“All that cotton.”
Why do the joints in your fingers look swole?
“All that cotton.”
Why don’t he talk to us?
“All that cotton.”
When Grandmama and her father go to bed, I look through these old encyclopedias Grandmama bought for my mama and them when they were children. I’m confused about how or when my great-grandfather could have picked cotton. I don’t find much in the encyclopedias, but my mama has a book called Slavery in the United States by Charles Ball. She’s using the book published in the 1800s to finish her dissertation on Poverty, Politics, and Public Policy in the South.
This is usually the kind of book Mama won’t let me read because she thinks it will give me nightmares.
Ball writes,
Surely if anything can justify a man in taking his life into his own hands, and terminating his existence, no one can attach blame to the slaves on many of the cotton plantations of the south, when they cut short their breath, and the agonies of the present being, by a single stroke. What is life worth, amidst hunger, nakedness and excessive toil, under the continually uplifted lash?
I’m not sure what he means by “cut short their breath.” But I understand the question “What is life worth?”
My grandmama hates her father because of his inability to be there with her. That night I blame cotton. Even though Grandmama hates her father, she lets him in, offers him food, gives him a bed.
I blame cotton.
There is a gun and a bulb of cotton in my great-grandfather’s overall bib. I don’t really even notice the gun.
I blame cotton.
I ask Grandmama the next day if her father really picked cotton.
“That’s the only reason he here,” she says.
I don’t know what she means. But I know we are in a seven-hundred-square-foot pink shotgun house surrounded by a garden we eat out of every day. I know there are a father and child in my house who were never paid fairly for work they did in houses, in chicken plants, and in cotton fields.
I blame cotton.
Thirty years later, when I drive to the University of Mississippi to accept a fellowship, I will see acres and acres of cotton on Highway 6, right down the road from where I’m supposed to stay that year.
I will accept the fellowship because of cotton.
When the land is freed, so will be all the cotton and all the money made off the suffering that white folks made cotton bring to Black folks in Mississippi and the entire South.
I go to sleep every night with a bulb of cotton on the dresser next to my bed, not because I want to remember. I will always remember. But the cotton helps me imagine. It helps me wake up. It helps me fight. It helps me realize that there are millions of ways to win. But in this country, they’re all rooted in Black bodies, Black deaths, Black imaginations, Black families.
And cotton.
1809–1814
THE LOUISIANA REBELLION
Clint Smith
In Wallace, Louisiana, at the far edge of the Whitney Plantation, between the wooden white fence demarcating ownership of the land and the red brick path leading you through it, is a plot of earth where the dark heads of fifty-five Black men sit on metal stakes, robust silver beams that push their necks toward the sky.
The heads are not real. They are ceramic renderings of a violent past, but from a distance the human likeness is so unsettling that you need to get closer just to be sure. In the warmer months, gnats and flies swarm around them, while wasps begin nesting on the underside of their open necks. The bugs hum together around the decapitated figurines like an army of small drones. The area beneath the rows of heads is an interspersing of brown and red mulch, creating the illusion that the land beneath these skulls is, similar to the faces, covered in dry blood. Each of the faces is nameless, with the exception of the ten that rest at the front. Mathurin. Cook. Gilbert. Amar. Lindor. Joseph. Dagobert. Komina. Hippolite. Charles. These were the leaders of the largest slave rebellion in American history. These were the people who decided that enough was enough.
On a rainy southern Louisiana evening in January 1811, Charles Deslondes, a mixed-race slave driver, led the rebellion.
Composed of hundreds of people, Deslondes’s army advanced along the serpentine path of southern Louisiana’s River Road to New Orleans with a military discipline that surprised many of its adversaries. It is remarkable to consider that hundreds of enslaved people—people who came from different countries, with different native languages, who had different tribal affiliations—were able to organize themselves as effectively as they did. The layered cacophony of their languages merged together into a single organized voice.
On the German Coast of Louisiana—named for the German immigrants who settled there—where the rebellion was taking place, roughly 60 percent of the total population was enslaved. The fear of armed insurrection had long been in the air.
That fear escalated over the course of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), in which Haitian slaves rose up against the French to create the first Black-led republic in the world. The successful uprising had both political and social import. The French army was defeated so badly—80 percent of the soldiers sent to the island died—that Napoleon, looking to cut his losses and refocus his attention on his military battles in Europe, sold the entire Louisiana territory to Thomas Jefferson’s negotiators for a paltry $15 million, about four cents an acre. Without the success of the Haitian Revolution, Napoleon would not likely have sold a landmass that doubled the size of the then–United States. Jefferson was simply looking to purchase New Orleans in order to gain access to the heart of the Mississippi River. For enslaved people throughout the rest of the New World, the victory in Haiti served as inspiration for what was possible.
Even William C. C. Claiborne, the governor of the territory that would become the state of Louisiana in 1812, wanted the territory to stop importing enslaved people from Haiti, fearing that some of them might have taken part in the Haitian Revolution. He didn’t want to run the risk of bringing that revolutionary ideology to his state. In 1804 he wrote to then–Secretary of State James Madison to share his concern. “At present I am well assured, there is nothing to fear either from the Mulatto or Negro population,” he began, attempting to assuage any immediate fears the president may have had, “but at some future period, this quarter of Union must (I fear) experience in some degree the Misfortunes of St. Domingue [Haiti], and that period will be hastened if the people should be indulged by Congress with a continuance of the African trade.” Claiborne said that he would attempt “to prevent the bringing in, of slaves that have been concerned in the insurrections of St. Domingo.”
As the men marched along the bends of the river—drums rumbling, flags held high above their heads—they attacked several plantations with an assortment of knives, machetes, muskets, and other scavenged weapons, killing white men and destroying property in their wake. The groundwork for the uprising had been laid for several months through careful and secretive planning, the planners even using code language so as not to tip off anyone unsympathetic to their cause. At first, the surprise held. The farther along the river they marched, the more men joined and the more weapons they were able to accrue. They wielded clubs and farm tools and the knives that they used to slice sugarcane in the fields. Still, not all the enslaved fighters had guns, and because of that, it would take only a small number of armed troops to put them down. And ultimately that was what happened.