Passing Strange (12 page)

For her birth date, she told a less consistent story, occasionally shifting the year, though always celebrating the day on December 23. The preponderance of evidence points to a birth date in 1860. No legal records exist to confirm it, but as a young adult, before vanity or forgetfulness altered her story, she repeatedly provided that date to medical authorities. And that date, coupled with her place of birth and the evident complexion of her skin, opens a window onto the world of her childhood. Ada Copeland was born a slave.

 

 

IN THE SUMMER OF 1860, a few months before Ada’s birth, federal census takers found fewer than eight-tenths of 1 percent of the Negroes living in Georgia to be free people.
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In Troup and Harris counties, home to 17,738 slaves and just fifty-eight free blacks, the percentage was even lower. The average slaveholder in these counties owned fewer than twenty slaves, but the average slave lived on one of the larger farms run by “planters,” who owned twenty or more human beings.
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In the absence of any historical documentation, then, we can imagine Ada’s being born into slavery, most likely on a cotton plantation that her parents had helped carve out of the tree-covered hills and valleys of west Georgia. Her earliest memories would be of cotton and work. And, of course, the sound of her name. She later said that “Ada Copeland” was her maiden name, but she would not have been called that at birth. Few slaves had a surname; their owners would not wish to acknowledge the bonds of family ties. She would have been just “Ada.”

The winter of 1860-61 was a time of increasing racial tensions in Georgia, exacerbated by white fears of a slave uprising and anxiety over the recent election of Abraham Lincoln.
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Only a few weeks before Ada’s birth, a group of local white men interested in “making one more effort to preserve the honor and rights of the South” met in the town of Hamilton, in Harris County, not far from West Point, to organize a military militia.
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In January 1861, after a contested and divided vote of its secession convention, Georgia withdrew from the Union.

 

 

THE HANDFUL OF ELDERLY ex-slaves from the surrounding west Georgia counties interviewed for the Federal Writers’ Project during the 1930s recalled their early lives for their white interlocutors in relatively benign terms, their memories shaped by the limited perspective of childhood and burnished by age, nostalgia, and a certain wariness about contemporary race relations.
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“Mammy Dink” Walton described the easy familiarity that prevailed between white children and “their little Negro playmates, satellites, bodyguards, ‘gangs,’ and servants” up until the age of ten or twelve, when whites and blacks alike would be schooled in the racial hierarchies of the slave system. She recalled being well fed as a child, even if forced to eat from wooden troughs. The ex-slave Easter Jackson had a similar memory: “A big bucket o’ milk would be brung and po’d in little troughs and de’d lay down on dey little stommacks, and eat jest lak pigs!” Both women recalled the exceptional days more readily than the routine ones, summoning up memories of the special treats received to mark a holiday or the birth of a new baby. Rias Body, an ex-slave from Harris County, likewise recalled the Christmastime treats, but he also recalled seeing slaves “driven to Columbus in droves—like cattle” to be sold at the old slave market, where “prospective buyers would feel of, thump, and examine the ‘Nigger’ to see if sound.”
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No anecdotal stories from Ada’s own childhood survive. We can imagine it only through the lives and memories of others.

Ada told people her parents were from Georgia, and that her mother’s name was Mildred.
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Such facts might let one track a white girl through the historical records, but they do not help one recover Ada’s girlhood. No sure trace of her as a small child in Georgia survives. Because she was a slave, she had no formal birth certificate, and because she was born in December 1860, she does not appear on the slave census that federal agents compiled when they passed through Georgia earlier that summer. The census takers likely counted her pregnant mother, Mildred. But they did not list her by name. Slaves had no names on the census sheets. They appeared, specified only by age, sex, and “color,” under the names of their owners. A twenty-three-year-old black woman, for example, would be recorded simply as “23, F, B.” The age and sex would help identify individuals and hint at their monetary value; a strong young man would be worth more than an elderly woman. But the racial categorization seems peculiar, and a statement of the obvious. Presumably, the census takers intended their careful distinctions between “blacks” and mixed-race “mulattos” to provide additional information, useful in identifying a runaway, for example. But the racial designations offer unintended insight into the complicated world of southern race relations, implicitly documenting the South’s long history of interracial sex and emphasizing the primacy of African American descent in determining one’s legal status.

The namelessness of the enslaved people listed on the federal census sheets underscored their status as property. Ada’s mother, Mildred, had a name, of course. She might be “Mildred” on the plantation where she lived and “Mr. Smith’s Mildred” if she needed to be distinguished from others. But the census records denied her even that bit of individuality. As anyone doing African American genealogy quickly learns, matching the cryptic record of a slave census to the full name of a newly emancipated freedman can be difficult work.

After the Civil War, former slaves took family surnames as an assertion of their new legal status. Sometimes they adopted the name of a former master, sometimes a symbolic name such as “Freeman,” sometimes a name whose very serendipity celebrated their newfound autonomy. One Troup County story, for example, tells of three brothers, recently freed from slavery, who pondered a new family name as they sat by the side of a river and, looking at the ground around them, chose “Banks.”
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Whether a mundane evocation of a place or a sentimental assertion of deep friendship, a surname powerfully denoted a freedman’s new standing in the post-emancipation world.

In the west Georgia counties around West Point, “Copeland” became a common African American surname in the years following the Civil War. Most of the freedmen selecting this name likely had a connection to William “Billie” Copeland, a Virginia-born planter who lived in a two-story, five-bay house with a long covered porch across the front, set out among the fields in the Pine Mountain Valley area of Harris County. The frame house did not advertise its owner’s wealth, as some of the nearby plantation homes did, but Copeland was among the district’s largest slaveholders. In 1850 he owned thirty-six slaves.
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When he died in 1859, he willed to his wife a “negro named Cicero” and the use of three other slaves: “Green a man, Caroline a woman and Rich a boy.” To his married daughter, Martha Copeland Mullins, he gave “a negro girl named Adaline.” The balance of his property he divided into six shares to be distributed among his surviving children and the offspring of his deceased daughters and son.
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His extended family owned a large number of slaves. In 1860 Billie’s son and namesake, William, oversaw a plantation in Harris County with seventy-four slaves, only some of whom were inherited from his father.
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In early 1862 he filed a notice declaring his intention to sell the “undivided negro property” included in his father’s estate.
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At war’s end, when the Copeland family slaves became freedpeople, many apparently took their former masters’ surname as their own. The gesture asserted their individual or group identity more than any sort of filial respect. “Mr. Copeland’s Jack” might choose to become Jack Copeland, for example, to legalize the name by which he had always been known. Or unrelated people who lived together on a Copeland farm might all decide to become “Copelands” because they considered themselves kin. The 1870 and 1880 censuses document many black Copeland families living in close proximity to William Copeland Jr. and his family in Harris County. Listed as farm laborers, they were sharecroppers or bound-contract laborers, legally free but still working the land they once farmed as slaves.
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Ada was likely a part of this extended family of Copelands. But even after emancipation, she does not appear in the records where we would expect to find her. The federal census of 1870 recorded for the first time the name, age, birthplace, and family members of people who had been born into slavery. But no black Ada Copeland of the right age appears in the census records in west Georgia in 1870, or anywhere else for that matter. And though several Adeline or Adaline Copelands surface, none of them lives with a mother named Mildred.

 

 

A FEW POSSIBILITIES PRESENT themselves. There is, first of all, the “negro girl named Adaline” that Billie Copeland bequeathed to his married daughter Martha in 1859. In the inventory compiled after his death in April 1859, “Adaline” had an assigned value of $1,250, a price that made her Billie Copeland’s most valuable female slave, worth almost as much as his most valued men.
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Very young slave children had relatively low appraisal values, though, largely because prospective buyers feared that the high mortality rate might deprive them of the benefits of their investment.
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In all likelihood, then, Copeland’s “Adaline” was a woman of childbearing age, far too old to be the Ada we seek (even if Ada was born in, say, 1858 rather than 1860).
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A second possibility emerges in the 1870 census records, which document a twelve-year-old “black” girl named Adaline Copeland living about twenty-three miles from West Point, in the vicinity of Hamilton, in Harris County, Georgia, near William Copeland Jr. and the families of the former Copeland slaves. Her 1858 or 1859 birth date puts her very close in age to the Ada Copeland who later moved north to New York. But young Adaline does not have a mother named Mildred. She lives with ten siblings, ranging in age from one to eighteen, and her parents, Abbie and Harry. Abbie is a forty-year-old black farmworker born in Georgia; Harry, a black Virginia-born farm laborer about sixty years of age.
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By the next census, in 1880, Adaline is gone; married, perhaps, for under her childhood name she does not appear again in the census records in Georgia or elsewhere.

A third possibility appears in the Harris County census records of 1880, which document an Adeline Copeland living with her husband, Scott Copeland, and their three young children in the district around Valley Plains, not far to the east of Hamilton.
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She had been born a Trammell, a member of a local family whose name, like “Copeland,” had become as popular in these parts among ex-slaves as among their former owners.
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Both her married name and her place of residence make her a figure of interest. Moreover, her mother’s name was Milley Trammell and her mother-in-law’s, Millie Copeland, both names diminutive forms of Mildred.
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Nonetheless, even given the notoriously inaccurate birth dates recorded for people born into slavery, she seems too old to be the Ada Copeland for whom we search. The census taker recorded her birth date as 1851.

Still, one wonders. Adeline Trammell Copeland disappears from the historical records. Her husband, Scott Copeland, remarries in 1887, suggesting that Adeline had either moved or died.
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The timing of her disappearance coincides, more or less, with Ada Copeland’s arrival in New York, a connection at once tantalizing and tenuous.

Tracking people born into slavery can be difficult and frustrating. The absence of legal birth or christening records, the initial absence of surnames, and then the adoption of surnames that mask familial connections all make it difficult to trace people who stayed out of trouble with the law (and hence out of court records), kept their names out of the newspapers, moved away from home, or became disinclined in later years to pass family stories down to their children. In the end, however, we can feel reasonably confident of this: Ada Copeland was born a slave, just months before the Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter and war turned life in rural Georgia upside down.

 

 

A DA WOULD HAVE LIVED her first years in a world regulated by the rigid rules that enforced the power of white masters over black slaves. Georgia’s slave codes dictated that no slave could carry a gun, own property, travel without a pass, or learn to read and write. Slave marriages had no legal status. Even religious gatherings among slaves were prohibited without the presence of a white person. Slaveholders in this part of Georgia operated with defiance in the face of civil war. Reporting on the high prices obtained at a slave auction staged in front of the Harris County courthouse in January 1862, the local paper noted, “The prices do not indicate that our people are very much frightened at the prospect of emancipation, notwithstanding Mr. Lincoln had announced that to be his intention towards the seceded States.”
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But war upset the fragile balance of the slaveholders’ world as well as the slaves’. Inflation soared, clothing and food became scarce, blacks and whites alike faced a shortage of basic resources. “Across the entire spectrum of slave life,” writes one Georgia historian, “the meager fruits of selectively bestowed paternalistic indulgence withered and died in the arid soil of economic self-interest and racial exploitation.”
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Slaveholders became increasingly reliant on slave labor as white farmers disappeared into the Confederate army, but anxiety over possible slave rebellions contributed to ever harsher and more punitive regulation of blacks. Increasingly, local slaves sought to escape, to join the Union army or to hide out in anticipation of the war’s end. And many of those who could not flee from home tested the bounds of self-expression in a world newly reconfigured by the absence of so many white men. In a world of women overseers, few patrollers, and a shortage of white men who knew how to farm, slaves might exercise a new sort of resistance to the old rules of work.
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