You could hear the contempt in Dr. Whitcomb’s voice, as Boris and Harvey shifted in their chairs. They probably weren’t used to such language from a brother. Our professor was safe, though, no matter what they wrote on the student evaluations at semester’s end. He was the only African American faculty member on campus with an endowed chair. Out of all the history professors, he had the most books: five edited texts and seven monographs, two of which had been finalists for the Pulitzer.
Rebecca, she would have been the master’s daughter. Or maybe the wife of the master’s son. Certainly, with her beauty, someone’s prize. Emma would have been her nearsighted, spinster sister.
Whitcomb and I, we’d have been enslaved. Maybe he would have had the courage to run, but I was a coward. I would have stayed and suffered, but I couldn’t yet decide whether I would have been up at the big house or out in the fields. The hard life or the soft. It might have depended on whether my master thought I was pretty or not. It wouldn’t have mattered if he believed in God.
[Pinchard Family Papers, Boxes 1–12, circa 1806–1934.]
6 JAN 1814 Ahgayuh purchased frm Lanc. Polcott （450 DOLLR） 2 JAN 1816 Mamie purchasd from Lanc. Polcott 4 JUNE 1817 Nick （b） born Mamie （Ahgayuh Nurse） 6 JUNE 1817 Mamie dead
7 MAY 1821 Tess （g） born Midas’s Ahgayuh 29 JULY 1822 Midas sold Lanc. Polcott The year before, I’d been so anxious to do research in the Old South Collections. The archives had fascinated me. Made me happy for the first time in my socially awkward life. But there was a catch when you did research on slavery: you couldn’t only focus on the parts you wanted.
You had to wade through everything, in order to get to the documents you needed. You had to look at the slave auctions and whippings. The casual cruelty that indicated the white men who’d owned Black folks didn’t consider them human beings. When I began doing research in the Pinchard family papers, I wasn’t reading about strangers anymore. These were my own ancestors, Black and white. Samuel Pinchard was the great-grandfather of Uncle Root and Dear Pearl.
When I’d done research on the weeping time auction, I’d felt so saddened, but now, when I left the Old South Collections, rage joined my sadness. Every white person who crossed my path made me want to scream so badly, it seemed my flesh burned with the effort to maintain control. And to make matters worse, on my walk across campus from the collections, I’d be forced to go past the statue of the colonial founder of my university, Edward Sharpe. The students called his statue “Quiet Ned.”
Sharpe had owned forty-three enslaved Black folks, but had caught religion during a sermon by a Great Awakening minister. After hearing the sermon, Edward Sharpe had decided he was against slavery. But instead of freeing the Black folks he owned and giving them a plot of land to work, he’d sold them for a profit, and bought land and started a university with the proceeds. In the university mythology, Edward Sharpe was lauded as a moral hero, and no information was given on the people he’d traded.
Every time I passed Quiet Ned, I thought of the hurt he’d caused those forty-three Black folks. I’d get so angry, it would make me sick, and I couldn’t eat for one or sometimes two days. I could only drink coffee to keep me awake. I’d tremble, unable to sleep. I’d whisper curses toward flesh-peddling white men, hoping my words could travel to the past.
1 OCT 1824 Nick sent kitchen
6 OCT 1824 Nick sent fields
16 SEPT 1828 Tess sent fields
11 APRIL 1840 Eliza Two & Rabbit born to Nick’s Tess 5 JAN 1843 Venie purchasd frm Lanc. Polcott （990 Dllr） 11 OCT 1847 Rabbit sent kitchen
11 OCT 1847 Eliza Two sent maiding
3 OCT 1851 Nick gone （Ran）
4 OCT 1851 Jeremiah Franklin patrol （10 Dllr） 3 JAN 1852 Leena purchasd frm Hez. Polcott （1100 Dllr） 3 SEPT 1852 Grace Bless Franklin & Victor Pinchard married （Rev. Dalton 2 Dollr） For the fourth week of his class, Dr. Whitcomb had assigned two big books, John Blassingame’s Slave Testimony and Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll, what our professor called classics in the field. In addition, he’d compiled a homemade reader that we’d bought at the campus copy shop. The reader contained copies of the Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives, interviews with then-living Black people who had survived slavery. These narratives had been commissioned by the government back in the 1930s, when President Roosevelt was trying to put the country to work.
“Ailey, what are your impressions of our readings?” Dr. Whitcomb asked.
I flipped through my notes. “Okay . . . um . . . I hope it’s all right that I comment on the narratives since nobody else has.”