Nah. Doesn’t even come close to comparing. What could I be waiting for that is even the least bit similar? Nothing, in my life, which I guess could be considered a victory for theirs.

On June 18 or 19th, federal troops rode into Galveston, TX, took over the city – and freed the slaves who had been officially freed with the Emancipation Proclamation two years previous.

Two years. And a half.

Can you imagine waiting and hoping and wishing and striving and rebelling all your life, preparing your life for this moment even while half believing that it will never come, at least not in your lifetime, and then to have that moment come… but not for you. Not for your old momma, not for your children, not for those on the auction blocks, or under the lash. Not for any of you, because the state you lived in decided to ignore the law and keep you in captivity anyway?

Two years. I can’t get over that, even though it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the centuries that came before. Waiting for the end is always harder (I think) than thinking about the beginning, for most of us.  For these people – unimaginable.

Happy Juneteenth, y’all.

Even so, I believe I have come to a point where one path calls me above all others (at least at this time) and that is the one I will follow with a spring in my step.

I will think on it more for the next few days, till I can fully communicate – then I think it will be time to move forward and not look back. Much.

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.

Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America by Fergus M. Bordewich

Already I have been leafing through the extensive bibliography in this book, Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America, by Fergus M. Bordewich, in order to see what’s going to be somewhere next on my list.  A never ending learning process (thank goodness).

Anyway, this isn’t a review, it’s more part of the research I am doing in preparation for writing my own book.  I don’t have the knowledge to review it, really, anyway.  I mean, I can say that the writing is engaging and holds my interest – although I am having a little trouble following some of the events and timelines, as he dovetails a lot – and that it is informative and all that. And it is. However, as it’s the first book I’ve read on this subject (amazing, huh?), I am not in a position to compare the information to anything beyond the Black History Month celebrations of Harriet Tubman. Whose life and contributions, it turns out, is only part of a vast, rich story, peopled with heroes and villians big and small, Black and white, that spanned almost a century (not, in the beginning, called the “underground railroad”, of course, as railroads themselves hadn’t been invented at the time). This in no way subtracts from her accomplishments, by the way, just brings others who have been forgotten to the fore a bit.

Also, I haven’t finished the book, another reason this isn’t a review. More of a page in a notebook where I plan to, in this and subsequent posts, jot my (mostly disconnected) thoughts down about different sections and events that I want to keep handy. As I can’t mark up the book itself (it belongs to the library and they don’t take kindly to that type of stuff), where I can I’ll just link to the place or at least the chapter or page in the Google books version. Which is limited preview, so there are parts where that won’t work, but still.

One thing impressed upon me while reading this book is the fact that almost nowhere in the US was safe for black people, free or slave. At any time, in almost any place, they could be snatched up and either returned back to wherever they had escaped from, or be stolen from their lives as free persons and sold into slavery. In fact, in some cases it was safer to travel as a slave with papers than as a free person, because while kidnapping, assault, rape,  and forcible captivity of a free Black person (even small children) was perfectly fine – to do the same to one claimed by another was theft – and greatly frowned upon.

For instance, New York, in the 1800′s, depended on the South for it’s prosperity as the city was part of what was called the Cotton Triangle. Not only did the trade in cotton and other goods to and from the South, moving through the NY ports, make some New Yorkers rich, the city was also host to second homes for many wealthy Southerners. New York law allowed them to maintain their households, slaves included (even though slavery itself was illegal in NY) for up to nine months, but no one bothered them if they stayed longer.

At the same time, NY state’s constitution “unfairly applied property qualifications to disqualify all but a handful of black voters. African Americans were almost completely excluded from colleges and public schools, and segregated in theaters, eating places, and accomodations.”

For all that getting to “the North” was the goal of many escapees, in some areas life was not very much better. New York was one of them. The city itself was virulently racist and the authorities were friendly to slavery – professional slave hunters, city constables, local lawyers and more comprised an informal ring that the abolitionists dubbed the “New York Kidnapping Club”.

One of the most poignant passages for me is this:

“It was not an uncommon sight for recaptured slaves to be seen being marched down Broadway in chains to a waiting steamer bound for the South. Seven-year-old Henry Scott, for instance, was physically snatched from his classroom by a city policeman and a Virginia planter who claimed him as his slave.”

I’ve been to NYC and if I ever get back there I’ll never look at Broadway the same way again.

Also, I can’t help but apply the imagery to events in the present day, with the ICE raids of past years and the rounding up of Latinos as “illegal immigrants”, the tearing apart of families, the incarceration of children and more atrocities besides. It’s not, of course, exactly the same but it requires, I believe, the same sort of um… beliefs and attitudes regarding the humanity (or lack of it) of another person.

I need to get to other parts of the book and other notes, but it will have to wait for another day.