Stock Farms
I came across a first-hand account of slavery in the local
area written by a man named Isaac Johnson. Titled Slavery Days in Old Kentucky, and first published in 1905, it had been an
obscure manuscript until re-issued and edited and annotated in the late 20th
century. The unique quality of the narration comes from the fact that Mr.
Johnson, born in 1844 to a slave woman brought from Madagascar and an Irish
father in Central Kentucky, later joined the Union Army in the Michigan
regiment, and migrated north, where he managed to become educated, successful
at a trade, and literate enough to record his own recollection of slavery.
It is poignant and genuine.
It rings true, because Isaac Johnson seems to be writing
something that is neither a screed against slavery nor an apology for the ways
of the Old South and its gentility.
In fact, he begins by writing about his early childhood,
one that he remembers fondly as prosperous and benign. His parents lived
together as a couple, and were extremely successful at cultivating tobacco;
hence, they made good money, and the five children were well nourished and
happy.
However, this drew others to live in the area, and the
bi-racial family was ostracized. Mr. Yeager, the father, picked up and left,
selling everything and putting his own wife and children up for auction. They
were taken to Bardstown, in the next county to our west, and auctioned off. This
whole experience was alien and shocking to the young Isaac, who was separated
from his mother and purchased for $700 by a William Mattingly, a name still
widely heard in Washington and Nelson Counties, then tied to a post, as he
writes, “as though I had been a horse.”
Thus begins the story of ten years of cruelty and almost
ceaseless labor. As a young child, he slept on a hard floor, ate only twice a
day, cold mush and milk, after the master and wife, like a dog, and worked from
sixteen to eighteen hours a day.
One of the stories he tells is of how, during a period when
he was “hired out,” he was made to fetch water from a spring that was down in a
dark cave. He had to haul the water back a long distance. He used a long wooden
pole to balance two buckets across his shoulders. But the most harrowing thing
of all was his climb down into the dark cave. Knowing this, the Master’s
children told him all sorts of tales of creatures and animals that would eat
colored children, and then started lighting fires in the cave on Sundays. He’d
run out screaming, thinking it was the Devil. Finally, they got caught and were
punished. (19)
The story told by Isaac Johnson is spare and simple, yet
engaging. The incidents he highlights and describes captured my imagination, and
I started to wonder: is my affinity for the Black people, all of them separated
from their original family, their ancestry and its rituals and languages, but
so many actually torn from their mothers, then abused, scorned, and
misunderstood, a function of my own past which had so many of these elements,
albeit much less traumatic? Without a reference point, losing your mother at
five, having heathens and a mean-spirited step mother move in when you are
eight, and having no one with whom to share your anxiety could leave one as
bereft as young Isaac. And again, the lost mother and the betrayed child is a
universal motif. Maybe anyone who sat down and thought deeply about this boy
would be affected.
He ended up on the border of Washington and Nelson counties,
at the farm of a John Mattingly. All the book tells us is “along the Beech Fork
River.” This is one piece of information it will be important to
cross-reference with some of the genealogy that’s out there.
John Mattingly’s “farm” was a “stock” farm. Isaac adds: “By
stock it will be understood is meant Negro slaves.” (21) During the time that Isaac was here, he
watched as human beings were shipped in and out like cattle. As they waited to
be shipped out to markets in Mississippi, where they would be kept in slave
pens until they were sold, the “stock” were put to work clearing the land. John
Mattingly owned “one thousand acres, mostly brush and bushes.” (21)
The time of the
removal was kept secret from the slaves, and about ten o’ clock the night
before, twelve men were sent into the cabins and there handcuffed the males. In
the morning these were brought out by twos and fastened to a chain about fifty
feet long…. The line of march was to Nashville where they were placed aboard
boats and taken to the different slave pens… A beautiful sight for a country
that boasts of its freedom! (21-22)
At one point the Master leaves with most of the slaves for
market and only about thirty are left behind, with his wife. She is a devout
Catholic, and begins teaching them to read the Bible, gives them prayer books,
and teaches them the Lord’s Prayer. He is furious when he returns, and he tells
the slaves that God has made them for the benefit of the Whiteman, who is their
lawmaker and lawgiver. They are no better than animals and must be broken. They
are the same as any ox, horse, or mule, and must be killed if they cannot be
broken. “If you don’t do what is right by me, why my duty is to kill you.” (26)
And Isaac saw this happen. A Canadian man named Bob who had
been free, a Black engineer on a boat, had been taken into slavery in New
Orleans and ended up at the Mattingly farm. He and Isaac, along with the
octoroon Rose, an overseer Bob had fallen in love with and thought he could
trust, made a plan to escape. Unfortunately, Bob was wrong. He and Isaac were
both caught, but he was tortured mercilessly, whipped and beaten publicly until
almost dead, and then left to die slowly and excruciatingly, to be made an
example.
Not long after this, Isaac left at the first opportunity
after the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed, and after a few false
starts, joined the Union forces.
He actually returned to Kentucky after the war ended, and
went to see his old master, who was paralyzed and bereft. He tried, but
couldn’t locate any of his family other than his uncles, who did verify some
parts of his story.
Closing out his book, Isaac writes, “I would rather be in
my black skin than in his or my father’s…My people, for I call only the colored
people mine, suffered for centuries, and the only wonder to me is that so many
survived, that they are as intelligent as they are, and as forgiving as they
have shown themselves to be. A race with such natural characteristics comes
nearer to the teachings of the great Master than any people of whom I have
learned.” (40)
I think this is why I attend, when I do attend, the Black
church. It’s not that all Black people are good, are innocent or free of blame.
It’s that Black people are, to me, God’s chosen people.
They have suffered the most, and the longest, without any excuse, and the white
man is the inheritor of the legacy of all that caused that suffering.
When I drive the roads and walk through the fields of this
region, I know I am not alone. I am accompanied by the ancestors: the restless
spirits of the slaves who cleared this land, rock by back-breaking rock, who
bore the “black snake,” who stripped the tobacco in heat I avoid with air
conditioning, who gave birth, prayed, loved and died without knowing freedom.
I don’t want to die without making reparations.
Questions
I often feel
that I alone see and hear these people, these ancestors. For two years, I’ve
sojourned among the Black people of this place, asking my questions, and
speaking as truthfully as I can about this project, and although a few have
expressed some enthusiasm, I have touched upon no excitement about un-burying
the past.
It could well be that talking about slavery is not the top
thing on the list of folks when they think of what they’d like to change. It
could be that from what they do know about slavery: the horrors, the brutality,
the utter inhumanity… they cannot bear to think their own ancestors may have
been treated that way.
The way they’ve been treated is bad enough.
People my age recall having to go to the back door or
window of restaurants and food places to be served. They remember having to
stand in the cold while the bus went by, so it could pick up all the white
kids, then getting on, finally, when the bus was on its way back into town.
They have a lifetime worth of slights, injustices, and dirty tricks to contend
with. The older folks worked as house maids, cooks, and nurses for the white
people. They know the gossip, the trash, and the dirty secrets of the people
who think they are their superiors. In many cases, these people have the same
name. They may have a common ancestor, if the Black person has light skin, but
no one wants to talk about that. At the very least, they know, and never say,
that somewhere back there, your great-great grandfather owned mine.
One could argue that it’s best to let it rest. Like the
librarian, when I first read the following paragraph from the book, Slavery Days in Kentucky:
Ironically
enough, the Rev. Jesse Head, who married the parents of the Great Emancipator,
erected in May of 1798 the ‘Washington County whipping post upon the public
square in Springfield for the use of this county.’ Here, as at the other public
whipping posts ‘39 lashes on the bare back well laid on’ constituted the
customary amount of punishment for recalcitrant blacks. (Slavery Days in
Kentucky, 248)
…and exclaimed, aloud, “Oh my gosh, there was a whipping
post in Springfield!” replied testily, “I wasn’t there. I didn’t do it,” even
though I wasn’t speaking to her, and I certainly didn’t think she was there in
1798.
Jesse Head owned the lot upon which the house I own in
Springfield (and rent as a B&B) now stands. So he lived very close to this
whipping post, and could hear, no doubt, the cries and the lashes, maybe the
cheers of the excited crowd. It isn’t mentioned on the historic marker outside
of the house that stands there now, our next-door neighbor’s, but his part in
Lincoln’s parents’ marriage is. Funny thing, I am told that Washington County,
which now celebrates its Lincoln Heritage as a marketing tool, voted
overwhelmingly against the man when he ran for President.
Question:
why does no one, Black or White, want to talk about slavery, even though the
trees were felled and the fields were cleared by the hands of slaves, the
fences were built and the barns constructed by slaves, the tobacco and hemp was
raised and the mules were trained and driven by slaves? The sweat and blood of
slaves literally watered this place.
