One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (2 page)
Authors: Arthur Browne
YOUNG SAM BATTLE
had always dreamed of New York. Visions of the big city gripped his mind as he crossed from boyhood into adolescence. He would imagine mighty buildings while he scrubbed the pine board floors of his family’s home. He would look at the Atlantic & North Carolina Railroad that came through town, New Bern, North Carolina, and try to see the faraway trains that carried crowds of people on tracks overhead. He would pass among the frame houses allotted to blacks, and he would ache for more than a life that led to a cemetery for dark-skinned people.
Two shining figures had brought the yearning. William and Killis Delamar visited from the North—and not just from the North, but from big, cosmopolitan Brooklyn, which was just across the river from even bigger New York. They traveled down the coast by steamship and train to renew family ties. Battle knew them as his mother Anne’s brothers, although William and Killis were likely her cousins. Their arrival in New Bern generated excitement. As of yet, in the 1890s, relatively few Southern blacks had joined America’s Great Migration, and a still smaller number had made as good as the Delamars had. They operated horse-drawn trucking businesses, and they seemed to Battle to have conquered the world. He would remember them as proud, good-looking men, who owned “several enormous vans and a number of big beautiful horses” and served “the best families in Brooklyn.” He found William’s cutaway coat particularly impressive.
Over Anne’s heaping meals, the Delamars told of wonders that were a ship’s sail away. They had seen the Brooklyn Bridge and skyscrapers with elevators and streets with electric lights. To Battle, New York became “the center of all the glory, all the wealth, and all the freedom of the world,” as poet and novelist Paul Dunbar would describe the magnetism that drew Southern blacks to the city.
2
A half-century later, Battle would tell Hughes, “When I first saw those wonderful relatives of my mother’s, I began to long for the day when I might go north to call on them, and to live as they did.”
He was, perhaps, fourteen years old. He had left school in the eighth grade rather than take a whipping from a teacher for beating up a classmate. He was so “given to fighting” that neighborhood boys called him “Bully,” while prominent black men knew him as a thief for filching their money. Shining shoes and working in the fields were his main sources of legitimate income. And, hard as it would be to bid farewell to his father, Thomas, and his mother, Anne, he was determined to leave the teeming, love-filled little house at 8 Primrose Street, the home of his birth on January 16, 1883, for the North.
OLD AUNT SUSAN
had predicted that the baby would arrive by Christmas, like a laughing and crying doll for thirteen-year-old Nannie, and then the weeks had passed. When finally nature took course, Old Aunt Susan laid the baby, round and brown and wet with the residue of birth, at his mother’s side. He was his father’s twenty-second child and his mother’s eleventh. Word spread that he weighed sixteen-and-a-half pounds. The neighbors were sure that they had witnessed the biggest infant ever delivered thereabouts, and Battle carried the fact through life as inspiration. “As a result, I guess I’ve always wanted to be large, and I have been large,” he told an interviewer, looking back after almost seven decades.
3
By the time Battle reached school age, Anne had given birth to four more children, nursing the babies along with the infants of others.
“I have seen her with a white child at one breast and a black child at the other,” he told Hughes. “White people called her ‘Sis Annie.’ Whenever anyone in the community was sick, hot broth and kindnesses went from her to them.”
He recorded that his mother “had no unpleasant memories of slavery so she never spoke with bitterness of the past.” He was sure that she was “the best cook in all the world.” He loved the feel of her silken hair and “would sit and feast my eyes and soul on her angel face.”
Endearingly, Battle would tell Hughes and Hughes would channel Battle’s memories to write that Anne began the day with hymns:
Rock of ages, cleft for me
Let me hide myself in thee.
Sometimes with the neighbors joining in from yard to yard—for mother was always up at dawn drinking her cup of black coffee, feeding her children, then early to her washing, boiling the clothes in a big three-pronged iron pot over a wood fire. By sun-up the wash was ready for the line and as she hung the clothes out to dry she sang:
Swing low, sweet chariot.
Coming for to carry me home!
I can see her now, white clothes billowing in the wind as her song rose in the morning air.
My mother received all the children of my father’s former marriages as her own. All of these children loved my mother and thought of her as an angel. She cooked and washed for all of us, dosed young and old with castor oil and asafetida when we were ill, gave us sassafras tea to thin our blood in the spring, made biscuits for everybody on Sunday mornings, and prayed for each of us every night by name—Tom and James, Nannie and William, Abigail, John Edward, Mary Elizabeth, Sophia, Lillian, Louise and me. Her prayers are with me, still in my heart.
For so many children there was almost continuous washing and ironing. The big wooden washtubs with staved handles served for both babies and clothes, and the iron pot in the back yard was almost always steaming. All day long my mother was busy; she made her own soap and potash, tended the garden, cleaned and cooked. When I could, I would help her. I did not mind chopping wood for mother’s wash pot or for the big fireplaces which we had throughout the house, masoned by my father. In those fireplaces on autumn nights we youngsters roasted chestnuts or sweet potatoes while some studied by firelight. In the winter in the kitchen we held molasses taffy pulls.
Battle referred to Thomas as “the old man,” no doubt because Thomas was approaching sixty and Anne was nearing forty as Battle reached school age. Thomas never drank or used foul language, although “on very special occasions he might inhale a cigar.” He would also engage in child-pleasing play.
“At night when he was sitting quietly in his chair, sometimes he would offer us children two cents for every louse we could find in his hair,” Battle told Hughes. “Of course, we could never find any lice. Much to the amusement of my mother, he would go to sleep as we searched through his hair.”
Of more lasting significance, Thomas instilled discipline and directed his children out into the world. He infused “a strictly Christian upbringing” enforced by corporal punishment. Battle’s father administered “whippings” as he felt necessary. Anne would slip away rather than witness the pain. Only once could Battle remember her laying a hand on him. She struck him “when I was still quite small,” Battle said, “during a New Year’s Eve ‘watch-meeting’ at St. Peter’s AME Zion Church when the building was rocking with hymns, spirituals and the shouting.” He recalled:
At midnight it reached its peak of prayer and song. There had been many testimonials, rejoicing, and much thanksgiving that the Lord had carried us all safely through the old year. Suddenly the spirit entered into my mother and she began to shout. Another woman nearby began to shout, too.
In her excitement she started to pound her fists on my mother’s shoulders. I thought this intended to hurt my mother, so I leaped on a bench and started pummeling the woman for all I was worth. My mother suddenly slapped me, shook me and sat me down on the bench again. Then, she resumed her shouting.
Early on, Battle proved blessed with intellectual and emotional intelligence. He astutely observed the world and easily mastered reading, writing, and arithmetic, not that he was much interested. Adventurousness propelled him instead to roam the streets, fields, and riverbanks, a head taller and beefier than his peers, blessed with strength and athleticism, and unencumbered by the behavioral expectations of bondage. As a member of his family’s first postslavery generation, Battle was freer to be a boy, not a
boy
. He recounted for Hughes, and Hughes sketched, an episode that brought to life the racial strictures of the day and gave a first glimpse at the insistence on dignity that was bred into Battle’s spirit.
I passed the home of a prominent white family, the Bryans. On the sidewalk, one of the Bryan boys was playing marbles with others, so I stopped. I was about sure that I could beat any of them and said, “I’d like to shoot marbles. I can beat any of you playing, I’ll bet.”
I stooped down to play, and they said to me, “We don’t want no niggers here.” Mr. Bryan’s son said that. “We don’t want no niggers in here.” As he did, I slapped him with my right hand on the side of the face—the left side of his face with my right hand.
The boy screamed because I had a powerful hand—I was a big, strong, husky fellow. There were five or six white boys. The rest of them were afraid to even tackle me. His mother ran out. His mother said, “What is your name, boy? We’ll have you arrested.” I said, “My name is John Brown,” and I walked away.
The Bryan boy’s father was a lawyer. It happened that there really was a colored boy in town named John Brown, so the Bryans got a warrant out for him. When the police found him, young Bryan knew Brown was not the lad who had struck him. Brown was practically a runt. It did not take them long to discover that it was Tom Battle’s son who had wanted to fight young Bryan.
Since my father was well known to the white people of the town and respected by all of them as a good workman, the warrant was promptly withdrawn. Instead, Mr. Bryan sent word to my father to come to see him and bring me along. We went to the Bryan’s back door.
Young Bryan still bore the marks of my hand. When my father saw the youngster’s face and learned what I had done—I had struck a white boy—my father offered to let Mr. Bryan or his son whip me.
Before either of them could answer, I said to my father, “I will die first! I will let you whip me, but not anyone else on earth.”
No one said a word. So I repeated, “You can whip me, but nobody else.”
Seeing that I meant what I said, my father whipped me himself in front of the white boy and his father. I was flogged severely there in the yard. This the white family accepted as satisfactory. I took my father’s punishment and did not shed a tear. Nothing in the world could have made me cry. On the way home my father counseled me about butting in where I was not wanted, and that night he prayed that I might learn to get along in this world of Negroes and whites.
WHEN THOMAS WOULD
tell his story, he would start with the American Revolution. He believed that his grandfather had fought as a slave shouldering a rifle at the side of a young master in the war that brought forth the new nation. Thomas handed down the lore as a badge of honor that stood as an irrefutable claim to citizenship and spoke of a bloodline whose enduring characteristic was to stand as upright as a person could stand.
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New Bern was prosperous as the war for independence had approached. Located at the confluence of the Trent and Neuse rivers, its harbor offered easy access to Pimlico Sound and then the Atlantic. A maritime industry exported goods and brought imports of clothing, shoes, hardware, rum, salt, and other mercantile necessities, including slaves.
Well-to-do whites enjoyed horse-drawn chaises; poor whites earned barely enough to survive. Slaves worked for food, clothing, and shelter. But, comprising roughly a third of the population, blacks had some latitude to live independently. They gathered for recreation and friendship and patronized shops that illicitly catered to them, including with the sale of liquor.
New Bern served as a base for disrupting enemy commerce during the war. With American independence—and ratification of a Constitution that pointedly failed to outlaw human bondage—came prosperity. Merchants, ship owners, and planters built handsome townhouses and Georgian homes. Eventually, a stately courthouse, complete with a tower for hangings, became a government center.
5
For a US Census, Thomas reported the year of his birth as 1829. Antislavery agitation was then on the rise. Writing safely in Boston that year, a freed North Carolina slave by the name of David Walker published a pamphlet that came to be known as his
Appeal
. There, he declared, “I tell you Americans! that unless you speedily alter your course you and your country are gone!!!!!” And in neighboring Virginia, Nat Turner would soon lead a slave insurrection that killed fifty-five white men, women, and children.
6
With fear of bloodshed running rampant, North Carolina’s governing institutions clamped the vise even more tightly on bondage. The state supreme court upheld an owner’s right to assault a slave—even to shoot and wound a slave—free from penalty, with a chilling turn of phrase: “The power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect.”
7
New laws stripped free blacks of the right to vote, preach in public, carry a weapon without a permit, buy or sell alcohol, or attend public school. The New Bern town commissioners restricted the number of slaves who could offer services for hire to whites. Those engaged in such employment were required to wear badges. All citizens were barred from teaching slaves to read or write.
Regardless, Thomas became devoted to book learning. Even more, while still a slave, he earned a living by laying brick and smoothing plaster for white townsfolk. He also gravitated to the unifying force of religion. Self-educated, he earned the status of minister in the African American Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, a storied denomination that came to be known as the “Freedom Church” in that its members included the giants of early black activism, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman.
Thomas took on the roles of preacher and Sunday school teacher. By saving his masonry income, eventually, and remarkably, he purchased emancipation. Over the years, he supported relationships with two women, described by Battle as his father’s first two wives, and sired with them eleven of his eventual twenty-six children. Why he parted from the women, whether due to death or disagreement or through forced separation, has slipped into the mists.
