Cowherd. Son of Hannah and Dick. Father of Hannah. Born about 1804. Died date unknown.
Whipped twice in one day. George whipped Isham twice in one day. In an 1847 letter to The General, George says
I gave isham too licks over his clothes for covering up cotton with the plow. I put frank, isham, violly, Dinah, jinny, evealine and Charlott to Sweeping cotton going twice in a roe, and at a Reasonable days work they aught to hav plowed seven accers a piece, and they had been at it half of a day, and they had not done more than one accer and a half and I gave them ten licks a peace upon their skins.
Twelve swings of the whip against Isham’s body. It’s hard for me to imagine any behavior warranting that kind of punishment.
It does seem, if George is representing the situation accurately, that Isham and the other field hands were moving very slowly in the process of “sweeping cotton,” or plowing under the stalks of the already-picked plants. Still, the idea that such slow movement deserved whipping is abhorrent. But then, this is a different time and a different system. Maybe I just don’t understand.
That same day, Isham’s sister Julyann was whipped for hiding her hoe, so maybe there was just a run of laziness or extreme fatigue running through the folk on the farm. Or maybe George was just hell-bent that day. It does sound a bit as if it might be the latter from the rest of George’s letter from that day. In it, he describes whipping a total of 10 people, including Robert, whom he almost whipped to death. But then John Cocke, The General’s cousin and overseer at Hopewell, told George that perhaps the other three people with Robert—who had purportedly given him lip—should have gotten the same treatment. It’s hard to know who’s wrong here—the people whipping or those being whipped. I do know that whipping is never deserved and that these were people working in a system that gave them no power of protest or complaint.
Yet, still, it seems as if Isham’s family kept getting a raw deal, and not just in the stripes left from the whip. His dad, Dick, died when he was very young, maybe still a toddler. His sister Mourning was hired out; living away from her family may have made her name more true than she’d have liked. She had a daughter but she wasn’t married, a situation of which The General surely didn’t approve and which may have been the reason he hired her off the farm. The General sold Isham’s brother-in-law, the man married to his sister Letty. For a time, his twin sisters Miama and Julyann, the girl who was whipped, were hired out. It didn’t seem much as if The General wanted the Gaults around.
The Cocke family legend says The General liked to keep families together. But here, he didn’t. He sold Letty’s husband and then hired out her own daughter.
The only person in Isham’s family who seemed to fare well was Joan, his brother Sam’s wife. She and Sam lived in the log house, and their two children—Bibyanna and Pompey—were enrolled at the school, the only children in the Gault family to be so. Of all the family members, Joan is the only one listed on the 1830s inventory as being a professor of Christianity. Given that The General would only consider people as possible candidates for emancipation if they professed his faith, it doesn’t seem too much a stretch to think he might have also treated those “professors” more kindly than he did others.
Yet, in 1837, The General sent Isham to Hopewell, where he was given the same conditions to obtain his freedom as everyone else. Yet, Isham did not, as was the case for almost every other person there. Instead, Isham lived on in Alabama even past emancipation. In 1870, he is on the census list for Cedarville, living alone but next to a woman named Hannah, who was his daughter, and two of his grandchildren, Julia and Samuel, named after their great-aunt and uncle, perhaps.
Isham is listed as a stock minder, and the census taker recorded that he couldn’t read or write. It seems he didn’t attend school or, if he did, he lost his literacy from disuse.
When I picture Isham now, I draw on this time in his life—the time when his grandchildren lived next door and his neighbors were old friends from back in Virginia—the Mosses, the Kellors. I see him on his porch, listening to Samuel and Julia laugh and play. She’s about seven, Samuel’s about two—she’s put Samuel in a dress and is trying to get him to sit for tea at a little table under a tree in the yard. There are no teacups, no cookies, no chairs even. Just a tiny round stump that is the table, but they are laughing. Isham is watching them from his rocking chair, easing back and forth. It is 2 p.m., and he is content to not be out in the heat of this August day, with his back bent over cotton fields. He smiles quietly at the sounds of giggles by the old stump. He thinks about walking over to join the party.
Then, Julia says, “I’m gonna whip you, boy,” when she’s pretending that Samuel spilled his tea. Isham is out of his chair before he even knows his feet are on the ground. He stands over the tiny girl, and as she cowers, his face softens and he says, “Child, we never say we are going to whip anyone. We don’t do that to people we love; we don’t do that to people we hate. Whipping isn’t right. You hear me?”
She nods, and he takes a seat on the ground beside her. “Can I have some tea, please?”
With her tiny hand, she pours from the imaginary teapot into the imaginary teacup Isham holds between three fingers. He takes a tiny sip and proclaims it, “Oh so good.” Then he passes Samuel the tray of cookies and says, “You both know you’re named after your aunt and uncle. Let me tell you about them.”