Boy oh boy. The idea that there would be a “truth” about one’s race that one would have to escape is shocking in this day and age, if not, unfortunately, surprising. I hope that boy can learn to appreciate all of who he is and find a community that can accept him as who he is. Such a community isn’t something any of us should have to seek out–it is our birthright. It is terribly sad that it is such a rare thing.
Question regarding the free blacks in the pre-Civil War south: If someone wanted to own them, could they? What would keep them from owning a free black person if he really wanted to own that particular guy?
Alan Smithee I agree with you 100%.
Kalhoun, in lots of areas, free blacks were issued “free papers” that listed their name, general description, and identified them as being freemen. People used to pass these papers around to help others escape from slavery. Now if you still wanted to own a particular person, and his papers went “missing,” it would have been difficult for him to prove that he wasn’t your runaway slave. Especially since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 denied him the right to a trial and the right to testify.
The Fugitive Slave Act also allowed anyone to take a black person before any judge and swear out an affidavit that the black person was a former slave who belonged to him and have him “restored” to his ownership. The victim was not allowed an opportunity to present any contrary evidence.
In a similar vein, we found a Cherokee ancestor in my extremely white family tree! I don’t know much about her yet, but I suppose she could have been passing, or the family simply never mentioned her ethnicity.
The Anthony Hopkins movie, The Human Stain, touches on this a bit, as did that old movie Pinky.
I also seem to recall an actual checklist of things to consider when passing in an old book – I’m paraphrasing, but the advice there was summed up as so:
-
Move Far. (West and North were preferred.)
-
Sever All Ties With Family and Childhood Friends. (So they don’t give you away.)
-
Come Up With A Convincing Story About Your Lack of Immediate Ancestry.
-
Identify With a Swarthy European Ethnicity.
Spanish and Italian were favorites. -
Do Not Move South to Large Cities, or To New Orleans, Baton Rogue or Charleston, SC. (The populations there are much more adept at discerning people who are “passing.”)
-
Minimize Racial Traits.
Hats, wigs, wearing your hair short, keeping clean shaven, -
Avoid The Sun.
There was also a bit about watching one’s diction and the risks of having children who may be born significantly darker than you or your spouse, and warnings about socializing with other colored people who weren’t passing, and eating colored foods, and finding clerical jobs or professional careers that kept you indoors and out the sun.
There’s at least one, maybe two maternal great uncles in my family who passed for white and dispappeared from the family in the 1920s. They left behind some sad and bitter people.
The book The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White* by Shirley Taylor Hazlip is a true account of a family’s legacy of “passing”. A mind-blowing story.
Back in segregation era, business owners would often employ “spotters”–black people who would inform management of customers who were trying to pass as white.
Same here- my mom told me, just before I got married, that my dad’s father was 1/8 Cherokee. I had no idea from looking at him.
Interesting. Thanks for the information.
How would a person come to be able to buy another person but not be able to afford to emancipate them?
I am assuming that emancipation fees were payable to the original owner of the slave but now it occurs to me that this might be an additional cost paid to the local government. In which case i can see how the extra money would be harder to pay. Would it have worked like that?
Was it legally possible for a 100% pure (by the definition of the times) white European-decendant to legally be a slave (rather than a time-limited indentured servitude)? Did the underlying law have any non-racial aspect to it (e.g. Roman slave law, where any race could be a slave)?
Arjuna34
In general, no. For an exact answer you’d have to trace the laws of England and of each American colony concerning importation of slaves and servants. Here is a good starting point listing some of the statutes of colonial Virginia. Note that laws restrict the term of indenture for imports who are “Christian, and of Christian parentage”, but not of “negroes, mulattoes, and persons of color”. (Note also that religion served as a proxy for race.) So if you tried to import a European slave, the law would set them free after a maximum indenture.
In some states, it wasn’t even legal to emancipate a slave. The Methodist church at the time split (like many denominations) into northern and southern branches shortly before the Civil War. The reason was that the General Conference forbade bishops from owning slaves and wanted to remove a prominant southern bishop who had inherited slaves through marriage and was kept from imancipating them by the laws of his state (one of the Carolinas, as I recall).
Thanks, that’s a great link. I thought this section was interesting:
It seems the default towards blacks (and Indians?) was to push them into slavery, while the default towards others was to set them free, eventually. It’s interesting to compare this type of system to the ancient types (e.g. ancient Rome), where race (or the pretense of religion) wasn’t really the primary issue.
Arjuna34
Thanks, Askia. That’s just so incredibly sad.
My aunt has found the contract by which the first ancestor of mine in America (a French Huguenot FWIW) “sold himself” into indentured servitude for seven years in late 17th-century Massachusetts. It was to a relative of his brother’s wife and he not only seems to have survived but flourished, since he married a granddaughter of somebody who came over on the Mayflower and started a fine family of New England swamp Yankees (lots of things like hills and ponds named after us but no money 
)
So, not a slave, but certainly not a free man by our standards.
BTW, I read “Puddn’head Wilson” in HS too and found it to be the strongest indictment of slavery since “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. Rare to find a slavery story that made the white kids in the class feel as viscerally rotten as the black kids.
Hmm,
Omega Glory, if you don’t mind, could you post a link to a picture of your relative in question? And Askia, could you do the same for your uncles?
It would be very interesting to see what some people consider passing for “white”. In my experience, no matter how light someone’s skin,their eye color or how straight their hair (usually artificially), there are certain features that are always a dead giveaway.
Mehibatel would you be able to scan that document onto your PC and post it? Or give us an idea of what it said?
It sounds fascinating
Mehitabel even
:smack:
These aren’t my uncles, but rather my maternal great-granduncles. There aren’t a lot of photographs of my family surviving from that time: this was poor black farming/sharecropping communities in the South Carolina midlands. Most of those photographs, if they’ve survived at all from moves and fires, have been scattered among my grandaunts and uncles and their kids. I have seen my aged great-uncles and as a child considered them tanned old white folks until a sharply worded correction from my Mama taught me otherwise.
One of my distant cousins, William, has lived in Queens for years and years is a dead ringer for actor Jon Polito. With curly (so-called “good”) hair and a tan. But if he bleached his skin, avoided the sun, cut his beard and hair like I’ve seen on Filipinos and doesn’t lapse into his Aiken dialect, he could likely pass as a Frenchman or Italian, easy.
