Slavers hid news of slavery’s end
A Juneteenth tale from CNN:
Temple “Tempie” Cummins stoically stares at the camera with her arms folded in her lap, sitting stiffly in a chair in her dusty, barren backyard with her weather-beaten wooden shack behind her. Her dark, creased face reflects years of poverty and worry.
The faded black and white image of Cummins from 1937 was snapped by a historian who stopped by her home in Jasper, Texas, to ask her about her childhood during slavery. Cummins, who did not know her exact age, shared stories of uninterrupted woe until she recounted how she and her mother discovered that they had been freed.
She said her mother, a cook for their former slave owner’s family, liked to hide in the chimney corner to eavesdrop on dinner conversations. One day in 1865, she overheard her owner say that slavery had ended, but he wasn’t going to let his slaves know until they harvested “another crop or two.”
“When mother heard that she say she slip out the chimney corner and crack her heels together four times and shouts, ‘I’s free, I’s free,’ ” Cummins told the historian, who recorded her story for a New Deal writers’ project that collected the narratives of the formerly enslaved during the Great Depression. “Then she runs to the field, ‘gainst marster’s will and tol’ all the other slaves and they quit work.”
Damn.
That story is one of the first recorded memoires of an experience that would inspire the creation of Juneteenth, an annual holiday celebrating the end of slavery that the US will commemorate this Monday. It marks the moment in June of 1865 when Union troops arrived in Texas to inform enslaved African Americans that they were free by executive decree. Many people like Cummins in remote areas of Texas and elsewhere did not know that they were free as their White owners hid the news from them.
My messaging friends remind us not to passive-voice the actions and decisions of others. “Mistakes were made” is obfuscatory bullshit. People made those decisions. Employees laid off did not “lose their jobs.” Their bosses/companies fired them. People were not “slaves.” Someone enslaved them.
“There’s been a shift in the historical community attempting to not define the period or the people by what was done to them in the sense that their identity becomes a noun, a slave, but rather that they are that they were in the process of being enslaved,” says Tobin Miller Shearer, a historian and director of African American Studies at the University of Montana.
“There were slavers who did that to them,” he says, “but there’s more to their identity than what was being done to them.”
Yet other myths about slavery persist, in part, because of the sheer enormity and brutality of slavery.
John Blake offers several myths. This anecdote was new to me:
In the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, there is a special exhibit of an artifact that is so rare that there are only a handful now in existence. It is what historians call a “Slave Bible.” It is a copy of a Bible that was used by British missionaries to convert enslaved African Americans. Published in 1807, the Bible deletes any passages that may inspire liberation – about 90% of the Old Testament is missing along with half of the New Testament.
“They literally blacked out, portions of the Bible that had anything to do with freedom, anything to do with equality, anything to do with God delivering folk,” says Leon Harris, a theology professor at Biola University in California.
Apparently, British missionaries created the radically edited Bible to reassure Caribbean farmers that they had not come to preach liberation to the enslaved. Nor to teach them to read?