The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (32 page)

In the days that followed, Ball pushed himself frantically, willing his hands to move faster. After a couple of weeks he had reached an average level.
The next day he increased his total by a few pounds, and then the white men who drove and measured him established a new, higher minimum. But Ball never excelled. He complained that he “was hardly regarded as a
prime hand
.” In Maryland, though he was not free, Ball had taken pride in the good things his brain and body could do together. They made him a man, in his view, and an individual as well.
They brought him a family. In South Carolina, he was never comfortable with the way cotton-picking required him to subordinate his inventive mind, and his muscles that were the product of ten thousand hours of hard labor, to the endless repetition of his hands. And it brought him nothing but an unwhipped back for one more day.
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The left-handed innovations that Ball had to surrender, imposing
self-torture to avoid that done by others, was in 1805 a future through which millions of people would be compelled to pass. The woods that shadowed Ball at the end of the day stretched a thousand miles away west, finally running out in central Texas. Everything in between, and even beyond, was potentially cotton land. For the next half-century new fields ran west and south like wildfire from the
Congaree, changing the world—one tree cut down, one field plowed, one bag picked at a time. Slave labor camps spread more quickly than any agricultural frontier had expanded in human history. Felled logs smoldered in countless new grounds. Fields widened. The processes of hand-making churned in a vast and ever-widening and thickening circle.

By the time William from Baltimore came to James Stille’s
place, which just happened to be right across the Mississippi River from Wade Hampton’s new Louisiana slave labor camp, everything Charles Ball had to produce in
South Carolina had raised the ante for what William would have to do. A few months after his sale, William woke up and found that he, too, would have to make his hands learn to pick cotton. Of course, learning how to meet the daily demands
of the overseers was measurably harder in 1819 than it had been in 1805.

Yet “hands” were not only white entrepreneurs’ disembodied appendages. James Stille had bought men who had been transformed into commodities. He drove them hard, and by the beginning of August 1819, they had their first taste of cotton-picking and, no doubt, the brutality of the southwestern “negro whip.” A few days into
the picking season, however, four of Stille’s “hands” crossed the river and went south fifty miles into the German Coast’s sugar country. At William McCutcheon’s slave labor camp—the same camp that in 1811 had been the source of many rebels—they tried to break into the storeroom. McCutcheon heard a noise, came out, and surprised the escaped captives. Two pointed guns at him. From five yards away,
they snapped their triggers. But the powder was wet. The guns misfired, and McCutcheon sounded the alarm. Enslavers soon captured two of the runaways and killed a third. The fourth escaped into the tall August sugarcane.
⁶¹

The whip drove men and women to turn all of their bodies and much of their minds to the task of picking faster and faster. But gang labor could never occupy every corner of
every person’s brain. There was always nighttime. So Charles Ball walked back to the small village of huts where the exhausted and bruised people among whom he had found himself were trying to survive. And a man—for all we know, Rachel’s shipmate William—crouched in McCutcheon’s cane field, trying to still his wildly thumping heart lest his pursuers hear.

5

TONGUES

1819–1824

S
HE HAD COME FROM
far away. Her journey down from Kentucky, all the tears she had cried when Robert Dickey bought her and left her mother at New Orleans—they had drained her. Now she was dead. But her body could not settle into death on a cooling board, couldn’t take the slow bumpy ride on the mule cart. Instead, morning after Louisiana morning, her body shuffled
into a sea of cotton. Her hoe rose and fell, rose and fell with the others. The sun that beat on her was gray, not gold, though the sky burned white-hot at three in the afternoon. Dust coated her legs and arms until they looked as gray as the underworld that her vacant stare took in. Water from the dipper scratched her tongue like sand. Her corpse grew thinner. Men tried to speak to her. Their voices
sounded far away, as if she lay at the bottom of the sea. Their faces shimmered over a surface she could not breach. Some looked kind; some greedy for a new woman; some waiting to see if she would gasp for help. But her dry tongue clove to the roof of her mouth.
¹

Wordless haunts like her wandered the landscape of slavery’s southwestern frontier. They hid in abandoned corncribs, waited at crossroads,
chased children from places where blood had spilled. They were girls who killed themselves after being beaten for leaving the onions out of the stew. They were men who disappeared after the master caught them praying that slavery would end. Slaves born in Africa told others that if you died outside God’s presence, perhaps because you were the victim of violence so horrifying that even a deity
couldn’t bear to watch, half of your spirit might remain behind—wandering the crime site, thirsty for peace.
²

Soon she would be another wisp on the night breeze. But as long as her working body inched up one furrow after another, she was also another story of the undead. Before the Haitian Revolution, Africans toiling in the sugar
fields of Saint-Domingue spread the story of the
zombi.
This was
a living-dead person who had been captured by white wizards. Intellect and personality fled home, but the ghost-spirit and body remained in the land of the dead, working at the will of the sorcerer-planters. Any slave could be a
zombi.
She already was one, in fact. And after the spirit departed, the individual body that remained behind might not last much longer. It might shake to death with the
country fever, or be beaten and killed by a furious overseer. She might waste away in the gray country until one morning the threat of whip couldn’t rouse her, one more uncounted ghost whose spirit and body had wilted and died in the new ground of the southwestern frontier. But if individual bodies died, more kept coming. In the broader sense, the body of slavery, the system of slave trades and
whipping-machines, of right- and left-handed power that enslavers were assembling—this kept growing.

Years later, she remembered her zombie days. And she never forgot the living men who called to her. They fished for her spirit, down in dark oceans of their own. Daughter sister wife lover they named her, for faces they remembered. Nights at the fire, they talked about her. They knew the cold
terrain of the submerged city where she wandered. When they lay down, they wondered about her to themselves. Then they dreamed of their own lost people.

No name turned the key of their prison. They stopped talking and started singing. Out under the sun, corn-shucking songs that laughed to a fiddle’s sawing beat just wouldn’t do. Out here hands were turning their own muscles into someone else’s
cash. So every song was a question.
(Am I born to die, and lay this body down?)
Some say that songs talked in cipher about running away. (On
Jordan’s Stormy Banks I stand, and cast a wishful eye / To Canaan’s fair and happy land, where my possessions lie
.) Some say those songs just promised pie in the sky. But, either way, these songs acknowledged that tears watered any Eden their singers could
imagine. For only once songs sounded the depths of the river could singers and listeners wade through the sorrow to walk on the other bank.
³

So in the dead land the men sang to her. The sound faded across the rows of plants. The dusty mechanism of her arms rose and fell.

At last they tried a new tune whose wave carried across the gray field. The melody rose to joy and plunged to sadness and
back again. Simple words named the brutality of their shared fates, and simple words promised that the world might have color once again, if the song could but sweep her up to the surface.
Hair as black as coal in the mine, little Liza Jane / Eyes so large and big and fine, little Liza Jane.
You are beautiful. We need you. You cannot go where you are trying to go. Come back up, and join us.

You plant a patch of cotton, I’ll plant a patch of cane / I’m gonna make molasses, to sweeten Liza Jane.
The singers kept one eye on the overseer. The other watched her. For they knew that no matter how they strove with their song, she would never see her mother again. As the men sang the verse again, they saw her bend down, holding onto the handle of her hoe for support. Here she was, all alone.
Her chest lifted and fell in convulsions. She could not bring herself to go on living by herself. But they were asking her not to let herself die.

Sobs began to heave out of her mouth. The men came around to the chorus. They felt the pain in their own dead flesh, cracking as the part that wanted to live tried to break through.
Oh Liza, poor gal, Oh Liza Jane / Oh Liza poor gal, she died on the trail.
Liza, they sang. Lucy raised her head. Tears flowed down her face and she opened her mouth: “I got happy,” Lucy Thurston remembered eighty years after her resurrection, “and sang with the rest.”
⁴

IN THE THIRTY
-
ODD YEARS
since the 1780s, when slavery’s survival as an institution had looked so imperiled, a complete reversal had taken place. The new zombie body of slavery, stretched by new
kinds of power, new technologies of exploitation, new markets, and new forms of credit, was now growing at a metastatic rate. Individuals like Lucy, their lives ripped asunder so that their market value could be extracted, were watching as their links to hope and to each other dissolved. And what could bring an end to their ongoing torture? Enslaved people’s opportunity for collective resistance
along the lines of Saint-Domingue had been foreclosed by enslavers and governments. Nor could enslaved people call upon powerful allies who might help bring about a peaceful end to slavery’s expansion. For virtually all white Americans were now interested, almost all profiting in some way—financially, psychologically, or both—from slavery’s growing empire.

The bond between white people was about
to be tested by the political controversy called the Missouri Crisis, in which northern and southern congressmen divided over the question of whether slavery should grow even more. The crisis lasted from 1819 to 1821, causing political insiders to panic—such as retired president Thomas Jefferson, who famously referred to it as a “firebell in the night.” In the end, however, the crisis—itself a
product of white people’s successful conquest of half a continent—would by its outcome raise the question of how enslaved people could ever draw upon any resources beyond their own and those of the others in the same coffles and fields and slave quarters.

At the same time, if people like Lucy could not survive in body and mind, it was obvious that no reversal of history’s course since the 1780s
would be possible. And if survival by means of outside help was unlikely, survival through the efforts of the enslaved acting together may have seemed even more unlikely. To understand why, plumb the depths of loss that Liza and Lucy’s chorus knew so well. Many of the people who came out of the chains and off the blocks, who couldn’t make their weight in those first weeks in the cotton fields,
had lost everything: their words, their selves, even their names. It was no foregone conclusion that Lucy Thurston would even remember her name, much less speak again. Forced migration to the frontiers of slavery took children from parents who named them and taught them to talk, brothers from sisters who carried them as babies, wives from husbands who had whispered to them in the night, men from friends
who had taken whippings rather than betray them. Survival by means of joint effort would require strong bonds, and all existing strong bonds had been broken.

One woman on Joseph Shepherd’s Mississippi plantation changed her name to “Silence.” Another sold-off woman said she was no longer Sophia, but Sophia Nobody. Many found that when they reached back for essential memories, nothing was there.
Margaret Nickens’s mother and father, brought to Missouri from Kentucky and Virginia as children, forgot their own parents’ names. Whenever they saw an adult slave who resembled their fuzzy memories, they asked: Are you my mother? Are you my father? A Tennessee girl lay in childbirth, when to her appeared a woman. Who are you, she groaned, not recognizing. “Don’t forget the old folks,” the ghost
replied, and vanished. Only then did the daughter recognize her own dead mother. The midwife put an axe under the bed to cut the young woman’s pain as the contractions grew harder. Soon she’d name her own newborn, a sword to pierce her own heart, another child sentenced to be sold from her mother.
⁵