The Making of African America (18 page)

But for the vast majority of deportees, the stark reality was that the journey from the seaboard South to the interior, like the transatlantic passage, was a one-way trip. There would be no return, even for the briefest of visits, and there would be no correspondence, even of the most abbreviated messages. Indeed, there would be no news of any sort: nothing of a daughter's marriage, a grandchild's birth, a parent's death. This second Middle Passage, like the first, permanently severed its victims from the life they had once known. Slaves literally could not go home. Interviewed in the 1930s, a former Virginia slave, like the millions caught in the transatlantic trade, “had two brothers sold away an' ain't never seen ‘em no mo 'til dis day.”
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But if they could not go home—and the number of migrants who reversed field and returned to their old homes was infinitesimal—the new arrivals remained intensely interested in and often deeply knowledgeable of their old homes. They renewed and refreshed knowledge of the seaboard and kept earlier arrivals alert to the people they had left behind. Small shards of information—news carried by new arrivals, gossip secured from their owners' table—enlisted memories of the world they had lost but never surrendered. Indeed, the very inability of the migrants to return to their former homes fostered their demand to know more.
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Arriving at some dense forest or forbidding clearing, having experienced all the nightmares of the second Middle Passage, deportees rehearsed the experience of the first black arrivals to plantation America. In their topography and geography, flora and fauna, the black-belt prairie or the river bottoms of the great valleys looked nothing like the tidewater or piedmont of Virginia and the swamps of low-country South Carolina and Georgia. The new ecology disoriented the migrants, as they searched for the familiar amid the foreign. Rough frontier conditions, debilitating work regimes, and brutal treatment left men and women psychologically spent as well as physically exhausted. The mortality rate of slaves spiked and fertility rates dropped as the first generation of cotton or sugar cultivators—many barely older than children—confronted an often deadly disease environment.
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In the face of frontier dangers, black men and women worked at quick pace—often under the lash—to get the first crops into the ground. Mastering a new crop and confronting slaveowners eager to ratchet up the level of exploitation took a toll. There was “no time off of' de change of de seasons and after de crop was laid by. Dey was allus clearin' mo' lan' or sump‘n,”' remembered one former slave. Beyond the workplace, the forced migrants faced endless difficulties during those first years. Exhaustion compounded a deep melancholy that cast a pall over black life. The transplanted suffered from dejection that bordered on despondency. “[E]very time we look back and think ‘bout home,” recalled one Virginian who had been transported to Texas as a young man, “it make us sad.” Spartan circumstances—shabby housing, inadequate nutrition, and bad water—pushed some slaves over the edge.
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However, within a generation of their arrival in the Southern interior, black people had recovered their balance and began to make the land their own. They mastered the landscape and the skills the new crops demanded. Like the first generation of Africans in mainland North America, they too created a new life built upon their own experiences and memories. This time, however, their memories were not drawn from Africa, from which they were removed by a century or more of American experience, but the Chesapeake, the low country, or occasionally the North, the world of their parents and often grandparents.

The new society in the interior emerged slowly and unevenly, since the internal slave trade remained open and slave traders continued to import slaves from the seaboard. Moreover, even as portions of the interior matured into settled plantation societies, other areas remained open to settlement. Transplanted slaves, many of them but recently arrived from the seaboard, thus were subject to resale, from Alabama to Mississippi, from Mississippi to Arkansas, or from Arkansas to Texas. The death of an owner, the failure of the plantation, or a sudden surge of planter ambition might send slaves to the auction block.

But if the same terror that gripped Africans caught in the transatlantic trade touched African Americans crossing the North American continent, the latter had one advantage. Shared language and common experiences allowed slave deportees from the seaboard to communicate freely. The new generation of forced migrants escaped the linguistic isolation that so weighted upon black men and women in the first Middle Passage. So too had they escaped the shock of seeing white men—faces reddened and hair wild and stringy—for the first time. Such familiarity enabled them to almost immediately begin reconstructing an African American society in their new location.

Like their forebears who had been shipped across the Atlantic, the black men and women ensnared in the internal slave trade also carried much with them on their transcontinental journey. Although many moved with barely more than the clothes on their backs, they too were nonetheless not without ideas that would shape their lives in the Southern interior. The rapid reemergence of the slaves' economy, the reconstruction of the slave family, and the growth of African American Christianity offer hints as to the cultural baggage that enslaved black men and women brought with them and how it was remade in the course of the transcontinental journey.

The slaves' economy—the complex matrix of customs and laws that allowed slaves to engage in independent economic activities, participate in the marketplace, and accumulate small amounts of property—had been disrupted by the forced movement from the seaboard to the interior. But in time, plantation society matured and slaves revived their economy. As on the seaboard, the independent productive activities grew at the intersection of the complementary interests of masters and slaves. Desperate to expand production, some planters paid their slaves—so-called overwork—for laboring on Sundays and evenings, revealing how the distinction between what was the slave's time and what was master's time had gained some legitimacy in the eyes of both slave and slaveholder. The line was blurred still further when slaves liberated some of their owners' possessions and traded them to white nonslaveholders and others for liquor, tobacco, and other niceties. Slaveowners despised such illicit activities, and, at their behest, lawmakers punished such exchanges severely, but owners often inadvertently encouraged such activities. To avoid the expenses of provisioning their slaves, they provided slaves with land for gardens and the time required to work them if slaves would accept the responsibility of feeding and clothing themselves. Slaves discovered markets for their produce among Native Americans, white nonslaveholders, and even their own masters.

Once slaveholders conceded the slaves' ability to work independently and retain a portion of the product of their labor, there was no turning back. Slaves demanded the right to keep barnyard fowl, maintain gardens and provision grounds, and market their produce. Before long, the slaves' economy metamorphosed from a privilege to an entitlement, much as it had been in the seaboard South. In addition to working the traditional gardens and grounds, slaves sold handicrafts, chopped wood for steamboats, and gathered moss and other marketable commodities. They labored into the night and on Sundays—traditionally the slaves' own time—for overwork payments. With produce to sell, they established ties with white nonslaveholders, many of whom were delighted to purchase the slaves' surplus, along with almost anything slaves could purloin from their owners.

The few dollars slaves earned by their own labor—or the “overplus” gained from the overwork—had great significance. This money supplemented the slaves' diet, allowed them to clothe themselves far better than their masters' dole, and permitted them small luxuries to ease the hard realities of frontier enslavement. “Den each fam'ly have some chickens and sell dem and de eggs and maybe go huntin' and sell de hides and git some money,” remembered one former Alabama slave. “Den us buy what am Sunday clothes with dat money, sech as hats and pants and shoes and dresses.” The benefits black people derived from their own economies tied them to the land—sometimes directly as they took pride in their gardens and grounds, and sometimes indirectly as the benefits they enjoyed became necessities. The trading networks they established with others—slaves and nonslaves alike—familiarized them with their neighbors, creating family ties, communities of interest, and, before long, political alliances. Such work required that available hands do their share. Charles Ball, sold south from Maryland, gained acceptance among the slaves of his new plantation only when he agreed to contribute his overwork “earnings into the family stock.”
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As Ball's experience suggests, the slave family reemerged slowly. While planters still relied upon the slave trade to reproduce their labor force, they—like their seaboard counterparts—found value in allowing slaves to maintain their own domestic institutions. Slave masters recognized that the birth of slave children added to their wealth, and they followed the practice established on the seaboard of allowing slave men to visit their “broad wives” and of easing the burden on slave women during the last months of pregnancy.

Despite the lack of legal sanction and enormous practical difficulties, the family once again became the center of slave life. As in the seaboard South, the family served as the locus of education, governance, and occupational training. Families established courting patterns, marriage rituals, and child-rearing practices. The family defined the domestic division of labor and shaped the aspirations of young and old. From cradle to grave, the family was more than a source of love and affection. From the slaves' perspective, the most important role they played was not that of field hand or house servant, but of husband or wife, son or daughter—the precise opposite of their owners' calculation.
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New families began to take shape as strangers anointed each other as kin. The pain of loss remained, but black people kept the memories of those losses alive. With their fathers and mothers gone, young men and women selected parents from among the few elderly slaves who had been transported west. “Uncles” and “aunts” became revered figures on the pioneer plantations, for they represented a tie to the world that was lost. While elderly slaves, many of whom had been forcibly separated from husbands or wives, were slow to establish new families, perhaps for fear that new unions would again be broken, young men and women married and soon became parents. Joe Kirkpatrick, separated from his wife and daughters, carried to Florida a five-year-old orphan boy named George Jones and raised him as his son. Jones grew up and eventually married, naming his own daughters after the sisters, Lettice and Nellie, he had known only through the memory of his foster father. The second great migration, like the first, dismantled families, but not the idea of family.
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Children soon populated the new plantation region. For enslaved men and women the arrival of a child affirmed their survival as a people. The new children also provided transplanted slaves with the opportunity to link the world that they had lost to the world that had been forced upon them. In naming their children for some loved one left behind, slave parents restored the ties that had been forever severed by the second great migration. In so doing, they reconnected themselves and their children with the ancestors they would never know. Some transplanted slaves reached back beyond their parents' generation to grandparents or other ancestors, suggesting how slavery's long history in mainland North America could be collapsed by a single act.
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Along those same pathways flowed other knowledge. Rituals for celebrating marriage, coming of age, breaking bread, and giving last rites to honored elders which had been transferred across the Atlantic and were reconstructed along the coast of mainland North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were passed on to new ground during the nineteenth. Along with the unfulfilled egalitarian promise of the Age of Revolution and the Great Awakenings, these rites survived in the minds of those forcibly deported from their seaboard homes. Such memories became the building blocks for reconstructing new communities in the black belt, Mississippi delta, trans-Mississippi west, and other parts of the land black men and women were making their own.

As the networks expanded, slave society grew increasingly complicated. Kin connections not only joined men and women together in bonds of mutual support but also created new enmities and alliances. From among various networks of kin, work groups, and acquaintances emerged multiple hierarchies. Differences within the slave community required mediation, if only to prevent slaveowners from entering their disputes, a circumstance that slaves much preferred to avoid. Such responsibilities also fell to a new class of leaders, for the enforcement of the norms established by slaves could not be left to the slave masters.
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Along with the new structure of leadership grew a host of new institutions, foremost among which was the African Christian church, which had generally been the province of free blacks prior to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The slaves' commitment to Christianity expanded rapidly during the second great migration. By the eve of emancipation, one-quarter to one-third of the slave population and perhaps an even larger share of the free black population identified themselves as Christians. Although antebellum planters—themselves in the thrall of evangelical Christianity—generally supported the conversion of their slaves, Christianity took on a different meaning in the slave quarter than the Big House. While slave masters dwelled upon the Pauline doctrine of slave obedience as their entrée into Christianity, slaves found a different message in the Old Testament. Anointing themselves as the modern counterparts to the Children of Israel, they appropriated the story of Exodus as a parable of their own deliverance from bondage. The appearance of plantation chapels and the growth of a cadre of preachers and deacons, like the reemergence of the slaves' economy and the slave family, tied black people even more firmly to place. The commitment to Christ added to the slaves' sense of proprietorship over the site of their enslavement.
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