South of Haunted Dreams (18 page)

Free blacks were not entirely free, were slaves without masters, limited by what they could and could not do, where they could and could not go. In many southern cities they had to register their names and occupations. Often they had to wear badges. Free blacks arrested in faraway places without proof of freedom were apt to be forced back into slavery. Sometimes, proof was not enough.

But the allure of the city was worth the risk, worth the insult and subordination. The allure of the city was obvious. There was opportunity there. There were jobs and money there. And there was freedom.

Not every runaway slave went north. Many escaped simply to anonymity in the closest southern city.

Cities like Richmond in Virginia and Charleston in South Carolina swarmed with black faces. The air was alive with black sounds—music, laughter, voices.

Away from the city, free blacks continuing to work on the farm were not much better than slaves. Some whites assumed that any black they saw was a slave, and dealt with him accordingly.

But in the city every black was not a slave and was not treated as one; nor was every black unskilled or unambitious. In the city there were blacks of every stripe.

In the city a black man could get lost in the crowd. In the city, free blacks and black slaves hustled along the sidewalks, bought and sold, shoved and shouted along with whites. The city was a more cheerful place. It was, perhaps, enough to know that slavery did not have to be a permanent condition. There was hope.

And there was life.

Fifty percent of Charleston's population was black, 40 percent of Richmond's, and the unskilled labor force in those two cities was 70 percent black—although in Charleston three out of four black men worked at skilled trades. The unskilled labor pool was 50 percent black in Mobile, 40 percent black in Nashville.

Blacks worked in tobacco factories, ironworks, construction crews, railroad companies. They were in the shops and on the streets. Blacks were plentiful. And they were conspicuous.

In the mornings the cities belonged to the blacks. Workers ran to the docks and hurried to the factories. Domestic workers went to the market. Drivers raced their wagons and carts noisily through the streets. Laborers repaired the roads, dug the ditches, manned the textile mills. The black presence was powerful and essential.

Free blacks were carpenters, millwrights, barbers, and tailors. Free blacks owned property, houses and farms and grocery shops. Free blacks owned slaves.

Free blacks made shoes, free blacks made perfume, free blacks made harnesses.

Goochland is only thirty miles from Richmond. Able to read and write, intelligent, Joseph surely would have accompanied John into town from time to time. He would have seen the possibilities afforded blacks in the urban environment. He would have wanted to test himself in those waters. If he had been living as a free man, he would need formal proof. An official deed of manumission was required.

And so one late-summer afternoon, John rode over to the Goochland County Courthouse and freed his son—if indeed he
was
John's son.

If he was John's son
 … The phrase causes me to stumble. Both pride and shame are bound up in it.

For days I pored over genealogy records in the State Library and Archives. I checked marriages, deaths, deeds, wills, I checked the census and the tax rolls, everything that was recorded by Goochland County for the state of Virginia. I followed a trail of property deeds and title transfers until finally I found John Harris's family and traced it as far back as the early eighteenth century, back to when this country was still England's and the land prices were still in pounds and shillings and pence. Probably John's family, possibly my family, had been here long before I found them.

His family, possibly my family, were speculators. They bought land and then sold it.

His family, possibly my family, were English or they were Scottish.

His family, possibly my family, were merchants. And they were successful. And I ought to be proud of them.

But my pride cannot outweigh my guilt.

John Harris's family, possibly my family, were also slave owners.

If Joseph Harris was indeed the son of John, then not just the blood of slaves but the blood of slavers ran in Joseph as now it runs in me.

If I am to be proud of what others have done before me, proud of these things I did not do, then I must feel guilt and shame as well for the horrors I did not do.

And which shame, that of slave or of slaveholder, should be the greater?

I was thinking for some reason of Joseph's mother. I know nothing about her. I wonder who she was and how she was, wonder as well how she endured being torn between joy and sorrow. She had conceived and for nine months would carry the joy that would be born a slave. The world her child would enter would not be the world she wanted for it. What a hopeful and strong woman she must have been.

No wonder John was attracted by her and drawn to her. No wonder he wanted her.

She likely had been a slave on the Harris farm. Although the southern edict has always been against black men loving white women, white men could do as they pleased. And one warm October night, John, wanting company, wanting a woman's warmth, walked in the darkness to where this nameless woman of my past sat, and he entered without knocking.

John Harris owned only three hundred twenty-five acres. His was no great plantation. He only held four or five slaves. He was probably a very humane man. His slaves might very well have liked him. He might have carried on regularly with the women on his farm before he married, and again after the death of his first wife and before his remarriage. So far there had been no accidents. But on this October night, the moon and the stars were aligned: the woman was fertile. John's lust was strong. And that night when he entered without knocking and took hold of his property, in a moment as fleeting, as stirring and mysterious as a heartbeat, the blood of slaves and the blood of slavers mingled. The act was both momentous and casual, so casual in fact that it was being repeated at the very same time on countless farms all over the South.

I wonder if John would have stayed the night. Or did he take his pleasure quickly? I try to imagine his face, his manner, his way of walking. But I can see nothing. It must have been a very dark night.

The following July, Joseph Harris was born.

This man's face I can see clearly. I see him in the eyes of my father. His smile lives in my father's smile, his laughter in my father's joyful noise. When I look at my father, in the same way that I see myself, I also see my great-grandfather Joseph. When I look for Joseph against the night sky, it is my own face I see. I hear his voice in the whispering of the wind, and it is my voice as well. I feel his hand press against my heart.

Joseph. I call him and he answers me.

So. It was not the voice of addiction that had urged me on. It was the soft voice of a man I had never met until now.

Until now I never knew him. Until now I never understood.

From the distance of centuries and the distance of different worlds, Joseph Harris at first seemed a coward to me. And my voice was accusing when I cried out to him.

Great-Grandfather, why did you suffer the hardship and humiliation of slavery? You could have fought against it. The arrogant blood that runs in me, that I took from my father and will give to my children, surely it came from you. Where was your courage and your pride when time came to rise up against injustice and pain? Why did you not think of me and the effect your actions would have on my life? Why this cowardice? Where would we be now if you had stood bravely and said no?

When I think of my great-grandfather with his head lowered and his eyes to the ground, I think of my father who in his day was also forced to bow his head and avert his eyes. And I am shamed. Having inherited arrogance, my father inherited cowardice as well. Having gone south to tempt fate and to test his limits, he learned his limits and had to eat his pride. And oh! how that must have hurt him.

If it hurts me now, how it must have hurt them then, proud men reduced to groveling, backs bent, heads bowed and eyes averted, voices humble and trembling with fear. When I think of them I feel their pain. How easy it is to hate them for it.

I ask myself how they could have done it.

I ask myself if my great-grandfather was a coward and the answer has always been yes. Of course he was a coward. But then again, he had to be.

He had been a slave. As fortunate as he was, still he carried the burdens of slavery, the insecurities of slavery. You don't go overnight from slave to free man in your thinking.

As free as he was, as light-skinned as he was, he was still a black man. He thought like a black man, was still plagued with the worries and fears of a black man.

When he moved to Richmond, he would not have wanted to draw attention to himself. Like other black men he would have wanted a low profile, would have tried to be as anonymous as possible. He disappeared from the tax rolls; the census takers could not find him. When he sought housing it would have been where the other blacks did, in back alleys, in stables and warehouses, in shacks on the edges of town. Where white residents refused to dwell, blacks both free and slave came together and formed communities. Comforts and services were few, but these hubs were vibrant.

In the cities slaves had been hiring out on their own time since at least as early as 1712. That year the South Carolina legislature complained that the practice of slaves hiring themselves out would grant them too much independence, and a chance to indulge in drunken behavior, to entertain evil ideas and develop bad habits. Slaves negotiating for pay, for housing, and for food struck many white southerners as undermining the very foundation of slavery. But the practice continued, and the white working man had to compete with the hired slave the same as he had to compete with the slave working for no wages.

(Naturally, resentment and hostility grew between blacks and poor whites. And violence often broke out as factory owners used blacks as strikebreakers—but still nothing like the great race riots that erupted in Boston and Philadelphia and other northern cities.)

As the southern economy expanded and the purchase price of slaves increased, those who could not afford to own slaves had to hire them. Cities hired slaves to collect trash, build bridges, maintain roads. Slave owners could cut expenses by letting others provide food and housing and clothing for slaves, as well as payment for their work. The slave owners could take in fifty cents a day for a slave. And if the slave could bargain for more than that, or find a job that paid more, he could satisfy his owner and still have a little money for himself. With this little bit extra he could set up house on his own and live away from his master. He could even hope one day to buy his freedom.

Until then, living out—as it was called—was liberty enough for the slaves, even if their lodgings were nothing more than squalid huts and makeshift shacks, dingy and dreary.

But they were away from the masters' gaze.

Some slaves were fortunate enough to rent houses, and while many families had never before found themselves in such favorable circumstances, these lodgings were often not much better than the shacks and huts the poorest of them stayed in. They were rickety and cheap, but still they afforded a degree of privacy and independence. And if a husband and his wife were owned by different masters, living out in these shacks and rented houses enabled them and their families to stay together.

In many cities, blacks were not restricted to certain areas by their race. Blacks lived in all parts of most southern cities. Not until after the Civil War would the South learn the strict segregation it would become noted for. And it would look north to places like New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Chicago to learn it.

Until then, as strange as it sounds, blacks were an accepted and integral part of the community at large. Considering the social climate, free blacks, because of their skills and their enterprise, had earned a rather high degree of respect and approval in cities all across the South.

At the same time blacks had their own community as well. Free blacks and slave blacks visited freely. They got together for church activities, interacted at social affairs. They assembled in public houses for drinking and for lively conversation. There were dances and weddings, they celebrated new life, they buried the dead. They were a community that had in common work and race and circumstance. They had the same oppressors and the same fears. They lived in the same two societies—the one black, the other one white.

And the white society was dependent on the black one. The white society lorded over the black one. And the white society was afraid of the black one.

Blacks free and slave could have divided, but they didn't. There was more that bound them than separated them. They associated freely. And the white society feared this as well.

In 1822 Denmark Vesey gave them reason to fear.

Vesey was a blacksmith who had purchased his freedom in 1820. He lived in Charleston. It was his plan for blacks both free and slave to rebel, to assemble on the night of June 16, attack the guardhouse, and take the arsenal. Then they would murder the whites, pillage and set fire to Charleston. Afterward they would make their way to islands in the Caribbean.

The plot was discovered. Thirty-five blacks were executed. But the hysteria didn't die. Concerns grew about the association of free blacks and slave blacks. It was feared that free blacks would inflame the slaves and preach rebellion, that free blacks would deliver freedom papers from ex-slaves living in the North to slaves still in the South, that free blacks would hide fugitive slaves. For the sake of white safety and for the sake of slavery itself, laws were passed attempting to limit contact between free black and slave, to keep blacks out of the transportation trade, and to restrict alcohol from slave blacks. The laws were not strictly enforced.