39. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 20–21.

  40. James Hammond’s private diary indicates that he also had sexual relations with a mother and a daughter he owned, Sally and Louisa Johnson, and that he may have impregnated both of them. Faust, James Henry Hammond, 314–17, 319.

  41. Picquet, The Octoroon, 9, 12. Gayl Jones, Corregidora (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975). Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 32–34. Wilma King makes important observations about the physical exposure of enslaved teenaged boys, who were given only long shirts to wear even as they developed physically. Exposure of these boys’ genitals was noted by some visitors as well as slaveholders, and most certainly contributed to these boys’ public humiliation and sexual vulnerability. King, Stolen Childhood, 65–66. For the clothing excerpt transcript of the Morris Sheppard narrative that King analyzes here, see Madison, Plantation Slave Weavers, 83–84.

  42. Emily Thornwell, The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility in Manner, Dress, and Conversation (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1856), 119–20.

  43. White, Ar’n’t I A Woman, 29, 32–34.

  44. Shaw, “Slave Cloth,” 5. Kathleen M. Hilliard, Masters, Slaves, and Exchange: Power’s Purchase in the Old South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 71.

  45. Egypt, Unwritten History of Slavery, 22, 20, 24, 27. Madison, Plantation Slave Weavers, head weavers: 31, 73, 98; sounds of weaving: 3, 21, 24, 49–50, 69, 101; night work: 9, 11, 79; nursing weavers: 17 (Cato Carter); falling asleep: 19. In her classic study of Black women’s labor, Jacqueline Jones notes that some women were released from fieldwork before the day was done in order to make preparations for cloth-making. She also points out that Saturdays were sometimes reserved for cloth production on plantations. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, From Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage, 1985), 30–31.

  46. Karen Hampton, “African American Women: Plantation Textile Production from 1750 to 1830,” Approaching Textiles, Varying Viewpoints: Proceedings of the Seventh Biennial Symposium of the Textile Society of America, Santa Fe, N.M., 2000, Digital Commons, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, digitalcommons.unl.edu/​tsaconf/​770, 266. Weaving houses were usually small, plain buildings; their size, materials, and capacity varied from plantation to plantation. John Michael Vlach, Back of Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 84 , 100, 101. Elise Pinckney, “Pinckney, Eliza Lucas,” South Carolina Encyclopedia, scencyclopedia.org/​sce/​entries/​pinckney-eliza-lucas/.

  47. Madison, Plantation Slave Weavers, dyes: 35, 37, 47, 61, 76, 103; artistry: 53, 61 (Susie King), 89, 99, 103. Hampton, “African American Women,” 262, 265.

  48. Faust, Mothers of Invention, 47, 48.

  49. Hampton, “African American Women,” 266. Hampton spells this surname “Izad,” a typographical error. For examples of enslaved women trained in weaving, see Madison, Plantation Slave Weavers, 33, 57.

  50. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 20.

  51. Chaplin, Anxious Pursuit, 215. Maurie D. McInnis, The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 261–62. Hilliard, Masters, Slaves, and Exchange, 71. Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 81–82.

  52. “Hidden world”: Shaw, “Slave Cloth,” 7.

  53. Language in this paragraph was inspired by the Bible: “For every trampling boot of battle and every garment rolled in blood will be burned as fuel for the fire,” Isaiah 9:5, Berean Study Bible Translation. Some readers will notice that here I am borrowing language from Harriet Jacobs, who used this phrasing to describe her choice of a lesser of evils. Jacobs, Incidents, 54.

  54. Hilliard, Masters, Slaves, and Exchange, 62, 83, 127.

  55. Narrative of James Curry in John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 128–29.

  56. Stephanie Camp was the first scholar to capture the depth of ingenuity and creativity of enslaved women’s self-made apparel. Camp, Closer to Freedom, 79, 69–78, 82–83. Drew Gilpin Faust discusses the rise of the hoopskirt as well as the difficulty white women faced in acquiring hoops during the Civil War; see Faust, Mothers of Invention, 223–25. Sharla Fett describes enslaved women making dried berries into jewelry and wearing mulberry bark for belts; see Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 70.

  57. Faust, Mothers of Invention, 226, 223.

  58. Egypt, Unwritten History, 134.

  59. Egypt, Unwritten History, 144–45.

  60. “Shape of their own form”: Camp, Closer to Freedom, 79, 121–22. Faust, Mothers of Invention, 223.

  61. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 20, 141–42. Shaw, “Slave Cloth,” 5. Hilliard, Masters, Slaves, and Exchange, 71.

  62. Picquet, The Octoroon, 13–14.

 
63. Potter, A Hairdresser’s Experience, 15.

  64. Picquet, The Octoroon, 16–19.

  65. Picquet, The Octoroon, 18–22. Sharony Green offers a detailed interpretation of Picquet’s abuse by Cook and Randolph in her Remember Me to Miss Louisa: Hidden Black-White Intimacies in Antebellum America (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2015), 72, 62–63.

  66. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 39–42.

  67. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 39–42, 31–36. For a rich analysis of this period of Keckley’s life when she was owned by the Burwells and likely hired out to William Bingham, see Jennifer Fleischner, Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckley (New York: Broadway Books, 2003), 65–88. These scars upon the body, symbolized in a shredded dress, are an archive of their own, and transform over time into “enslaved women’s stories.” I derive this notion of scars as archives and this quote from Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 14. The translation for Louisa Picquet’s price was dated from 1840, the approximate year of her sale, using the Inflation Calculator at westegg.com. The precise figure came out to $38,920.32.

  68. Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 42, 43, 45. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), 257.

  69. Erskine Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in Antebellum Georgia and the Carolina Low Country (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000), 88, 89, 90, 91, 99.

  70. Sam Aleckson, Before the War and After the Union: An Autobiography (Boston: Gold Mind, 1929), 51–53. Maurie McInnis interprets this scene somewhat differently; see McInnis, Politics of Taste, 240–41. Thornwell, Lady’s Guide, 125.

  71. Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839 (1961; repr., Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 93. This passage from Kemble is quoted in Camp, Closer to Freedom, 84. Camp analyzes the clothing that Kemble reported as having “roots in African visual arts.”

  72. Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie, ed. Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Avary (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1906), 250 (November 30, 1861).

  73. Egypt, Unwritten History, 77.

  74. I refer here again to the sewer and memoirist Megan Sweeney, with whom I had many exchanges about clothes. Put another way by an art historian, there is a “capacity of textiles to mean in multiple directions.” Bryan-Wilson, Fray, 9.

  Chapter 5: The Auction Block

  1. Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), xiv, 25; Wood cites 1708 as the likely year that Black slaves overtook free whites in population numbers, 143. Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 151. Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 30–32. Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 33–34. Manisha Sinha, The Counter-Revolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 12.

  2. Sinha, Counter-Revolution of Slavery, 13.

  3. Adam Hodgson, Letters from North America, vol. 1 (1824; repr., Bedford, Mass.: Applewood), 55–58. Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, vol. 1 (1838; repr., Bedford, Mass.: Applewood, 2007), 234–36.

  4. Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy (New York: New Press, 2017), 12, 16–17. Myers, Forging Freedom, 28. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 7. Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 181–82.

  5. Maurie D. McInnis, The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 28. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage, 2014), 114.

  6. McInnis, Politics of Taste, 5, 35–36, 79.

  7. Cynthia M. Kennedy, Braided Relations, Entwined Lives: The Women of Charleston’s Urban Slave Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 15.

  8. Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839 (1961; repr., Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 37.

  9. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (New York: Mason Brothers, 1861), 404.

  10. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 102–6, xvi–xvii, 60. Baptist, The Half, 350. Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 220–21, 278–80; Chaplin points out that the first cotton seed grown in Carolina came from the West Indies, 153–54. McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, 33–34. See, for example, Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982).

  11. Angelina E. Grimké, diary entry, February 6, 1829, Charleston, in The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké: Selected Writings 1835–1839, ed. Larry Ceplair (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 16.

  12. Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, 236, 238–39.

  13. On anxiety: Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 13. “Architecture”: Kytle and Roberts, Denmark Vesey’s Garden, 21.

  14. Myers, Forging Freedom, 25.

  15. Olmsted, Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, 404.

  16. Samantha Quantrellis Smalls, “Behind Workhouse Walls: The Public Regulation of Slavery in Charleston, 1730–1850” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2015), 7, 8, 15, 16, 22, 23. Michael D. Byrd, “The First Charles Town Workhouse, 1738–1775: A Deterrent to White Pauperism?,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 110, nos. 1–2 (2009): 35–52.

  17. John J. Navin, “A New England Yankee Discovers Southern History,” in Becoming Southern Writers, ed. Orville Vernon Burton and Eldred E. Prince, Jr. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016), 186–87. Brenda Thompson Schoolfield, “Charleston Poorhouse and Hospital 1770–1856,” South Carolina Encyclopedia, https://www.scencyclopedia.org/​sce/​entries/​charleston-poorhouse-and-hospital. In 1780, an explosion of a powder magazine in the area during the Siege of Charleston damaged the workhouse building and injured or killed two to three hundred people inside. The city moved the operation to a rented sugar loaf (or cube) factory building following the incident; Navin, “New England Yankee,” 187; Smalls, “Behind Workhouse Walls,” 27–28. The Statutes at Large of South Carolina, vol. 1 (Columbia, 1836), 432, quoted in Smalls, “Behind Workhouse Walls,” 63. The term “fugitive seamen” referred to criminals at sea.

  18. Smalls, “Behind Workhouse Walls,” 28, 29, 32. McInnis, Politics of Taste, 22, 225, 226.

  19. McInnis, Politics of Taste, 22, 225, 226. Navin, “New England Yankee,” 188.

  20. Navin, “New England Yankee,” 187. The novelist Sue Monk Kidd repeats this “sugar” phrase in her moving novel about the Grimké sisters as slaveholders; see Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 215.

  21. Terror quote: Maria Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 8. Fitzhugh Brundage implicitly links practices of European religious and state tortures designed to elicit confessions with the tortures of American slavery. See W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018), 24–30, 88–117.

 
22. Sinha, Counter-Revolution of Slavery, 5, 13, 14, 2. The state legislature was elected by propertied white men until 1810, when pressure by an expanding white middle- and upper-country population pushed the state to adopt suffrage for most adult white men. Even after this limited expansion of suffrage, slaveholders dominated state offices. Sinha, Counter-Revolution of Slavery, 13. Erskine Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in Antebellum Georgia and the Carolina Low Country (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000), 85.

  23. As recounted in chapter 2, Ashley appears as the name of an enslaved girl or woman only three times in the public South Carolina slave records. I am grateful to the historian and academic administrator Susan Lively, whose interest in this project led her to search the Social Security Administration database for the name Ashley. She found that Ashley was used for boys especially after 1900 (when data collection began) but not very often for girls until the 1960s. These data are not specific about race, but it seems a fair assumption that whiteness was assumed, at least for the early years of the record; see ssa.gov/​cgi-bin/​babyname.cgi. Charles H. Lesser, “Lords Proprietors of South Carolina,” South Carolina Encyclopedia, June 2016, scencyclopedia.org/​sce/​entries/​lords-proprietors-of-carolina/, 2.

  24. My description of slaveholder naming practices is drawn from Ira Berlin’s analysis; Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 54. The specific examples are all drawn from the slave lists of the Middleton plantations, which are representative, in this regard, of slave lists across the state. Barbara Doyle, Mary Edna Sullivan, and Tracey Todd, eds., Beyond the Fields: Slavery at Middleton Place (Charleston: Middleton Place Foundation, 2008). For lists of slaves owned by the Middletons, see 43–59.

  25. “Contempt”: Berlin, Generations of Captivity, 54. On names bestowed in secret, see Berlin, Generations of Captivity, 65; also see Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 196. Wilma King offers a sustained analysis of Black family names during slavery that I have drawn from for this account; see her Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (1995; repr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 47–50. Day and seasonal names in this example are, again, drawn from Middleton Place lists; Doyle, Sullivan, and Todd, Beyond the Fields, lists of slaves owned by the Middletons, 43–59.