“… the women and children of colored soldiers …”

And about what an excellent resource the National Archives’ Prologue magazine is.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve had a tough time finding  some of the women – of my family or any others – so I am anxious to try some of the methods the Prologue article suggests. I will write about what I find on TBoL, and list resources as I come across them on the Research page there.

Of course, it could be my inner storytelling self in combat with my inner “Oh, but I can’t do that very well” self – but I prefer instead to think that it’s an ancestor or two giving me a slight nudge. Or shove. Yes, definitely sometimes a shove. Ancestors apparently being rather bossy folks. And who can blame them? (Or do anything about it? After all, who do you complain to?)

I think one of my problems is that I have too many stories, of too many people, other people’s ancestors and my own – some of them like untitled, unsigned paintings lining an old entryway; when you go to look behind them there is nothing but a blank wall. Yet the mystery of their lives nags at you, and you just can’t help but let the curiosity take you over as your imagination fills in the blanks.

Like the other day I came across a listing of slaves included in one woman’s will and distribution of “property.”  It was just like many listings one comes across – a bunch of first names (if you are lucky; sometimes there are only ages and gender listed), but you never get used to them. At least, I hope I never get used to seeing the names of men, women and children listed as “property” to be disposed of along with the house, the furniture and the livestock. (If I do it will be time to put down my pen and let someone else take it up.)

There were about 20 names or so on this list and I looked it over, attempting to record and acknowledge every name – but then my eye swiveled back to the first name on the list, because my brain noticed something odd about it. Ah, there it was… “Sara, 28, slave for life.” Slave for life? Of course, most slaves were expected to live out their lifetimes in bondage, but sometimes some were able to buy their freedom, or gained freedom through the death of a slaveholder, or by other means, as apparently was allowed for the other people listed. But not Sara. Not only did the slaveholder who held her in bondage die; she died deliberately doing what she could to make sure that Sara, already and only 28, never took a breath of freedom.

And you just have to wonder: why? Did she particularly hate Sara? Was Sara perhaps not as meek as the slaveholder wished? Too pretty? Or maybe it was one of those grotesque perversions of “love” one sometimes comes across in those old stories; the slaveholder loves their captive so much that they never want to let them go. For this they would condemn their “loved ones” to a life of unending submission and drudgery.

Whatever the reason – and it could be any one of many; slaveholders were masters (and mistresses) of self-justification – I hope Sara had the last laugh. The slaveholder died just around the time of the Civil War.

So, so many stories of people rendered nameless, faceless and useless except as beasts of burden – but they simply refuse to stay that way. They demand bones and sinew and flesh and clothing; they clamor for recognition of the depth of their thoughts, the strength of their minds; they insist on acknowledgment that they loved and hated, laughed and cried, were indifferent or cowardly or courageous in turn, like almost everyone who has ever lived. Entire nations drew their wealth from each welt or ridge on their scarred backs or callused hands and they, these unwilling builders and wealth creators, are demanding to exist, at least in memory.

I can’t tell all the stories, of course – but then I am far from the only one the ancestors are pinching, and nudging and hectoring (and let’s not forget shoving) into “tending to the past.” I’d love to hear your tales, too.

[Crossposted at The Book of Louis. Photo from here (I cannot vouch for all of their content, not having read the entire site, but they have built a great resource of Civil War and related history items.)]

Togo is a narrow country sandwiched between the West African nations of Ghana and Benin. It was afflicted by the slave trade. The population fled inland. Today, some of their descendents sell fish beside the shore of a vast lake while making their homes on an island where their forebears hide from slavers. Art Wolfe, Photographer

The photo caught my eye, sure, when I came across it at This is Africa, an excellent new tumblr site that works to present more than a single story of Africa. But just the sight of the country name, Togo, invokes thoughts and feelings and… not quite memories.

See, I recently found out that… well, I’ll let Sven Beckert tell it:

It was a stormy November morning in 1900 when the Graf Waldersee steamed out of the port of New York for its journey across the Atlantic Ocean to the German city of Hamburg. Among the more than two thousand travelers who glanced one last time at the receding steeples of Trinity Church, the towering Manhattan Life Insurance Company building, and the Statue of Liberty, four passengers stood out: James N. Calloway, John Robinson, Allen Burks, and Shepherd Lincoln Harris. All were the sons of slaves from Alabama, and all were connected to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. Calloway was a Tuskegee teacher, and Robinson, Burks, and Harris were students or recent graduates. Perhaps even more remarkable was their mission: They had boarded the Graf Waldersee that morning on a journey to new jobs in a faraway land—the German colony of Togo. On the western coast of Africa, they were to instruct the German colonialists and their subjects on how to grow cotton for export, “to determine the possibility of a rational cotton culture as a native culture, and … to show the marketability of the product for German industry.”^{1 From Tuskegee to Togo: The Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton}

That person, James Nathan Calloway? He was my great-grandfather. That’s just… weird. I’d always heard, to the extent that I was even interested in the past at that time, that he was connected in some way with the Tuskegee Institute, and my mother once mentioned that he spoke German and had a sword that was presented to him by the Kaiser in Germany (I think she got that part a bit wrong). But when I idly did a Google search one day I was shocked to find him on there. And even more shocked when I found out about the Togo expedition.

The paper at the link is just an abstract but I think I can get the full thing through school. I haven’t yet but I need to, to find out the full story or as full as I can.

Whenever I think of Togo now, though, I wonder… how much damage was done to the people who lived there, their families, their way of life, did the knowledge of cotton planting help them later, after the Germans were gone, and lots else besides.

The journey to the past, once you start on it, never goes in a straight line, it seems. It bobs and weaves and takes off down dark and scary roads, or zooms down byways and you sometimes wind up in some pretty unexpected places. Like Togo.

Three Women and a Suitcase (1930s)

From the Charles “Teenie” Harris Collection (via Omega418’s photostream again – a wonderful resource)

Doesn’t this picture just make you wish you were going wherever these three women were going? Love the hat on the seated one, too. In fact, have those styles come back into fashion yet? If not, they  should.

What an amazing archive of work. Here is one collection of Harris’ photos – each picture a part of telling our stories. In his work he didn’t just photograph celebs but also working-class/blue collar people, the poor, the middle class, and children. In other words, a full-spectrum of lived lives – more than just a single story.

Disney, in the planning and making of the movie featuring their first Black princess, tried to please the wrong demographic. The story would have made a good second, or maybe third, Black princess movie, but for the first? No. For the first film, they needed a real, capital “P” Princess (said, in my mind, with the British pronunciation. Which sounds far more official.)

This isn’t a review of a year old film, though. In fact, before I sat down to write I had no intentions of mentioning anything at all about frogs, princesses or films. I just wanted to highlight what I think is a really nice photo of a young Black girl.

Except. The photo, on the flickr site where I found it, is titled “Boogie Woogie Girl”, maybe because of the hair. I don’t think the person meant anything by it; this photo set seems to be lovingly made up of vintage photos of Black women in all their variety. Still, this title rubbed me the wrong way. The effort to tease out just why sent my mind whirring off to mainstream cultural views of young (and old) Black women, Snow White, and then on a beeline straight to the Princess and the Frog. Simple, no, when you see the progression?

She’s lovely, isn’t she, the girl in the photo. Sweet smile, bright eyes and that hair! It was picture day and we all know what that means. Momma probably sat her down on the kitchen chair and dragged the sides up into the clip or rubber band, teasing the front then working each curl to make it lie perfectly against the next, before making sure the cascading curls in the back were just fluffy enough – but not too much. I think the lipstick was the addition of whoever tinted the photo – either the original photographer or someone in later years, but it looks good.

She just looks like a nice young girl. And that, I think, is why the photo title hit the wrong nerve. Because, in traditional U.S. and colonial culture, young Black girls (and boys) are barely allowed childhood, let alone niceness and innocence -,even when they are small children.

For instance, not long after Katrina I was reading a post, I think about how the recovery was going, on one of the White feminist blogs. One nice, liberal White woman commented, saying she was a resident of New Orleans and that the schools would be starting back up soon. Because of where she lived and how the school system had been jerry rigged together, she was going to have to send her children – kindergarteners – to a kindergarten that had almost all Black children in it. She was worried, you see, for her children’s safety because her little snowflakes would be surrounded by all these children who were – not to be racist or anything – Black! What should she do? And, she asked, was it racist even to worry and to wonder? 

Many of the other commenters gave her advice and consoled her and stuff (mainly about being a victim of the storm), but not one said “Yes, that IS racist to worry that these Black babies are all violent criminals or something.” I finally signed on and said so… I would point you to the comment but the site had some issues and lost all their comments. When they were finally restored mine was not among them. A glitch, I’m sure.

Anyway, back to the young girl and Snow White and the Princess Frog. Snow White really has little to do with anything except that the film came out in 1937 and it’s entirely possible that this young girl saw it and instead of a hoochie momma or a boogie woogie girl, imagines herself a princess. Well, sure, she doesn’t resemble Snow White at all, except for maybe the hair but, particularly back in those days, if one is Black and is going to identify with a Disney character, it will likely be a princess and not one of Disney’s racist caricatures of Black people.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if, even today, if a young Black girl (or boy) is going to identify with a Disney princess that it won’t be Cinderella or Snow White or someone, instead of Tiana or whatever her name was (I liked the name they were originally going to use, Maddy, better, personally.) Why? Because they were real princesses. And yes, looking at Disney movies from a feminist prospective the princess movies are dreadful, dreadful things, which must be placed within their sexist context and all that. But, as I’ve mentioned before, little Black girls have no such context, in the mainstream consciousness, of being pampered and coddled and innocent and protected. Of course many had those things within their own family circles, where to momma and daddy and all the extended family, they have always been princesses. But you know how things go – few things are real (growing up) unless everyone else knows it.

After all, many feminists are not kicking back against the actuality of all those things in their lives but at the perception of (White) women as helpless and needing protection and extra care for their feelings and all that. This is not something that Black girl children have had to fight against in popular consciousness because they are not portrayed as any of those things. This is why, in my view, the Princess and the Frog was targeted toward the wrong demographic. Whoever it was targeted to – and I suspect I know – it wasn’t to an ignored young girl who had hoped to finally have her place on the pedestal.

Anyway it’s called The Book of Louis and while it’s still a bit scattered, it is open. I’ll pull it all together soon.