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‘A soil manured with black
blood from two hundred years of oppression and exploitation until it
sprang with an incredible paradox of peaceful greenery and crimson
flowers and sugar cane sapling size and three times the height of
man... valuable pound for pound… as if nature held a balance
and kept a book and offered a recompense for the torn limbs and
outraged hearts…’
-William Faulkner, Absalom,
Absalom!
Colonel
Thomas Sutpen likens “it” to an erupting volcano. Sitting
atop his horse, hearing “the air trembling and throb at night
with the drums and the chanting…” It was “the
heart of the earth itself he heard,” calling forth from him an
acknowledgment of its depths soaked in “violence,”
“injustice,” and “black blood.” Maybe not
outright compassion. Or empathy, even. Just an acknowledgment that
the spilling of blood and the indifference toward suffering is an
abomination, a crime against the very Earth that gave birth to all
life on the planet.
And
yet, “apprenticing” in Saint-Dominique, overseeing the
earth and the laboring human beings beneath him as he rode atop his
horse, the future slaveholder oscillates between anger and fear.
Years later, to a fellow neighbor and Civil War veteran in
Mississippi, General Compson, Supten admits to feeling this
“incredible paradox” rising from the earth, too. But what
could it mean? What role could it possibly have in his
life?
Riding
across the plantation owned by his mentor and boss, Sutpen concludes
that this “incredible paradox” was originating from
within him - not the earth itself! For what could the trembling
and throbbing of air and
earth at night refer to, if not to him, and him alone? Whatever was
“boiling and readying to rise up violently underneath him”
spoke to his dreams! Didn’t he, Sutpen, find himself suddenly
“riding peacefully” - despite the distance drumbeats
beneath his feet?
He,
Sutpen, had discovered a “design”! Was it not a
caricature of his dream? His own rising volcano of innocence?
“I was quite calm, quite calm,” he told Gen. Compson,
while he listened to the earth speak to him of a “man’s”
destiny, of his “destiny.” And then the “design”
unfolded before him. a glorious “design” in which he was
at the center of a grand enterprise, of great extravagance. Out
enterprising all others!
To
see it through, he explains to the general, he would need to acquire
“money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family - incidentally
of course, a wife.”
And
why not? Sutpen recalls for the general how he came to discover his
innocence while learning about the difference not only between white
and Black men, but also “between white men and white men.”
Even before he arrived in Saint-Dominique, something nestled within
him, angered him, and filled him with hate. He remembers running to
escape it but to no avail. It took hold of him, at the front door of
the big house, the moment a “n----r” told him, the son of
a poor tenant farmer, but white
nonetheless, to go to the back door! To
the back door! Go!
The
“incredible paradox” must have been there in Virginia.
Had to have been since he realized, in retrospect, that it wasn’t
the “nigger anymore than it had been the nigger that his father
had helped to whip that night. ”
At
that moment, ready to relay his father’s message to the Black
face, he hears, instead of words, an “explosion. ” Before
the door closes in his face,”something in him escaped.”
Something
in him escaped.
In
the novel, Absalom,
Absalom!, William
Faulkner’s fictive Col. Thomas Sutpen has a dream…
My
father was a cotton picker in Arkansas. When exactly, I don’t
know. For how long, a month, a year? I don’t know. I don’t
know if he had a dream. He would have picked cotton before I was born
in the early 1950s. His story of picking cotton told by an older
sister. And why not? Memory of those days wasn’t to be shared
with future generations who imagine the humanity surrounded by the
whiteness of an American kingdom while listening to the down beat of
drums and the whistle of trains passing on their way north…
The
Cotton Kingdom begins with a dream - but not my father’s dream.
Thomas
Jefferson dreams of populating the earth with yeoman farmers, writes
historian, Walter Johnson, in River
of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom.
His dream for America begins in a vision of a nation secured and
cultivated by yeoman farmers. “These yeoman farmers would be
self-sufficient, equal, and independent - masters of their own
destiny.” Their hard work and sacrifice “would give birth
to independence, maturity, freedom.” The philosopher visionary
president of the US, Jefferson was thinking of white
yeoman farmers and not the Black people working in his fields at
Monticello. Jefferson’s dream of a landscape populated by white
yeoman farmers would require land, money, wives. And enslaved Blacks.
That’s
the conundrum for a liberal-minded person like Jefferson – the
“incredible paradox” he writes about in works describing
potential of Virginia’s landscape to yield a life for his
ruling class while he has listened for years to feel the seismic
waves and the shifting of earth itself underneath his feet.
Jefferson
writes of an American soil producing “wheat, rye, barley, oats,
buck-wheat, broom corn, and Indian corn” while “we,”
he continues, cultivate melons, potatoes, ground nuts, and tobacco
(Notes on Virginia).
The “gardens”
produce figs, tomatoes, pomegranates, apples, pears, and cherries -
all as if the “we,” Americans, in their fields and
gardens,
are already white yeoman farmers instead of people, participating by
force in a dream and neither as yeoman farmers nor as gardeners but
as enslaved people.
In
1803, the news from Saint-Dominique is worse: the newly formed
governance there, now called by the former enslaved Blacks, Haiti,
managed to drive the last European slaveholder and French troops out
of country. Jefferson worries that in due time, the drumbeats may
well sound the loudest in the American colonies. Jefferson writes in
Notes of fearing “a
revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among
possible events.” A seismic shift?
It’s
no surprise that when Jefferson packs his bags to visit France and
negotiate for the purchase of the Louisiana territory in 1803, he has
Black people on his mind. The liberal dreamer, president of the
United States, Jefferson, wasn’t compelled to confer with the
Indigenous people who had served as guardians and cultivators of the
land for centuries. Jefferson has a dream, America has a dream, a
“design,” And the Indigenous were like the “mistake”
that “rendered it impossible” for them to be
“incorporated” in the American design - as free
human beings, subjects,
co-existing on the earth, enjoying the same liberties as white
Americans.
Jefferson
had the business of Empire to tend to in France.
In
River of Dreams, Johnson
notes that when Jefferson spoke or wrote about liberty, he had “in
mind a liberty of a very particular sort,” a liberty that
didn’t exclude the necessity of removing Indigenous people and
continuing to deny liberty to Black people.
In
subsequent years, the necessity of conquest and enslavement provides
an excuse for someone such as an Andrew Jackson whose life’s
mission was to be the agent by which the ideology of white supremacy
spread through the colonies and beyond. When Jackson comes along, he
spends the next 15 years, first as a general in the army, and then as
governor of Florida, and finally as president, “supervising the
ethnic cleansing and racial pacification of the southeastern United
States.”
While
Jackson executes his policy to remove Indigenous people, a new crop
of people are creating new opportunities - thanks to the recently
“cleared” land. Surveyors are paid by the mile to work
“their way across landscape, marking boundary lines and making
detailed notes about the land those boundaries contained.” And
the surveyors can hardly keep up with Jackson’s “ethnic
cleansing” campaign.
Beginning
in 1831 with the Choctaw, then in 1837 with the Creek, Seminole,
Chickasaw, and ending in 1838 with the removal of the Cherokee, made
to walk along what’s known as the “Trail of Tears,”
Jackson “added over 100 million acres to the public domain.”
This is still a beginning in a land by and for the people - except
when a people have designated themselves as the superior beings,
others may stay, if useful to the design, but others, still, must be
removed as worthless to the goal of American Empire. As Johnson
writes, “tens of thousands died in the process.”
But
who is counting the bodies? For those with the capital, all that
mattered was the purchase of more land, filled with more people,
“purchased” and worked to
death or to a condition
in which they were no longer of worth to slaveholders.
The
flow of capital puts the Mississippi Valley on the world’s map
as one of the richest economies of the first half of the nineteenth
century, Johnson writes. The “Cotton Kingdom” gave new
life to slavery in the United States.” In 1800, there were
100,000 or so enslaved Blacks living within borders of present day
Mississippi and Louisiana. In 1840, there were 250,000 and in 1860,
750,000. “The specter of Haiti” haunted the Mississippi
Valley, Johnson explains, sending whites into a buying spree. More
land and more laborers to work the land! More laborers, more land!
A
ship building industry springs up, and by the 1840s, the New
Orleans, so goes the
legend, is the first steamboat built to trade in cotton. More
steamboats follow, traveling to and from ports in New Orleans, New
York, and Liverpool. These steamboats are built and set out by
owners, individuals called “investors.” More investors
meant more boats, bigger boats, and more cargo clogging the ports as
financial opportunities depend on the efficiency of a well planned
out schedule. Trouble was brewing.
But
in the meantime, money had to move. And fast! Connecting the ports of
New Orleans to those in New York or in Liverpool was one thing, but
exchanging capital for bales of cotton was another matter. The
solution: paper!
Investors
turned to paper, to its production, which, in turn, would supply the
cotton industry with currency in the form of banknotes. Banknotes,
Johnson explains, were “printed markers of an amount of money
that was notionally deposited in the bank whose name was on their
face - the Merchant’s Bank of Philadelphia, the Farmer’s
Bank of Tennessee, the Citizen’s Bank of Louisiana.”
Banknotes created the need for expertise in all things pertaining to
financing the cotton trade.
Expansion
is dizzying! Surrounding America’s primary bread winning
industry – that “peculiar institution” - the
Mississippi Valley becomes a hub of commercial trade in cotton.
“Hundreds of thousands of bales of cotton and hogsheads, of
sugar would pay their price” and metropolitan markets
represented in the Atlantic world: Philadelphia, New York, Boston,
Havana, Marseilles, and Liverpool, reap profits such as the world has
never seen.
As
money flows, so does the flow of human languages across the Atlantic
ports, reflecting the reality of a global
enterprise. At the
various ports in the US, sightseers on a causal stroll would hear
French, Spanish, English, and sometimes German languages, spoken by
Blacks, mulattoes, “quartre
unes,” and whites.
On the market, standing chained on the auction boxes, were of course,
people - for sale. Boats on the levees carried cargoes full of
Africans to be auctioned at the markets. The world had come to trade
in the currency of cotton picked on fields by Black people - and
trade in the buying of the people themselves!
By
1850, writes Johnson, New Orleans” was the third-largest city
in the country (the largest in the South).” The business of
cotton was booming in so many ways; for it was a time of massive
economic growth for merchants, bankers, planters, steamboat builders,
engineers, pilots, city clerks, and accountants. The building of
hotels meant that there would be a need for entertainment, and
entertainment meant offering the capitalist class refined culture,
like that in European nations. So along the Mississippi River, the
ladies and gentlemen of the South and North could wine and dine, and
then attend theaters, ballrooms, operas, and musical concerts. Just
like the well-to-do in Paris or London.
The
ladies and gentlemen, even in their finery, could attend the slave
markets, too. There were big ones and small ones in the Mississippi
Valley. As Johnson explains, “at Donaldsonville, Clinton, and
East Baton Rouge in Louisiana; at Natchez, Vicksburg, and Jackson in
Mississippi; at every roadside tavern, country courthouse, and
crossroads across the lower South,” there are slave markets
where a slave or two could be purchased - like any other item on
sale. As Johnson adds, “promises made in the Mississippi Valley
were backed by the value of slaves and fulfilled in their labor. If
the dollar was the universal equivalent of the steamboat world, as
often as not its value turned out to be backed by flesh rather than
gold.”
There
were, nonetheless, “snags,” accidents, the trouble
waiting to happen: steamboats packed with merchandise, hopelessly
trapped nowhere near destination. Steamboat accidents required the
skills of insurance adjusters from insurance agencies specializing in
the cotton trade. Those citizens recording the largest investments
aboard a sunken steamboat would receive a different valuation
regarding loss than would a citizen less valued or not valued at all.
In other words, a return on a capitalist investment would be the
American way of protecting class interests.
Enslaved
Blacks, serving as personal assistants and errand “boys,”
lost limbs or were crushed hauling goods, scrubbing and scrapping the
decks of steamboats. Their “owners” were compensated. So,
too, if an enslaved Black decided to distance himself even farther
from the plantation and escape from the dock of a steamboat, then
citizens who are investors or slaveholders would be compensated for
their loss of property. And there would be lawyers and courtrooms
specializing in settling losses among those members of society who
were valued
- monetarily.
On
the other hand, free
Blacks had no monetary value.
The
accidents continued to increase financial losses for capitalists. As
Johnson explains, the explosions, “sinkings,”
“snaggings,” fires, collisions were “evidence of
the undertow of the steamboat era: risks known, but ignored; fears,
at the margins of hope. They were evidence of the violence that the
commercial boosters called history.” But the Cotton Kingdom
must go on!
Surveyors
were sent out to scout the land, locating places were tracks could be
nailed in place, making a pathway for railroad trains.
By
the 1850s, the railroads were tapping into the river trade bypassing
“New Orleans and carrying cotton directly eastward to markets.”
The
Mississippi Valley, Johnson writes, began falling off the world map.
But
it’s only a shift in the capitalists’ gears!
In
River of Dark Dreams,
Walter Johnson’s
discussion about cotton and empire and the buying and selling human
beings - my ancestors. It’s about those “hands…”
In
1811, the ports of New Orleans are filled with the business of white
men exchanging goods and cotton and Black men and women. Here and
there they are a visible mass, huddled over bills of sale. There,
too, are enslaved Blacks from Saint-Dominique, eager to exchange news
on the resistance, speaking in low voices with native Blacks, serving
as dock laborers and personal servants. The two groups, a sampling of
the Black Diaspora in the Western Hemisphere. Were they whispering
ideas about liberty?
Nonetheless,
Black humanity at the ports was not unnoticed. As a scrutinized
people, Blacks were observed by white Americans and they imagined
talk not of the business at hand but instead of insurrection. White
people “had been hearing rumors that an insurrection was being
planned among their slaves,” writes Johnson, and they began to
complain. How is it that Blacks, once of good nature and obedient,
were now “insolent and disobedient”? Look at them there
“engaged in secret conversation when they ought to have been
engaged in their business.”
Yet,
uprisings happened. One of the biggest and earliest, writes Johnson,
is led by an enslaved Black, Charles Deslondes. Alarmed, the planter
class as well as the white population in general, many of whom had
come to trust Black people in their homes, with their children,
determined to send a message to Black people considering the
possibility of freedom on American soil. On one day, writes Johnson,
“sixteen slaves and seven white men” were put to death
“without any pretense of a trial.” And for the first time
in its history, the US Army (along with volunteer militia) was
deployed against a slave revolt.
When
captured, Deslondes was executed on the battlefield. Others, captured
and hanged! For some, hanging wasn’t enough. Their heads were
severed from their bodies and “exposed at one of the lower
gates of the city.” That is, at the gates entering New Orleans.
Anyone passing the gates would look on those rotting heads, and, as
Johnson writes, would be reminded “of the inexorability of the
emergent order.” It won’t be the last time in the history
of the US that “national security and white supremacy were
synthesized into state policy and military violence.”
The
“new thing on the face of the earth, created in Rodney,
Mississippi, around 1820… was a hybrid… [a blend of]
Georgia and Siamese cotton,” planted in Mississippi from the
end of the eighteenth century, Johnson writes. In the ensuing
century, he continues, Mexican cotton was introduced to the region in
the nineteenth century. This hybrid was patented as “Petit Gulf
cotton,” and became, for merchants and “lucky planters”
trading in this breed of cotton, a lucrative source of income.
Pickability
guaranteed the quality
and value of a brand of cotton - and Petit Gulf was “pickable”!
“Immune to cotton rot,” Petit Gulf, Johnson explains,
“produced long, fine cotton fibers,” making it
exceptionally marketable. In turn, the planters looked to “hands”
that could make the dream come true.
Shape
“hands” and the world will demand the cotton called,
Petit Gulf!
With
Petit Gulf, nature, the planters believe, has already adjusted to the
“mechanical capabilities of the human hand.” All that’s
required now are the appropriate “hands” to pick the best
brand of cotton that produces the most wealth. Once a system
develops, by trial and error, the Mississippi Valley produces not
only the best brand of cotton in the Western Hemisphere but also a
narrative, the American
Cotton Planter, for
planters to reproduce success.
The
best laborers are those between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five
years old. Darker skinned is more preferable for field work than
lighter skinned Blacks. Lighter skinned Blacks and mulattoes are sent
to the “house” and trained as “house servants,
mechanics, body-servants, carriage-drivers, negro-drivers, or
overseers. “Among the darker skinned Blacks, care must be taken
to select the appropriate “hands.”
To
produce a good crop of cotton, the bales are “calculated”
per “hand.”
In
the chapter titled, “Dominion,” Johnson explains, “the
‘hand’ was the standard measure that slaveholders used
when calculating the rate of exchange between labor and land. Cotton
planters began the year by calculating ‘to the hand. ’ By
multiplying the number of hands times the number of acres each hand
could be expected - would be forced - to tend, they planned their
sowing.”
Therefore,
the appropriate shape of “hands” must be considered key
to the success of bales of Petit Gulf, and, in turn, the success of
the Cotton Kingdom.
Healthy
adult men and women, for example, were accounted as “full
hands”; however, suckling women were accounted “half
hands.” Those children in their first years in the fields were
accounted “quarter hands,” and the tiny ones were of no
value at all.
And
children? Children, writes Johnson, were raised at the “margins
of the cotton crop.” According to a memoir of Charles Ball,
mothers, while working in the fields, tended to babies they placed
along the side of the fence.” When the rest of us went to get
water, they [the mothers] would go give suck to their children.”
Young children would often have to be “tied to keep them from
crawling away.” Very young Black children, too, could be seen
alongside old enslaved Blacks and nursing mothers, as what was
labeled the “trash gang.”
In
the cotton fields, idleness wasn’t tolerated: “hands”
were expected to keep to the task before them. The training of human
beings to the cotton fields in the Mississippi Valley required that
each become as mindless as a cog on a piece of factory machinery. “In
effect,” Johnson explains, their “senses, their muscles,
and their minds were reeducated to suit their work.” Here in
Cotton Kingdom is the “serial conversion of human beings into
lineal holdings.” And as such, Black hands could be molded into
whatever the slaveholder required for the production of wealth. The
plantation becomes an organizational design of “labor and
nature,” where the nightmare in Jefferson’s dream (the
uprising of the enslaved) becomes the nightmare (the violence of
enslavement) in the dreams of freedom for Black people.
In
this foreign landscape, African and their descendants are subjected
to organized as well as arbitrary violence, for “behind closed
doors, in outbuildings, or in the woods at the margins of the fields,
the choreography of service, surveillance, and space defined a
landscape of sexual violence.”
Citing
passages from diaries of former enslaved Blacks, Johnson further
muddies the images of the good and the clean, the innocence of cotton
production in the Mississippi Valley with the utterly grotesque -
infecting every bale of cotton. In between the white fields of fabric
are, as Toni Morrison referenced, “repressed darkness”
concealed behind every bill of sale, every ledger entry, attributed,
ironically, to those Black bodies - and never the minds conceiving
the system of cruelty and brutality.
There
is the teenager, Henry Bibb, forced to fan the mistress of the
plantation –while “she slept.” A slaveholder nails
the penis of an enslaved man to his bedpost. Solomon Northrup
recalled a slaveholder who would come to the fields, making “clear
his ‘lewd intentions’ by ‘motioning and grimacing,’
he ‘beckoned a woman named Patsey to leave her work and come
over to him.” “Summoned to a barn to look for ‘nests,’
an enslaved woman named Mary finds the slaveholder’s son
demanding that she ‘bed’ among the ‘hay and submit
to his lustful passions.’”
The
worms an enslaved failed to catch, might end up being placed in his
or her mouth. An enslaved could be beaten with a bullwhip or
pitchfork, as often than not, “tools,” Johnson explains,
were turned into “weapons” used against Black people. As
Johnson writes, “the satisfaction that [whites] got from
violence - threatening, separating, torturing, degrading, raping -
depended on the fact that their victims were human beings capable of
registering slaveholding power in their pain, terror, grief,
submission, and even resistance.” What, then, is so paradoxical
about a history, that is, to paraphrase Macbeth, so deep in blood?
Jefferson
wrote of the impact of white children witnessing the cruelty and
brutality of their parents directed at Black people, men and women.
Jefferson writes, in Notes
on Virginia, “from
his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do.”
This madness of “innocence” is passed on from one
generation to the next. What is “stamped” on the minds of
these children if not, as Jefferson observed, an exercise in
“tyranny” on a daily bases?
The
historical imprint of white violence on Black bodies has
traditionally unified white America against a common foe. European
immigrants to the US had only to hitch their whiteness to the
“innocence” mythology as did many of the Founding Fathers
and slaveholders before them who considered their “innocence”
a “refinement,” to use Johnson’s term, reason for
setting whites apart from Blacks and animals. The staged reality
seemed to suggest as much. Anyone doubting the righteousness of the
planters in the Cotton Kingdom, need only look among the “domestic
animals” to find “enslaved human beings,” living
“specifically, with cattle and pigs”!
Images
such as these of American violence traveled far and wide - first
among the “hearts and minds” of whites in surrounding
communities. The violence inherent in the Cotton Kingdom not only
provided a source of wealth for planters, merchants, bankers,
insurance brokers, financiers, ship builders - the multitude that
came to depend upon the cotton industry for their livelihood. It also
became a cultural norm throughout the US.
Legend
has it that there once was a Kingdom of Cotton in America…
The
“mistakes” of the original design, that is, the presence
of free roaming,
landowning Indigenous
people, was corrected while Black people, reduced to “hands,”
struggled to rebel.
But
resistance never dies.
Read Part II
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