CHAPTER SEVENTEEN — ANARCHA’S CHILDREN
[The Anarcha Archive is a series of short essays about the sources for Say Anarcha. A great deal more about the sources can be found at AnarchaArchive.com.]
In this essay, we’re going to dive into the question of Anarcha’s children.
Let’s start with an acknowledgement. Whenever you work in history or biography, you work with materials — evidence — that come in a variety of kinds and qualities.
There’s direct evidence, and circumstantial evidence — and there are primary and secondary source materials.
So when a historian or biographer says that something is “true,” it means that it has passed a certain threshold of possibility — but there are degrees of certainty even beyond that threshold.
This is particularly true when it’s the history of slavery and enslaved persons — and when it comes to what can be said of Anarcha’s pregnancies and children it has to be allowed that we are talking about various levels of possibility.
We’ll start here. This is significantly later, and for now I’ll ask you to just trust me that this is Anarcha — those connections will be established in later essays. But what we can see here, for now, is that in 1870 Anarcha had four children, William and Oliver, who were young boys, and Delia who was 19, and Elizabeth, who is listed as 10. A later record indicates that this girl was slightly younger than this, probably around 7.
So what we can say with a high degree of certainty is that Anarcha had a daughter named Delia who was born around 1851 — which is the time period we’ve been looking at in the previous few essays. The two boys and the girl, William and Oliver and Elizabeth, were born much later.
In an earlier essay, we looked at Anarcha’s case record from New York City. By December 1856, she had given birth five times. We know that her first birth took place in mid-1845. There were four others between 1845 and 1856.
Beyond Delia, from 1851, there were three others that we hear nothing more about. What seems most likely is that these babies either did not survive, or were sold away. In my book, Say Anarcha, I make suggestions as to what might have happened with these children, but it has to be acknowledged that these are informed assertions — not fiction, but logical inferences.
There’s also a suggestion that Anarcha gave birth again, around 1858, but once again it appears that this child did not remain with her.
Delia, however, remains with Anarcha — and is with her in 1870, which turns out to be right around the time Anarcha dies.
So Delia stayed with Anarcha as she was taken away from Alabama, and as she was experimented on further in Richmond, as we described in the last couple of essays.
All told, we can tally up from solid primary sources that Anarcha had ten total pregnancies that came to term. Three of them, and probably a couple more, lived beyond infancy. And one daughter, Delia, remained with Anarcha from 1851 until the end of her life.
Next time, we’ll look at what happened when Anarcha left Richmond, to live at Old Mansion, in Bowling Green Virginia.
