Celebrate
A Glimpse at the Foundation of Black American Identity
This will be short, but it will tell you what you need to know.
When I was eight or nine, my mother gave me a copy of Julius Lester’s To Be a Slave. I still have it. I wanted to share it with next generation in my family, my parents’ grandchildren, so I gave it another read and quickly abandoned project. How nine-year-old me got through a book that traumatized adult me is one for the shrinks. Despite my shock at the graphic portrayals of the violence associated with the commercialized dehumanization of labor, I still have deep, positive associations with that text.
For one thing, it opened up a new conversation with my paternal grandmother. I asked her if she knew about slavery, and she had. Over the years, snatches of conversation strung together by only my ongoing curiosity yielded details about her childhood: her father and his mother were indigenous Americans; she had played some of the same ring games I had played with cousins; her elders had different words for some things; her mother died young.
One day, after years of asking, she gave me a story that her grandmother told her about slavery. I made sure my siblings learned the story, too, in case I forgot the details.
One day, the slaves been working in the field. Men and women been there; the overseer been there; and some of the women babies been there sleeping in troughs underneath the trees by the field. When one of the babies would cry, the mother had to leave the field to nurse the baby. The women kept leaving the field to go to the babies. The overseer didn’t like that, so he took water and pour it in the troughs. When the work been done, the women came back to the troughs: all them babies been dead.
Because I don’t know what you know, I will fill in the details that my eleven-year-old self knew as a been-here, and I’ll share facts that I learned as an adult.
I took it for granted that leaving your spot in a large field and returning to it later would take a long time. I knew that nursing a child is an unhurried chore. I knew violence against enslaved people was mostly unrestricted, up to and including death. I knew it was possible to hate something enough to kill a person about it.
As an adult, I’m more informed about the social and legal apparatuses that made all this possible. I can see that chattel slavery aimed to make machinery out of men and livestock out of women. I learned that babies had a market price. However, the cotton harvest could be a brutal time of year when the cotton fastest picked and first to the gin might get the best price. Before the new year came in and slave markets revived, a baby might be seen as liability, a hurtle to be cleared as its parents were pressed towards annual profits.
Killing a slave in an effort to get a slave to comply was legal — not passively legal, but explicitly protected by law. In the area where I grew up and where a part of my family was enslaved, the overseer was the law, and slaves lived and worked often without any direct contact with the plantation owners. The babies were murdered legally, and their mothers had to go back into the field the next day, and the next day, and the next.
American chattel slavery is an immobilizing truth. As you ponder it, it ponders you.
I grit my teeth sometimes, when I hear people say, with a naïveté they cannot fathom but often summon: “My plight is the same as the plight of your people.” “We were treated like — or worse than — Black people when we came to America.” “I was poor, and so were my parents; I know what it’s like.”
They don’t. They can’t. How can they? I can’t, and it’s my story. I am the descendant of the people that were there. A little girl told her granddaughter, and the granddaughter told me.
My adult self looks back and wonders how they did it, how they remade their humanity. In childhood, I was innocent and could dance in the ruins of their history, could listen to spirituals with listless enjoyment, could sleep under a handsewn quilt and dream Little Golden Book dreams, could eat fried pork chop and never think, “Whose idea was this?”
In adulthood, I grieve the death of the babies, but I also grieve that this story had to be exhumed from history’s potter’s field. Yes, I have the story, but under what conditions? I was given this weighty, grotesque heirloom when it was safe, when natural death was the only realistic option, when the likelihood of other confirming voices fanning the flickering memory into full, factual recollection was near zero and declining. Surely it was not lost on my grandmother that giving this story to a child could easily have led to its loss.
Maybe that was the plan: each generation freer than the last, less unselved than the generation before. And here I am, college-educated, booed up, and funcling. I am not bound to the field; my partner is free; our children will not lie in the trough.
Peace and healing, fam. ✌🏿
