UPON ARRIVAL
Jericho Brown
We’d like a list of what we lost
Think of those who landed in the Atlantic
The sharkiest of waters
Bonnetheads and thrashers
Spinners and blacktips
We are made of so much water
Bodies of water
Bodies walking upright on the mud at the bottom
The mud they must call nighttime
Oh there was some survival
Life
After life on the Atlantic—this present grief
So old we see through it
So thick we can touch it
And Jesus said of his wound Go on, touch it
I don’t have the reach
I’m not qualified
I can’t swim or walk or handle a hoe
I can’t kill a man
Or write it down
A list of what we lost
The history of the wound
The history of the wound
That somebody bought them
That somebody brought them
To the shore of Virginia and then
Inland
Into the land of cliché
I’d rather know their faces
Their names
My love yes you
Whether you pray or not
If I knew your name
I’d ask you to help me
Imagine even a single tooth
I’d ask you to write that down
But there’s not enough ink
I’d like to write a list of what we lost.
Think of those who landed in the Atlantic,
Think of life after life on the Atlantic—
Sweet Jesus. A grief so thick I could touch it.
And Jesus said of his wound, Go on, touch it.
But I don’t have the reach. I’m not qualified.
And you? How’s your reach? Are you qualified?
Don’t you know the history of the wound?
Here is the history of the wound:
Somebody brought them. Somebody bought them.
Though I know who caught them, sold them, bought them,
I’d rather focus on their faces, their names.
1659–1664
ELIZABETH KEYE
Jennifer L. Morgan
1662 Act XII [of the Virginia House of Burgesses]. Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman shall be slave or free, Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother—partus sequitur ventrem. And that if any Christian shall commit fornication with a negro man or woman, hee or shee soe offending shall pay double the fines imposed by the former act.
Elizabeth Keye was an African American woman who lived in colonial Virginia in the seventeenth century. She was the daughter of an enslaved African woman and the Englishman who owned her. As is so often the case, we can know nothing of the nature of their relationship except that it produced a daughter. Elizabeth Keye would instigate the single most important legislative act concerning the history of enslavement, race, and reproduction in the colonial Atlantic world.
As a child, Keye found herself misidentified on the estate where she was indentured. At some point in the late 1620s, Thomas Keye, a free white Englishman and member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, had impregnated her mother, an enslaved African-born woman (whose name we do not know). What this woman (who appears in the archives as “woman slave”) hoped or believed about her daughter’s future is utterly lost in the documentary record. What is clear is that her father’s death threw that future into some confusion. Although Elizabeth had been placed in indenture as a child, after his death she (or her indenture) was sold to another Virginia landowner.
Selling the remaining term of an indenture was not uncommon, but because Elizabeth Keye was the daughter of an African woman, her race made her vulnerable to abuses that an Englishwoman would not have had to endure. Although the English embraced the system of African slavery elsewhere in the Atlantic, in Virginia they relied on indentured servants, the vast majority of whom were also themselves English. In the 1650s there were fewer than three hundred Africans in the colony, or about 1 percent of the population of English settlers. And yet Elizabeth understood that she was in danger, that her color could dictate her status.
Her status as Keye’s daughter was never a secret; it was widely known that this young woman’s father was a free Englishman. We learn from one witness that, out of ignorance or spite, Thomas Keye’s other child, John, called Elizabeth “Black Besse.” Mrs. Speke, the overseer’s wife, “checked him and said[,] Sirra you must call her Sister for shee is your Sister.” Whether or not Mrs. Speke’s intervention was meant to take John Keye down a peg, it was recognition of Elizabeth’s lineage. But her relative freedom, pinned as it was to a transgressive paternity that increasingly muddied the waters of property rights, was insufficient.
In 1655 Elizabeth Keye petitioned the courts for her freedom—and that of her new child—and thus became the first woman of African descent to do so in the English North American colonies. While we know very little about her, we can be confident that she had a precise understanding of the dangers that surrounded her as a result of the interrelated consequences of race and sex in colonial Virginia. She had been transferred, by then, to a third Englishman, whose executors listed her and her son among his “negroes” rather than his “servants.” She had, by that time, been held for at least ten years longer than the terms of her 1636 indenture had specified. Her original freedom suit was granted, then overturned, and finally won when the father of her child and common-law husband, William Grinsted, an indentured Englishman who was knowledgeable in the law, brought her case to the General Assembly. On the day that her case was finally decided, July 31, 1656, she and Grinsted posted their banns (publicly announcing their intention to marry), and she and her descendants remained legally free well into the eighteenth century.
Less than six years later, the Virginia Assembly revisited this case. Perhaps the lawmakers understood that granting freedom to the children of women raped by free property-owning Englishmen would fundamentally undermine the labor system they relied upon. In 1662 they decreed that a child born to an African woman slave, no matter who the father was, would follow that woman into slavery. This piece of legislation encapsulated the early modern understanding of racial slavery—that it was a category of labor that African people and their descendants inherited.