Serenity… refocus – seek joy – thrive

The other day I was reading a post over at the Field Negro’s site that primarily dealt with Black conservatives, but also, somewhere in there, talked about the name he uses as his handle and also as his blog’s name – Field Negro.

Not surprisingly, there has been a bit of controversy over the name from the beginning, with both white and Black people objecting to it for one reason or another. Right at the top of his blog page he has an explanation – “Why The Name” – with a video of Malcolm X giving his explanation of the difference between a field negro and a house negro, in today’s world. He also expands a bit on his thinking and who he designates as which, and why,  in this post he wrote a couple of years ago, Field-Negro 101.

So. I’ve never had much of a problem with the name or the explanation; I don’t really now, in fact, it’s just that… well, I’ve had cause to wonder lately if the entire field vs house negro bit didn’t come from the same poisoned well as “Mammy” and “Sapphire” and “Uncle Tom” and so on.

So much of our history that we were taught, Black history in particular, has turned out to be just lies. Some that perhaps based on a kernel of truth – after all, I imagine that at some point in time, and in some place, there was a slave or few who did fit the Mammy stereotype. Those same types exist today in all cultures, and I imagine they existed then. And some who embodied what we now call “Uncle Tom’s” (apparently the Uncle Tom in Beecher Snow’s book does not exactly resemble what the stereotype has grown to be known as), because they too exist today, across the board.

So, too, I’m sure there were “house negroes” who were more concerned with the master’s comfort and welfare, and the house and what measure of comfort and safety it brought the enslaved person, than they were with the welfare of their fellow captives – but,  well… did it hold true in great numbers?

I have no real idea. I’ve been doing quite a bit of research and reading about Black folks in the pre-Civil war south, and the lives of slaves and so on. Absolutely fascinating reading, some of it; no matter how dry the words that chronicled some of these lives, the just unimaginable spirit and determination forces its way through. So much I didn’t know; so much I have yet to learn.

What got me started on this research – because, shamefully, I really wasn’t all that interested before, it all seemed so one dimensional and boring, the way it was often presented – was a couple of paragraphs in the family tree book about my great-great-great (maybe another great) Uncle Louis. I’d read these paragraphs a few times – three of them, no more than 30 words altogether, that told a terrible, tragic, triumphant story, no less compelling for all that it was so short.  Whenever I’d go through the book to look up dates or to get the name of someone else that maybe I could Google, I’d glance over those words and wince a bit, but then move on to someone more modern.

If you had asked me, I would have said that of course I knew what those three paragraphs said – after all, had I not read them many (or at least a few) times? Any missing details my mind could supply, for this is a story often told, of the horrors of slavery and its effects.

His story in brief (because that is all I have is brief) is that of one of the youngest of maybe 17 children, some of whom were sold away, Louis was born into slavery and grew up in captivity. He was, apparently – and understandably – adamantly opposed to being in bondage and attempted to escape almost continuously. Each time he was either captured and brought back, or returned on his own. After his twelfth escape, he was captured and beaten so severely that he was bedridden for weeks, unable to move for part of the time. After he recovered he was finally as meek and mild as the slaveholder could have wished. A completely broken man, it was felt – until his escaped a thirteenth time and this time made it to Canada.

Terrible, fascinating story that I thought I knew the whole of. I could imagine him trudging through the fields, despairing, burdened, working from sun up to sun down, day by day, until it finally got to be too much and he just took off. Over and over again.

Except there was one part of his story that I kept missing, each time I read it, because (I guess) it didn’t fit in with my world view, with my preconceptions of both slaves and slavery. It wasn’t till I went to write it up for a family tree site that I finally noticed what I had been missing.

See,  Louis escaped the last time by making friends with some sort of clerk’s daughter, gaining access to blank passes, and then he forged himself a pass of some sort, that somehow got him into Canada, or at least to a place where he could initiate the journey there (maybe the Underground Railroad).

Anyway, he could forge this pass because he could read and write. And he could read and write, and do it well, because he was …. a secretary. The slaveholder’s secretary, in fact. A pencil pusher in the big house. A house Negro if ever there was one, I’d say. And yet he escaped, time and time again.

This completely upended my worldview. I had, it seems, accepted it as a given (were we not taught this?) that slaves who worked in the house – while they may have had a few discomforts just by virtue of being slaves and being at the beck and call of everyone in the house and liable to be hit by any white person in the house, including small children – were happy to stay there in relative comfort and looked down on the field workers. Oh, some may have helped by stealing food for those in the field shacks or something, but for the most part they valued their place and would do little to jeopardize it.

But how do we know that any of that is true? Again, I’m sure that there is at least a kernel of truth there, but how do we know it was not the other way around? That the majority of those in the house preferred not to be there, or to be in bondage anywhere, and it’s the few that were wedded to the house, the comfort and the masters? Could this not too be a lie, meant, like so many, to make us feel bad about our Blackness, our history and those who peopled it? I’d like to find out.

As I said, I don’t have any problem with Field Negro’s name, or why he uses it, or anything like that, in general, but I think it may possibly be unfair to the people it references. Sure my uncle’s story is just one story, but I’m just one random person wandering through her family tree who has found an unlikely hero; I think there are many, many more out there.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 8:32 am and is filed under (in)significant heroes, bone of my bone, first draft, repairing the past. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.