#slavery in South Carolina

[ausetkmt]

Did You Know About The Weeping Time ?

Take a few moments and watch this piece of american's hidden history, that is very relevant today.

Wonder why this isn't being taught in any american history books?

We are asking for Reparations, and quite frankly we should be filing some lawsuits against these slave merchants.

They are the ones who benefited most from our enslavement.

Watch, Learn and Think, because this is very relevant to the economic dis-infranchisement in american society today.

Wonder why this isn't being taught in any american history books?

COHENS, AND BUTLERS - YOUR PAYMENT IS OVERDUE

[yearningforunity]

Freed African-Americans stand in front of their homes that are still the same slave quarters on a white man's plantation in Saint Helena Island, South Carolina. The picture, which features a barefoot child in the foreground and a man with a cane in the background, is understood to have been taken in 1863.

[thechanelmuse]

Alkaline-Glazed Jugs Made by Master Potter, David Drake

David was a chattel enslaved Black potter from Edgefield, South Carolina. He was owned as the property of Harvey Drake, a large pottery business owner who partnered with Abner Landrum, an editor of a local newspaper called The Edgefield Hive. (He would also be owned as the property of Lewis Miles and the Landrum family. Not simultaneously.)

David was forced to labor in Pottersville, one of the twelve pottery factories in Edgefield at that time. He’s recognized as the first enslaved potter to inscribe his work (with a couplet poem, the date, and his signature—Dave) during the time when literacy was forbidden for the enslaved with enacted laws and deadly consequences. 

Some of his inscriptions are practical instructions or reflections on love, spirituality, or afterlife; while others are commentaries on the institution of US chattel slavery. His earliest recorded work is a pot dated July 12, 1834. The poetry on this one reads: 

Put every bit all between 

Surely this jar will hold 14

One of Drake's better known pieces, a 19-inch greenware pot, is dated back to August 16, 1857. The inscription reads: 

I wonder where is all my relations

Friendship to all and every nation

David made more than 40,000 large stoneware jugs and jars between the 1820s and the 1870s. They were worth about 50 cents during his lifetime. You can only imagine how much they are worth today... There are pieces housed in museums from Greenville County Museum of Art to the Smithsonian.

Per the US census in 1870, it’s labeled that David couldn’t read or write. Ha.

So how was he able to read and write (in cursive) to the point of demonstrating such charming and emotive, couplet poetry? Wouldn’t they all like to know. 

[lyledebeast]

Watching all these historian commentaries/butcheries of The Patriot often leaves me wondering if we aren't sending one humanities discipline to do a job as well or even better suited to another one. Obviously, some people do both--I did both!--but when historians criticize fictionalized accounts of history for representing people whose views and actions were not statistically common, maybe they are missing the point? The Patriot does not purport to be a biography. it is a fictionalized account of historical events. It does, however, purport to accurately reflect a historical setting, but it doesn't do that either! The more egregious problem with The Patriot is that it presents very rare views and actions as completely normal and far more commonplace ones as aberrant.

Historians often cite statistics about the pervasiveness of chattel slavery in colonial South Carolina to argue for the ridiculousness of Benjamin Martin not owning slaves. It is a very misleading choice given that Martin is a composite of several historical figures who certainly were enslavers, but there is a reason he isn't called Nathaniel Greene or Daniel Morgan or Francis Marion, and that is to give the writers some leeway in how they represent him. What is weird about Martin not owning slaves is that not one of his peers finds it weird. When he refuses to support the war for independence, none of his fellow assembly members responds with, "Well, what did we expect from a freak who pays free men to work his land?" Martin is in a long-term relationship with a woman who does own slaves, and his children spend most of the movie's run time with her without the issue of slavery ever coming up. When Martin's employee tells Tavington of his situation, Tavington replies without skipping a beat, without so much as a raised eyebrow with "Well, then you are free men who will have the honor and the privilege of serving in the King's Army" when a more appropriate response would have been " . . . What?"

You know what Tavington does find positively bizarre? Colonial Loyalists. He regards James Wilkins with suspicion from the moment he opens his mouth: "How can I trust a man who'd betray his neighbors?" When Wilkins replies that he sees neighbors who would betray England as traitors, Tavington looks at him like he's confessed to having a very niche fetish. And Tavington is his ally! Mr. Howard cannot credit finding Wilkins among the Green Dragoons at Pembroke church even though he exchanged verbal blows with him on the subject of independence years before. In a more accurate setting, they would have employed far more lethal materials than words against each other by 1780. Martin blithely leaves his children in the most obvious place possible without even considering that someone who knows his family might seek to harm them. The problem is not, as some have argued, that the film only has one Loyalist character. When its main focus is on South Carolina Patriots and their families, how may Loyalists does it need? The problem is that Wilkins is treated as a pariah rather than a representative of a population within South Carolina large enough to cause problems for the Patriots.

The South Carolina of The Patriot is absolutely otherworldly: a problem-free idyll until Cornwallis's army rolls up like Satan into Paradise and ruins everything for everyone, apparently. The small biographical inaccuracies seem to me to pale into insignificance against the film's refusal to depict South Carolina as the cesspool of racial and political violence that it actually was all throughout the American Revolution. Other representations of this war also contain numerous biographical inaccuracies--I am talking about Turn, if that's not abundantly clear--but nonetheless do a much better job of representing the diverse perspectives that made up colonial America. It seems grossly unfair to lump these kinds of texts in with The Patriot. Obviously, historical accuracy is important to consider when evaluating even fictionalized representations of history, but historians would benefit from considering character dynamics and narrative framing as well.

[sameerkankali]

“Your oppression will not save you.” Best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates sits down with Jon Stewart to talk about his latest book, “The Message,” and reconciling past and present vestiges of oppression. They discuss his visits to Senegal, South Carolina, and The West Bank, how past atrocities like slavery and the holocaust can create a zero-sum game of control, the need for safety and statehood despite morally problematic systems, his exposure to Palestinian stories that have been hidden in American media, understanding the physical traumas of the Black community, and the purpose in writing to shape the world around us.

[protoslacker]

“He wanted to be known,” says Daisy Whitner, a fourth-generation granddaughter of Dave, later recorded as David Drake. Witness her and her siblings contemplate their ancestral connection to Dave, his life, and what his poetry means to them.

Video Run time: 3:58

This wonderful exhibit is worth exploring.

Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina

[reasoningdaily]

John C. Calhoun's view on slavery

[not-so-superheroine]

fun fact, i live in a swamp.  no, it doesn’t smell bad. when you get to the swampy areas there are cypress trees in the water that put of the smell really good.  the marshes near the salt and brackish water that smell like the pluff mud from which the sweetgrass grows. it smellls like dead sea creatures and works like quick sand and the more tou struggle the more you sink. simply do not walk on it. i have literally never in all my years. anyway, living in a swamp is cool. there are all sorts of creatures and plants. you can find and hunt for food. i wouldn’t go swimming in it (don’t die from brain eating amoeba or gators pls. take florida level precautions bc it’s not that that different in coastal neigboring states). we also have lots of swamp themed/related events. my favorite is the hell hole swamp festival, a bomb community event where everyone comes out for essentially a swampy country fair (no rides or funnel cakes but like barbeque and cake and children’s games, and child school choirs, and fun competions. Its also home of the Hell Hole Gator Run, a 10 K. The Hell Hole Talent Show is great too. Just community members of all ages putting on performances and a dinner. If you are from the lowcountry come check it out. we admittedly can be a bit insular, but bring a friend or family and you’ll intergrate right in. express interest in them, their culture, and the geographic area and they will be happy to share.  there are state parks specifically so people can enjoy there time in said swamp. the Santee Canal park has a nature museum that’s pretty cool. you can learn about the ecology of the area and the flora and fauna there in. knowing how to navigate the swamp help the US win the revolutionary war (they didn’t have immunity against malaria and probably got attacked by gators like today’s clueless and or ignorant tourists to the southeast US. like don’t get piss drunk in an area that has deadly wild life and don’t think you’re city smarts apply in nature. they don’t. listen to locals. also don’t screw around with the gators??? we have tourists who pelt them with stones. they are opportunistic hunters who often don’t even mess with you unprompted most of the time. they are important to the enviroment and tourist foolishness can get them put down/ euthanized). i realize i keep pointing out how deadly it can be, but urban places like NYC, Philly, Los Angelos, and Chicago have their potentially deadly issues, just different ones. still places worth visiting and respecting.  but basically, i live in a swamp and it’s great actually. i often feel like Shrek when people come here to live and disrespect the area. it’s a beautiful place, ecologically important, has events you can’t find in urban areas, people (left and right politically) care about ecological preservation (hunters and fisherman are on board). don’t disrespect the swamp because the swamp WILL disrespect you. also don’t try to make it new york city or columbus. (becuse its usually and ohian. they are gentrifying the area and promoting “development” that ruins the natural beauty and ecological important cites that the locals take a lot of pride in and are essential to our way of life. literally stay in Ohio if you can’t intergrate into rural/ small towns in southeast states, deadass. i get so angry, no joke. i love my home and my swamp. the state most hated by south carolinians is ohio and there is a reason for that.) in the words of shrek which often echo in my head: “what are you doing in MY Swamp?!!!” i like it here, you should totally visit and drop you preconceptions to best enjoy the experience, and be on your toes and your best behavior if you are an ohian, because most of us already hate all things ohio and will may mess with you if you have an ohio tag on your car and tick them off on the road for diving rudely or insulting said swamp, and our preferred “lack” of development. We feel about it like shrek did tbh. we want to live in south carolina, not ohio /srs.

[lightdancer1]

The Denmark Vesey Conspiracy of 1822 is a mirror of 1741:

As with 1741, so here is a reminder that slavery was and is a brutal and inhuman institution whose overlords lived in perpetual fear of what might be. The question of if it actually was, or if the fear was a case of justifying the savagery unleashed on the people in question remains a subjective one that cannot be fully answered. And in the end whether or not it is true, noting that there was such a concept and that it was organized ultimately is in itself subversive. As I said before, there is no good slavery, and there is no good slavemaster.

[rabbitcruiser]

International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Today we honor and remember those who suffered and died as a result of slavery: the victims of the transatlantic slave trade. As many as 15 million men, women, and children were cramped in slave ships, devoid of sanitation and any basic necessities, as part of the trade. Upon arrival at their destination, they faced a new life of perennial hardship and suffering. Enslaved Africans were spread all over the world, but most were sent to the Americas. Ninety-Six percent of those held captive on the coast of Africa were sent to South America and the Caribbean Islands. Not only does today’s holiday honor and remember the victims, but it also keeps one foot grounded in the present, by aiming to raise awareness about the dangers of racism and prejudice.

The United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 62/122 on December 17, 2007. It declared the International Day of Remembrance of tBreaking the Chains by Melvin Edwardshe Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to be observed annually on March 25, beginning the following year. March 25, 2007, had previously been recognized as the International Day for the Commemoration of the Two-hundredth Anniversary of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which illustrates why March 25 was chosen as the date for today’s holiday. (The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves in the United States had been passed in 1807 and went into effect on January 1, 1808.) The resolution for today’s holiday created it to complement the already existing International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition.

Each year, today’s holiday has a different theme. Events are held at the United Nations Headquarters and have also been organized by United Nations Information Centres (UNICs) around the globe. Events have included discussions, visits to slave ruins, film viewings, and cultural performances. Other events apart from the United Nations have also been held around the world.

How to Observe

Here are some ways to remember victims of the transatlantic slave trade and observe the day:

Attend an event at the United Nations Headquarters or one organized by a United Nations Information Centre.

Visit The Permanent Memorial at the United Nations in Honour of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Explore resources related to the day and information about past observances.

Reflect at a slave trading site in West Africa or a southern plantation in the United States.

Visit the International Slavery Museum or the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Read a book about the transatlantic slave trade.

View a timeline of the banning of slavery and the slave trade throughout the world.

Learn more about the slave trade online at The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.

Explore UNESCO’s slave route project.

Watch a film about slavery or the slave trade, such as Amistad or 12 Years a Slave.

Watch a documentary about the transatlantic slave trade, such as “The Black Atlantic,” the first episode of The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.

Source

[whitesinhistory]

On July 2, 1822, Denmark Vesey, a free Black carpenter, was executed in Charleston, South Carolina, for planning to emancipate enslaved people. Weeks before his execution, Mr. Vesey was accused of designing a rebellion to emancipate thousands of enslaved Black people from Charleston and the surrounding plantations. Even though no rebellion ever occurred and no white people were harmed in any way, Mr. Vesey and 34 other people allegedly involved were executed. In 1781, a Carolina-based slave trader named Joseph Vesey “purchased” Mr. Vesey, who was in his mid-teens at the time. Mr. Vesey was enslaved in Charleston for many years until he won a street lottery in 1799 that allowed him to “buy” his freedom. However, the man who enslaved his wife refused to allow him to “purchase” her freedom, so she remained in bondage. He became a carpenter and was a well-respected community member in Charleston.  In 1818, Mr. Vesey co-founded an independent African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Charleston that quickly attracted a congregation of over 1,800 members, making it one of the largest Black churches in the country.  After Mr. Vesey was executed, white Charleston officials claimed the Black church had played a crucial role in the planning. They ordered the AME members to disperse and burned the church to the ground. Black churches were soon outlawed in Charleston; the AME church was the last Black church to exist there until after the Civil War. In 1865, under the leadership of Mr. Vesey’s son, Robert Vesey, the church was finally rebuilt. Nearly 200 years after Mr. Vesey’s execution, in 2015, a white 21-year-old attended bible study at the church—renamed the Emanuel AME Church—and opened fire on the other worshippers in attendance, all of whom were Black. 

A monument dedicated to Denmark Vesey in Charleston, S.C. (Ralph Cohen)

[ausetkmt]

On a rainy morning in March, George Dawes Green, a seventy-year-old novelist and the founder of the storytelling nonprofit the Moth, arrived at Millstone Landing, about twenty miles north of Savannah, Georgia, on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River. He and thirteen others were preparing to look for remnants of a secret fortress built in the seventeen-eighties by Maroons—people who’d escaped slavery to live in the wilderness. (The term derives from the Spanish word “cimarrón,” which means “unruly” or “fierce.”) Maroons existed in the South from the beginning of slavery, and, according to historical accounts, the population of this encampment—around a hundred—dwarfed that of any other known group. The fortress was said to have been uniquely defended, with a wall, weapons, and sentries; its residents had lived there and in another nearby camp for years until white militias finally found the sites and burned them to the ground. Green had first read about the fortress decades ago; last year, he published “The Kingdoms of Savannah,” a thriller involving a search for its ruins. Early in writing the book, he began reaching out to scholars to turn the fictional search into a real one. Now archeologists, historians, and others were donning rain gear and wrestling with tall snake-proof boots in a parking lot by the Savannah River.

Rick Kanaski, a gray-goateed archeologist at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge, was part of the expedition. He warned that we were unlikely to find the fortress itself. Instead, he said, “We’ll get a sense of place”—an idea of what the Maroons’ life had been like. Archeology is slow work, Kanaski went on: “Eventually, we’ll be able to tell some life stories about these individuals who were essentially creating their own community, and reclaiming their own individuality, and their own personhood, and their own society, so to speak.” But the first step was to get the lay of the land.

We strapped on life jackets, climbed onto a boat, and headed north. South Carolina was on the east bank and Georgia on the west; the temperature was in the fifties, and gray clouds spat water in our faces. Brown water sprayed up behind the motors. We had a rough idea of where we were going. Running parallel to the river, about a mile to its west, was Bear Creek; historical documents indicated that the fortress had been near the creek, and about two miles north from a lower fork. Green’s research had pointed him toward a region just south of where Bear Creek jutted east and then west, creating a thumb-shaped area of land. His target zone covered maybe twenty acres.

If the ground were dry, the area would be about fifteen minutes’ walk from shore. But we soon encountered a small, winding creek that cut through the lush vegetation. We sloshed across, walked for another few minutes, then hit another creek. This one was waist-deep, and we halted at the impasse. I was shivering, and my fingers had turned blue from the damp and cold. If it were warmer, I knew, we’d be getting eaten alive by mosquitos.

“This actually helps as part of their defense,” Kanaski said, of the forbidding landscape.

I imagined living on this land for years, with scant supplies. What had life been like for the Maroons? How had they survived? How had they understood their own story? Answers to these questions had been lost, like the fortress, in the swamp.

Although Maroons existed wherever slavery did, they are often left out of U.S. history curricula. In her book “Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons,” from 2014, Sylviane A. Diouf, a historian and visiting scholar at Brown University, offers several explanations for this. American Maroon communities weren’t as large as their counterparts in Central and South America, she writes, and they didn’t wage wars against enslavers; their settlements weren’t well documented, and, whereas everyone has heard of the Underground Railroad, marronage “lacked the high drama of the escape to the North.” Diouf also argues that the Maroons’ “narrative of autonomous survival without benevolent white involvement” probably lacked mass appeal.

Nonetheless, Maroons lived at extremes. They faced the constant risk of capture, especially while sneaking supplies from plantations. Some Maroons built underground dens and lived in them for years, occasionally even filling them with furniture and stoves; children were born and raised in darkness. While reading archival documents, “I found examples of caves all over the South,” Diouf told me. “It’s just mind-boggling that that kind of life could exist.” If Maroons returned or were caught, Diouf writes, “severe whippings were the ‘mildest’ punishments.” They could be branded, castrated, dismembered, or executed. After hanging, their bodies might be decapitated, quartered, and displayed.

Diouf dedicates a chapter of her book to the Maroons of Bear Creek. (A 2009 volume called “Maroon Communities in South Carolina,” edited by the historian Timothy James Lockley, also contains many original records from the period.) The Bear Creek Maroons built their first settlement around 1780, at the southern end of the waterway. In 1786, the group swelled in size, and their plantation raids attracted negative attention. That October, the grand jury of Chatham County complained that “large gangs of runaway Negroes are allowed to remain quietly within a short distance of this town.” Militia members located the Maroons and attacked them. Several people on each side were injured, and the militiamen, low on ammunition, retreated. They returned with more men that evening, but were ambushed, and fled.

James Jackson, a Revolutionary War hero and future governor of Georgia, took over the effort to capture or kill the Maroons. A few days later, he brought in fresh soldiers, but by then the Maroons had evacuated. He destroyed what they’d left behind, including houses, about fifteen boats, and four acres of rice. That December, Jackson wrote to the governor of South Carolina, Thomas Pinckney: “Your Excellency may have heard of the daring banditti of slaves, who some weeks since, attacked two of my detachments, & were at last with difficulty dislodged from their camp.” He warned that some Maroons had relocated to South Carolina, across the river, where they were again raiding plantations for supplies.

The following March, Pinckney authorized a plantation owner to hire up to a hundred minutemen—volunteer soldiers who were ready on short notice—for a monthlong search. He sent supplies and offered bonuses of ten pounds per Maroon caught dead or alive. He also asked an associate to hire twenty members of the Catawba tribe—who knew the land and were skilled trackers—to join the search, offering the same reward. The Maroons, meanwhile, had regrouped at a new location, two miles north of the old one, and fortified it.

On April 21, 1787, a group of Maroons went out in boats, planning to collect family members and others who wanted to join them from a nearby plantation. They ran into a group of minutemen, and several Maroons were shot and killed. The militiamen now knew of the encampment’s general location; even so, it took them two more weeks to locate it in the swamp. Finally, on the morning of May 6th, they killed a sentry and rushed through an opening in the fortress’s defensive wall. The Maroons fired a few shots before running away, leaving behind an enclosed area that covered seventeen acres and contained rice and potato fields and twenty-one houses. The attackers chased the Maroons for two miles, killing six of them, then burned down the camp and reported their victory. Later, the Charleston Morning Post would describe how the Maroons “had got seated and strongly fortified in the midst of an almost impenetrable swamp.”

“Running away from a fight was the best strategy,” Diouf said. “People say that’s not what heroes do, but it is. The goal of the Maroons was to stay alive.” Their leader, who went by the names Sharper and Captain Cudjoe, and his wife, Nancy, were among a group that escaped and eventually made its way to Florida. But the second-in-command, a man called Captain Lewis, was captured shortly after the raid and tried, in Savannah, for the murder of a white man whom he had brought back to the settlement before it was discovered. He was sentenced to be hanged, and to have his head displayed on a pole. Some audiences cheered for the Maroons’ defeat, but others celebrated their success. In an editorial, the Massachusetts Centinel admired “those brave and hardy sons of Africa” who “seem wisely to prefer a precarious existence, in freedom, on the barren heath, to the chains of their oppressors, whose avarice, cruelty and barbarism increases with their wealth.” The article concluded, “The spirit of liberty they inherit appears unconquerable. Heaven grant it may be invincible.”

Green is an eighth-generation Savannahian, and “The Kingdoms of Savannah” grew out of stories about the region that he’d heard as a child. The gothic tales often mixed horror with glamour. Once, an elderly relative described a group of escaped enslaved people who’d established a camp on an island in the Savannah River; they’d come upon a pirate ship run aground, its occupants all drowned, and had found gold inside, which they’d taken and buried. Green remembered the story in the early two-thousands, when a friend who was a local professor and historian of Savannah also mentioned a group of escaped enslaved people who had lived in the wilderness. He went to the Georgia Historical Society and pored over the archives. Along with his brother, an archeologist who studied the Taíno people of the Caribbean, he borrowed a canoe and spent a day paddling through the creeks and woods near where the fortress might have been. They didn’t find anything.

“The Kingdoms of Savannah,” which Green wrote about two decades later, centers on the disappearance of Matilda Stone, an archeologist studying the fortress site. The novel is about “a panoply of historical injustices,” Green told me—not just slavery but corrupt police, abusive labor practices, and pollution. At one point in the story, a member of an old Savannah family hoping to solve the kidnapping case is at the library browsing books about Savannah’s history. “I mean that’s what these books are all about,” someone says. “The crimes of Savannah. Every book in here. They’re all just the sickest crime stories you can imagine.” The novel is “sort of a tapestry of stories, which are all based on reality,” Green said. He explained that he’d been inspired in part by Lawrence Durrell’s “The Alexandria Quartet”—a tetralogy of novels set around the time of the Second World War which is “about folks wandering around Alexandria, Egypt, and all of the little ethnic enclaves, and the incredible corruption that rules everything, and how every little enclave is making deals constantly just to survive,” Green said.

Last fall, after the publication of “The Kingdoms of Savannah,” Green organized two events with Diouf and Paul Pressly, a historian writing a book about people who had escaped from slavery. The three soon started assembling a group to search for the fortress. “Historians like me, even public historians—you tell stories, and they just hang in the air, and they don’t go anyplace except for the twenty-five people that you talk to,” Pressly told me. “In talking to George, I realized, This man knows how to bring this into the public arena. A novel is the way you can bring it.” Diouf concurred: “There are more people who read fiction than there are people who read academic books.”

The day before the swamp trek, I spoke with Daniel Sayers, a historical anthropologist at American University who has spent years exploring Maroon history in the Great Dismal Swamp, in Virginia and North Carolina, and had agreed to join the search party. I asked him how he’d proceed once we were out in the wilderness. What would he look for, specifically?

“I’ll probably rely on my Spidey sense—‘Wow, people were here,’ ” Sayers said. His voice was gruff from years of smoking cigarettes and chewing tobacco; he wore jeans, a torn T-shirt, and an Olympia Beer trucker hat. It would be great to find an artifact, he went on, but that was unlikely; he would be satisfied with vibes. The site would probably be on slightly high and dry ground, he thought. “I’m hoping the place speaks to me,” he said.

Savannah, along with other Southern cities, is home to many macabre tours that mix history and spiritualism. In “Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era,” Tiya Miles, a historian at Harvard, writes that, “according to popular lore and common knowledge alike, ghosts dwell in places stained by unresolved conflict—places marked by pain, violence, betrayal, suffering, and ugly death.” That night, before dinner, I asked Esther Blessing, Green’s wife, if we might go on one. She described the tours as “this weird Tarantino-meets-‘Gone with the Wind’ clickbaity bullshit about enslaved people that isn’t even real.”

“They’re telling these fake stories about history,” she went on, her voice rising. “Why are they doing that when stories like this are there?”

In the swamp, we noticed a spot where the creek seemed to be shallower, and decided to try our luck crossing there. But we arrived only at another deep creek. “It looks like what we have is a whole series of dendritic creeks that are interlacing with this landscape that’s not well shown on any of the U.S.G.S. topographical sheets,” Kanaski said. In other words, we were in a watery maze.

“Where we’re standing might also have been where a small encampment of Maroons was,” Sayers ventured. “This is a Maroon landscape we’re in already.” It was a view that offered some consolation.

Dionne Hoskins-Brown, a government marine scientist who teaches at Savannah State University and is the chair of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission, spoke up. “Is it just the terrain that allowed the community to persist?” she asked. “I mean, it’s given us a fit today.”

“Even militia, who are trained to carry their guns and shoot people and track them down—they’re kind of afraid to go in,” Sayers said. “This is a big deal to just even experience this place,” he went on. “We’re in the heart of resistance in marronage.”

Green and a companion returned from a scouting mission. They’d followed the creek in one direction and found no easy way to cross; they wanted to try in the other direction, but Kanaski proposed coming back another day, when the ground was dry. While they debated, Hermina Glass-Hill, a Black activist and historian wearing pink-fringed boots and a red flower in her hair, removed a Congolese vessel—an engraved wooden chalice—from her bag and filled it with distilled water.

“Before we proceed, can we just pour libations right now, since we have identified that this is the terrain of that Maroon community?” she said, building on Sayers’s hopeful notion.

Glass-Hill stood and led us in a round of “Kumbaya”—“Come by here, my Lord”—an African American spiritual, first recorded in that part of Georgia. “Libations is about honoring the ancestors, honoring those who have come before us,” she said. “We want to give thanks to those brave, courageous souls who thought that taking the risk for freedom and the wildness of this place was more safe than staying on dry land.” She started pouring out some water. “To the men, to the women, to the children, who made this place home,” she said. “Ashé.”

[yearningforunity]

Children and their families - all freed African-Americans - continue to work on a plantation, doing exactly the same work they did as slaves, despite being liberated. This picture was taken in Saint Helena Island, South Carolina around 1863.

[ukdamo]

Charleston

Afaa M. Weaver

In a fountain at the harbour, children wash themselves in water spraying in the heat. They count themselves dark and light. The aircraft carrier sits in the moist nothing of salt water, tons of tons weighing in the soft splash. We count our wishes, to be free, to be at ease, to be in abundance. Above us spirits whirl in a thunderhead.

On steps across from the slave mart, I peel an orange for the slow rip of its flesh in my thumb, the sweet dotting of my nose with its juice. I suck the threads of it, gaze at the wooden doors now closed, at the empty space inside with iron hooks. I can see the white folks' heads checking available cash in front of naked Africans chained, bereaved, and listening to a cruelty yet to be born. I can smell the congregation of odours, humans fresh from slave ships or working in fields, and humans fresh from beds of fine linen, sleeping with fingers in Bibles and prayers.

This is not a petty thing because we have a rental car with an air conditioner, a tape player, and various cushions. We have come far to do this, to gaze out from the banks of this plantation river to the rice fields, to walk in Charleston. I keep the heat from threatening my life, and I wonder if I could have survived slavery to be old, if being old is all there is to live to be. I walk around the slave quarters and hear African languages speaking in magnolias.

[lyledebeast]

Gentlemen, Rustics, Accents, and Imperialism

Reflecting on binary oppositions in The Patriot, I'm surprised (and a little embarrassed) that I haven't discussed one of the more obvious ones: foreigner/native. Oh, this is a thorny one! For the sake of what I'm hoping and praying will be brevity, for once, I'm going to focus on how this distinction is portrayed through characters' accents. It turns out that accent choices do a lot of heavy lifting in this film to conceal historical truths, particularly those that paint South Carolina Patriots in an unflattering light.

The first accent to cover is the most often heard foreign one, and it is, almost, one accent. Although the 18th century British Army was full of men who joined to escape a life of poverty or at least found it be a better option for supporting their families than the professions available at home, we never hear them. There are no Cockney redcoats in this film. The accent we do hear often--from Cornwallis, O'Hara and Tavington--belongs to the landed gentry. The only British character who does not share it is the wounded private Tavington interviews after Martin's massacre in the woods, who is also the only speaking British soldier below the rank of captain. By comparison, the Americans have different accents and are represented by people of different classes, upholding a distinction between the oppressed, poor native-born population and an oppressive, wealthy foreign one that has little basis in historical reality.

While the difference in class and accent for Americans is more accurate, the accents themselves are not. The one belonging to Martin and his children, Charlotte Selton, the Howards, and James Wilkins is recognizably American but not distinctly Southern. More likely, Colonists would have had accents reminiscent of their, or their parents', country of origin (something AMC's Turn: Washington's Spies captures far more effectively than The Patriot). The development of distinct, regional accents takes generations. Interestingly, the more rustic characters, the ones we first meet when Martin and Villeneuve recruit at the rowdy tavern, do have clear, modern Southern accents. I'll return to this later, but for now I wonder why there has been time for some South Carolinians to develop a thick backwoods Southern accent but not for others to develop the kind of genteel Southern drawl spoken by such specimens as the Epps in Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave. In this respect, Charlotte and Tavington are near perfect opposites. He has lost the land and wealth that were his birthright but kept his accent; she lacks the accent but has the plantation full of inherited slaves.

It also bears mentioning that all the Black characters, enslaved and free, have American accents even though the transatlantic slave trade was still in full force and Charleston harbor was the busiest slave port in the colonies. Occam and Martin's workers could just as easily have had African accents, but perhaps that would too readily remind the audience that they did not simply co-exist with White South Carolinians but had, or been born to parents who had, been kidnapped from another continent and brought to the colony against their will.

Another accent The Patriot wholly silences is, of course, Cherokee. Indeed, no Cherokee person speaks in the film at all even though fighting them is a significant part of Martin and other characters' backstories. Part of the reason characters like Rollins and Billings do have recognizably Southern accents is likely deference to the stereotype that Southerners are more "rustic" than Americans from other regions, but there is something even darker at play. Since regional accents take so long to develop, that the characters Martin fought the Cherokees alongside have one indicates that their families have also inhabited this land for a very long time. The narrative presents them as South Carolina natives at the expense of the actual Native people they forced to give up land they'd inhabited for centuries even as they rebelled against oppression at the hands of British "foreigners."

That there are two scenes featuring Cherokees filmed but not included in the final cut--a flashback to Fort Wilderness at the beginning and a a brief, unheard exchange between Tavington and Cherokee scouts--illustrates the difficulty of fully erasing Native people from the history of place in which they played such a significant role. Similarly, we see many Black people on Charlotte's plantation and in the sea island community to which she and Martin's children escape, but almost all of them are in non-speaking roles. The Patriot asks us to sympathize with South Carolinian Patriots for their oppression under British rule but ignore their participation in the "ugly business" of imperialism through African slavery and Native genocide. The story may not be able to erase people without whom colonial South Carolina would be wholly unrecognizable, but it can certainly silence them.

[covenawhite66]

Slave Owners rented out their slaves for skilled labor outside the Master's plantation. To do this the Master had to put a badge on their slaves to show the craft they specialized in.

The badges were reregistered by the city of Charleston SC, every year. The Charleston badges were made of metal which were easier to preserve.