Philadelphia Archaeological Forum



Creating Mindful Heritage Narratives: Black Women in Slavery and Freedom

Elena Sesma

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Correspondence to:

Elena Sesma

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Department of Anthropology

215 Machmer Hall

240 Hicks Way

Amherst, MA 01003

(301)367-0182

esesma@anthro.umass.edu

Abstract

Attempts to correct the whitewashing of New England history and the amnesia of Northern slavery must be done in ways that responsibly account for the diversity of experiences throughout the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This transitional period from slavery to emancipation laid the foundations for how slavery is remembered and how race is understood, even to this day. Reading through the historical and archaeological records allows a more nuanced understanding of the mechanisms by which captive and free Blacks were marginalized from New England’s landscape and historical memory through gendered and racialized processes of erasure. This paper looks at the experiences of three women from early rural Massachusetts through a lens of black feminist theory with the goal of creating mindful narratives of what it meant to be Black in New England at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Keywords: slavery, black feminist archaeology, New England, heritage, historical narratives, African diaspora

To those of us who have been in the habit of thinking of negro slavery as an exclusively Southern institution, this title may have in it an element of surprise, if not of offence. I know of no reason, however, why we should not face the facts relating to it, found in the history of our colonies, in church and town records, and old family manuscripts. There can be no dispute that for more than a hundred years before the foot of a slave was allowed to pollute the soil of Georgia, men, women and children were bought and sold, and held, and worked, by the leading dignitaries of the Puritanic Colony of Massachusetts Bay; and on the death of their owners were inventoried in their estates as property, together with horses, hogs, cows and other animals. (Sheldon 1896:888)

So begins historian George Sheldon’s discussion of “Negro Slavery in Old Deerfield,” in which he takes account of that ‘peculiar institution’ so often associated solely with the American South. The history of slavery and racial discrimination in the North is easy to see in the historical and material record of the past, but much of this has been lost or misinterpreted at heritage sites and in history books. In recent years, historians and archaeologists alike have made significant efforts to uncover and correct the history of race and Northern slavery. Not all historical narratives, however, are created equally.

This paper examines three women of African descent; all of whom lived through a period of captivity in New England, witnessed the American Revolution and experienced the unique conditions of Northern emancipation. Two we know through popular memory and legend and another we know additionally through archaeology (Sheldon 1896; Bullen and Bullen 1945; Baker 1978). Historians, museums and anthropologists have said many things about each of these women in the past two centuries based on information from archaeological investigations, historical research and even fond recollection (Romer 2009; Gerzina 2008; Baker 1980; Battle-Baptiste 2011).

Black feminist theory emerged out of decades of critique of first and second wave feminism that focused predominantly on the experiences of middle-class white women in the contemporary period and in historical interpretations of women in the past (Combahee River Collective 1977; Davis 1981; hooks 1981; Crenshaw 1989; Collins 2000). Patricia Hill Collin’s seminal work, Black Feminist Thought provides a historical analysis of the way black women appear in popular culture throughout American history. These “controlling images” shape social, economic and political opinions of the most private aspects of black women’s lives, thus making the private always public and always political. The ways that these three women have been portrayed by historians, archaeologists and museums in the intervening two centuries since their deaths carry inadvertent messages about what it means to be a black woman in New England history. This paper will take a look at the ways images of these three women and others like them help to construct a narrative of Black women’s experiences at this period of transition from slavery to freedom.

Slavery in New England

In her close study of gradual emancipation laws in New England, Joanne Pope Melish (1998) discusses the degree to which slavery was integrated into nearly every aspect of the northern economy and the northern household. Ownership of captive laborers was not necessarily a sign of wealth or elite status. Rather, the labor of captive Africans was “crucially important in performing the work that a household head would have performed in a purely subsistence, or pre-market, economy,” thus allowing slave owners to participate more fully in the growing economy negotiated outside of the house (Melish 1998:18). Small towns in rural New England were able to run in large part due to the incorporation of slave labor into the house “as so-called family members” (Melish 1998:27; Pierson 1988:25). The notion that “family slavery” was kinder than the plantation system of the south would persist for centuries. The paternalistic system of northern slavery, however, followed a pattern of a patriarchal family common amongst English Protestant settlers in New England where both white and black children were hired out as laborers to neighbors across the colonial community (Pierson 1988:26).

In contrast to concentrated populations of captive Africans on southern plantations, Northern slavery clustered in coastal urban areas where individuals might labor within specialized trades, and in small pockets across rural Massachusetts, where captive laborers were often responsible for general household labor or farming (Pierson 1988; Melish 1998; Romer 2009). Low levels of importation of human cargo throughout the early eighteenth century coupled with the diverse origins of the captive population created a very heterogeneous captive population throughout the region (Pierson 1988). The creation of racial groups in early America was necessarily defined by one racial group’s most basic phenotypic differences from another; in this case, by being white or non-white (Hutchins 2013:71; Paynter 2001; Bell 2005).

Massachusetts slavery came to an official end in1783, following several court cases in which captive African men and women sued their owners, calling into question the legality of the practice of slavery at large. Legal emancipation, however, was not quickly followed by an end to the social relations and division of labor established under slavery (Hutchins 2013:203; Melish 1998:103).

The topic of slavery and race in New England is not necessarily new to archaeologists and historians, thanks in large part to critiques from within both fields in the past two decades (Bullen and Bullen 1945; Baker 1980; Paynter 1990; Fitts 1995; Deetz 1996; Chan 2007; Woodruff et al. 2007). However, within the field of African Diaspora archaeology, the Northeast is noticeably underrepresented in comparison to the number of studies on southern slavery and post-emancipation sites. This is certainly not for a lack of African Americans in the northeast in either the recent or distant past, a fact made very clear through work at the African Burial Ground in the 1990s (La Roche and Blakey 1997; Perry et al 2009). Rather, it is a reflection of the narratives of the Northeast’s role in slavery and abolition. As early as 1895, George Sheldon would caution against the historical amnesia that would repaint New England as a seat of abolition rather than the site of some of America’s earliest cases of slavery.

Early archaeological studies in the Northeast often conflated difference across time period and geography by using models of Southern slavery. This might be most evident in James Deetz’s early study of Parting Ways in Plymouth, MA. Deetz compared the archaeology of the New England site to architectural footprints of slave dwellings in the Chesapeake and the Carolinas, and faunal and ceramic assemblages from “excavations of slave quarters from Virginia to Georgia” (Deetz 1996:231). At the time, African American archaeology was growing significantly in the Mid-Atlantic and in the southern United States, but these regions were not comparable geographically or culturally to eighteenth and nineteenth century New England. More recent studies across the Northeast have attempted to clarify the unique experiences of African descent communities without these ill suited comparisons (Paynter 1990; Woodruff et al 2007; Battle-Baptiste 2011; Hutchins 2013; Armstrong 2011).

In her 2013 dissertation, Karen Hutchins revisited the original 1970s Deetz excavations of Parting Ways to interrogate the ways in which the experiences of freedom following emancipation in rural New England were still very much determined by racialization defined under slavery in the eighteenth century. By studying the documentary record, architectural data and several categories of material culture, Hutchins determined that while the four African American families residing at Parting Ways were legally free, they were forced to operate under a racial system that classified them as inherently docile and incapable of fending for themselves in the new state of freedom in which they found themselves. The town attempted to hold these families to these standards under a paternalistic system of control and supposed care. Hutchins, however, demonstrates through her analysis of household materials and artifacts of daily life, “the role individual agency played in the construction of their lives in freedom,” and that “the creation of family, home, and community at Parting Ways can be argued to be the real process through which the residents realized emancipation” (Hutchins 2013:239).

Emancipation and Racial Formation

The slow and steady decline of slavery throughout the Northeastern states through gradual emancipation laws created a confusing grey area for previously enslaved individuals, who suddenly found themselves in a new category of “free” but with very little change in their roles in society (Melish 1998:88; Hutchins 2013:84-85). According to Melish, “slavery had provided a fixed role, status, place, and identity in the social structure for persons of color: within the white household and, by that means, in the polity,” (Melish 1998:88) meaning that newly freed people of color could be imagined “only with reference to [their] former enslaved status” (Melish 1998:88). It was the persistence of old forms of race-based differentiation of labor, rights and citizenship that allowed a paternalistic system of oversight to continue even after emancipation. With the legal framework for slavery struck down, the class of former slaveholders and those who benefited from slave labor continued to exert social control over a new class of free African Americans (Melish 1998; Hutchins 2013). White community leaders were free to interfere in the lives of people deemed vulnerable or incapable of supporting themselves or repaying debts owed to the town. Through a system of “guardianship” and veteran’s pension management, town leaders provided the [black] residents at Parting Ways with economic benefits while reclaiming control over their finances, infantilizing them by treating them as dependents, and literally calling them imbeciles” (Hutchins 2013:225). New England towns had a long history of offering assistance to residents, given they met certain requirements (Hutchins 2013:100). Incorporating former captive populations into this system maintained racialized assumptions about the inability of individuals and families to support themselves, and in doing so, New England town leaders helped to create one of the earliest stigmatized images of the American black family as inferior and indebted to a benevolent welfare society (Collins 2000:96).

Melish discusses the “extensive machinery of surveillance and interrogation” used by town bodies to monitor the presence, employment, enumeration and arrival and departures of free Blacks from towns across New England (1998:110). This system of paternalistic control cast former slaves and now free individuals in a comfortable, familiar, and non-threatening manner. In continuing these old ways of thinking, “whites evaded the emerging necessity of creating a new set of relations with free people of color and, instead, transferred to them their old assumptions about slaves as publicly available commodities in permanent need of direction and control” (Melish 1998:107). These characterizations kept newly freed blacks subjugated and under the heel of the white community in a way that unquestioningly maintained the status quo.

Michael Omi and Howard Winant define racial formation as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” through 1) “historically situated projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized” and 2) “the evolution of hegemony, the way in which society is organized and ruled” (Omi and Winant 1994:55-56). Race, they conclude, “is a matter of both social structure and cultural representation” (1994:56). Racial ideologies of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were not necessarily newly emerging. On the contrary, these ideas were historically and culturally constructed and began to shape and direct racial thinking for centuries to come.

Laurie Wilkie’s (2003) study of the Lucrecia Perryman site of Mobile, Alabama provides another example of the experiences of black families at the transition from slavery to freedom in the South. Emancipation in Alabama and other southern states occurred over seventy years after Massachusetts. The system of slavery in these southern regions was drastically different from that which existed in most of the northeastern states. Despite these differences, Wilkie offers several valuable ways of thinking about this social and political transition in both the South and North.

Wilkie’s study of the Perryman family recognizes that that emancipation brought the ability for individuals to create a family and a community of free people of color on their own terms (Wilkie 2003). Moving from captivity to freedom allowed black families and black women in particular “a right to the private realm of domesticity—and one where they aren’t laboring in somebody else’s domestic space” (Wilkie 2003:45). Even while the new legal status as free allowed many black women a chance to create a homespace for themselves and their families in ways not open to them under slavery, many black women still had to face very difficult decisions to seek employment outside of the home- sometimes in domestic service for the same people who once owned them. Lucrecia Perryman’s work as a midwife in Mobile, Alabama is just one example of the kind of work many newly freed black women pursued while simultaneously raising families of their own. Lucrecia and her contemporaries, no matter where or how they were employed, were “part of the black feminist movements that sought to redefine views of black motherhood that continued to shape women’s experiences in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (Wilkie 2003:46).

This renegotiation of black women’s roles and black womanhood was a pushback against gendered and racialized discourses of slave women in the past and against the shifting discourse on newly freed women who, like their male counterparts, were just as vulnerable to the ascription of a “slavelike status” that carried over into freedom (Melish 1998:107; Hutchins 2013). Like in Plymouth, ideas about race that originated under slavery lasted well beyond the point of emancipation. The post-emancipation system of race-based discrimination was not new, but rather, was dependent on a racial discourse that had been naturalized over the course of nearly two centuries. Presuming that difference was inherently race-based, therefore, allowed racism and stereotypes of black men and women to persist for centuries to come.

For black women, these stereotypes helped establish what black feminist theorists have termed “controlling images.” Patricia Hill Collins defines a “controlling image” as one that determines the ways in which black women can and have been seen in popular American imagination for centuries. Controlling images are “designed to make racism, sexism, poverty and other forms of social injustice appear to be natural, normal and inevitable parts of everyday life” (2000:77). Following emancipation in both the North and the South, controlling images were used to continue the subjugation of black women. They explained the perceived differences and assumed inferiorities of this entire group of people, and justified the continued treatment of black women as a threat to white women’s domesticity, white men’s decency, and black men’s masculinity.

The following is a discussion of three particular black women in Massachusetts, all of whom spent most of their lives in rural New England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These women experienced life under slavery, witnessed the transition to freedom, and helped to shape their own experiences as well as the narrative of black women of this period for centuries to come.

Lucy Terry Prince, Deerfield, MA

Lucy Terry Prince’s life comes to us through the words of two of Deerfield’s most influential and memorable town historians. Pliny Arms and George Sheldon both wrote their respective histories of Deerfield in the nineteenth century, nearly 75 and 100 years after Lucy and her family had left the town, meaning that a considerable amount of the information about the Princes came from popular legend and oral history (Arms 1840; Sheldon 1896). The fact that the Prince family survived in popular memory and town history for so long is a testament to the substantial role that this particular free family of color may have played in the life and story of Deerfield.

In 2008, Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina published Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Extraordinary Eighteenth-Century Family Moved Out of Slavery and into Legend. Gerzina had compiled nearly a decade of research from archives across Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, town histories from every small New England town where the Princes once lived and interviews with other historians working on African American history in the region (Gerzina 2008). Gerzina’s work provides the most extensive account of the Prince family to date and the most comprehensive picture of the Princes within the context of New England and its changing racial and socio-economic landscape.

Lucy Terry Prince, according to town historian George Sheldon, was “stolen from Africa” at a young age and brought to Rhode Island as early as 1730 (Sheldon 2004[1895]). She first appears in the records of Deerfield, Massachusetts in 1735, when she and another captive African by the name of Cesar were baptized in the town church. Both were owned by Ebenezer Wells of Deerfield. In 1756, Lucy married Abijah Prince, a free black man from Northfield, Massachusetts. Prince, nearly twenty years Lucy’s senior, had spent several years moving between various towns in the Connecticut River Valley for work. The Princes set up house at the east end of the Wells homelot, though the precise location of this site is still unknown (Arms 1840; Sheldon 1896:899; Gerzina 2008:94). Lucy gave birth to six children in the following twelve years, all of whom (Cesar, Duroxa, Drusilla, Festus, Tatnai, and Abijah) were registered in the town of Deerfield as free people of color. Neither Lucy Terry Prince, nor Cesar were listed in the property of Ebenezer Wells at the time of his death in 1758, suggesting that despite the close living arrangement, Lucy Terry Prince was a free woman. No records exist that might indicate whether Abijah purchased his wife’s freedom or if the Wells family freed her and Cesar independently.

By the 1760s, residents of western New England towns were engaged in land speculation across New York, Vermont and New Hampshire and the Princes were no exception. Abijah had procured claims to property in both Guilford and Sunderland, Vermont when both towns were established, so long as land was being continuously cleared and used. Gerzina’s examination of the Deerfield account books reveals that Abijah was making many purchases of building and domestic supplies, most likely to be taken north to Guilford, a new town that lacked the supplies and stores that established towns like Deerfield maintained. Both Lucy and Abijah appeared frequently in town records prior to the 1760s, making purchases or doing work such as spinning flax for other townspeople or ferrying across the Deerfield River, but soon their presence in the archival record began to decrease. By 1775, the Prince family had relocated to Guilford, Vermont.

Thanks to their land ownership and several unfortunate and sometimes destructive conflicts with neighbors, the Princes make frequent appearances in historical and legal documents after moving to Vermont. However, it is also at this point that the story of the Princes begin to slip further into obscurity, lines blurred by popular memory and unconfirmed stories. We know that Lucy, Abijah and their children all appeared in several court records for suits on damages inflicted on person and property in Guilford. Reading between the lines of the rare well-preserved pages of legal documents from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Gerzina tried to piece together the reasons for so many of the disputes: “We still couldn’t prove that race was the reason for the difficulties with [their neighbors] but slowly we began to eliminate other possibilities” (Gerzina 2008:148).

The likelihood of racial discrimination in the largely white landscape of a post-Revolutionary but still pre-emancipation New England makes sense of one of Lucy’s most legendary moments, in which one of the Guilford lawsuits “reached the Supreme Court of the United States, where, we may suppose, Col. Bronson met a Waterloo defeat, and Luce Bijah gained a national reputation” (Sheldon 2004). Gerzina, however, found no record of any case reaching the Supreme Court, though a series of suits between the Princes and Guilford neighbor John Noyes did reach the Vermont state court, which ultimately sided with the Princes time and again (Gerzina 2008:160). The second case that might’ve led to the Supreme Court story occurred in Sunderland, after the Princes had relocated following Abijah’s death. The original parcel of land belonging to Abijah had been sold to another man through some unfortunately typical manipulation by land speculators in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The Princes won this case too, and though they could not reclaim the land, they were awarded $200 and eventually a parcel of land to call their own (Gerzina 2008:184). The Princes were not the only captive or free people to turn to the courts in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Massachusetts slavery came to an end in 1783 as a result of several suits for freedom by individuals across the new state, a fact that Timothy Breen suggests was the result of changing public opinion towards the institution of slavery in the state (Breen 1997). While the courts were willing to alter the legal standing of once captive people in Massachusetts, many individuals across New England- especially those from slave-holding states like Connecticut, where Noyes was originally from- were not as quick to adjust (Gerzina 2008).

Abijah passed away in the final decade of the eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century, Lucy had lost two grandchildren at very young ages and one daughter-in-law had left the family. Two more of Lucy’s children died in 1820. Conflicts with neighbors continued in Sunderland while the family struggled to make ends meet. The remaining three Prince children and grandchildren receive little treatment in Gerzina’s book, most likely because of a slowly decreasing paper trail. Duroxa, Lucy’s eldest daughter who went “insane” in 1773 suddenly emerged with the “clear exercise of all the faculties of her mind” in 1826, several weeks before she too died (Gerzina 2008:130; Vermont Gazette, September 12, 1826 in Gerzina 2008:197). Her son Caesar died in 1836, leaving the Prince’s last child, Drusilla living alone though greatly respected by the community in Sunderland until her death in 1854 (Gerzina 2008:199).

The lives of the Prince family and of Lucy Terry Prince in particular are remarkable. It is at times surprising to think about the wealth of knowledge we can tease from the written record about these individuals- captive and then freed African Americans who lived two and a half centuries ago in what was once the New England frontier. While any of the above mentioned stories could be enough to bring Lucy’s story out of obscurity, what she is most remembered for in Deerfield history is her poem “The Bars Fight,” which recounts the story of a 1746 skirmish outside of Deerfield between English settlers and a group of French and indigenous raiders that left five Deerfield men and two natives dead, and one woman severely injured from a head wound (Arms 1840; Gerzina 2008:78). The earliest published version of the poem appeared in the Springfield Republican in October of 1854 (Gerzina 2008:199), though both Pliny Arms and George Sheldon suggest that this rendition was well known, as were Lucy’s poetic tendencies which were remarked upon in her obituary in 1821 and by several neighbors and friends that knew her while she lived (Field 1879). Sheldon suggests that Lucy’s poetry and story-telling skills were popular amongst Deerfield residents, especially the children who would gather at the house beside ‘Bijah’s Brook’ to hear her stories (Sheldon 1896:899).

Lucy Terry Prince is an important piece of historical interpretation in the town of Deerfield today because of her unique story and her contribution to Deerfield’s heritage as an early colonial frontier town. In his analysis of the historical narratives visible in Deerfield, Robert Paynter identifies the two most influential and common as Deerfield the Bloody and Deerfield the Beautiful (Paynter 2002:88). The former narrative focuses on the violent past of the English frontier village as it sought to establish itself, while the trope of Deerfield the Beautiful fosters the image of a quaint New England village frozen in time, one that represents the idyllic and peaceful past of an era that never quite existed in reality (Paynter 2002). Despite the complexity of Lucy and her family’s story, one of her most famous roles in Deerfield’s history plays directly into maintaining a piece of Deerfield the Bloody, even while her existence in the town is a challenge to the notion that Deerfield was ever a peaceful town free of violence and slavery.

Jenny Cole, Deerfield, MA

Amongst Deerfield’s captive African population was another woman, named Jenny Cole, also referred to as Jinny Cole or Jin in Sheldon’s history (Sheldon 1896:896). Unlike the story of the Prince family, George Sheldon speaks from personal memory in telling the story of Jenny and her son, Cato, who was still living when Sheldon was a child. For the most part, however, Jenny’s story was preserved through oral history and in her occasional mention in the accounts and town records of Deerfield. Sheldon begins his account of Jenny’s life as follows:

By the tale she always told, she was the daughter of a king in Congo, and when about twelve years old, she was one day playing with other children about a well, when they were pounced upon by a gang of white villains, and the whole party were seized and hurried on board a slave ship; ‘and’ said Jin, ‘we nebber see our mudders any more.’“ (Sheldon 1896:896)

Following her capture in Africa, Jenny next appears for sale in Boston, and arrives in Deerfield three or four years later “with a baby in her arms” (Sheldon 1896:896). Deerfield’s Reverend Jonathan Ashley owned both Jenny and her son, Cato (Sheldon 1896).

Robert Romer, a retired physics professor from Amherst College, realized there was a surprising lack of information on Jenny while working as a docent in Historic Deerfield, Inc.’s Ashley house museum. Romer’s discovery pushed him to further investigate Deerfield’s town archives in search of more information on the town’s captive and free Black population (Romer, personal communication). His research uncovered only three occasions in which Jenny appears in town records. The first is in the account books of Zadock Hawks who repaired Jenny’s shoes on multiple occasions (along with those of Cato and Ashley’s third captive African, Titus). Secondly, in Reverend Ashley’s will, he left “[his] Riding Chair, [his] Grey Mare, two Cows & ten Sheep, also [his] Easy Chair, all the Silver Utensils which She brought with her at our Marriage, my Negro Servant Jenny- and also one half of all [his] Household Furniture to be to [his] said Wife to her Use & Behoof forever...” (Hampshire County Register of Probate in Romer 2009: 84-85). Finally, the last record of Jenny in Deerfield comes with her death in 1808 (Romer 2009:84-86). Though Cato was baptized in Deerfield in 1739, Jenny was not- perhaps because she had been baptized before her arrival in Deerfield or because she never accepted the Christian faith (Romer 2009; Gerzina 2008).

Reverend Jonathan Ashley died in 1780, a few years before slavery began its gradual demise in the Massachusetts courts. Jenny, however, continued to work for the late Reverend’s wife, Mrs. Dorothy Ashley and “her son, Dr. Elihu Ashley, and assisted in bringing up his family of children” (Sheldon 1896:897, original emphasis). This later portion of Jenny’s life is represented as a far kinder part of her life, though it is unclear if or when she was ever legally freed despite staying in the service of Mrs. Ashley for 28 years after Jonathan Ashley’s death. Sheldon recounts a perfect picture of New England race relations, sharing that “just a few days before the tragic death of Jin, a neighbor found these two old cronies sitting together busily engaged in sewing, and chatting merrily over their work like children making dresses for their dolls” (Sheldon 1896:897). Mrs. Dorothy Ashley survived only a few weeks beyond Jenny.

Despite the seemingly happy relationship- at least between Jenny and Mrs. Ashley- one of the most memorable aspects of her life and that of her son Cato was their determination to return to Africa either before or after death:

She could not forget her early life, its sunny days, her royal blood, and her cruel wrongs. And she fully expected at death, or before, to be transported back to Guinea; and all her long life she was gathering, as treasures to take back to her motherland, all kinds of odds and ends, colored rags, bits of finery, peculiar shaped stones, shells, buttons, beads, anything she could string. (Sheldon 1896:897, original emphasis)

Sheldon himself remembers seeing Cato collect many of the same “trinkets” as his mother, “his most valued possessions being brass or copper buttons” often called “Cato’s money” even after his death (Sheldon 1896:897).

Much of Jenny’s story is left to speculation but there are several things that can be inferred based on an understanding of her situation. Jenny arrived in Deerfield in 1739 with her own young child. In that same year, the Ashleys had the first of six children (the remaining five to survive infancy would born over the course of the next 18 years) (Sheldon Geneaologies 1896:48; Romer 2009:87). Jenny- the only female captive laborer in the house, with a child of her own and several white children running through the house- would have been doing an enormous amount of motherwork for everyone in the house. No matter how sympathetic New Englanders may have been to the human property they kept in bondage, slavery completely disrupted mothering for captive Africans throughout the American colonies and states. What must it have been like to raise one child under the conditions of slavery while also taking care of several children not your own who would never know the experience of slavery?

Furthermore in the early 1770s a rumor began spreading through town that Reverend Ashley had castrated Cato (Romer 2009; Gerzina 2008). No evidence conclusively proves that this horrible act did in fact occur and there is a chance that the rumor was an attempt to slander Ashley’s name because of his Tory politics in the years leading up to the American Revolution (Romer 2009:95-96). Just previous to the spread of this rumor, another case had gone to court in Greenfield, only four miles north, in which the minister’s daughter and one of the minister’s captive Africans were brought to court “on the charge of fornication” (Romer 2009: 97). At the time, there were two teenage girls in the Ashley home, and the sale of Ashley’s third slave Titus to Connecticut around this same time may have allowed the townspeople of Deerfield to draw their own conclusions (Romer 2009). Regardless of the truth of the matter, and “whether or not anyone thought to ask or examine Cato himself,” as Gerzina questions (Gerzina 2008:129), there was a distinct ease with which black bodies were used to serve the ends of the white population- to protect family or to slander the name of a disliked neighbor. What must it have been like for Jenny to know that her son and his body was subject to such discussion and policing but not have the power to do anything about it?

In contrast to Lucy Terry Prince, the information that historians and archaeologists have been able to glean about Jenny Cole is significantly less. And yet, her story is another that has lasted in popular memory and served as inspiration for Romer’s project of bringing forth the captive history of Deerfield into public interpretation. Though it is difficult to discover the conditions of Jenny’s life based on materials that directly reference her life, it is easier to puzzle over the context in which she lived. However, as noted above, this leaves a number of unanswered questions about her experience and her identity as a captive African woman, a mother, and eventually a free woman.

Lucy Foster, Andover, MA

Lucy Foster was born in Boston in 1767, and by 1771, was a part of the Foster household in Andover, Massachusetts, which was made up of Job and Hannah Foster and their nine year old son, Joseph (Battle-Baptiste 2011:123-4). The historical record is very slim in regards to Lucy’s life as a young captive African woman in the Foster household. Records do provide information about the changing Foster family, however, which welcomed their second child into the home in 1775. The next significant change we see in the Foster home comes in 1782, when Job dies of smallpox- around the same time that slavery was coming to a legal end in the Massachusetts courts. Whether by choice or by force, Lucy remained in the service of Hannah Foster even after Hannah remarried Philemon Chandler in 1789 (Battle-Baptiste 2011). In 1791, Lucy was warned out of Andover, though there is no evidence to conclusively say whether or not she did in fact leave town or if she continued to lay low, thus evading the few possible chances to make it into the historical record over the following two years when she next appears. A month after reappearing in the South Parish Congregational Church, giving a “Profession of Faith,” Lucy’s son Peter is baptized (South Parish Congregational Church in Battle Baptiste 2011). It is unknown how old Lucy’s son was at the time, or who his father was, leaving many unanswered questions and plenty of opportunity for guesswork and assumptions about Lucy’s relationships in the two years in which she may have been gone from Andover.

After Chandler’s death in 1798, Hannah Foster Chandler removed to the Foster property. With Hannah’s death in 1812, we find one of the most conclusive pieces of information about Lucy Foster, who inherited one acre of the Foster land and a cow (Battle-Baptiste 2011). Lucy Foster’s house was completed in 1815 (Baker 1978) and records indicate that she received nearly yearly aid from the town of Andover until her death in 1845, though “she is never asked to leave her house and relocate to an alms house” (Battle-Baptiste 2011:128). The association between town aid and poverty tainted interpretations of the site during early archaeological studies and altered the perception of Lucy Foster and many others like her.

Ripley and Adelaide Bullen first excavated “Black Lucy’s Garden” in the 1940s (Bullen and Bullen 1945). It was one of the earliest excavations of an African American site in New England- several decades before Deetz began his work at Partying Ways in Plymouth, MA. In the conclusion of their archaeological report, the Bullens describe Lucy’s life as follows:

While we know about most of the landmarks in Lucy’s life, something about the clothes she wore and the food she ate, we can only surmise about her as an individual. She seems to have been a worthy, respected, and faithful person with a flair for collecting pottery. The fact that she had a child by Job Foster in 1771 cannot be held against her alone. She was 14 and a slave at the time while Job was 45. Certainly Hannah Foster did not hold it against her. While we cannot tell what motivated people to help build her cottage, they would not have done so if she was not accepted as a respectable member of the community. (Bullen and Bullen 1945:28)

The Bullens’ statement about Lucy’s position within the Foster household was built upon very superficial and un-complicated understandings of what it meant to be a black female captive in eighteenth century New England. The simplification of Lucy’s racialized and gendered role within the household simultaneously denies her agency with also assigning blame to her for something that was assumed to be widespread practice of miscegenation.

In 1978, Vernon Baker reexamined the site’s material culture recovered from the original excavation. This time, the Foster site was interpreted as the home of an impoverished black woman based on existing models of plantation and free African American archaeology in the nineteenth-century south- an ill-suited comparison for the eighteenth century rural New England homestead (Baker 1978; Battle-Baptiste 2011; Hutchins 2013). Whitney Battle-Baptiste, who reanalyzed both previous studies, points out that the material assemblage recovered from Lucy Foster’s homesite indicates that Foster participated in many of the economies that other free African women were also engaged in, including “service jobs, such as sewing, taking in laundry, keeping house, raising young children, cooking or other domestic duties” at places outside of the home (Battle-Baptiste 2011:128). Likewise, despite being painted as an impoverished African American woman, the ceramic assemblage recovered from her site reveals a wide variety of items in large numbers, possibly indicative of entertaining (Battle-Baptiste, personal communication). Rather than a collection representing poverty inherent in her race and social position, Battle-Baptiste envisions “a woman living independently (with help from time to time), well respected, working within a system that gave her freedom, but maintained a level of restriction that she had to maneuver throughout her adult life” (Battle-Baptiste 2011:130).

Battle-Baptiste’s discussion of the site comes as a critique of some of the original conclusions about race, class and gender from these earliest archaeological analyses. By reexamining the site through a black feminist framework, Battle-Baptiste suggests that the story of Lucy Foster “addressed the invisibility of Black women, their daily lives, their labor, and their overall presence” and that thinking about this site might allow a more “critical analysis of what life meant for free people of color in Northeastern states like Massachusetts” (Battle-Baptiste 2011:118). Additionally, reintegrating Lucy Foster into the context of an active and diverse Andover community complicates the Bullens’s mid-twentieth century readings of what was in fact a wide community network of first captive, and then free blacks in this region of New England (Martin, unpublished/unsure how to cite??).

In contrast to the examples of Lucy Terry Prince and Jenny Cole, whose stories reside in archival materials and museum interpretation, Lucy Foster’s homesite has been studied numerous times by archaeologists throughout the past sixty years, each time with a slightly different take on her experience as a free Black woman in early nineteenth century Massachusetts. Early interpretations of the site generalized all African American experiences despite differences in time, geography, and free status. The conflation of race, class, and gender in these analyses were products of the times in which these earlier historical and archaeological narratives had been constructed. Despite the multiple and increasingly more complex analyses of Foster’s life, there are still unanswered questions about her experience as a free woman in rural Andover at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Black Feminist Theory and the Colonial Archive

Black feminist theorists have long understood the intersecting oppressions that define the lives and experiences of women of color under a “matrix of domination,” which organizes and powerfully institutionalizes these oppressions (Crenshaw 1991; Collins 2000:21). As Patricia Hill Collins notes in Black Feminist Thought, “the dominant ideology of the slave era fostered the creation of several interrelated, socially constructed controlling images of Black womanhood, each reflecting the dominant group’s interest in maintaining Black women’s subordination” (Collins 2000:79). These controlling images persisted well after slavery ended and continue today, “firmly enshrining in the consciousness of white America” so many ideas of black womanhood, motherhood, and the conspicuous lack of both (Collins 2000:79).

Black feminist theory can help analyze why and how we know what we do about the women discussed here and others that history has forgotten; and can help us move forward from the persistent tropes and controlling images of black women at this particular moment in history. Lucy Terry Prince, Jenny Cole and Lucy Foster could fit into certain “controlling images” that make their stories more acceptable and more accessible for the largely white audience that visit their respective historical sites or learn about them through other means. Though each of them have their own particular and complex stories, at the most superficial level, these women are often portrayed as kind-hearted, faithful and always in service to their owners and to their larger community- either through their labor and employment or by serving the ongoing narrative of life in New England at the time. Whether or not these were in fact true characteristics of these women, it strikes a chord with images of the mammy, who is, according to Patricia Hill Collins:

the faithful, obedient domestic servant. Created to justify the economic exploitation of house slaves and sustained to explain Black women’s long-standing restriction to domestic service, the mammy image represents the normative yardstick used to evaluate all Black women’s behavior. By loving, nurturing, and caring for her White children and “family” better than her own, the mammy symbolizes the dominant group’s perceptions of the ideal Black female relationship to elite White male power. Even though she may be well loved and may wield considerable authority in her White “family”, the mammy still knows her “place” as obedient servant. She has accepted her subordination. (Collins 2000:80)

The mammy is docile, friendly and non-threatening to the status quo. She accepts her position in relation to the normative white family and happily serves the role assigned to her. The notion of the mammy justifies the system of her exploitation by existing without protest, without challenging the social order of the white household and while seeming to prefer the work of caring for a family that is not her own. She serves as the foil to all other black women. Those who cannot or refuse to meet this standard only bolster the argument that the mammy is the preferred model of black womanhood.

In actuality, the three women discussed in this paper defy definition of the Mammy. Lucy Terry Prince was hardly acquiescent to abuses of her family and property after relocating to Vermont and her multiple appearances in court prove that she was not accepting of subordination and abuse under law. Though she may have been “a great storyteller” (Sheldon 1895:56) and infamous for her poem, “The Bars Fight,” Terry Prince existed in her own right, not merely to support the town’s historical trajectory as victor against the Massachusetts frontier. As easy as it would be to limit Jenny’s story to Sheldon’s description of the woman who “served her mistress faithfully and well, in household work, and in the care of her steadily increasing family” (Sheldon 1896:897), Jenny Cole was strong enough to insist on her own identity as an African woman who would return to her homeland despite being held in slavery. Lastly, Lucy Foster was almost certainly using her significant household items to negotiate a tenuous racialized environment on a daily basis. The stories of these women operate within limited understandings of race, gender and class that emerged at the end of slavery in New England. While they may not fit traditional definitions of the Mammy, unquestioningly using their stories perpetuates problematic notions of black womanhood at the transition from slavery to freedom and paints a very one-dimensional picture of slavery and race relations in the North.

According to Wilkie’s study of southern black womanhood and midwifery, painting black women as “the mammy” was done to subvert attempts by black women to reclaim maternal rights that were denied to them under slavery (Wilkie 2003:56). Female captive Africans no matter where they were held, were left in a constant state of vulnerability. Where children followed the condition of their mother, any child born to a captive woman became property of the mother’s owner, thus taking away some of the most basic family rights of captive people and allowing slave owners every right to sell and buy and separate families. For those captive families that were able to stay together, motherhood and mothering were disrupted due to work loads and job assignments (Wilkie 2003). After being denied family rights under slavery, newly freed African Americans began to establish their own families immediately following emancipation. Women in particular began “to redefine their roles in the eyes of society following Emancipation by establishing themselves as full-time mothers and homemakers,” claiming a right to their private realm of domesticity (Wilkie 2003:9).

Notions of white womanhood and white mother’s superior maternal instincts had been based on the slave era’s “mythology of an equally unvirtuous and neglectful black womanhood” (Wilkie 2003:56). This mythology supported the controlling images of the jezebel, who threatens white women and imposes sexual danger on white men, thus destroying white families, and the matriarch, who defies gender roles and destroys black families through overzealous domination of the household (Collins 2000). Wilkie suggests that studies in the mid-twentieth century conclude that hyper-sexuality and immorality were seen as inherent to black women, thus explaining why they were “unable to coexist in a ‘normal’ nuclear family arrangement” (Wilkie 2003:58). These tropes fostered the notion that while the black woman couldn’t possibly successfully mother her own children because of her promiscuity or her asexuality, she mothered many white children out of pure love and devotion to the family she served. Compared to these two images, the mammy was and remains the least threatening character, still honored under paternalistic assumptions of love and devotion.

In the cases of Lucy Terry Prince and Jenny Cole, we are perhaps blessed by the fact that these two women were so greatly appreciated by the people who owned them during their lives in Deerfield and so adored by those who came later. Without such fond retellings of at least one perception of their lives, Lucy and Jenny might have been lost to memory the way that most of their contemporaries were. In collecting histories from Deerfield residents and neighbors of the Princes in Guilford and Sunderland for his History of Deerfield, George Sheldon encountered many who either knew Lucy and her children or had family who knew the Prince’s well. Several of these accounts speak of Lucy’s friendly countenance, storytelling and commitment to her family, undoubtedly passing many of these traits on to her children, who are referred to in much the same way (PVMA Prince family folder).

What, however, are the limitations of relying upon an already biased record of individuals who are interpreted through the colonial gaze of a race-based system of enslavement? The archive is itself an object shaped by colonial enterprises of collection, cataloging and preservation, and therefore mining the archive for historical truths is extremely problematic. Anthropologist and historian Ann Laura Stoler suggests that archival interpretations might be more effective if archives are seen rather as “cultural artifacts of fact production, of taxonomies in the making, and of disparate notions of what made up colonial authority” (Stoler 2002:91). Inclusions and exclusions from the official archive have the potential to shape the historical narrative, and thus it is extremely important to study the process by which “issues were rendered important” in the past. Archives are not just “products of state machines” but “are, in their own right, technologies that bolstered the production of those states themselves” (Stoler 2002:98).

Stoler’s plea for researchers to pay close attention to the means by which some pieces of history make it into the colonial archive and the reasons behind those decisions is a precautionary tale that should be taken into account when constructing the historical narrative of slavery and emancipation in New England and especially in Deerfield. “The archive bears witness to a complex network of power relations and construction of subjects and memory,” (Anderson 2013:3) and as such, its historical production is just as telling as the supposedly unbiased and official documentation of the past that the archive contains. Those who use the archive to understand and construct the past must also be ready to read through the controlling images written into the historical record.

When the only information we have about slavery in New England comes from the mouths of white slaveholders, our information is already biased and problematic. In the case of Lucy Foster’s story, archaeological interpretations were shaped by racial and gendered carried in historical records. When the Bullens interpreted the material assemblage at Foster’s homesite, they were reading her life through a lens that understood black women as only capable of occupying a single role: either respectable and non-threatening members of a largely white community, or simultaneous jezebels and victims in the white household (Collins 2000). The interpretation of Lucy Terry Prince and Jenny Cole as gentle and unchallenging women and of Lucy Foster as an impoverished drain on Andover society must necessarily be viewed through the lens of those who originally interpreted their persons into stories. The non-controversial and non-confrontational historical narrative that arises out of using these unquestioned nineteenth century ideas enables a very one-dimensional interpretation of black women at this period in American history and further silences the experiences of thousands of throughout the northeast. Rather than relying on dated and problematic records and stereotypes, a reconsideration of these controlling images and the history that is obscured behind them might create a much more complex and appropriate understanding of black women at this crucial transition from slavery to freedom.

Constructing mindful narratives

The three cases covered in this paper are by no means extensive, nor are they meant to represent all African-descent women who lived through this transition from captivity to freedom in Massachusetts. To create such a sweeping generalization would defy the purpose of this paper. Rather, in highlighting these stories of women discovered in the pages of archives or layers of soil, I hope to demonstrate the importance of constructing mindful narratives of slavery in New England and of the ways that black women experienced the transition from life in captivity to a life of legal freedom.

It is no easy task to uncover and resurrect women and people of color from the bottom of the matrix of domination and the footnotes of the historical and archaeological record. Deerfield’s two museums, the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association and Historic Deerfield, are both well aware of the complexity and variety of experiences of the town’s eighteenth century captive African population, and they struggle with incorporating this information into the public interpretation. While the willingness to bring these stories into conversation on Deerfield’s Street is commendable, it needs to be done in mindful ways. According to many in the Deerfield museums, Lucy Terry Prince is the most easily accessible entry point for talking about slavery in Deerfield. This approach may be useful for introducing difficult history to a broader public considering that Lucy may be the individual about whom we can say the most about life under slavery, but her story is still shrouded in myth and hearsay that have been passed down for nearly two and a half centuries. While the Prince family was certainly remarkable and deserving of attention, so are the stories of the Deerfield’s other captive and free blacks, those that are known and those that have unfortunately been lost for centuries. The experiences of this community is extremely important to understanding the ways that slavery impacted western Massachusetts but it cannot be used to create a one-size-fits-all image of New England slavery and emancipation, nor can popular images of Lucy be used to define a generation of black women.

Maria Franklin aptly described the significance of historical interpretations of African Americans and especially of Black women, saying, “though the public consists of individuals varying in their knowledge of Black history, each comes to us with at least a preconceived notion of what it means to be Black in the past that ultimately informs their perceptions of who they believe us the be in the present” (Franklin 2001:114). When people arrive at heritage sites like those in Deerfield and elsewhere in New England, it is of the utmost importance to remember that the interpretation given at these sites has the potential to shape an understanding of a history of slavery and racial discrimination that might not be very well known. The Deerfield museums have made significant efforts in the past five years to uncover and publicize Black history in the town through specialized tours, a map and guide of African American historical sites in the village, and inclusion of African American history on the museums’ respective websites (PVMA 2010). Telling the history of human slavery is no easy feat, nor is correcting several centuries worth of historical representation. And yet, historians and archaeologists have begun to complicate the narrative of Northern slavery.

By using black feminist theory to deconstruct both the colonial archive and the early 20th century archaeological analysis of Lucy Foster’s life, Battle-Baptiste re-instilled her story with the complexities of human experience. Foster cannot be a caricature of any controlling image. Rather, her story is one a black woman, once captive and then freed, who worked to create a worthwhile life for herself under painful conditions. Mindfully considering what it meant at the turn of the nineteenth century to occupy this space allows us to reconsider the lives of Lucy Terry Prince, Jenny Cole, and the many other women who don’t even appear as footnotes in New England’s history.

Battle-Baptiste and many others suggest that there is an “invisibility of Black women, their daily lives, their labor and their overall presence” in much of American history (Battle-Baptiste 2011:118). Including these histories in the public interpretation of New England history is the first step to correcting both the amnesia of slavery in the north and the misrepresentation of race across the region. Archaeologists of the African Diaspora have worked extensively across the continental United States and beyond in order to “reveal the structures of racism and the mechanics of oppression inherent in the formation of the African diaspora” (Leone et al 2005:576). Historians of New England, too, have sought ways “reconcile the region’s fame as the birthplace of immediate abolitionism and its leadership role in the successful Civil War assault on the southern slave power with two centuries of their own involvement with slavery” (Melish 2006:105). While exposing the general public to slavery’s presence in New England is a commendable goal, it would be irresponsible of anyone engaged in these heritage practices to tell this story without noting the complexity of the experiences of captive and free Blacks.

Attempts to classify any of the three women in this paper as one kind of controlling image is certainly problematic; but so is relying on old frameworks for interpreting historical or archaeological data. Patricia Hill Collins (2008) stresses the centrality of the personal lived experience in creating Black feminist epistemology, and the importance of allowing Black women a space to speak and a voice to speak with in telling their stories. The women discussed here and the thousands of others who are not can’t always be heard through the archival and archaeological resources at our disposal. Archaeologists, historians and other heritage practitioners at sites like Deerfield must therefore be cautious about the narratives they construct and perpetuate in relaying the history of captive and free people. The historical records and archeological evidence may be limited, but in order to come to a fuller understanding of the lives of black women in history, those who tell their stories must be cautious to not unknowingly oversimplify the many diverse experiences into the same mistaken tropes and controlling images of the past.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my faculty advisors and committee, Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Robert Paynter and Jane Anderson for their guidance, insight and inspiration on this project over the past few years; and to Tim Neumann, Barbara Mathews and David Bosse at the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association and Historic Deerfield, Inc, for their assistance and for the opportunity to work with them on several projects. Special thanks to my family, friends and faculty mentors who helped me through the thinking, writing and editing processes.

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About the Author

Elena Sesma is a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She holds B.A.s in Anthropology and Women’s Studies from the University of Maryland and an M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her current research is on collaborative and community-based archaeology in the Bahamas.

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