Foreman. Husband of Betty. Father of Frank, Toby, Gilbert, Cary, Nancy, Dinah, and Lydia. Born 1770. Died 1849.
I am fairly certain his gravestone sits close to the place where the slate wall around the cemetery has fallen and corroded with rains and years, where we park on the grass and walk into the graveyard. A solid stone, it’s made of sandstone and sits upright in the ground, unbroken, not leaning. A little slanted at the top, as if it was repurposed when it didn’t fit a slot in a wall.
This slave cemetery is on Lower Bremo plantation, the place where my family still lives, the place I think of as home even though we never have owned the land there. My family came to live on Lower Bremo when I was 14 because my father took a job as the manager of a new tree nursery being established there on the middle of three plantations all started by the same man and still owned by his descendants. These three farms—as most people call them—are in a rural part of Central Virginia, a land that looks very much as it did when enslaved people first arrived there to clear the land with axes in the early 18th century.
Primus—an enslaved man—was the foreman on Upper Bremo, the largest of the three plantations. As foreman, Primus’s job was to ensure that all the enslaved people did their work. He didn’t discipline them—that was the work of the overseer—but he managed them, making certain that the crops were harvested and the garden tended, the livestock moved, and that there were enough hands at every task. He also sounded the bell to start and end the workday. In modern times, we would think of him as “middle management.” Except that he didn’t get paid for his labor or have any choice whether or not to take it on.
Some call people in his position “slave drivers,” since technically he was the person who “drove” the work on the farm, but I cannot bear to lay that word against him. The lashing connotation is too painful.
I wonder if it was an honor for him to be the foreman, a point of privilege, maybe the kind of privilege that brings derision, like the kid who is the teacher’s pet in class. Maybe other enslaved people sneered at him, disliked him because he was perceived as kowtowing to privilege. Maybe they saw him as the “Uncle Tom” before Uncle Tom was Uncle Tom.
Somehow, though—and maybe this says more about my wishful imagination than it does about the man—I can only picture him as respected by his friends and family. I just think that he was one of those people who managed to be esteemed by all who knew him. I have no basis for this idea since all I really know of him comes from tax lists, blanket distribution records, and slave inventories, but still, it seems true to me, the way I know something of a person’s spirit by the way they speak to children.
He stands by the corncribs that now—in my time—have the patina of age. Then, they still held the gold of the heart pine from which he had hewn them. So much were these his buildings that an overseer called them “Primus’ corn cribs.”
His brow is damp in the six o’clock sun of a warm February evening, a pewter mug of water in his hand, filled quickly from the horse’s trough nearby. His back is straight, but the pinched corners of his eyes speak of hard work and aching body. He watches as everyone walks past on their way home from the fields, nods to some and looks each in the eye, an acknowledgment that girds them as they pace homeward, upright for the first time in hours, hands caked with the soil of the low grounds by the river and blistered from wooden handles. The fields are fully hoed, ready for manuring tomorrow. Primus wants them to know he knows what this work took of them.
He stands there until each of them passes. He has been with them on and off all day, his back bent over that wood handle, too, because he does not require that anyone do work he won’t do. He has honor, even in this job that pits him between master and slave in that space between powerless and truly empowered.
He does what he is asked—reports to the overseer who is sick and doesn’t work, who drinks too much and beats his wife. Master thinks Primus does this for him, the paternal owner of this wide farm “family.” But Primus knows better. He does it for them, to save them from what is worse—to be sold away from their mothers and children, to be whipped by the overseer who won’t, even as he tries, look Primus in the eye. He has perfected the role of the middleman: to do as he’s told but to find a way to do so without betraying his people, his kin, his family, his community.
At night, he lies down next to Betty and smells the sheep she has tended all day and beneath that the fragrance of her, salty and sweet. He nuzzles into her neck to breathe in the scent of home. His seven children drape themselves over each other on the low burlap mattresses covering the floor, and before he sleeps, Primus bends to touch each of them—a kiss on the cheek, a weighted hand on the shoulder. This small reminder that he is their father, their hope. He will not fail them.
Or so my imagination tells me.
What I do know of him, as fact, is that he lived to be about 76 years old and died here on this farm. The first mention I have of Primus is on a Fluvanna County personal-property tax list for 1782. His name is there, sandwiched between Charity and Mam. He was here, in this place, before any of the Cockes—his owner’s family—lived here. This was his home first. His name appears again in the inventory from 1791. On the 1801 inventory, he’s listed again, and then sporadically, over the next 20 years, when the overseers mention the daily tasks of running an agricultural enterprise.
In 1820, he received a blanket, and in 1822, he and his family received 1 bushel, 1 peck, and 1 gallon of meal—worth just about five dollars in today’s economy. When his family and many others moved to the New Quarter down by the barn and on the other side of the creek, they got a blanket, a double bedstead, and two beds.
His daughter Lydia and her husband, Peyton, emigrated to Liberia in 1837 as free people. Lydia and Peyton Skipwith gave birth to Matilda, who married Samuel Lomax. Matilda and Samuel then had two daughters, Eliza Adala and Lydia Ann, who grew up as free people in Liberia. In 1840, Primus was counted as part of a census of the “Slaves at Upper and Lower Bremo” and listed, with Cato, as one of two “Male Slaves upward of 55 years and under 100.”
This is not enough to know. It does not tell the story of this man—it does not give him flesh. It does not carry his dignity. It is only inventory, not story.
But it is all I can tell. Perhaps I have missed some references in the University of Virginia collections. Maybe the owner regales Primus’s praises in the pages of his journal that I have not yet read. Maybe. But probably not.
Sometimes I walk up to the slave cemetery and kneel by Primus’s grave. I talk to him about this book and what I hope to find. I read him this chapter and listen to the breeze in the oaks overhead to see if he approves.
Then, I whisper, “I want to tell you, Mr. Randall, that you did it. You made it. You lasted. You endured. I want to tell you that your strength was worth it. They made it. Those children of yours, they made it. Because of you. You have a story, and it lives on.”