2 - The Gathering Storm
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2014
Summary
There is…a constant dread felt by the whole slave population, that they shall be torn from their families and friends.
Professor E.A. Andrews, 1836During a newspaper assignment in Alabama in 1910, progressive civil rights activist and journalist Mary White Ovington asked an elderly ex-slave named Kitty to tell her about her experiences in bondage. Similar to many former slaves asked the same question, Kitty began by recalling the horrors of forced removal. “De hardes’ part ob dose days,” she told Ovington, “were being sold. It done seem as tho yer couldn’t to bear it. When I was sold away by de speculators it seem like I griebe ter death.” Ben, another former slave whom Ovington interviewed, emphasized not only forced removal itself but also bondspeople’s constant anxiety that they would one day be forced to move. Where he lived, the threat recurred annually. “Every fall they sell people jes’ like cattle,” he explained. “They go from place to place drivin’ us along as ef we was mules or cows. Sons ‘ud be taken from their mothers, women from their husbands.” He himself had been put “on the block” twice as a young man – first to be forcibly hired out for two years and then to be sold. “I brought a good price. A heap o’ people done want me fer I could do a sight o’ work. Um, Um.”
Although economic trends and market labor demands turned enslaved people into commodities in the account books of white slaveholders and traffickers, African-American slave migrants such as Kitty and Ben experienced the reallocation of their valuable bodies as human beings rather than products. For them, forced removal from the plantations, farms, and residences where they had been born or where they had lived for long periods of time was the central event in their lives; as such, it was frequently the very first episode they recalled in interviews and autobiographies, both during slavery and after the institution’s demise.
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- Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South , pp. 56 - 93Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
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