Slavery, the Environment, and Black Consciousness in the Antebellum South
First, we must realize that no such institution as the Negro church could rear itself without definite historical foundations. These foundations we can find if we remember that the social history of the Negro did not start in America. He was brought from a definite social environment,—the polygamous clan life under the headship of the chief and the potent influence of the priest. His religion was nature-worship, with profound belief in invisible surrounding influences, good and bad, and his worship was through incantation and sacrifice.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Working in the indigo and cotton fields, on the tobacco plantations and rice estates, in the fishing waters and cattle pastures, the majority of slaves spent most of their waking hours exposed to and grappling with the forces of nature. They daily witnessed the mysteries of seeds transforming into plants, newborn animals growing up, and rivers continuing to yield fish. They cleared forests to make way for staple crops, and they went into the forests that remained to beseech for deliverance. Under the surveillance of their masters or plantation overseers, slaves worked between the burning sun and the heavy soil, covered only at times by the shadows of the plants that they cultivated. And to cope with the pain that racked their bodies, they looked into the natural world for healing balms. Because through their work slaves spent the bulk of their time dealing with nature, it figures prominently in their artwork and in their ideas about life, power, and social relations. In their reflections on their experience and on more transcendent matters, natural metaphors abounded.
In this way, slaves were much like other people who worked in premodern societies or under forced labor conditions. One example in another context is Hilda Vitzthum, a survivor of the Soviet gulags. Like Africans who experienced unthinkable losses in the Middle Passage or their descendants in the antebellum South who lived under the constant shadow of the domestic slave trade, Vitzthum survived the Stalinist era, when she lost her husband and children during her imprisonment in the gulags. She faced the harshest elements of nature, yet she also saw in it glimpses of the sublime. When she was young, her father took her on hikes into the forests and mountains to catch the sunset, and this sensibility helped her survive the bitter elements of nature. After making a five-day trek on foot from Asinovka, she “could not resist the magic of the wintry landscape.” She added, “When we reached a clearing and I saw the tall, snow-covered trees glittering in the noon sunshine, I was overwhelmed.”1 Months later and after having been displaced several times, she was transported to Volosnitsa, where she continued to feel moments of inspiration in the midst of deep suffering. After looking around her, observing the desolation and falling into despair, she “noticed a little daisy that sprouted from this scarred and trampled earth.” She went on to ask, “Had this plain little flower, which had grown despite the thousands of footsteps that daily tramped by, become a symbol for me?”2 For Vitzthum, the daisy represented a potential that was not crushed by the Soviet forced labor system.
Like Vitzthum, slaves in the antebellum South looked to the natural world as a source of power and inspiration, even though they confronted its sharpest edge. Their autobiographies, folklore, music, and oral histories are filled with ideas about the natural world. Surviving sources tell us that slaves marked time through nature, worshipped within the context of nature, found momentary refuge in nature as a means to escape punishment, and extracted healing energies from nature. Building on the previous chapters that looked at the ways that slaves extracted material goods from nature through work practices inherited from Africa, this chapter will explore the ways that slaves in the antebellum South spun political, social, and religious ideas out of the natural world. In so doing, they created what anthropologist Eric Wolf terms an alternative ideology, which would “sound a systematic counterpoint to the mainstream of communication.”3 For instance, slaves contested the mainstream idea of planter paternalism that portrayed slave society as a big family in which slaveholders were the parents and slaves their dependent children. For slaves in the Old South, different visions emerged; nature spoke, revealing mysteries and telling stories, recounting memories and portending the future, ushering in change and offering rootedness in a troubled world.
Slaves spoke about that troubled world in a language laden with metaphors from the natural realm. Slaves read patterns in nature as allegories of the story of slavery, and in some contexts nature was the site of historical memory. For people who had little access to written means of recording their history, the natural world yielded mnemonic devices for slaves.4 Mnemonic devices are deployed within specific historical contexts and through ongoing dialogues between memory bearers and their audiences, a process that enables people to access and transmit historical knowledge. Such was the case in the Lowcountry creeks and swamps of Georgia and South Carolina, which contained the voices and memories of the slaves’ African ancestors, haunting the people who entered. For example, the father of Paul Singleton, who was a slave near Darien, Georgia, heard the sound of ghosts that lurked in the creeks and spoke of the illegal slave trade. “Lots of times, he told me another story about a slave ship that was about to be caught by a revenue boat. The slave ship slipped through the back of a river into a creek. There were about fifty slaves on-board. The slave runners tied rocks around the slaves’ necks and threw them overboard to drown.” Singleton continued, “They say you can hear them moaning and groaning in the creek if you go near there today.”5 In this way, the rivers of coastal Georgia contained the memories of the ancestral passage through the Atlantic slave trade.
Slaves and their descendants also deployed mnemonic devices from nature to recount the story of the domestic slave trade, as in the legend of Boggy Gut swamp in South Carolina, where the slave trader Ole Man Rogan bought and sold slaves. Through a dialogue between “Old Bill” and his audience, a historical picture of the domestic slave trade and its impact on black and white southerners emerged. Ole Man Rogan parted families during his slave trading, and he was said to have “always looked satisfied when he saw tears running down the face of a woman when she was weeping for her child.” He paid a price for slave trading, because after he died, “his spirit wandered and wandered from Boggy Gut to the river and wandered across the big swamps to Congaree.” For black people in South Carolina, Boggy Gut not only contained the restless spirit of Ole Man Rogan but also echoed with the memories of slavery. As Old Bill recalled,
Some time in the night if you sit on Boggy Gut, you’ll hear the rattle of the chains, you’ll hear a baby crying every which a way, and you’ll hear a mother calling for her child in the dark night on Boggy Gut. And you can sit on the edge of Boggy Gut and you’ll see men in chains bent over with their heads in their hands—the sign of distress. While you sit, you can see the spirit of Ole Man Rogan coming across the big swamps. You can see him look at the women and men and children, and you see him laugh—laugh at the distress and tears on Boggy Gut, and he laughs like he is satisfied, but he’s had no rest.6
The creeks in the Chesapeake had similar stories to tell. On the estate of Edward Lloyd in Talbot County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, a slave Demby ran into a creek to prevent further punishment from the plantation overseer, who gave Demby to the count of three to come out. When Demby resisted, the overseer Mr. Gore took aim and fired his musket at Demby, and the creek soon became his grave. Creeks contained the voices of the dead, heard by those who knew the stories of American slavery and the Atlantic slave trade and their horrors.7
Demby had sought a temporary refuge in the waters, looking for protection from his overseer who hovered over him like the boiling sun. Overseers’ presence continued to haunt slaves. Frances Kimbrough of Georgia recalled that after Jessie Kimbrough, the “young marster” of the plantation, died she could see “his ghost leaning against a pine tree, watching his former slaves working the field.”8 Plantation overseers such as Mr. Gore and Jessie Kimbrough enforced a labor regime with a social and political order defined in part by one’s relationship to the sun. As the American folk music scholar Alan Lomax writes, “From the beginning, it was the white man standing in the shade, shouting orders with a club or whip or gun in his hand—while out in the sun the blacks sweated with the raw stuff of wealth, cursing under their breath, but singing at the tops of their voices.”9 Those songs resonated into the slave quarters, where slave artisans were at work. Talking about his mother who worked textiles, George White stated, “When mama was going around seeing if the other slaves had done their carding, she would sing: ‘Keep your eye on the sun / See how she runs / Don’t let her catch you with your work undone / I’m trouble, I’m trouble.”10 Even slave children, who were generally spared the most arduous tasks, spoke about plantation power dynamics by referring to the sun. As Charlie Hudson recalled, “When work got tight and hot in crop time, I helped the other children tote water to the hands.”11 And Henry Box Brown recalled how, at a young age, “as the hot sun sent forth its scorching rays upon my tender head, did I look forward with dismay, to the time, when I, like my fellow slaves, should be driven by the task-master’s cruel lash, to the performance of unrequited toil upon the plantation of my master.”12 He had good reason to be dismayed.
When slaves stood away from the earshot of their owners and overseers, the pain of toiling under the sun entered their conversations, shaped their memories, influenced their imagination, and informed their worship. After Henry Box Brown’s family was sold into slavery in South Carolina, he imagined working under the sun as a sign of their distress. “Far, far away in Carolina’s swamps are they now, toiling beneath the scorching rays of the hot sun.”13 The intensity would have been like that which Solomon Northrup endured on the Louisiana plantation of John Tibeats. “As the sun approached the meridian that day it became insufferably warm. Its hot rays scorched the ground. The earth almost blistered the foot that stood upon it. I was without coat or hat, standing bareheaded, exposed to its burning blaze. Great drops of perspiration rolled down my face, drenching the scanty apparel wherewith I was clothed.” In that moment, his call for relief went unheard. He added, “Over the fence, a very little way off, the peach trees cast their cool, delicious shadows on the grass. I would gladly have given a long year of service to have been enabled to exchange the heated oven, as it were, wherein I stood, for a seat beneath their branches.”14 That spot was reserved for plantation overseers, as Northrup and former slaves such as Benjamin Johnson understood; he recalled that “the overseer would be sitting down under a tree and he would holler ‘keep going.’ The sweat would be just running off of you.”15
The sun was seared into the memories even of slaves who weren’t involved in field work. William Wells Brown wrote that when he had been a slave in Missouri, “the plantation being four miles away from the city, I had to drive the family to church. I always dreaded the approach of the Sabbath; for, during service, I was obliged to stand by the horses in the hot broiling sun, or in the rain, just as it happened.”16 Slaves carried this sensibility into their religious life and practices. During a prayer meeting in Virginia, one slave minister beseeched, “Please, Lord, the load of slavery is so heavy it’s about to destroy us all. The grass in the cotton field is so high. The sun is so hot. We almost perish in the middle of the day. Do, Master, have mercy and help us please.”17 The refrain of enslaved field workers was that they worked under the scorching rays of the sun, both a literal and figurative statement about slave labor and plantation power dynamics.
During the antebellum period, the presence of the domestic slave trade bore down on the enslaved much like the burning rays of the sun under which they worked. From 1820 to 1860, southerners entered into two million slave sale transactions, with one-third of the sales carrying slaves over state lines.18 The threat and recollection of the auction block, the presence of speculators creeping through the Upper South looking to buy slaves, and the separation of families wore on slaves, and they used natural metaphors to discuss the process through which they journeyed. For example, the mother of Henry Box Brown pointed to nature to teach him lessons about the domestic slave trade before his own family was threatened with breakup. Brown recalled that his mother, “pointing to the forest trees adjacent, now being stripped of their thick foliage by autumnal winds, would say to me, ‘my son, as yonder leaves are stripped from off the trees of the forest, so are the children of slaves swept away from them by the hands of cruel tyrants.’”19 While slaves harvested crops, speculators and planters harvested slaves.
Working under the sun added intensity to an already grueling forced labor routine, which reached its extreme in the marshes and swamps of Louisiana and the South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida Lowcountry. In his political opposition to slavery, Henry Box Brown invoked the image of “Carolina’s pestilential swamps,” and slaves who had family sold during the domestic slave trade to the Carolinas sang, “Gone,—gone,—sold and gone, to the rice swamp dank and lone!”20 The swamps were a haunting presence to black people and affected the artwork of Thaddeus Goodson of Columbia, South Carolina. Though he was born after the Civil War, his sense of the swamps reverberated from the antebellum period. As mentioned before, the swamps of Boggy Gut were haunted by Ole Man Rogan’s wandering spirit and the voices of the people he had sold. The master storyteller and poet informed his audience, “I’ve been down in the big swamps of the Congaree.” Someone responded, “Tell us, brother?” Good-son went on, “I’ve been down to the Congaree in the swamps … where owles on a dead limb talk of the dead and laugh like the dead, way down in the big swamps of the Congaree.”21
Like a Central African shaman, Goodson prophesied from the sounds of birds that death was impending. Duarte Lopez, who was on the Central African coast during the years of the slave trade, wrote that people there “are greatly given to Divination by birdes” and that if a bird cried in a particular way it was a foreboding sign.22 This belief resonated through the period of slavery. For instance, Dye Williams of Georgia recounted that she knew that her son was going to die soon when she heard an owl hooting.23 Goodson also realized that the world of slavery in the antebellum Lowcountry’s marshes was a world of the dead, where malnutrition, infant mortality, malaria, and other tropical diseases led to alarmingly high mortality rates. For instance, over a fifteen-year period (1819∇34) on the Butler Island plantation of Georgia, over 16 percent of slave children born alive died within the first two weeks of birth.24
This grim reality figured into Goodson’s portrait of the swamps, where he saw “trees sweat like a man.” His poetry reminded his audience of the physiological toll of slave labor, and while Central African ideas shaped his poetry, it was forged through the experience of American slavery. For example, he refashioned the claim that cotton was king in the South and pointed out the irony of the national anthem’s lines about America being the land of the free and the home of the brave by calling the Congaree swamps “the land of poison, where the yellow-fly stings, in the home of the fever and where death is king.” In a sobering conclusion to his poem of entering into the land of the dead, Goodson ends, “That’s where I’ve been, down in the big swamps. Down in the land of mosquitoes, way down in the big swamps on the Congaree.”25
The swamps were so nightmarish that they drove some to seek a spiritual return to Africa. In the 1780s, a group of slaves were brought to the swamps of coastal North Carolina to dig a canal from the Scuppernong Lake to the Scuppernong River, and many succumbed to the brutal work routine. The plantation overseer recounted, “They were kept at night in cabins on the shore of the lake. At night they would begin to sing their native songs, and in a short while would become so wrought up that, utterly oblivious to the danger involved, they would grasp their bundles of personal effects, swing them over their shoulders, and setting their faces towards Africa, would march down into the water singing as they marched till recalled to their senses only by the drowning of some of the party.”26 One wonders whether, as in the creeks of coastal Georgia that contained the voices of the dead, one could hear the sound of ghosts near the Scuppernong Lake.
The enslaved expressed their grief through natural metaphor, particularly comparing slavery to clouds hanging overhead. On remembering the eve of being sold from William Ford to John Tibeats, who proved to be more cruel in his punishments, Solomon Northrup wrote, “Clouds were gathering in the horizon—forerunners of a pitiless storm that was soon to break over me.”27 Henry Box Brown invoked similar imagery to mobilize opposition to slavery: “Imagine, reader, a fearful cloud, gathering blackness as it advances towards you, and increasing in size constantly; hovering in the deep blue vault of the firmament above you, which cloud seems loaded with the elements of destruction, and from the contents of which you are certain you cannot escape.”28 And black people in South Carolina spoke about clouds to give voice to their pain. On visiting a Carolina plantation, William Wells Brown observed, “The night was dark, the rain descended in torrents from the black and overhanging clouds, and the thunder, accompanied with vivid flashes of lightning, resounded fearfully.” Brown witnessed a prayer meeting, led by an elder who poured forth “such a prayer as but few outside of this injured race could have given.” The people gathered then followed another slave in song, who intoned, “Oh! breth-er-en, my way, my way’s cloudy, my way, go send them angels down. Oh! breth-er-en, my way, my way’s cloudy, my way, Go send them angels down.”29 With both the rays of the sun and the clouds in the sky representing a menacing planter class, the “signs” from nature meant that the possibilities for escape seemed closed.
Many slaves spoke about the power struggle between masters and slaves indirectly, pointing to forms of nature to give voice to their own discontent. One slave song summed up the exploitative labor dynamics of antebellum plantations in the lines, “The Old bee makes the honey comb, the young bee makes the honey. The niggers make the cotton and corn, and the white folks get the money.”30 William Wells Brown recorded a similar song from a slave named Cato, who intoned, “The big bee flies high, the little bee makes the honey, the black man raises the cotton, and the white man gets the money.”31 This sentiment paralleled the more well-known work song with which Frederick Douglass grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland that went, “We raise the wheat, they give us the corn; We bake the bread they give us the crust; We sift the meal; They give us the husk; We peel the meat, They give us the skin.”32
Slaves could invoke the impersonal world of nature to talk about the exploitative and demeaning system of slave labor. In fundamental ways, planters set the tone for the conversation, having legally defined slaves as chattel in the seventeenth century. Yet slaves adopted and transformed this language, turning the tables ideologically to create a vision that challenged the claims of white planters to superiority and their sense of manhood. For instance, Simon Brown, born in Virginia, said about the owners of a woman that he was courting, “Like many white men all over the South, they appeared to me—and to all the slaves mostly—to be lower than the beasts of the woods. We had no real respect for them. A wolf or a tiger would fight to defend his young. He would never forsake his children. But a white man would force a slave woman to have children by him and then hold his own blood offspring in slavery.”33 Through this critique, Simon Brown revealed a strain of thought that held slaveholding to be simultaneously unmanly and unnatural. And in doing so, he challenged the paternalistic claims of slave owners.
Slaves also created an ideology that opposed the institution of slavery by comparing their own status to that of animals. They drew parallels between their work in the fields and the horrors of the auction block to the lives of beasts. Brown told a young William J. Faulkner, who sat at the feet of the elder Brown as he recalled stories about slavery, “You see, in slavery days, black people weren’t treated like human beings, but like work animals.”34 And in the words of Fountain Hewes, who was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, and whose grandfather was owned by Thomas Jefferson, “We were slaves, we belonged to people. They’d sell us like they sell horses, and cows, and hogs and all like that, and have an auction bench, and they put you up on the bench and bid on you the same way that you’d bid on cattle.” He added, “If my master wanted to send me, he never said you could get on a horse and ride. You’d walk. You’d be barefooted and cold, and it didn’t make any difference. You weren’t much more to some of them than a dog in those days, you wouldn’t be treated as good as you treat dogs now.”35 And looking back at the days before his sale down the Ohio River, Henry Bibb said that his fate was for him “to be sold like an ox, into hopeless bondage, and to be worked under the flesh-devouring lash during life, without wages.”36 Being bought and sold and working without wages, slaves and their descendants compared their lot in the antebellum South to that of animals.
The writings of many slaves repeated a refrain that slaveholders, by labeling and treating slaves as chattel, themselves became like animals. Likening her owner Dr. Flint to a snake, Harriet Jacobs labeled him a “venomous old reprobate.”37 Henry Box Brown asserted about planters “that all who drank of this hateful cup were transformed into some vile animal” and that his owner “so became a perfect brute in his treatment of slaves”; he also referred to the planter class as “the bloodhounds of the South.”38 Simon Brown opined, “You know that folks in a heap of ways are like the creatures in the Deep Woods. They act as if they’re not any better than the animals that kill and eat one another.”39 Henry Bibb, recollecting his family’s escape from his plantation into the swamps of Louisiana, found himself surrounded by a pack of wolves. He added that “my chance was far better among the howling wolves in the Red River Swamp, than before Deacon Whitfield, on the cotton plantation.”40 Through these analogies, blacks unmasked the genteel, “paternalistic” veneer of slavery of Old South legend and peered into its violent core.
At its core, slavery was a system that gave slave owners property rights in people who could be put to work in places and at times that they would not willingly be.41 Slaves were painfully aware of these property rights, as Fountain Hewes and Simon Brown pointed out, and they were clear about what they meant in terms of the impact of the elements on their bodies. For example, Armici Adams, a former slave from Virginia, recalled, “When it snowed, the work was very hard. I can remember carrying milk in the snow when it was snowing so hard that you couldn’t see a foot ahead of yourself. When I got back I was so cold I couldn’t get my hand off the bucket handle. They had to pry it off. My feet would freeze too. Missis used to thaw my hands and feet out every winter morning.”42 On top of the already rigorous labor they required of their slaves, slaveholders used the forces of nature as a way to control their slaves. For example, planters exposed slaves to the elements as a punishment. The North Carolina fugitive slave Harriet Jacobs recalled an instance in her childhood that illustrates this slaveholding tactic. Jacobs was wearing a new pair of shoes her grandmother had bought her to protect her from the snow. When Jacobs walked through the room of her mistress, the shoes made too much noise, and her mistress ordered her to “Take them off … and if you put them on again, I’ll throw them into the fire.” The mistress then sent Jacobs on an errand barefoot.43
Even when slaves resisted, the natural world seemed to place constraints on them and provide a tool for planter domination. For Harriet Jacobs, snakes and mosquitoes in the swamps of eastern North Carolina stood as obstacles to her escape. During her flight, the only refuge her uncle Phillip could find for her was in the swamps, where both of them “were covered with hundreds of mosquitos. In an hour’s time they had so poisoned my flesh that I was a pitiful sight to behold. As the light increased, I saw snake after snake crawling round us.” With no regrets, she added that “even those large, venomous snakes were less dreadful to my imagination” than the planters who claimed to be civilized.44 And during her seven years in the garret of her grandmother’s house before her ultimate escape from slavery, rats and mice were her companions. Others who sought to escape conjured frightful images about their “natural” surroundings. Frederick Douglass plumbed the minds of slaves, which were tortured by images of attack. Speaking for himself and others who contemplated escape, he felt that they would be “stung by scorpions—chased by wild beasts—bitten by snakes; and worst of all, having succeeded in swimming rivers—encountering wild beasts—sleeping in the woods—suffering hunger, cold, heat and nakedness—we supposed ourselves to be overtaken by hired kidnappers.”45 So Douglass and others saw nature as a line of defense for slaveholders to hem in their enslaved population.
In their poetry and autobiographies, in their work songs and folklore, which reveal the political ideologies of slaves, nature was prominent. For slaves, nature was by no means always a benign force but had a malignant potential. Their daily exposures to the rays of the sun, the pestilence of the swamps, and the harshness of winters served as sobering reminders of their status as slaves. Nature also carried memories, of lakes that people waded into while struck with visions of a return to Africa, or fields where previous generations had toiled. In these ways, slaves’ perceptions of the natural world paralleled those of people along West Africa’s Gold Coast and its interior, who in particular believed that Nyame, the creator of the universe, had infused it with power, or tumi. As explained by Emmanuel Akyeampong and Pashington Obeng, “The Asante universe contained numerous participants—spirits, humans, animals, and plants. It was a universe of experience in which some of the participants were invisible.” Furthermore, “the Asante universe was suffused with power,” and “access to power (Twi: tumi: ‘the ability to bring about change’) was available to anyone who knew how to make use of Onyame’s powerful universe for good or evil.”46
In Asante, gaining access to and exercising tumi became the basis of social and political conflict as Asante political authorities attempted to impose violent control over their subjects by deploying tumi malevolently. However, they never held a monopoly on power. Simultaneously with these efforts at domination and often in response to them, people on the political margins sought to access tumi in ways that posed a challenge to the hegemony of Asante political elites and had the potential to spark social change. A parallel struggle emerged on North American slave plantations. Where white southern planters attempted to deploy the forces of nature toward their own ends, slaves developed systems of knowledge and strategies to tap into these forces to empower themselves.
Perhaps the most radical example of a slave whose dialogue with nature informed his resistance to slavery was “Prophet” Nat Turner. Struggling against the imposition of an overseer, Turner ran into the woods, where he remained for thirty days before returning to his plantation. He revealed that in the woods “the Spirit appeared to me and said, I had my wishes directed to things of this world, and not to the kingdom of heaven, and that I should return to the service of my earthly master.” Soon after, he had a vision in which “the sun was darkened, the thunders rolled in the heavens, and blood flowed in the streams.” Later, Turner withdrew from that world to contemplate “the Spirit” through observing the rhythms of the natural world. In his quest, he sought for it to “reveal to me the knowledge of the elements, the revolution of the planets, the operation of the tides, and changes of the seasons.” Turner continued to avail himself of signs from nature, which extended in part from his labor. “While working in the field,” Turner recalled, “I discovered drops of blood on the corn.”47
Turner’s vision resonated with other political claims, spoken in naturalistic terms, by black people elsewhere. For example, during the early nineteenth-century debate over the American Colonization Society’s effort to return blacks to Africa, black political and religious figures such as Richard Allen and Absolom Jones argued that because “our ancestors (not of choice) were the first successful cultivators of the wilds of America, we their descendants feel ourselves entitled to participate in the blessings of her luxuriant soil, which their blood and sweat manured.”48 Given how other black people stressed how slaves and their ancestors had poured their blood into the soil, it was no great leap for Turner to see drops of it on the corn.
While organizing his insurrection, Turner also looked to the forests and the skies for knowledge, tapping into their tumi. He “found on the leaves in the woods hieroglyphic characters, and numbers, with the forms of men in different attitudes.” And he timed his decision to inform a small band of confidantes of his planned rebellion by signs from nature, which took the form of a solar eclipse in February of 1831.49 Turner, like other slaves in the antebellum South, saw in nature’s signs a call to change. And in the process of reading its signs, slaves at times blurred the line between nature and the human experience, bringing the information they garnered from nature into their artwork, education of young people, labor struggles, and political perspectives.
Even the slightest hint from nature pushed slaves forward. While Nat Turner acted along dramatic, violent lines for slave liberation, other slaves, realizing the overwhelming armed might of the planter class, believed stoically that change would happen over a longer time. George White, who was born into slavery in Virginia in 1847, recalled that his mother had inspired him with the song “Keep inching along, Keep inching along, Inching like a two inch worm, You’ll get there by an’ by.”50 Other slaves expressed envy when looking at nature, seeing its creatures as privileged with a kind of freedom denied to slaves. Solomon Northrup, who was lured to Washington, D.C., kidnapped, taken to Richmond, and sold to the Deep South, recalled that during his captivity on the steamboat that took him south, “the sun shone out warmly; the birds were singing in the trees. The happy birds—I envied them. I wished for wings like them, that I might cleave the air to where my birdlings waited vainly for their father’s coming, in the cooler region of the North.” And like George White’s grandmother, Northrup found inspiration in the seemingly smallest of creatures. Speaking proverbially, he remarked, “Life is dear to every living thing; the worm that crawls upon the ground will struggle for it.”51 This sensibility resonated in work songs and the heart of the blues, as in the words of the blues singer who hollered, “I’d rather be a catfish swimming in that deep blue sea, than to stay in Texas, treated like they wanted to do poor me.”52
Through metaphors of flight and an identification with birds, slaves developed counterideologies that challenged planter domination. For example, black people in coastal Georgia made repeated claims that Africans had the power to fly back to Africa. After one overseer tried to punish a group of Africans, they were said to “rise up in the sky and turn themselves into buzzards and fly right back to Africa.”53 Harriet Tubman had a similar identification with birds and flight. She recalled that during her days as a slave in Maryland, “she used to dream of flying over fields and towns, and rivers and mountains, looking down upon them ‘like a bird,’ and reaching at last a great fence, or sometimes a river, over which she would fly.”54 Behind the identification with the fish that swam the seas, the birds flying aloft, and the inchworm that snuck by generally unnoticed, slaves simultaneously protested the exploitative dynamics of antebellum forced labor camps and saw a vision of different life possibilities.
Slaves grappled with that tension, between the painful and creative potentialities of nature, in the swamplands. As already noted, slaves found the swamps to be “lands of poison.” Yet conversely many sought refuge from slavery in the lowland marshes, such as the Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and Virginia and the swamps of Louisiana. For instance, Henry Bibb and his family fled into the swamps near the Red River in Louisiana, hoping to find their way to freedom. Yet the swamp creatures seemed to parallel the violence of the plantation world. Bibb recalled, “About the dead hour of the night I was roused by the awful howling of a gang of blood-thirsty wolves, which had found us out and surrounded us as their prey, there in the dark wilderness many miles from any house or settlement.”55 While Bibb’s flight into the swamps failed, other slaves found the liberation Bibb and his family sought. Simon Brown recounted the story of “Big Tom,” who fled into the Dismal Swamp of Virginia, fended off bloodhounds sent after him, and successfully escaped to an Indian village.56 Omar, the grandfather of jazz artist Sidney Bechet, roamed the bayous of the Lower Mississippi Valley and was said to live like a “free slave long before Emancipation.”57
Furthermore, some saw in the swamps a sacred dimension. The anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston pointed out that the swamps offered a context for black conversion experiences and religious visions. She wrote, “The vision is a very definite part of Negro religion. … The cemetery, to a people who fear the dead, is a most suggestive place to gain visions. The dense swamp with the possibility of bodily mishaps is another.”58 Such a vision was revealed to Solomon Northrup in the swamps of Louisiana. In spite of the “dreariness” of the marshes, he saw within them a pulsation of life. “Not by human dwellings—not in crowded cities alone, are the sights and sounds of life. The wildest places of the earth are full of them. Even in the heart of that dismal swamp, God has provided a refuge and a dwelling place for millions of living things.”59 Upon entering this refuge for other forms of life, Northrup realized the possibility for a refuge for himself, which he would eventually find.
Slaves also transformed “the woods” into a refuge; the forests had a kind of tumi that allowed them to effect change in their lives. Liza Brown, who was a slave in Virginia, vividly remembers that slaves fled to the woods for protection. She recalled, “Yes, the slaves used to run away from our flock and stay in the woods.” Cornelia Carter had an even more intimate memory. She remembered about slavery that “Father got beat up so much that after a while he ran away and lived in the woods.” Horace Tonsler was inspired by a slave Berkeley Bulluck, who told him how he had made an escape from slavery. “One day we were driving up the road and he showed me the very road he used when he first escaped. This road led to Bath County. He said he traveled at night by the moonshine. Said he would feel around the trees and whichever way the moss grew on, he knew that was the north direction.”60 In this way, the trees of the Old Dominion served as compasses and contained the history of slave flight.
While some slaves found in these temporary refuges a springboard for their ultimate escape, other slaves found their escape to be more fleeting. During instances of petit marronage, slaves fled into the forests and elsewhere for short periods, only to return back to their plantations.61 The woods provided some personal and spiritual relief from the larger “cotton fever” sweeping the antebellum South, as one slave termed the cotton boom and the demand for slaves in the Deep South. With the pressures of the domestic slave trade, some slaves fled to the woods so that they could remain close to their families, and in some cases the response worked. One person who had been sold to a slave trader fled to the woods, which became his home for a year, until “Miss Sarah Ann bought him and united him with the rest of his family—his wife and three children.” Lorenzo L. Ivy of Chatham, Virginia, exclaimed, “Runaways! Lord, yes, they had plenty of runaways.” He added, “Sometimes slaves just ran away to the woods for a week or two to get a rest from the field, and then they would come on back. They never came back till they got the word, though. … My grandmother, named Sallie Douchard, stayed in the woods for three or four weeks.” Douchard eventually returned and was spared the violence that led her to flee in the first place. However, many other slaves who fled temporarily into the woods faced severe consequences. Further torture or sale to the Deep South might face those who were caught in the woods or returned to their plantations.62
Slaves drew upon the woods not only for personal refuge but also for resources that they intended to use for protection on their plantations. As on the Gold Coast, in other parts of West Africa, and in Central Africa, a group of experts formed in the antebellum South who accessed the powers of the natural and spiritual world to protect their clients. On the Gold Coast and in its interior, for instance, a group of Sufi healers made protective amulets to protect their clients; and in Central Africa diviners gave their clients charms, or nkisi, to save them from harm. Nkisi contained elements from nature, such as herbs and roots.63 The tie between Frederick Douglass and the conjurer Sandy demonstrates the ways slaves accessed power through their knowledge of the natural world. After being threatened by his overseer Covey, Douglass fled into the woods, where he “was buried in its somber gloom, and hushed in its solemn silence; hid from all human eyes; shut in with nature and nature’s God, and absent from all human contrivances.”64 There he met Sandy, a conjurer who aided Douglass’s resistance to the ceaseless violence he faced at the hands of Covey. Douglass poured his story out to Sandy and his wife, and Sandy offered his aid. According to Douglass, Sandy “was a genuine African, and had inherited some of the so called magical powers, said to be possessed by African and eastern nations. He told me he could help me; that, in those very woods, there was an herb, which in the morning might be found, possessing all the powers required for my protection.” Though Douglass was first incredulous, he obeyed Sandy’s order and ended up beating back Covey’s attacks.65 While diviners such as Sandy were concentrated in the eastern slave states, some carried the knowledge to the western states through the domestic slave trade. William Wells Brown recalls a Missouri slave named Dinkie, who “roamed through the woods” whenever he decided to and declared that he “got de power” and could know things “seen and unseen.”66 And as Douglass tapped into such knowledge to fend off the beating from Covey, Dinkie used his knowledge of the natural world and as a diviner to spare himself from an impending beating.
Like West and West Central Africans, southern slaves saw a tension between the forest and the village or plantation and moved back and forth between these two areas to create change in their lives. In West Central Africa, this tension reflected a larger cosmology that “deploys a series of complementary oppositions between the visible and the invisible, life and death, above and below, day and night, village and forest. This universe is organized in time as well as in space, in such a way that the other world is both the past and the future, and the movement of human life matches that of the sun. The same cosmology is general in forest West Africa.”67 Slaves such as William Wells Brown and Dinkie viewed the universe according to a similar set of dual, opposing forms.
In the antebellum South, black people turned the woods into sanctuaries. For example, Harriet Jacobs entered into the woods for contemplation, in her case to visit the burial grounds of her parents. Just before her flight from her owner to her grandmother’s garret, where she stayed for seven years before making it to the North, she visited the gravesites of her parents in the woods, where slaves often buried their dead. Ryer Emmanuel of South Carolina had witnessed such burials when she was young. “When they were about to bury them, I used to see the lights many times and hear the people going along singing out yonder in the woods. All about in these woods, you can find plenty of those slavery graves.” Emmanuel added, “Right over there across the creek in those big cedar trees, there is another slavery graveyard. People going by there could often hear talking and couldn’t see anything, they tell me … and would hear babies crying all about there too.” So when Harriet Jacobs went into the woods to visit her parents’ gravesite, she entered a world where the ancestors spoke to the living. She wrote, “The graveyard was in the woods, and twilight was coming on. Nothing broke the death-like stillness except the occasional twitter of a bird.” In this stillness, she knelt before their graves and “poured forth a prayer to God for guidance.” She received an answer on her way from the gravesite when she heard what sounded like her father’s voice, “bidding me not to tarry till I reached freedom or the grave.”68
The movement of the sun was also central to slave philosophy, artwork, and cultural and religious practices. The sun not only scorched enslaved workers who toiled under its rays but represented by its movement the possibilities for transformation and the cyclical nature of the human experience. In particular, black people in the antebellum South inherited the Central African belief that human life passes like the sun’s cycle through four phases—birth, maturity, death, and ancestry. They represented this cyclical movement by a circle with a cross overlapping it and by the ring shout, a counterclockwise dance that represented these phases. Through these beliefs and practices, African descendants tapped into ancestral knowledge.69 After sunset, though exhausted from their plantation work regimen, slaves gained access to this ancestral knowledge, going into the woods or elsewhere to shout, and they gave reverence to the sun as it rose. Rosa Grant of coastal Georgia recounted how her grandmother, who was from Africa, had told “her about the harvest time when the folks stayed up all night to shout. At sunup, they sang and prayed and said that they will live better and be more thankful the next year.” And George Smith “remembered hearing the older Negroes tell of having watches on certain occasions when they sat up all night waiting for sunrise. When the sun at last appeared over the horizon, they would start a slow-dance and bow to the sun.”70
Yet as the sun rose it marked the beginning of another day’s work, as it did for a gang of slaves hired out to work on a Virginia railroad that was to pass through Appomattox. Painting a vivid image of the morning sun that accompanied workers who cleared forests from the tracks, Fannie Berry recalled that “they all started coming from all directions with their axes on their shoulders, and the mist and fog was hanging over the pines, and the sun was just breaking across the fields.”71 If it rained, they might sing a verse like the “John Brown’s Hammer” song, which went, “Everywhere I look this morning, look like rain, baby, look like rain. I got a rainbow tied around my shoulder, ain’t gonna rain, baby, ain’t gonna rain.”72 Though the sun bore down on them intensely during their field labor, and though many were afraid that as the day passed and the sun set they would be caught “with their work undone,” slaves still revered the movement and cycles of the sun. The movement of the sun perhaps reminded them that “trouble don’t last always.” It was as if through their voices slaves channeled the powers of nature, which, whether in the form of a rainbow or the fields, offered them strength and bodily protection.
While slaves had little access to the fruits of the plantation fields, those fields teemed with energy, and slaves drew upon this to make it through their days of labor. In particular, they transmuted the power of the fields and the skies surrounding them into songs that sustained them as they worked. Simon Brown invoked this sense when he recounted that among slaves in Virginia, “Many times, in the field, black voices would sing, ‘Over my head, there’s music in the air; There must be God somewhere.’” Brown added that this allowed them to make it through periods of fatigue. Under some cases, when some slaves suffered from exhaustion and became vulnerable to punishment, their leader would exhort them to “‘to reach inside your hearts and bring out a song, a song of salvation, of freedom. You’ve got a lot of songs of salvation in your hearts.’ With that, the slaves began to sing, and they were refreshed.”73 Like people on the Gold Coast, slaves in Louisiana used the power of speech and song to access power in nature. The New Orleans jazz musician Sidney Bechet theorized that “the only thing they had that couldn’t be taken from them was their music. Their song, it was coming right up from the fields, settling itself in their feet and working right up, right up into their stomachs, their spirit, into their fear, into their longing.”74 And those songs resonated beyond the immediate fields. As Marrinda Jane Singleton recalled about slave religious meetings, “Here we would pray and sing in our own feelings and expressions singing in long and common meters sounding high over the hills.”75 Through their song, they developed a deeper connection to the fields, where in some places generations of slaves had poured out their labor.
As they worked in the fields and forests, they connected to the land while simultaneously knowing their fragile connection to it. Slaves in Virginia, as they cleared forests, would create songs that acknowledged the possibility of their being sold on the slave market. Fannie Berry remembered slaves felling pine trees and singing a “sorrowful song” that went, “This time tomorrow night, Where will I be? I’ll be gone, gone, gone, Down to Tennessee.” She recalled the woods would just “ring with this song.”76
Within the context of the unimaginable pressures that the domestic slave trade placed on slaves in the antebellum South and the fragility of the ties between people within the slave community, many slaves become lovers of the natural world and saw transformative power in it. Much as Hilda Vitzthum saw in a small daisy that grew in the desolation of the Soviet gulags an image of her own survival, some slaves saw in the flowering of nature possibilities for their own transformation. Even the gardens of their owners delighted slaves. Solomon Northrup said of the Ford plantation in Louisiana, “I strolled into the madam’s garden. Though it was a season of the year when the voices of the birds are silent, and the trees are stripped of their summer glories in more frigid climes, yet the whole variety of roses were then blooming there, and the long, luxuriant vines creeping over the frames.”77 The former slave Clara Allen remembered being sent to a plantation in Monroe County that had “gardens and a big lake just outside the yard. Every kind of flower that ever grew.”78 Louis Hughes said about the ironic beauty of the southern landscape, “Flowers grew in profusion everywhere through the south, and it has, properly, been called the land of flowers.”79 And Harriet Jacobs recalled that after the winter passed in coastal North Carolina, “The beautiful spring came; and when Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also. My drooping hopes came to life again with the flowers.”80
The spontaneous growth of plants in the rural South gave way in some places to slave horticultural practices, enabling slaves to have a more reliable source of inspiration in a world of family separation and uncertainty. Nathaniel John Lewis of Georgia claimed that the plants in his garden provided him with protection. On the path leading to his house in coastal Georgia, Charles Hunter had a garden of “brightly colored flowers.”81 And on the property of the North Carolinian Priscilla Joiner, “the garden was immaculately kept. Rose bushes climbed the houseside. The late fall breeze wafted dying pink petals over the whole garden; magnolias, petunias, tulips were in bloom. As she led us from bush to bush, Priscilla Joiner fondled occasional flowers and seemed to take on strength from them.” Joiner, who lived alone and had little contact with her children, drew comfort from her garden. “I have my own place here and my flowers. What more could an old woman want?”82
In tending to the natural world, black people simultaneously tended to their own selves. For instance, Mildred Heard recalled, “Once a little red bird got hurt and I caught it and nursed it back to health and this bird began to act just like a pet. When I saw the bird was well enough to leave I tied a red string around its leg so that I would know it if I saw it again. After that for three years my little bird used to fly back and sit on the steps until I would feed him and then he would fly away.”83 Given the deep significance that slaves gave to flight, as in their stories about Africans flying back to Africa, Heard’s practice of nursing this bird back to health must have offered her a great deal of succor in the midst of the pressures of black life in the rural South.
Other slaves captured a sense of the sublime under the stars. The meteor storm of 1833 was emblazoned in the psyche of many slaves for decades. Some former slaves such as Rastus Jones and Baily Cunningham had early memories of it. Cunningham claimed to have been eight years old when the meteors “began to fall about sundown and fall all night. They fell like rain. They looked like little balls about as big as marbles with a long streak of fire to them. They fell everywhere but you couldn’t hear them. They did not hit the ground or the house. We were all scared and did not go out of the house but could see them everywhere.”84 Black people in Georgia also invoked the memory of the meteor shower. Edie Dennis remembered “the wonderful manner in which the stars shot across the heavens by the thousands, when every sign seemed to point to the destruction of the earth.”85 For the slaves who witnessed it and passed knowledge of it to succeeding generations, the meteor shower called forth awe and fear that momentarily equalized everyone under its domain. It served as a marker of time, influenced their artwork, and gave slaves a language to understand the Civil War, which for some replicated this natural event. As Charles Grandy stated, “Did you ever see stars a-shootin? Well they were shooting one right after the other—fast! Then a great big star over in the east came right down almost to the earth. I saw it myself. It was a sign of the war, alright.”86 And the meteor showers inspired the black artist Harriet Powers, who had been born a slave in Georgia in 1837 and who depicted it over sixty years later in a quilt she made in 1898.87
Most spectacularly displayed during meteor showers, the night sky held for slaves a deep political, social, and spiritual significance. Under the cover of darkness, fugitive slaves made their escape from southern slave labor camps. After sunset, slaves reenergized themselves from exhausting field work through the social life of the slave quarters and in the woods. Ellen Lindsey remembered that her father “used to lay flat on his back and tell time by the stars.”88 Some simply gazed at the stars in wonder. Even in the midst of the nightmarish experience of slavery in the coastal swamps, slaves revered the beauty of the night sky. For instance, Daphney Wright, who was a slave in the South Carolina Lowcountry, recalled, “When the stars would come out there over the water it was a beautiful sight!”89 Perhaps for this reason, slaves in Virginia intoned, “I’ve been in the valley praying all night, All night—all night, All night—All night. Give me a little more time to pray. I’ve been in the valley mourning all night, I’ve been in the valley mourning all night, I’ve been in the valley mourning all night.”90
For slaves, nature possessed its own wonders; however, the contexts of slavery and freedom sharpened their sense of its meaning. When Harriet Tubman passed into northern lands from slavery in Maryland, she saw that “there was such glory over everything, the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven.”91 Upon being captured during an attempted escape from slavery, Henry Bibb seemed to have been awakened to natural beauty. He recalled that, “while I was permitted to gaze on the beauties of nature, on free soil, as I passed down the river, things looked to me uncommonly pleasant: The green trees and wild flowers of the forest; the ripening harvest fields waving with their gentle breezes of Heaven; and the honest farmers tilling their soil and living by their own toil.” And when he made his final escape, the new political context shaped his sense of the natural world. Bibb recounted that as he passed up the Ohio River toward his freedom, “notwithstanding I was deeply interested while standing on the deck of the steamer looking at the beauties of nature on either side of the river, as she pressed her way up the stream, my very soul was pained to look upon the slaves in the fields of Kentucky, still toiling under their task-masters without pay.”92
In a world where planters tried to bind slaves to particular pieces of land, the movement and flow of rivers took on political and spiritual meanings. And for many slaves, the waters became the medium for Christian conversion. Slaves conducted their baptismal ceremonies in ponds, and others took slaves to the rivers for this rite of passage. “There weren’t any pools in the churches to baptize folks in then, so they took them down to the creek,” Elisha Doc Garey recounted. She added, “First a deacon went in and measured the water with a stick to find a safe and suitable place—then they were ready for the preacher and the candidates. Everybody else stood on the banks of the creek and joined in the singing. Some of the songs were: ‘Lead Me to the Water to be Baptized.’”93 Similarly, Callie Elder recalled, “All I know about baptizing is they just took them to the river and plunged them in. They sung something about: ‘Going to the River to be Baptized.’”94 And though Carrie Hudson didn’t participate in the ritual, she witnessed other slaves pass through the baptismal waters. She stated, “I can see them folks now, marching down to the creek, back of the church, and all the candidates dressed in the whitest of white clothes, that was the style then. Everybody joined in the singing, and the words were like this: ‘Marching for the water, for to be baptized.”95 Understanding baptism as simultaneously an act of purification and a means of accessing spiritual power, slaves marched to the rivers when they were at ebb “so the sins would be washed away.” When they got there, the preacher took the candidates one by one into the river and dipped them in the water. “Then he made a prayer for the river to wash away the sins.”96 Marching to the rivers and through baptism, slaves, though they could not wash away slavery, could become transformed in other ways.
The agricultural fields, where slaves transmuted seeds into crops, offered another site for slave spiritual transformation and conversion to Christianity. Like Nat Turner, who had visions when he was in the fields of Southampton County, Virginia, many slaves captured sublime messages in the midst of field labor. One slave remembered, “One day while in the field plowing I heard a voice.” Another slave told of her conversion experience: “One day, a year later, I was out chopping in the field. The corn was high and the weather was hot. I was feeling joyous and glad for I wanted to eat and I was thinking of coming to the dance and the good time I was going to have. Suddenly I heard a voice. It called ‘Mary! Mary!’” One slave recalled, “One Thursday morning, the sun was shining bright, I was chopping corn in the garden, when a voice ‘hollered’ and said, ‘Oh, Nancy, you got to die and can’t live.’”97
Through their daily labor, work songs, and conversion experiences, slaves developed a deep connection to the cultivated soil; however, it was more often the outskirts of the primary work fields that offered slaves their refuge. Slaves went into thickets and forests for contemplation and religious camp meetings, where they created a world beyond the control of planters. This connection to the natural world salved the wounds of separation brought about by the slave trade. One slave recalled that after being sold to a planter in Louisiana, “I started to praying and calling on God and let what come that might. I somehow found time and a chance to slip to the bushes and ask God to have mercy on me and save my soul.” The woods also provided cover for collective meetings of slaves, who connected simultaneously with nature and with their ancestors through “the shout.” One person recalled that “the old folks used to slip out in the fields and thickets to have prayer meetings and my mother always took me along for fear something would happen to me if left behind. They would all get around a kettle on their hands and knees and sing and pray and shout and cry.” The meetings made a deep impression on the youths, one of whom stated, “I will never forget some of the meetings in the fields and thickets where the old folks got together in the quiet hours of the night and lifted their voices to glory.” Another slave recalled, “God first spoke to me when I was eight years old. I was down in the thicket getting some brush to kindle a fire.”98 Thus nature became a means for the conversion process.
Because of the domestic slave trade, the prospect of being uprooted shadowed slave life in the antebellum South. Given such uncertainty, the rooted nature of trees and forests spoke to slaves in significant ways. Some went in solitude and sought to recreate practices carried from Africa through the Atlantic slave trade. According to the former slave Julia Henderson, “I can remember my father’s father, Horace his name was, going to that pine tree. Miss, it would be just like that yard, it was clean because he prayed there so much. I didn’t know if he prayed like we did, but he got down on his knees and spoke an African prayer.”99 As slaves formed religious communities, they often noted more about the natural context of worship than about the sermons themselves, and the songs that slaves sang were often laden with natural metaphors. For instance, the brush harbors where many slaves in the antebellum period went for worship stayed in the memory of former slaves. As Simon Brown describes black worship in Virginia, slaves worshipped in brush harbors or under trees, and they sang “natural” songs upon returning, such as “Go Down to the River Jordan,” “Wade in the water, children; O, wade in the water, children; Wade in the water, children; God’s going to trouble the water,” or “Oh, my soul got happy When I come out the wilderness, Come out the wilderness; Oh my soul got happy When I come out the wilderness; I’m a-leaning on the Lord.”100
From working under the burning sun to holding camp meetings under the cover of the night sky, slaves drew upon the natural world for symbolic and political resources. The compelling beauty of the foliage and flowering of the South simultaneously inspired awe in slaves and served as a cruel reminder that the full blossoming of most slaves would not be actualized. The forests, swamps, and rivers spoke with the voices of the dead, and the soil was soaked with the blood and sweat of the living. The woods were simultaneously a natural barrier to slaves’ escape, a refuge for fugitives, and a sanctuary for religious devotees. The sun beating down on slaves during the daytime in many ways defined their status as unfree labor, while the night sky, periodically revealing the marvels of shooting stars, inspired visions of freedom.