The Making of African America (12 page)

Marched in chains to some isolated, backwoods plantation, forced to labor long hours at unfamiliar tasks, enslaved black men and women began their lives in mainland North America. It was a grim existence, as their debilitating work regime, drafty shelters, and bland rations invited a familiar visitor. Within months of arrival, many of the new immigrants—ridiculed as “outlandish” by their owners—were dead. In all, perhaps as many as one-quarter to one-third would perish in the first year from overwork, exposure, and diseases to which they had but scant resistance. A few survivors took to the woods and others tried to paddle east in a futile effort to retrace their path across the Atlantic. Still others resisted more directly, assaulting overseers with fists, knives, and axes, burning barns, and occasionally organizing rebellions. Their efforts were met with overwhelming force backed, when necessary, by the local constabulary: the lash and pillory for first-time offenders; dismemberment for those who persisted; death for those who were deemed incorrigible. Against this carnival of violence, many simply collapsed and a few destroyed themselves. Most accepted the grim reality, turned inward, did their owners' bidding, and waited for their moment. The repeated shocks—African enslavement, the Middle Passage, and American captivity—took their toll.
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Lonely and disoriented, transplanted Africans lived amid a Babel of languages. Linguistic isolation was especially painful and depressing. His shipmates having been sold, Olaudah Equiano found “no person to speak to that I could understand. In this state, I was constantly grieving and pining, and wishing for death rather than any thing else.” Thus many new arrivals struggled for comprehension, not so much to understand the orders shouted by their owner or his representatives—who had their own ways of making their wishes known—but to break the silence that isolated them.

Fluency was achieved in many different ways. Some slaves had an ear for language and became considerable linguists as they mastered various languages of the New World. When he ran off from Philadelphia, one Joseph Boudron, who had been born in Guadeloupe, but lived in New York and Charlestown, spoke “good English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.” Others participated in the creation of pidgins or trading languages and later so-called creoles or more formal languages that slaves forged from the cacophony of African, European, and Native American tongues. From just this process the Gullah language emerged in low-country South Carolina. But the creation of full-blown creole languages were rare occurrences; in the case of Gullah, it was the product of the unique circumstances of low-country slavery: the black majority, the open slave trade, the planters' withdrawal to the rice ports, and the isolation of plantation life. Elsewhere on the continent, where the special circumstances of the low country did not exist, African slaves bent to their owners' language, adding their own intonation, vocabulary, and sometimes even syntax to English, Dutch, Spanish, or French, thus making the foreign familiar.
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Once the barrier of language had been breached, the business of making the foreign familiar proceeded along a broad front, as Africans began to create a society of their own. Transplanted Africans began to master the countryside, form friendships, and piece together new lineages from real and fictive or adoptive kin. “Families” derived from the occasional blood connections that survived the Atlantic crossing, as well as from shipmates and new friends who were elevated to the status of brothers and sisters. Having learned that members of his nation were held captive on a nearby plantation, a newly arrived South Carolina slave set off “to visit a countryman of his.” To these countrymen, others were added as newly arrived Africans joined together. Upon occasion, friendships created in the holds of slave ships conquered old enmities. One Neptune—whose body was scarred by “many small Marks or Dots running from both Shoulders down to his Waistband” and whose teeth were “fil'd sharp”—fled George Washington's Dogue Run Quarter with his shipmate Cupid and another whom Washington called their “Countryman.” Runaway advertisements from various parts of the mainland confirm that Kongos fled with Wolofs; Calabars with Coromantees.
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The thicket of connections grew as the newly arrived explored their environs, traveling at night or—if released from work on Sunday—in a single day to meet with old friends or make new ones. Before long, such ventures became regular outings. Try as they might, slaveholders could not prevent enslaved men and women from “rambling” and gathering, according to one frustrated master, in “considerable Numbers of Negroes together in some Certain places.” Those certain places—plantations with a compliant overseer or hidden forest clearings—became the loci of black life. Funerals became especially important occasions, since the burial of the dead was such an elemental human rite that slaveowners rarely forbade them. But there were other occasions, as men and women from various estates exchanged ideas, shared memories, honored the passing of a respected elder, celebrated weddings, or marked a child's coming of age. Whatever the initial impetus, such occasions came to serve every purpose from the sacred to the profane. If the forced immigrants sometimes reinforced their connections to the Old World by reenacting ancient rites and affirming customs, they were also mixing the many cultures of Africa, allowing them to emerge in new combinations. The sounds of these gatherings—the mixture of languages and music—signaled the arrival of something new.
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From their experiences in the New World and memories of the Old, enslaved Africans dispersed along the periphery of mainland North America constructed African America. The new society took a variety of forms depending upon the transplanted Africans' origins, the time of their arrival, their numbers, and the site of their enslavement—as well as the culture of their owners and the character of their localized American experience. Such differences created distinctive immigrant cultures in the North, the Chesapeake region, low-country Carolina and Georgia, and the Mississippi Valley. Indeed, within these broad regions still finer differences could be found, such as between black life in New England and the Middle Colonies, the backcountry and tidewater of the Chesapeake, and urban New Orleans and its hinterland. Even in the smallest hamlet, black people experienced a different slavery than those who resided in the countryside. Not only did slaves in different regions speak different languages, but even when they spoke the same language they conversed with distinctive regional intonations and dialects. Elijah, a Virginia-born fugitive, spoke “with the accent of that country,” and William, another runaway, was reported to have the “Virginia accent.” Seally, a slave sold from Maryland to South Carolina, stood out in that he too “spoke the Virginia language.”
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Slowly, often reluctantly but inexorably, Africans and their African American descendants took root in American soil, as they made their own the land that had been forced upon them. But black people did not embrace some generic America. Rather they were connected to a particular county, parish, or even plantation. During the eighteenth century, generations of slaves lived and died in the same neighborhood and sometimes on the same estate, often surrounded by family and friends. Planters often spoke of their slaves as “born and bred” within their own families. In one Maryland county, fully three-quarters of the slaves remained on the same plantation or farm between 1776 and 1783, despite the turmoil of those years.
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Such ties did not constitute immobility. Nowhere in mainland North American were black people frozen in one spot. Within particular locales, they were ever on the move, transacting their owners' business and their own. Even in areas of large plantations, the boundaries of the estates proved to be remarkably porous. As carters and boatmen, they traversed the countryside, often stopping to visit relatives, trade goods, or exchange gossip. Slaveholders, while condemning the subversive effects of slave mobility, inadvertently promoted it by renting or loaning slaves to neighbors, a practice that seemed to grow during the eighteenth century. Others sent them on long-distance errands, delivering goods or messages. Sometimes such journeys kept slaves on the road for days or even weeks. Upon their return, these wayfarers carried their knowledge of the terrain back to their plantation, so that few slaves did not know something about the adjoining countryside and many had a good sense of the geography of their region even if they had never left their owner's estate.
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In addition, the ground upon which slaves resided was hardly stable. Eighteenth-century Chesapeake planters, eager to find more productive land, steadily transferred their operations from the tidewater to the piedmont and beyond. In the Carolinas, indigo production, which had once flourished in the low country, moved to the upcountry. Northern farmers opened new lands in the Hudson Valley, northern New Jersey, and western Pennsylvania, and settlements in the Mississippi Valley crept northward. But the absence of transportation and communication between the North American colonies assured that Africans rarely moved from the region in which they had disembarked. To a remarkable degree, their children and grandchildren did not stray very far. According to one estimate, only a minority—about one-fifth—were removed by their owners to the new areas of production or sold to some distant place.
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While white free men and women became famous for pulling up stakes in search of some new opportunity, slaves remained in place.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, black people became increasingly identified with place. A Maryland slave scheduled to be sold across the Potomac “declar'd Several times that he will Loose his life, or had rather Submit to Death then go to Virginia to leave his Wife and Children.” Slaveholders recognized their slaves' attachment to the land of their birth. As Thomas Jefferson noted, the threat of deportation to “any other quarter so distant as never more to be heard of among us” was a far more fearsome weapon than the lash. The peril of physical removal became the most powerful weapon in the masters' arsenal, precisely because they appreciated the slaves' deep attachment to place. Slave masters employed the threat of deportation carefully, saving this terrifying weapon for only the most intractable rebels.
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The transfer of black men and women often became a subject of intense negotiations between themselves and their owners. Rather than chance the disruption—and incur the anger—which the movement of established residents entailed, slaveholders generally preferred to send newly arrived Africans to the upcountry quarters. For transplanted Africans and their African American children, the dense web of kinship created over the course of more than a century of American captivity endowed place with an ever-deepening meaning. In low-country Carolina, as the slaveholdings expanded—with estates in the rice region averaging more than a hundred slaves—the plantation often became a series of extended families. In the Chesapeake region and the towns and cities along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, where units were generally smaller, “broad marriages” became common. Husbands and wives, parents and children lived apart, but they were accorded visiting privileges, often on Saturday and Sunday. Visiting also allowed slaves to sustain more distant kin connections, with aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews, as well as with brothers and sisters. By the middle of the eighteenth century, enslaved black people lived surrounded by kin connections.
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Patterns of flight revealed the increasingly dense network of kinship and friendship. Fugitives looked first to their relatives. The proclivity of runaways to find refuge with kin forced slaveowners to follow their slaves' family connections. When Cyrus and his wife, Dorinda, fled their South Carolina plantation in 1759, their owner recited Cyrus's genealogy in an advertisement he hoped would lead to their capture. Dorinda “has a mother and a sister at the honourable William Bull, esqr's plantation on the Ashley-river a sister at the late Thomas Hohnan's and several relations at doct. William Elliott's, and many others; amongst whom theire is great reason to believe both are harboured.” Slaveholders tried to constrain such networks by forbidding slaves to marry off the plantation, but to little effect.
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The dense network of kinship and friendship also became the primary link that fastened slaves to place. By the middle of the eighteenth century, slaves—according to the Quaker John Woolman—“married after their own way.” While slave masters claimed the mantle of the patriarch, slave parents took control over their own children. They named their sons and daughters—having wrestled that perogative from their owners—after some worthy forebear, generally a father or grandfather, although sometimes also female relations. Slave parents protected their children and, as best they could, guided their future prospects. A system of inheritance allowed parents to give their children “a start.” Slave children also began to follow their parents into trades, so that both sons of Cooper Joe on Charles Carroll's great Doohoregan Manor in Maryland were also barrel makers. In a like fashion, house servants secured positions for their children within the house. Children, for their part, succored their elderly parents, so much so that Landon Carter—one of the wealthiest planters in Virginia—could only envy his elderly slave Nassaw for the respect accorded him by his own children. While Carter received only disdain from his own children, Nassaw's progeny honored their father.
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As African American slaves regularized protocols of courtship, marriage, and even divorce during the eighteenth century, ties to place deepened. Marriages between slaves became not simply the joining of two people, but the expansion of a lineage. Members of extended kin groups—which often included fictive as well as blood kin—were expected to assist one another and, when possible, advance a common interest. Such assistance took a variety of forms, from a good word with the master to concealing a fugitive. Where slaves were able to pass their possessions from one generation to another, the material linkages stabilized home life and strengthened neighborhood ties. Slave gardens and provision grounds, handicrafts and other various small bits of property affirmed the slaves' ability to participate in the marketplace, negotiate with free people—including their owners—and, upon occasion, collect wages like free men and women. Acquired at great personal cost, such holdings—although infinitesimal compared to their owners' wealth—created responsibilities and entitlements, which in turn rested on both obligations and expectations. Inheritance bolstered the family relations.