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Black voices: Writings inAfrican American historyNeil A. Wynn aa Reader in History and American Studies ,University of GlamorganPublished online: 21 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Neil A. Wynn (1997) Black voices: Writings in AfricanAmerican history, Immigrants & Minorities: Historical Studies in Ethnicity,Migration and Diaspora, 16:3, 94-101, DOI: 10.1080/02619288.1993.9974920

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Black Voices:Writings in African American History

NEIL A. WYNN

Kate E.R. Pickard, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed: the Narrativeof Peter and Vina Still after Fortv Years of Slavery (with Introductionsby Maxwell Whiteman and Nancy L. Grant) (Lincoln, NE and London:University of Nebraska Press, 1995). Pp.xv + 409. £14. ISBN 0 80329233 3

Winthrop D. Jordan, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into aCivil War Slave Conspiracy, Revised Edition (Baton Rouge, LA andLondon: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). Pp.xix + 403. £15.95.ISBN 0 8071 2039 1

Nat Love, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love (Introduction by BracketteF. Williams) (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press,1995). Pp. xviii + 162. £8.50. ISBN 0 8032 7955 8

Susan L. Smith, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired: Black Women'sHealth Activism in America, 1890-1950 (Philadelphia, PA: University ofPennsylvania Press, 1995). Pp.xi + 247. £15.95. ISBN 0 8122 1449 8

These different books span the experience of black Americans from slaveryto the present day. Each adds something to our understanding of the subject,and each raise questions about the nature of evidence, the reliability andmerit of certain sources. The first is one of the ever-growing number ofreprinted slave narratives which contributes to our knowledge of the'peculiar institution' and the ongoing historical debates. This particularnarrative provides further testimony not just of the cruelty of slavery (ifanything, there is less cruelty in this tale than many others), but alsoparticularly of the strength of the black family. Peter Still was apparentlykidnapped from Maryland, sold in Kentucky and transported to Alabama.He neither forgot his mother, nor, according to Pickard, that he had beenfree. After 40 years in slavery he was able to purchase his freedom, travelback North, be re-united with his mother and meet brothers and sisters he

IMMIGRANTS & MINORITIES, Vol.16, No.3, November 1997, pp.94-101PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

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BLACK VOICES: WRITINGS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY 95

had never known. After an attempt to gain his own wife and children'sfreedom by engineering an escape had failed, Peter Still travelled the Northraising the money to purchase their freedom. The irony is, as we learn fromNancy Grant's introduction, that Peter and his brother had in reality beenborn into slavery and were abandoned by their mother when she fledMaryland to join her husband who had previously bought his own freedom.

This confusion on Peter's original status points up one of the difficultiesof this text. First published in 1856, the original subtitle of The Kidnappedand the Ransomed was Being the Personal Recollections of Peter Still andhis Wife' Vina', and the narrative is not a first person tale, but one recountedin third person through an intermediary. This undoubtedly affects the styleof the text in that three voices can be detected: those of Peter and Vina, andthat of the editor/author, Kate Pickard, a white woman who had known boththe main characters while they were slaves. While this helps to authenticatethe story, it also determines the tone which tends to be that of the Victorianmelodrama rather than the powerful personal account of a FrederickDouglass or William Wells Brown. Occasionally, too, Pickard's voice isobtrusive. Writing of the necessity of the slaves to hide their true feelingsbehind cheerful exteriors, she observes that the temperament of the Africanis 'well-suited' to this role - cheerful and warm-hearted, with an innate loveof light and harmony, the slightest sympathy awakens his affection, and thefaintest dawn of happiness provokes a smile' (p.31). Although Peter Still isclearly determined to gain his freedom, and is prepared to dissemble to thatend, in his role of the hardworking, decent, rarely protesting slave heoccasionally appears something of the 'Uncle Tom'. None the less, it isclear that Still had one objective in mind: earning enough cash to purchasehis freedom. On another occasion Pickard remarks somewhatcondescendingly on Still's free relatives as being hard working, well-educated, 'yet they were not proud' (p.264).

The contradictions of slavery are everywhere evident. The young Stillsfirst worked as labourers in brick yards, and although rarely harshly treatedby their master, they found the black moulders 'cruel tyrants' (p.35).Following the death of one owner Peter became the property of Levi Gistand moved to Alabama. He was proud of his young master on whoseplantation 'peace and happiness established their dominion' (p.84).However, when Peter's brother married a woman on another plantation andpersisted in visiting her contrary to instruction, he was severely flogged -the master was later filled with remorse and apologized for acting in the heatof anger. Peter, too, married contrary to his master's wishes, but was able tovisit Vina and build her a cabin and by making and selling shoes, was ableto purchase furniture and clothes.

Although clearly allowed more 'freedom' than many slaves, Peter and

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Vina experienced the cruelty both of the institution itself, and of owners andoverseers. The experience of the female slave is outlined in stark reality:Vina had seven children, oniy three of whom survived. Vina's feelings onthis subject are not voiced. She was also subject to sexual threats and themost powertul example of slave resistance is seen when Vina rejects thesexual advances of an overseer and later of her owner. When the latter,having been rebuffed by Vina, talks of her daughter, the angry woman warnsthat she will kill him and 'from that time he ceased to torment the resolutewoman' (p.353). Another woman, threatened with transportation south andseparation from her husband, refused to leave and threatened to kill herselfAs a consequence she was sold where she lived and 'left to spend theevening of her days in her beloved Lexington' (p.69).

The degrees of freedom available to slaves can be seen as they negotiatethe terms of their own sale, or even the conditions of their work. Peter Still'sability consistently to work for cash pointed not only perhaps to his specialstanding in his master's eyes, based in part on Peter's reliablity as ahardworking individual, but also serves to point up the variety of slaveexperience. Peter increasingly was hired out as a casual labourer and onoccasion had to find his own work. This enabled him to arrange his hire byJoseph Friedman, the Jew who was to be instrumental in obtaining hisfreedom.

This part of the tale, presumably through Pickard's contributions,provides insights into the place of the Jewish community in the AmericanSouth and the perverse view of them from white southerners. WhenFriedman purchases Peter on the agreed (but secret) understanding thatPeter can in turn purchase his own freedom, the popular view was that theslave would just be used to make money; one woman is reported to remark'Jews will sell their own children for money' (p.226). Although only a smallpart of the narrative, this interesting subject is explored further in theintroduction to the 1970 edition included here, entitled 'Jews in theAntislavery Movement' by Maxwell Whiteman. Also included is theoriginal appendix which provides biographical details of the white man,Seth Conklin, who died having failed to effect the escape of Vina andchildren. He, like the Friedman brothers, seemed to be motivated bypersonal conviction and acted as an individual rather than part of anyorganized movement. His is yet another story within the narrative, and it isthis multiplicity of tales which makes this such an interesting book.

Voices, or the absence of voices, are very much the concern of WinthropJordan's book, first published in 1993 and now with additional documentarymaterial included in the appendices. It deals with a slave conspiracy in agroup of plantations near Second Creek, in Adams County, south ofNatchez, Mississipppi, in 1861. The incident was kept so quiet at the time

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BLACK VOICES: WRITINGS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY 97

as to remain virtually unknown to historians. Jordan uses slave testimonyrecorded by a participant in the examination committee convened after theplot had been discovered to explore the relationship between slaves andowners, and particularly to understand the motives of would-be rebels.Their testimony is subjected to a close and detailed reading by Jordan, andhe builds around this an erudite and complex study of plantation life. Inaddition to his main source, the author draws upon an enormous range ofother material - diaries, census material, post-Civil War testimony, WPAinterviews, and a mass of secondary sources - to recreate the feel of theperiod. He compares the Second Creek 'plan' with other more famousrisings such as Nat Turner's to examine the role of leaders and religion, andto consider aims and motivation. He points to the difficulty of interpretation,of filling in the gaps - knowing what was real and what was imagined, whatwas genuine and what was the result of the whippings which precededquestioning.

What emerges is not a 'narrative' - there is no clear story here other thanthat, following news of the outbreak of the Civil War, some slaves plannedto strike their own blow for freedom but were uncovered before they couldact. Whether they were encouraged in this by white people is never clear -the slaves refered to White Men, and their interrogators seemed more thanwilling to accept this possibility. The intention of slaves seemed to be to riseonce the Union forces had taken New Orleans, kill their masters and takesome of the white women as 'wives', and join the Union army. They would,they believed, put an end to whipping which clearly was one of the causesof the resentment which led to the conspiracy. Nineteen slaves belonging toseven different owners were questioned; possibly as many as 40 werehanged or died as a result of their 'interrogation'. What we know of them islittle more than informed guesswork. In the end, as Jordan says, all we areleft with is an awful silence and a sense of the awfulness of slavery and itsconsequences.

Nat Love's story is another matter altogether. As the subtitle claimsLove was Better Known in the Cattle Country as 'DeadwoodDick', and hedescribes his book as 'A True History of Slavery Days, Life on the GreatCatle Ranges and on the Plains of the "Wild and Woolly" West, Based onFacts, and Personal Experiences of the Author.' The line between 'fact','personal experience' and fiction seems to be a fine one. Despite Love'sstated aim 'to record events simply as they are' (p.l), it is better, as theeditor suggests, to see Love's tale as stories to be told around the campfire,rather than reliable 'history'. Indeed, the story sometimes seems to owemore to the dime novel heroics of Deadwood Dick than to real experience.But the book is a 'unique construction' by an African American who writesa western rather than a traditional black narrative.

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First published in 1907, his celebration of the West and the beauty of thelandscape, both as a cowboy and later as Pullman car porter, make him arepresentative American spokesman of the period. In writing 'See America,then let your chest swell with Pride that you are an American' (p. 142), hehas more in common with white contemporaries such as Owen Wister,Frederic Remington, or Theodore Roosevelt than with most black voices.As Williams notes, 'anyone looking for a critical or self-reflective analysisof the racial and cultural composition or patterns of social interaction on thewestern range ... will not find it in Nat Love's account of his life' (p.xii).Thus implicitly, and explicitly in his acknowledgement of 'theBROTHERHOOD of men' (p.l), Love's story is a claim for equality. In hisstory of success, his espousal of self-dependence and 'true usefulness,' heresembles a Horatio Alger character, a sort of Booker T. Washington of thewest.

Love's story begins with his birth into slavery on a plantation inTennessee in 1854. Although his master was kind, and his parents hadprivileged positions as foreman and cook respectively, Love writes of thecruelty of slavery. He indicates that much of American wealth was createdby 'the sweat of the black man's brow' for the benefit of'the dominant race'(p. 11). How much of this he truly saw or understood is unclear - his personalexperiences of slavery as recounted here are of childhood mishaps andadventures. His memory was also misleading, misplacing the start of theCivil War in his tenth year. Once slavery had ended his family rented 20acres and began the hard climb from destitution. When his father died,young Nat, aged 15, became the man of the house and struggled to care forthe family. However, having fortuitously won a horse in a raffle, sold it, wonit again, and made another 50 dollars in a second sale, Love gave his motherhalf the money and set off to make his fortune. It is the last we hear of hisfamily, life in the Reconstruction South, or the issue of race.

From 1869 to 1890 Love worked as a cowboy in Texas, ranging fromthere to Arizona, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. His story isready made for the movies: round-ups, stampedes, clashes with Indians, andshootouts are interspersed with praise for the cowboys' 'love of showingoff,' 'gameness, and 'nerve'. If Love's own race seemed to have littlesignificance on the frontier, that of others did: Mexicans are 'greasers',Native Americans appear as 'painted savages' or 'red devils' who, alongwith white desperadoes, 'infested' the plains (p.51). Love several times 'feltthe hot sting of the leaden bullet' (p.70), often making mircaculous escapes.Wounded and captured by Yellow Dog's tribe, he was cared for and adoptedinto the tribe, but faced with the prospect of marrying the chiefs daughterhe made good his escape! His skill at roping and mounting a mustang inrecord time in a competition in Deadwood in 1876 won him the nickname

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BLACK VOICES: WRITINGS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY 99

of Deadwood Dick and the champion's title he held until 1890; naturally, healso won the rifle and revolver shooting competitions.

Marrying in 1889, he gave up the 'wild life' and began to work for thenew order. As a Pullman porter he joined an almost entirely black fraternitywhich served mainly white passengers, taking care of their every need anddependant upon their tips. The irony of this is lost on Love: included in thebook are two obviously studio photographs of him in his cowboy finery,posing confidently hand on gun belt, foot on saddle, Winchester in the otherhand; they contrast sharply with the later photographs of him in his porter'suniform, but he faces the camera with exactly the same sense of pride anddignity. Perhaps his understanding of the loss of freedom is implicit in hisfinal reminiscence - a list of characters he claims to have known, rangingfrom Buffalo Bill and Billy the Kid to the James Brothers. This last additionpoints up the need for some sort of authentication; without it this reads likethe story of a black Little Big Man. Perhaps for this reason Love is rarelymentioned in the major texts on African American history.

Susan Smith's academic monograph, derived from her Ph.D., is solidlybased on a wide range of written and oral sources, but she too introducessome lesser-known names. Her aim is to enable us to 'hear the voices ofthose who make history outside of the limelight'. In providing a history ofsome of the health reform movements and programmes created by AfricanAmericans in the first half of this century, she does introduce a whole rangeof characters little known to most textbooks. Moreover, her study of healthand medical concerns demonstrates the far-reaching consequences ofracism in literally life and death issues. Poverty and discrimination ensuredthat health-care provision for African Americans was totally inadequate,and led to widespread disease, high mortality rates and low life expectancy.Yet the fear that illness among the black population might spread to whiteAmerica was ever present. The increased health needs of AfricanAmericans called out for concerted private and public action and provokedan aspect of black activism which is little known and which clearly pre-dates the cry of the the 1960s civil rights leader, Fannie Lou Hamer, thatAfrican Americans were '"sick and tired of being sick and tired'" (p. 14).

The complexities of the subject - often involving the intersection ofclass, race and gender - are quickly apparent. So much is this so that thecontent of the book is both more, and less, than the subtitle suggests. Firstly,the focus is almost entirely, and probably justifiably, southern, but much ofthe detail is drawn from two states, Alabama and Mississippi. Moreover,women's activism is in fact only part of the story. As Smith openlyacknowledges, health was a microcosm of civil rights generally: formalleadership often came from men while women provided the grassrootseffort. None the less, one of the central figures that emerges is Booker T.

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100 IMMIGRANTS AND MINORITIES

Washington and his successors in control of Tuskegee Institute.While Smith points to the activities of middle class black women in their

clubs and organizations, including the Tuskegee Women's Club, it wasWashington who instituted the National Negro Health Week at Tuskegeewhere it ran from 1915 until 1930 when it was taken over by the US PublicHealth Service (USPHS). In a speech in 1914, Washington pointed out that'Disease draws no color line' (p.42), but the National Negro HealthMovement continued until 1950 when moves towards integration suggestedit was redundant. However, recognition of the continued special plight ofAfrican Americans saw Black Health Week resume in the 1990s.

The creation of the Office of Negro Health Work in the USPHS duringthe 1930s was undoubtedly due in part to the lobbying of black leaders andthe black doctors' organization, the National Medical Association. Inlooking at the work of these bodies, and of individuals such as Dr RoscoeBrown, head of the Office of Negro Health Work, who brought the health ofAfrican Americans to national attention, Smith perhaps goes beyond herstated brief. If occasionally the female activists disappear from sight, theseare important aspects of black history which reveal the complexities of racerelations. Nowhere is this more so than the example provided by theTuskegee Syphilis experiment in which 400 African Americans sufferingfrom the disease in Alabama were studied without treament by the USPHSover a 40-year period beginning in 1932. The subjects of the experimentwere never told the true nature of their illness nor that they could spread it.The college agreed to participate in order to enhance its standing and gainfunding, and undoubtedly some black doctors and nurses revealed the classdivide in their attitudes towards these poor lower-class guinea pigs. Themorality of this programme was not questioned until the 1970s.

The Tuskegee Moveable School which existed from 1906 to 1944, andwas incorporated within the US Department of Agriculture, was altogethermore uplifting. This mobile education programme provided training foradults in agricultural methods, home economics, and health care acrossAlabama. A public health nurse also joined the programme. Graduates ofTuskegee and other institutions were involved in these educationprogrammes which emphasized cleanliness, hygiene, and basic health care.It was the health education field that most involved African Americanwomen activists. From the late-nineteenth century on middle-class blackwomen strove to improve health conditions among the poor, and toinculcate the values of respectability, particularly among other blackwomen. The combination of social welfare and racial uplift were evident inthe activities of groups like the National Association of Colored Women inthe 1890s, and were still apparent in the work of the Alpha Kappa AlphaSorority's Mississippi Health programme in the 1930s. This remarkable

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BLACK VOICES: WRITINGS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY 101

venture, begun by a native of Mississippi, Ida Louise Jackson, established ateam of volunteer 'health missionaries' from within the black femalecollege group who established mobile health clinics visiting AfricanAmerican workers across the state every summer between 1935 and 1942.They saw between 2,500 and 4,000 people each year, and providedimmunization against smallpox and diptheria for over 15,000 children. Thework of these women pointed up the absence of medical provision either bystate or federal government; attempts to get official asistance were largelyineffective even though Time magazine in 1940 described black health asthe nation's '"No.l public health problem'" (p.60).

Where the state did become involved was in the regulation of midwifery,an aspect of health care which in Mississippi and other southern states wasdominated by black women. Public health systems were partiallyimplemented through the South by midwives and their incorporation intostate health programmes between 1920 and 1950. Midwifery was oftenviewed as an extension of women's work, and the lay black midwife carriedout her medical activities in addition to working in the fields, domesticservice or teaching. Publicly funded public nurses began to train andregulate midwives, who were often perceived as 'ignorant, unclean, andsuperstitious' (p. 124), as part of the attempt to improve public health afterthe First World War. Not surprisingly, there was resistance to this process,but the decline of infant and maternal mortality rates point to its overallsuccess.

Again, this discussion provides fascinating insight into an aspect ofhealth care and the complicated relations between white officialdom, blackmiddle-class women, and the ordinary African American. Letters frommidwives show individuals actively engaged in providing health care fortheir communities. Obviously determined to a large extent by the availablesources, the voices missing in much of this study are those of the patients,the ordinary African Americans who suffered illness, endured limited healthprovision, were the victims of medical experiments, and had low lifeexpectancy apparently without complaint. If Smith's heroines are among thecountless unsung African Americans, male and female, who toiled toimprove the lot of .their people, the sense of powerlessness and silentsuffering which runs through African American history, punctuated onlyoccasionally by rebellion, protest, or individual triumph remains one of thecommon elements of these disparate works.

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