The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (85 page)

Here at Cornell University, I’ve benefited from a wonderful and supportive group of colleagues. I especially appreciate the friendship and intellectual exchange I have enjoyed with Holly Case, Derek Chang, Duane Corpis, Jeff Cowie, Ray Craib, Maria Cristina Garcia, Robert Harris, Louis Hyman, the late Michael Kammen, Walter LaFeber, Fred Logevall, Tamam Loos, Vladimir Micic, Larry Moore, Mary Beth Norton, Jon Parmenter, Gabriele Piccoli, Mary Roldan, Aaron Sachs, Nick Salvatore, Suman Seth, Joel Silbey, and Eric Tagliacozzo.

I appreciate the confidence of Cornell’s History Department, especially a series of supportive chairs: Sandra Greene, Victor Koschmann, Barry Strauss, and Isabel Hull. The History staff, above all Katie Kristof and Maggie Edwards, not only did a great job, but also taught me a lot about friendship. In my other life on campus, on West Campus and especially at Carl Becker House, I have to thank Cindy Hazan and Laura Schaefer Brown in particular, but also Renee Alexander, Garrick Blalock, Rick Canfield, Isaac Kramnick, and Elmira Mangum. Above all, when it comes to Becker House I am deeply grateful to our incredible assistant dean, Amanda Carreiro. Along with her, I thank our assistants Jesse Hilliker and Victoria Gonzalez, as well as Tony Kveragas and Eileen Hughes, and the wonderful graduate and undergraduate student staff members with whom I have worked. Among the latter, I want to name in particular Neal Allar, Tinenenji Banda, Fritz Bartel, Joyce Chery, Ryan Edwards, Kelsey Fugere, Jeremy Fuller, Aziza Glass, Darvin Griffin, Louis Hopkins, Janice Chi-lok Lau, Javier Perez Burgos, Jon Senchyne, and Kavita Singh.

I have benefited for many years from the teaching, guidance, and mentoring of Drew Gilpin Faust, Richard Dunn, the late John Hope Franklin, David Johnson, Robert F. Moore, and my parents Ed and Lynda Baptist. I would forget my own self without my friends Luther Adams, Stephen Bumgardner, and Justin Warf to remind me of who I am.

As this book was going to press, my friend Stephanie M. H. Camp passed away. She was a great historian of slavery, and in this book, she would see much that she had shaped. But to me, she was my older, wiser sister, always there for me when things were at their lowest ebb. I will miss her grace and her laughter as long as I live. I still hear her voice in the words that she wrote, and I see her in the inspiration she gave to so many others. To feel those things is its own kind of grace, sweet and painful, a left hand that holds me up in its palm.

This book would have remained forever entombed in my computer without Donnette’s unflagging support, enthusiasm, and love. Now it lives, because she helped breathe the spirit back into me.

Above all, the book is for my children Lillian and Ezra, who have known this story from before-times. In many ways it has made us. But stories change with each passing day. Now we are writing our own chapters.

ABBREVIATIONS

NOTES

INTRODUCTION. THE HEART: 1937

1
. Robert F. Engs,
Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited: Samuel Chapman Armstrong and Hampton Institute, 1839–1893
(Knoxville, TN, 1999); Lorenzo Ivy: Charles L. Perdue Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, eds.,
Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves
(Charlottesville, VA, 1976), 151–154; personal communications with Rev. Doyle Thomas, January 2012.

2
. Stephen Small and Jennifer Eichstedt,
Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums
(Washington, DC, 2002); cf. Stephanie E. Yuhl, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Centering the Domestic Slave Trade in American Public History,”
JSH
79, no. 3 (2013): 593–625.

3
. Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,”
Shadow and Act
(New York, 1964).

4
. Many recent historians of slavery, preferring the published autobiographies, have discounted the WPA narratives. Systematic critiques of the use of such interviews include the following: John Blassingame, “Introduction,” in ST, xliii–lxii; Donna J. Spindel, “Assessing Memory: Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives Reconsidered,”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
27 (1996): 247–261; Damian Alan Pargas, “The Gathering Storm: Slave Responses to the Threat of Interregional Migration in the Early Nineteenth Century,”
Journal of Early American History
2, no. 3 (2012): 286–315. I find these critics less persuasive than those who argue that the twentieth-century narratives are extremely useful. The WPA narratives contain rich personal observation remembered by the interviewees themselves, which can be read carefully and successfully with an understanding of the interview dynamic. Just as importantly, the narratives also transmit collectively held stories that in some cases are even older than the interviewees. The latter reflect the culture, beliefs, and vernacular history of the enslaved—including concepts and beliefs that clearly predate and make their way into the nineteenth-century narratives. See Mia Bay,
The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People, 1830–1925
(New York, 2000), esp. 113–116; George Rawick, “General Introduction” to AS, S1, 11, xxxix; Edward E. Baptist, “‘Stol’ and Fetched Here’: Enslaved Migration, Ex-Slave Narratives, and Vernacular History,” in Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp, eds.,
New Studies in the History of American Slavery
(Athens, GA, 2006), 243–274. For links between vernacular storytelling by slaves and former slaves, on the one hand, and literary production by African Americans, on the other, see William L. Andrews,
To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865
(Urbana, IL, 1985), 274; Marion W. Starling,
The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History
(Boston, 1981, repr. of 1946 diss.); Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, eds.,
The Slave’s Narrative
(New York, 1985); Henry Louis Gates,
The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism
(New York, 1988).