There are other instances of gender-nonconforming figures during the nineteenth century. On June 11, 1836, Mary Jones (also known as Peter Sewally) testified in court after being arrested for stealing one of her sex work clients’ wallet and money. She testified:
I have been in the practice of waiting upon Girls of ill fame and made up their Beds and received the Company at the door and received the money for rooms and they induced me to dress in Women’s Clothes, saying I looked so much better in them and I have always attended parties among the people of my own Colour dressed in this way—and in New Orleans I always dressed in this way.
“Folks like Mary Waters, Mary Jones, and Thomasina Hall come up in court records in explosions of conversations that fixate on their gender and race,” Johnson says. “It’s probably one of the biggest similarities we have in how women of color are treated now, especially being policed, scrutinized, surveilled, and possibly not given justice in court. That’s a legacy of an earlier preoccupation.”
The existence of queer behaviors and modes of expression, and the larger white society’s need to police these expressions by Black gender and sexual minorities, have long existed on this soil. As Johnson explains, “Policing gender, race, and the boundaries of these things has always been the work of creating laborers, separating communities and people from their humanity. A lot of categories we’re dealing with in present-day are legacies of that period.”
REMEMBERING THE ALBANY 3
Ishmael Reed
For Edwidge
Like Caonabo
Anacaona
Padre Jean
And Macandal before
Boukman got his
Guabancex and Ogun on
Saint-Domingue flowed with the blood of France
Dread spread to Guadalupe, Jamaica and
The slaveholding North
Not only in the South but Albany, New York
Virginia masters slept with their lights turned
On
They feared that it might happen up here
Slaves roaming from plantation to plantation
Their minds set on decapitation
Said Jefferson’s man
Jupiter: There wasn’t no
Sword of Damocles over the enslavers’ beds
It was a machete that Iman Boukman held
I overheard Tom talking to his friends
About how they could wrench the
Settler French from danger
Wasn’t gone be no cinch. Ha!
He was all for the French having their liberty
But condemned his “property” to a life of slavery
They was afraid that Boukman would cross the sea
And interrupt their lives of comfort and ease
While we lived on pork, cornmeal and day old fish
They recruited French chefs to
Prepare their dish
Had all the pretty women at their
Beck and call
Said Monsieur La Rochefoucauld
After visiting Monticello
Tom’s Greco Roman involuntary
Bordello
“I have even seen, and particularly at Mr. Jefferson’s, slaves
Who have neither in their color nor features a single
Trace of their origins.”
Tom couldn’t keep his children out of sight
He was a founding father all right
Sally Hemings wasn’t the only one
There were at least two others by whom
He had daughters and sons
They weren’t treated like the other
Slaves whose wounds were
Smeared with brine
After his overseers got
Drunk on Tom’s imported wine
He and his friends thought that
Haitian rebels would rob them
Of their gains
The ones they stole from Indians whom
They murdered and maimed
Tom called the rebels “Cannibals”
When it seems to me that
He was the one who was a
Consumer of men
Worked them 24/7 without a fee
While he studied Plato’s philosophy
The Albany Dutch shared the planters’ fears
The Schuylers, the Ten Eycks and
The Rensselaers
When arson broke out
They blamed the Haitians
Saw Haitians under their beds
Behind the door and
In the basement
But finding none arrested their
Slaves
Pompey was the first who was taken in
He was grilled until he finally bent
If you name the conspirators we’ll
Set you free, they lied
Just like they lied to the Central Park 5
He named two teenage girls Bet and
Dinah
Said that they helped him burn a
Barn that belonged to Gansevoort
Another Dutchman who prospered
From stolen loot
They were found and jailed
For the Albany conflagration
All three were sent to the gallows
By the kind of Albany jury
That acquitted the
Murderers of Amadou Diallo
The Gov. said the facts of the
Case didn’t make sense
And tried to postpone their sentence
But the Albany mob was lusting for a kill
The girls were hanged on Pinkster hill
And Pompey was hanged a little later