Last summer I visited the place in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman was laid to rest in 1829. My trip was a pilgrimage in honor of a woman who changed the fates of Black Americans in Massachusetts. Her story is also a starting point for the long saga of how Black Americans have wrestled with constitutions. Freeman’s story is but one in countless efforts by people of African descent to bend the aspirations set to paper by free, white, propertied men to their own ends.
I came to Stockbridge to honor this too-often-overlooked figure in U.S. constitutional history. There she is not forgotten. Still, buried in Theodore Sedgwick’s family plot, Freeman is not honored as a figure of consequence in the epic battle for freedom over slavery in Massachusetts. Instead, her headstone is a tribute to her labor for Sedgwick’s family in the years after winning her freedom. Her prominently sited marker tells of a loyal servant who had no equal “in her sphere,” was trustworthy, dutiful, and efficient in the domestic realm, and was a tender friend and “good mother” to the white Sedgwicks.
It is another lesson in the politics of monuments. Freeman’s burial site remains an incomplete and misleading monument to her life.
NOT WITHOUT SOME INSTANCES OF UNCOMMON CRUELTY
Justin Phillip Reed
Patrick Henry, addressing the Second
Virginia Convention, 1775, thrice mentioned
“chains,” “slavery,” “submission,” the myth,
in transcription, refraining his Homeric
homoteleuton of royal blues—“We have
petitioned,” “remonstrated,” “supplicated,”
“prostrated,” and “implored”—all before
demanding God deliver death or liberty.
That year in Virginia existed so many actual
slaves that Henry’s echoes could have been
nine Negroes opportunely plotting in open
air, his shadow daring daydreams of out-
running streams of liquid sterling under
evening’s seasickness of starlight and silence.
When Southern night shuffles the black
capacities of bull rustle, bark knots, clots
of nettle, I know insurrection is an act
of intellect. If not the slave’s will to kill
to live free, what animates humanity’s
heat for reason? Let me never fix my face
to say Wheatley’s mistress mistreated her
with literacy. (I have also exalted Christ
until salvation and survival were two
tines of the same fork, and eaten.) It’s just
this abolitionist’s education takes me
at times for a fool, uses my gifts against me,
enters at ease assuming that because I enjoy
the music I haven’t stashed the duller strings
and meanwhile practiced strangulation.
Not all rebels yell. Not all run. Not all
of Carolina is a complacent swamp.
This is a gator road. This, the Isle of Wait.
My people stay places eponymous for
plantations, patriots—Marion, Sumter,
many Greene streets. They stay like
depressions in plaster walls or knives
in their never-owned tapestries war routes
gallantly streak. Militia-secreted creeks
taper to tap hiss in pots where rice still
whitens and rises. Remembering’s expensive
if you can’t afford to know what is owed.
My people’s self-retention inside this theft
is investment—enviable, thick-leggedness
of shall-not-be-movement. They don’t move
easily from home (again) or (back) to tears.
No one has liberated my mouth except
to give me more elaborate things to do
with these teeth. Assume I mean nothing
by it, that the overwrought rhyme lucy-
terries mastery as a matter of fact, a draught
to steal them off to sleep, a loose leaf,
a draft on the way to someday seal them
up in it. They still have their guns, still
go to separate church. No, sir, this poem
torched none of the houses on the road,
merely wrote: Here was a row of angels,
molting, folded—stars, aligned—and the reddest
gullet of God hollered their ankles to powder.
1779–1784
SAVANNAH, GEORGIA
Daina Ramey Berry
Nestled along the Atlantic coastline, paralleled by the Savannah River, the city of Savannah is the oldest urban center in the Peach State. Established in 1733 by King George II’s 1732 charter, the colony was an experiment to provide British debtors and war criminals a second chance at life in the New World. Thus 114 colonists set sail across the Atlantic on the Anne, arriving in February 1733. They “were expected to become farmers and citizen-soldiers on a hostile and desolate frontier,” and they worked hard to create amicable relations with the Yamacraw Indians.
Between 1779 and 1784, Savannah residents experienced changes in the economy, in the population, and in social and religious institutions. They witnessed the importation of enslaved people from various regions of West Africa, the growth of religious public worship through the Second Great Awakening, and severe losses during the American Revolution’s Siege of Savannah.
Savannah had been planned by William Bull of South Carolina and James Oglethorpe, the British leader sent to establish the colony, and it included a series of squares, wards, and trust lots. Planners intended to create a city that would resemble London. Each ward was “built around central squares with trust lots on the east and west sides of the squares for public buildings and churches, and tything lots for the settlers’ homes on the north and south sides of the squares.”
With so many enslaved people residing in those wards, in many ways Savannah was nothing like London. There is not a singular way to think about the lives of people of African descent in Savannah, especially between 1779 and 1784. Many and varied factors and circumstances were in play, including the tremendous restrictions of slavery, the freedom some experienced as a result of war, and the spiritual expression realized through religious conversions.