slave suicide

8/22/2019 Slave Suicide

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Suicide, Slavery, and Memoryin N o rth Am erica

Terri L. SnyderLots of slaves wha t was h rung over from Africa could fly. "There was a crowd of th emwo rking in the field. They don 't like it here and they th ink they go back to Africa.One by one they fly up in the air and all fly off and gone back to Africa.

J Ta ttna ll, Georgia W riters' Project Interview, in Georgia W riters' Project,Drums and Shadows: Survival Stories among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (1940;Athens, Ga., 1986), 108.W h en ex-slaves were interviewed by the Federal W riters ' Project in the 1930 s, the subjectof suicide rarely surfaced. ' Exceptions to this silence abo ut slave self-destruction camefrom the particular region of the Ceorgia and South Carolina Sea Islands where ex-slavesand their children related stories, similar to Jack Tattnall's, of Africans who literally hadthe power to take flight to escape enslavement. The flying African folktale probably hasits historical roots in an 1803 collective suicide by newly imported slaves. A group ofIgbo (variously, Eb o or Igbo ) captives w ho ha d survived the mid dle passage were soldnear Savannah, Ceorgia, and reloaded onto a small ship bound for St. Simon's Island. Offthe coast ofthe island, the enslaved cargo, who had "suffered much by mismanagement,""rose" from their confinement in the small vessel, and revolted against the crew, forcingthem into the water where they drowned. After the ship ran aground, the Igbos "took tothe marsh" and d rown ed themselves an act that m ost scholars have unde rstood as a de-liberate, collective suicide. The site of their fatal imm ersion was nam ed Ebos Landing.^Terri L. Snyder is professor of American studies at California State University, Fullerton. The author wishes to thankVincent Brown, Kevin Dawson, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Edward T. Linenthal, M ark M. Smith, Jordan Y. Taylor,Sharon E. Wood, and the anonymous readers for t\\eJAH for their perceptive commentary and helpful contribu-tions. She also is grateful to the staff of the 7 ^ / / , especially Stephe n Do uglas And rews, Sarah B . Rowley, and Gyn -thia Gwynne Yaudes, for their assistance in shepherding this article through the publication process. Support forresearching and writing this article was provided by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and afaculty research grant from Galifornia State University, Fullerton.Readers may contact Snyder at [email protected].


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40 The Journal of American History June 2010

"The fate of those Igbo in 1803 gave rise to a distinctive regional folklore and a placename, but both individual and collective suicide were also part of the general history oNorth American slavery. From the start of the transatlantic slave trade, mariners, mer-cha nts, and masters exchanged repo rts of slave suicide along with th eir hu m an traffic, andthey noted alarm ingly that captive Africans often respond ed to enslavem ent by destroy ingthemselves. Som e ship captains kep t accou nt o f their cargo losses for investors and insur-ers; one study of surgeons' logs for the period 1792-1796 reveals that 7.2 percent of cap-tive Africans killed themselves at some point during capture, embarkation, or along themiddle passage. Particularly at loading points on the African coast and aboard ships dur-ing the middle passage, captive Africans' self-destruction was common enough to warranthe use ofthe earliest technologies for suicide prevention. Nets were strung on the decksof slave ships to forestall any captives who might leap to their deaths and the speculum oriwas used to forcibly feed those who chose to starve themselves. While work by MichaeGomez and, more recently, Marcus Rediker and Eric Robert Taylor has underscored thefrequency of suicide among captive Africans during the early stages of the transatlantictrade, little atten tion has been given to the mean ings of self-destruction am on g new ly im-ported slaves after disembarkation or among seasoned and former slaves born in colonialNorth America and, later, the United States.^

Self-destruction in the context of North American slavery has been overlooked, inpart, because of the problematic nature of all evidence for suicide. We simply cannoknow how many enslaved personsor even free peoplechose suicide in early modernAmerica. Because no systematic public accounting of deaths was undertaken when slaveswere domestically dispersed, traded, and resold on the North American mainland, sui-cide figures for disembarkation are difficult to ascertain. Naval office shipping lists fromthe colonial period provide the numbers of slaves who died within forty days of arrivaat American ports, but they do not give reasons for the deaths. Because surviving NorthAmerican plantation records are essentially private documents, they also do not systematically account for the causes of slave deaths. The incidence of suicide under the slaveEbos Landing, see Michael A. Gom ez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel H ill, 1998), 117 -18 ; Powell, "Sum mon ing the Ancestors," 253 -8 0; Tim othy B. Powell, "Ebos Landing," June 15, 200 4, New Georgia Encyclopedia, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/ngArticle.jsp?id=h-2895&hl=y; and Malcolm Bell Jr., Major Butler's Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Fa(Athens, Ga., 1987), 131-32.' See Gom ez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 116-31 ; Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Hum an History (NYork, 200 7); and Eric Robert Taylor, IfWe Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of he Atlantic Slave Trade (Bton Rouge, 2006). David Eltis, The Rise ofAfrican Slavery in America (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), 157n73. The earest sustained consideration of suicide among Africans who were forcibly transported to the Americas is William DPierson, "W hite Canniba ls, Black Ma rtyrs: Fear, Depression, and Religious Faith as Causes of Suicide am ong NewSlaves," Journal of Negro History, 62 (April 1977), 147-59. On slave suicide among newly imported Africans, sStephanie E. Smallwood, Saltivater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Ma


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Suicide, Slavery, and Memory in North America 41

The speculum oris was used in the forced feeding of suicidal slaves. Ac-cording to a merchant who sold the instrument, "slaves were frequentlyso sulky, as to shut their mouths against all sustenance, and this witha determination to die; and it was necessary their mouths should beforced open to throw in nutriment, that they who had purchased themmight incur no loss by their death." Thomas Clarkson, The History ofthe R ise, Progress, and Accom plishmen t of the Abolition of the AfricanSlave-Trade by the British Parliament (2 vols., London, 1808), I, 377.Courtesy Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

system is also difficult to assess because cultural and legal principles encouraged the sup-pression of evidence of self-destruction in all historical periods, including the present.While some captive Africans viewed suicide as an honorable escape from slavery, for earlymodern Anglo- and European Americans, suicidewhat they termed self-murderwasa sinful act and also a felony that carried substantial penalties. Individuals who killedthemselves could be denied Christian burial rites, and their bodies could be subjected topost-mortem desecration; their surviving families could also be penalized financially and


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42 The Journal of American History Jun e 201 0

Historians' interpretative choices also help explain the lack of attention paid to slavesuicide in No rth A merica. The groun dbreak ing studies of s lavery in the antebellum Un it-ed States implicitly followed Emile Durkheim's widely regarded sociology of suicide inassuming that the mature slave community provided the social integration and solidaritynecessary to deter slaves from self-destruction.' ' To argue that slave suicide occurred fromthe beginning of the slave trade through the end of the Civil War does not diminish thepower of cultural formadon in the African diaspora. Rather, it suggests that a condnuityin the conditions that prompted slave suicide existed despite African American commu-nity formation.

This article widens the traditional scope of evidence to consider slave self-destructionfrom multiple perspectives and chronological moments and more effectively places sui-cide within the long history of North American slavery. Slave suicide often has beenrightly perceived as a form of defiance; indeed, Michael Gomez assesses suicide as "per-haps the ultim ate form of resistance." ' To co ntem plate the h istory of suicide with in thecontext of North American slavery, however, I step outside of that resistance model andexamine slave self-destruction through what I term slave suicide ecology: the emotional,psychological, and material conditions that fostered it. My consideration of ecology doesnot discount resistance as a precipitating factor in slave suicide, but it allows for a morenuanced exploration of slaves as individual subjects and encourages a more careful pars-ing of the role of power in acts of self-destrucdon. Certainly, the power of kidnapping,forced migration, rape, brutality, starvation, natal alienation, and family separation gaveslaves readily imaginable motives for suicidal responses to their captors and owners. Butcasting a wider ecology of slave suicide allows the inclusion of other, lesser known sourcesof power, including religious beliefs, gendered entitlements, family and household com-position, physical pain, revolt, and imminent incarceration.

While slave suicide was a seemingly isolated choice driven by immediate, identifiableconditions, it nevertheless reverberated in significant local, regional, and national con-texts and raised questions about a host of cultural and political issues: the nature of slavetemperament, the legidmacy of the insdtution of slavery, and the extent of individualrights and liberties in the early republic and du ring the anteb ellum era. Histo rians of earlyand post-Civil War America have studied suicide as part of legal history or the history ofmedicine, as a way to examine social change, or as a species of violent crime/ Those ap-low," a conclusion based on evidence from the 1850 census. The census is not a reliable source of information,however. Slave deaths were only occasionally investigated and, therefore, rarely appeared in census statistics, whichaccounted only for officially reported causes of death. See Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time onthe Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston, 1974), MA-l^. On the difficulty of assessing suicistatistics, see David Daube, "The Linguistics of Suicide," Philosophy an d Public Affairs, 1 (no. 4, 1972), 387-437Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Farly Modem England (New York, 1990


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Suicide, Slavery, and M emo ry in N or th Am erica 4 3

proaches uncover many ofthe social and political nuances of suicide in the United States,bu t they reveal little abou t the act of self-destruction and its various mean ings with in thecontext of slavery. Suicide by slaves might signal cultural continuity with ethnic Africanattitudes about choosing death rather than dishonor, or it might be seen as an entirelyreasonableif not outright revolutionaryresponse to enslavement. Suicide might havebeen a source of spiritual relief for slaves: a means for African-born slaves to transmigrateto Africa or a way for native-born Christian slaves to reach heaven. Suicide might also beunderstood as an aggressive act toward others, as an expression of gendered entitlement,or as an escape from physical or emotional pain. Historically speaking, however, slave sui-cide was an act that held shades of discernable meaning and that reflected the ecology ofthe enslaved self Simultaneously, accounts of slave suicide carried a host of potent politi-cal and cultural meanings and came to symbolize, particularly for abolitionists, much ofwhat was objectionable about the institution of slavery.

Beyond the immediate experience and perception of the act of self-destruction, ex-slave memories also reconfigured the intersections of slavery and suicide. Flying Afri-can folklore, in particular, illustrates how distinct cultural communities chronicled, com-pressed, and remembered the experience of self-destruction in slavery. Stories of flyingAfricans, like the types of African American folklore that were explored by Lawrence WLevine and Sterling Stuckey, serve didactic purposes. Using Saidiya V. Hartman's argu-ment that memory is not simply an inventory of what went before, but is, rather, a bridgefrom the past to the present that redresses the wrongs of history, the stories can also beseen as corrective measures.^ In this sense, fiying African folklore demonstrates the powerof cultural memory to reshape past tragedies, transforming stories of suicide into storiesof strength and propelling them into the future.

Taken together, the attitudes of onlookers to the slave trade, the viewpoints of slavesthemselves, and the perspectives of ex-slaves can historicize our understanding of suicidewithin slavery and our paradigms for studying self-destruction in the American past.Moreover, the interplay among the perceptions, ecology, and memories of suicide withinslavery can challenge us to rethink so me of our assu m ptions ab ou t the peculiar institu tionand about the history of suicide in early North America.

EvidenceHea rd about the Ibo's Landing? That's the place where they bring the Ibos over in aslave ship and when they get here, they ain't like it and so they all start singing andthey march right down in the river to march back to Africa, but they ain't able toget there. They gets d row n.


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44 The Journal of American History June 201 0

A comp arison o fth e recollections of Jack Tattnall and Floyd W hi te suggests that evidenceof slave suicide on plantations in early North America is impressionistic and often com-peting. Over the course of slavery's long history in North America, slaves, masters, legalauthorities, and antislavery activists held divergent interpretations of suicide by slavesmost often seen in legal, political, and popular descriptions but also found in private pa-pers and plantation account books. A brief review of the evidence makes clear how inci-dents of slave suicide served different purposes and allows us to consider the conclusionsthat might be drawn from those often contradictory and sometimes ambiguous sources.

Legal sources, particularly legislative petitions, coroners' reports, and breach-of-warranty lawsuits attest to the incidence of slave suicide from the seventeenth centurythrough the Civil War. At first glance, the sources appear to report on slave suicide, butmost of them also represent the actions of slave owners (or potential owners) who weremotivated to protect their financial interests. In eighteenth-century Virginia, for exam-ple, slave owners petitioned the colonial legislature for compensation when their slavescommitted suicide. Compensation could be gained only if the slave had already beensentenced to capital punishment, so the peti t ions must be understood to convey only afraction of the suicides that had occurred at the time. (See table 1.) Similarly, coroners'reports from county jurisdictions in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia alsoreflect the persistence of slave suicide in mainland North America well beyond the colo-nial period. Juries of inquest were summoned to view the bodies of slaves and give officialrulings on the causes of death. Such inquests appear to have been irregular, although, asthey exist from the mid-eighteenth century forward, they may have prefigured the pa-ternalism more commonly associated with antebellum slavery. If, as Eugene Cenoveseand Peter Kolchin have argued, paternalism reflects both masters' and the states' greaterinterest in protecting the lives of bondspeople, then inquests for incidents of suicide inthe colonies and the early republic anticipate the emergence of post-1820 legislation thatpenalized masters, overseers, or any on e wh o m urd ered or mistreated slaves. '' (See table 2.)

Breach-of-warranty legal cases provide yet another view of slave suicide from the mid-eighteenth century through the Emancipation Proclamation. Early on. North Americancourts consistently recognized that slaves killed themselves because of "cruel and im-proper treatment." Breach-of-warranty suits attempted to affix responsibility for slave sui-cide on owners, overseers, or those who hired slaves and attempted to recover monetarydamages. In the 1741 case of Viel v. Pery, a plaindff in Louisiana sought damages for thedeath of Francois, an enslaved carpenter who cut his throat "in despair, whether for ill-treatment or for other causes." Other ordinary southerners shared a similar perspectiveon slavery and suicide. In 1861 on e yo ung w om an in New O rleans saw a slave atte m pt tohang herself and concluded that the act was caused by the "ill-treatment of her devilish


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Suicide, Slavery, and Memory in North America 45

Table 1Suicide, Possible Suicide, and Slavery in Virginia, 17 27 -177 6Suicide as a cause of death Men Women Unknown TotalC e r t a i n ' 31 6 6 43Possible'' 19 2 4 25T O T A L S 50 8 10 68 .

SOURCE: J. R Kennedy and H. R. Mellwaine, Journals ofthe House of Burgesses,1712-1726, 1727-1740, 1742-1749, 1752-1758, 1758-1761, 1761-1765, 1766-1769,/773-/776 (Richmond, 1905-1915).

'Petitions directly state that slaves committed suicide by hanging, drowning, gunshot,or burning. Petitions state that slaves ran into rivers, ponds, and creeks and drowned toavoid capttjre or refused to surrender when surrounded and were fatally shot.^Petitions report that slaves were "shortly found dead" after having been outlawed,"set fire to" their jails, or who died shortly after confinement in jail.

Data from legal records must be treated with caution. Masters' claims that their slaveskilled themselves andverdicts of suicide from coroners' inquests probably masked homi-cidal violence against slaves. Similarly, deaths that might be legally ruled as accidentalmay have been ho micides or suicides. Som e inqu ests were no doubt he ld at the request ofmasters who suspected foul play and wanted to sue for damages. The records also refiectthe local tensions between slave owners and the juries who made final rulings (some notalways in favor of masters, particularly after 1820, as both Genovese and Kolchin havefound) . When the enslaved Rachel died of a blow to her head in 1834, for example, thejurors "rest[ed] their suspicion" on her owner Thomas Preay."

In contrast , depictions ofslave self-destruction in antislavery print culture served verydifferent ends than the depictions in legal documents: those that appeared in print cul-ture directly addressed the system of slavery and the experiences of enslaved persons. Thepublished results ofa 1791 British House ofC om m on s investigation into the slave trade,for examp le, provided am ple evidence that Africans resp ond ed to enslavement by destroy-ing themselves. Investigators directly queried merchants, sailors, ship captains, planters,overseers, and investors about slave suicide in the British Caribb ean, andmost of the an-swers affirmed that suicide was common at embarkation, along the middle passage, andamong unseasoned or newly imported slaves. Suicide ideation and specific accounts ofself-destruction can be found in personal slave narratives as widely ranging as OlaudahEquiano's and Mattie J. Jackson's. Harriet Jacobs contemplated suicide, writing that slaveself-destruction was a "frequent occurrence" in all slave states and relaying the story of


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46 , The Journal of American History June 20 10

Table 2Slave Suicide and Coroners' Inquests fromSelected Southern Jurisdictions in theColonial, Early Republic, and Antebellum Periods'

Suicide VerdictsSlaves I Total Percentage of Inquests on Slaves

North CarolinaSouth CarolinaVirginiaTOTALS

10 / 451 8 / 4 97 / 3 335 / 127

22%37%21%28%

SOURCE: C.C.R. 192, Inquests, 1690-1745, Miscellaneous Papers, 1677-1775, NorthCarolina Colonial Court Records (North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh); Box 1, SSXVTIl, Secretary of State Coroners' Inquests, 1728 -177 5, N orth C arolina ColonialCourt Records, ihid.\ Miscellaneous Records, Ashe, Bertie, Burke, Caswell, Chowan,Gates, Granville, Cuilford, Hyde, Iredell, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Person, Randolph,Rowan, Tyrell, and Surry Counties, ca. 1752- 1859, N orth C arolina Colonial C ourtRecords, ibid.\ Inquests for Camden, Fairfield, Kershaw, Kershaw General, Laurens,Marlboro, Pinckney, Spartanburg, and Union Counties or Districts, ca. 17841830(South Carolina D epartment of Archives and H istory, Columb ia); Inquests for Amelia,Prince Edward, Chesterfield, and Henrico Counties, ca. 174I-I847 (Library of Virginia,Richmond).* Thesefiguresreflect explicit suicide verdicts; they do not take into account ambiguousor suspicious findings.

self in the wo ods. Ball asserted tbat "self-destruction was m uc h mo re frequent am on g theslaves in the cotton region than is generally supposed" and added that he did not "marvelthat the slaves who are driven to tbe south often destroy themselves." His comments sug-gest that the social and cultural dislocations created by the transatlantic slave trade andthe middle passage continued to shape the self-destructive impulses of slaves who wereborn in the United States and traded domestically. Still, even antislavery forces used theincidence of slave suicide for different purposes. Witnesses in the House of Commonsinvestigation, for example, argued that slave suicide would diminish if the slave trade wasended and if the enslaved population was allowed to increase through reproduction ratherthan importation. They suggested that suicide among slaves would be lessened by stablefamily forma tion, a factor dep end ent on the reprod uctive labor of female slaves. How ever,as the testimonies of Jacobs, Ball, and Douglass make clear, such stability was illusive forslavestwo million of whom, according to Walter Johnson, were sold at interstate, local,and state-ordered sales from the end of the transatlantic trade through the Civil


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Suicide, Slavery, and Memory in North America

The cover of The Dying Negro illustrates the wrongs of slavery through images of the central fig-ure's self-destruction and contextual representations of family separation, forced labor, and theoverseer's whip. The turbulent skies and epigraph also reflect a challenge to traditional attitudestoward suicide. Tbe slave offers his spirit to God and defiantly suggests tbat bis voluntary deatbis unstaine d by sin: "To you this unpolluted blood I pour. To you tbat spirit whicb ye gave re-store." The open beavens suggest tbat God is, at least, listeningand perhaps even yieldingtothe slave's challenge. Reprinted rom Thomas Day, The Dying Negro, a Poetical Epistle supposedto bewritten by a Black (Wbo lately shot himself on board a vessel in the river Thames;) to hisintended Wife (London, 1773). Courtesy Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

The Perception of Slave SuicideI have heard of them people. . . . My mother used to tell me about them when we


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The Journal of American History Jun e 201 0

and his wife say, "We going back ho me , goodie bye, good ie bye," and just like a birdthey flew out of sight. Ca rrie Ha m ilton, G eorgia W riters' Project interview, in Georgia Writers' Project,Drums and Shadows, 28.

During the early stages of North American colonization, European and Anglo-Americanonlookers viewed suicide by captive Africans through an early modern sensibility thatemphasized hierarchies of dom inatio n and subm ission. Som e empowered onlookers weresimp ly perplexed by slave suicide, particula rly suicides by newly im po rte d slaves. In 169 8the British politician Edward Littleton warned planters that slaves hanged themselves and"no creature knows why," while the Virginian William Mayo wrote matter-of-factly in1731 that the "Negro Quaccoo Hang'd himself the Women all in Health and all thingsgoe on as well as can be expected." Early newspapers were also at a loss to explain suicideby the enslaved. A 1752 announcement in the Virginia Gazette noted that "a few daysago, a fine negroe Man Slave, imported in one ofthe late Ships from Africa, belonging toa W heelw right, near this City, taking Notice of his Master's giving anoth er C orrec tion fora Misdemeanor, went to a Grindstone and making a Knife sharp cut his own throat, anddied on the Sp ot. "' ' The language of the item seems to unde rscore th e deliberateness ofthe slave's self-destructive inten tion s: he watch ed, walked, an d sh arpened his knife. W hil ethe story suggests that his suicide was a response to witnessing a beating, its tone doesnot otherwise directly comment on his reasons for so doing, suggesting that the Gazette'sreaders required no further explanation.

Other observers of slave self-destruction appealed to essentialism. They explained sui-cide as a predilection of newly imported slaves of a particular age or ethnicity rather thanas a response to enslavement. Planters were counseled to avoid purchasing older slaveswh o were "sullen an d u nteach able an d frequently pu t an end to their own lives." As JamesGrainger's popular poem The Sugar Cane (published in 1764 but reprinted in the UnitedStates as late as the 1850s) expressed the matter:

But, planter, from what coast soe'er they sail.Buy not the old: they ever sullen prove;With heart-felt anguish, they lament their home.And oft by suicide their being end.'"*Planters were also warned against obtaining captives from particular nations. The SugarCane counseled planters to "fly, with care, from the Moco nation," because "they them-selves destroy" and to avoid "C oro m on tee" w ho "chuse death before dishono rable bon ds."Merchants such as Henry Laurens of South Carolina wrote that Igbos were "quite out


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Suicide, Slavery, and Memo ry in N or th Am erica 49

of repute from numbers in every Cargo . . . destroying themselves." Traders in the WestIndies and planters in South Carolina avoided the Igbo precisely because they were re-ported to be suicidal. Even so, Virginians apparently were not dissuaded by such reports:between 1710 and 1760, 38 percent of all slaves imported to Virginia were Igbo. ' ' '

Aside from age and ethnicity, however, temperamental stubbornness was the charac-teristic mo st co m m on ly ascribed t o suicidal slaves, regardless of wh ethe r th ey were new lyimported or native born. Self-destroying slaves were deemed to be willful, sullen, or sim-ply insensible individuals whothrough unconscious inabili ty or conscious determina-tion railed against their station. The ch aracteristic of stub bo rnn ess also linked self-de-stroying slaves to what early modern observers referred to as refuse slaves: seasoned yetundesirable slaves who were traded northward from ports in the Caribbean. By the earlyeighteenth century, slave dealers up and down the Atlantic seaboard had learned to avoid"refuse Negroes" because, as one merchant explained, they were "Hazardous. Criminallsor otherwise of Litde Worth" and also "distempered or refractory."' ' ' Refuse slaves fit un-easily into early modern Anglo-American models of authority and were, therefore, easilycast aside. Their recalcitrance made them unfit for slavery, compromised the mastery ofowners and overseers, and diminished the overall value of slaves as property.

In the early modern world, the concept of stubbornness was not solely assigned toslaves; the label was also placed on the socially an d eco nom ically m argina lized, reflectinghow assessments of tem pe ram ent were a strategy of racial an d class opp ression. T he Con-necticut Courant printed the findings of a coroner's inquest on a ten-year-old house ser-vant who, "refusing to do what his master bid him," had been beaten to death: the verdictattributed his death to "stubbornness and manslaughter." Early coroners' reports fromVirginia and Maryland similarly imply that servants who killed themselves were simplystubborn. Most of the reports are formulaic and explain suicide as a result of diabolicalinspiration or, alternatively, because the suicidal servants did not have "grace" or "Godbefore their eyes." Occasionally, the rep orts con tain a brief com m en t: U rsala Fallis han gedherself "without apparent provocation" and servant Walter Catford "barbarously" tied agrindstone around his waist and drowned himself in a millpond. The act of committingsuicide was ultimately con strued as the act of a stubborn self One example of this type ofconclusion comes from a 1733 article in the New England Weekly Journal. It claimed thatthe ancient suicides of Cato and Brutus reflected a "rather sullen stubbornness" in thatthey died by their own hands rather than by submitting to fate. Such a usage of the wordstubbornness implied the existence of temperamental challenges to cultural hierarchies.Stubbornness was equated with servile disobedience and even criminality, just as an ir-rational resistance to natural and biblical types of authority was linked to self-murder. '^

' ' ' Crainger, Sugar Cane, bk. 4, lines 81 , 99. D onna n, ed.. Documents Illustrative ofthe History ofthe Slave Trade,IV, 317. For a discussion ofthe Igbo in Virginia, see Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 11415, 124. The


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The connection between stubbornness and slavery was also refiected in the punish-ments that were meted out to self-destructive slaves, and slaves who took their own liveswere used as visible deterrents for the res t of the community. In 1712, when the enslavedRoger hanged himself in the "old 40 foot Tobacco House," his overseer's response wasswift and immediate: Roger's head was "cutt off and Stuck on a pole to be a terror to oth-ers." Through the Civil War era, the corpses of suicidal slaves were decapitated, dismem-bered, and displayed to punish the victim and to deter like-minded slaves. That type oft rea tment was comparable to early modern English and European punishm ent for the actof suicide, whether performed by slave or free person; indeed, corpses were sometimesdragged through the streets and were often buried profanely (facedown, naked, outsidethe churchyard, beneath gallows, at a crossroads, or in a river). Such practices attested tothe community's need for a retributive justice that could only be obta ined by punishingthe body and the family of a self-destructive soul. These practices also parallel the Britishand European punishments for treason that were widely visited on the corpses of rebel-lious or suicidal slaves in the West Indies, the Chesapeake region, and the Carolinas.Historically, the act of desecrating or dismembering the corpses of rebellious or suicidalslaves serves as a reminder that the violence v isited on the corpses of African A m erica nstypically equ ated w ith the lynchings ofthe postbellum yearshas a history that stretchesback to the earliest period of North American sett lement.

Desecration practices for suicide in general had fallen out of favor in England, Euro-pe, and North America by the end of the eighteenth century, except for the bodies ofslaves. Within the insti tution of slavery bodily dismemberment continued to const i tutewhat Vincent Brown has called a "spectacular terror" that was designed to establish andreinforce masters' secular and spiritual authority over their slaves. Even later, during theantebellum period. Christianized masters attempted to "discountenance and prevent"slave suicide through spiritual intimidation and bodily desecration. A ccording to CharlesBall, owners denied to the bodies of their slaves who committed suicide the Christianburial rites "accorded to the corpses of other slaves" and "branded" slaves who killedthemselves "as the worst of criminals."'^

Whi le the association of suicide with stubbornness held fast throughout the era ofNorth American slavery, perceptions of slave temperament did begin to change dur ingthe revolutionary period. The concept of refuse slaves shifted subtly, used more common-ly for those slaves who were "sickly . . . by grief" or who had been "over crowded on boardthe ships." Particularly in the e ighteenth-century Car ibbean and in South America, slaveself-destruction was increasingly viewed as a symptom of pining rather than as a result ofa stubborn temperamenta change that also refiects emerging views of suicide as con-


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Suicide, Slavery, and M emo ry in N or th Am erica 51

sequence of mental disease, not a product of a willful temperament or diabolical inspira-tion. The tendency toward suicide by slaves was labeled "nostalgia" and had a distinct setof symptoms that s t i l l continued to encompass temperamental s tubbornness. Slaves whomanifested medical nostalgia killed themselves through outright refusals: they would noteat or move and by these actions they deliberately courted death."

The evolving assessments of slave temperament reflected eighteenth-century debatesover both suicide and slavery. In the modern world, suicidelike slaveryposed an ex-istential dilemma. Debates about the legitimacy of both suicide and slavery were joinedtogether in philosophical and popular reflections on human existence, transforming earlymodern dialogues about s tubbornness into more modern considerations of temperament,agency, and emotion. The rise of antislavery sentiment and the move to decriminalize sui-cide raised questions about individual rights and human liberty. Some political theoristsargued that subjects and citizens bore an obligation to keep themselves alive, while othe rssaw self-destruction as a tragic but ultimately individual right that was not the businessof the state. Even today, suicide uneasily measures the divide between private will andpublic interest. Beginning in the eighteenth century, antislavery activistsincluding ex-slavesused self-destruction to illustrate the wrongs of slavery, the denial of liberty, andthe immorali ty of arbitrary power. Such themesnatural r ights , the entidements of theself, and the extent of individual libertywere central to the ctiltural and political de-bates that mark the emergence of the modern era. On occasion, arguments about slaveryand suicide literally invok ed one anoth er. W he n John Locke asserted that freedom fromarbitrary power was a natural right, he used the example of a slave's choice to die to il-lustrate his point. Locke argued that whenever a slave found that the hardship of slaveryoutweighed the value of his life, "it is in his power, by resisting the will of his master, todraw on himself the death he desires."^"

Sen time ntal dep ictions of slave suicides appeared in the pr int cu lture of the revo lution-ary and early republican eras. Even those who were convinced of slaves' innate s tubborn-ness and were disdainful of abolitionism would have been hard put to ignore the difl^erenthuman temperament reflected in Thomas Day's wildly popular poem. The Dying Negro,wh ich becam e an overnigh t sensation when it was first pub lished in 1 77 3. Acco rding toits epigraph, the poem, allegedly based on an actual event, was written by a slave in Eng-land who believed that he was free. He had been baptized and was about to marry his be-loved, a w hite servant, when he was seized and readied for ship m ent back to th e Americas.W hile awaiting transport o n a ship in the Tham es, he shot himself^' Botb the news itemof the actual event and Day's poem were widely reprinted in American newspapers, am-plifying the contradictions of the chattel principle: Were enslaved individuals commodi-ties or persons? The p oem reflects the new assessments of slaves' em otion al tem pe ram entthat were emerging at tbe end of the eighteenth century, and it ultimately endows slaves


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Iht American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1838 illustrated tbe suicide of the slave Paul, who, accordingto fellow slave Ch arles B all, had "suffered so much in slavery tha t he chose to enco unte r th e h ardsh ipsand perils of a runaway. He exposed himself, in gloomy forests, to cold and starvation, and finallyhung himself, that he might not again fall into the hands of his tormentor." Nathaniel Southard,ed., American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1838 (Boston, 1838), 13. Courtesy Huntington Library, SanMarino, California.

separation, and despondency stemming from physical and sexual brutality. Sensibility inslaves marked their humanity and explained their resort to suicide. For example, an an-tislavery tract published in 1803, Refkctions on Slavery, With Recent Evidence of its Inhu-manity, recounts the "melancholy death"by suicideof a Philadelphia "French Negro"named Romain. Upon learning that he and his family were to be shipped to the WestIndies and likely separated, Romain's wife escapes with their child, and he faces shipmentto the Caribbean alone. As he contemplates the si tuation, R om ain becomes "m addened ,""rendered desperate," and "complicated by misery." With his "faculties benumbed by op-pression," he seizes a pruning knife and slashes his throat three dmes, in a repetition fos-tered by his "dread" tha t a spark of life should remain and he be revived. The tract lamen tsRomain's death, but it does not condemn his act of self-murder. Instead, it valorizes Ro-main in an attempt to elicit an empathetic response from the reader.^^By attrib utin g sentim ental rather than stu bb orn em otion al sensibilities to the enslaved,


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Suicide, Slavery, and M em ory in N or th Am erica 53

as the British colonial administrator Edward Long, held firm to traditional ideas of slavestub bo rnn ess, believing that they were ruled by passions and that male slaves in particular,were governed by "blind anger and rage."^^

It is also possible that these cha ng ing assessments of slave tem pe ram en t affected th emasters. As the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, masters became increas-ingly defensive about the suicides of their slaves; perhaps the mask of paternalism necessi-tated their denials of slave self-destruction. W illiam Beverley, a me mb er of one of Virgin -ia's most powerful slave-owning families, testified in 1791 that "never one" report of slavesuicide had ever reached hi m . That statem ent seems nearly inconceivable, however, from awell-born Virginian who was studying the law and whose family possessed approximately500 slaves. Writing later in the nineteenth century, Charles Ball is even more explicit onthat point, asserting that "a certain degree of disgrace falls upon the master whose slavehas committed suicide: the master is unwilling to let it be known, lest the deed should beattributed to his own cruelty."^"*

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, antislavery reformers and slaves chal-lenged the centrality of stubbornness and, instead, used slave suicide to highlight thedenial of personhood that was central to the institution of slavery. Doing so gave freshmeaning to Cato's choice, widely invoked in North American slave narratives, betweenliberty and death.^^ Antislavery print culture depicted suicidal slaves as closely linked toan emotional sensibility that was more often manifested in nostalgia and melancholythan in temperamental stubbornness. The image of slave suicide became a potent politi-cal shorthand for the wrongs of slavery. That slaves could all too often be driven to suicidewas a reflection of their lack of liberty and their membership in humanity and, therefore,a key argument against the maintenance ofthe peculiar institution. Perceptions of slavesuicide highlighted the contradictions of the chattel principle, which were increasinglydifficult to reconcile in the minds of onlookers. Suicide played a key role in th e c om -peting assessments of slavery. As a result, representations of suicide by the enslaved car-ried complex and changing messages to a variety of early modern and antebellum NorthAmericans.

The Ec ology o f Slave Suicide

My gran use to tell me about folks flying back to Africa. A man and his wife wasbrung from Africa. When they find out they was slaves and got treat so hard, theyjust fret and fret. One day, they was standing with some other slaves and all of asudden they say, "We going back to Africa. So goodie bye, goodie bye." Then theyflied right out of sight.


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Mose Brown, Georgia Writers' Project interview, in Georgia Writers' Project,Drums and Shadows, 18.Despite the persistence and abundance of competing assessments and perceptions of slaveself-destruction in early Am erica, com pre he nd ing the subjectivities of those w ho respo nd-ed to enslavement by destroying themselves remains difficult. Without their own wordsto explain their actions, often w e are left to look at the co nd itions sur rou nd ing their deci-sionsthe emotional, psychological, and material circumstances that fostered slaves' self-destruction. Using those exterior embodimentsthe ecology of s lave suicideto parseslave subjectivities is tricky, bu t do ing so will bring us closer to an u nd ersta nd ing o ft h eexperience of self-destruction within slavery.

Newly im po rted African slaves as well as native-bo rn N or th Am erican slaves held a va-riety of attitudes toward suicide. Evidence suggests, as Michael Gomez has demonstratedextensively, that some African groups held strong prohibitions against suicide. Amongthe Igbo, participants in the 1803 group suicide, self-destruction was a serious trans-gression. According to Gomez, however, the dislocations of the transatlantic slave tradeeroded those tradit ional taboos. O th er African ethnic gro ups, includin g the Yoruba a ndthe Ashan ti, did n ot eq uate suicide with jeopardizing one's soul, social stand ing , or familyreputation. Indeed, in some instances, suicide was deemed an honorable act, particularlyif it provided an escape from a dishonorable status such as that created by slavery. Dan-iel E. Walker also argues that captive Africans who desired spiritual transmigration anda return to Africa took courses of action that they fully understood might lead to death.Walker considers the contempt for death as it was manifested in the specific context ofcollective slave resistance and revolt. In that sense, captives' behaviors can be seen as par-allels to H uey P. New ton's definido n of revolutionary suicide: that it is better to fight th eforces of oppression that lead to despair rather than to endure them, even if the fightmeans risking death.^^

Slaves might have understood that even death by suicide was preferable to life underslavery because, however it was obtained, death brought the possibility of transmigratingand returning home to Africa. They therefore prepared for death in a ritualistic manneror with materials they believed would aid their journey. Ship captains and planters alikeunderstood this motivation for suicide and dismembered the recovered corpses, tellingslaves that desecration would prevent their return to Africa. There is no evidence that sucha method of deterrence worked. Before killing themselves, for instance, newly importedslaves would put on or remove all of their clothes, place food and water nearby, or wrapchains around their waists; they believed that these actions and objects would sustainthem through the transmigration, regardless of whether the act of self-destruction was


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Suicide, Slavery, and Memo ry in N orth Am erica 55

methods also had class connections and may have merely reflected a lack of access to the .laudanum or firearms preferred by suicidal upper-class whites. Regardless of the motivefor suicide or the method behind it, however, most slave narratives do not rebuke the actof committing suicide. Elizabeth Keckley matter-of-factly reports that her uncle hangedhimself from the branch of a willow tree, and Frederick Douglass warned others away ftom theact, even as he acknow ledged self-destruction as a reasonable response to slavery. ''

The ecology of slave suicide also includes acts of refusal that ultimately lead to death.The case of Tony, who se life is do cum en ted in seventee nth-c entury M arylan d records, isa complex but usefiil example. It is important to acknowledge that Tony did not commitsuicide; his dea th was caused by mu rder. Tony is in the M arylan d records only because hismaster faced homicide charges for the excessive violence that caused his death. His demiseis meaningful, however, because he epitomized early modern descriptions of stubborn,nostalgic, and, therefore, suicidal slaves: he repeatedly refused to work, to eat, and, even-tually, to move. His case illustrates the tug-of-war that is often at the root of subjectivitiesin slave suicide: the tensio n between the m aster's desire to com m an d To ny an d Tony's de-termination to answer only to himself

Tony had been brought to Maryland in 1656 by Symon Overzee, a Dutch merchantw ho trafficked in slaves along the no rth A tlantic seaboard, throu gh the Carib bea n, and inthe Chesapeake region. According to several witnesses, including fellow servants HannahLitt leworth an d W illiam Hew es, Ton y imm ediately singled himself out as a troub lesomeslave who was distanced from the community, living mosdy in the woods and enteringhouses to forage for food when other laborers were out in the fields.^*"In doing so, he cre-ated a "rival geography" that amounted to carefully choreographed resistance to enforcedlabor and bodily possession. ' ' By all accounts, he did so alone and unaided. On many oc-casions, his actions kept him outside of his master's power, but six months after arrivingin Maryland, he was chained up for running away and refusing to work. Subsequently"lett loose" and ordered to "goe to wo rke," To ny instead "layd himself do wn e and wo uldnot stirre." In response, as witnesses recounted, his master laid on Tony a series of vividlybrutal punishments, whipping him with pear tree wands, pouring hot lard on his freshlylashed back, and ordering an Indian slave to hang Tony by his wrists from a ladder. Af-ter three hours, Tony was dead. Two years later, Overzee would be indicted for excessivecruelty and hom icide by chance or misadventure. Th e jury return ed a verdict of "ignora-mus" and Overzee was cleared by proclamation, but the depositions reflect much aboutthe ecology of Tony's en slavemen t.

Tony's life of reftisals was an assertion of self-possession and a rejection of the alien-ation that enslavement threatened to confer; it ultimately reflected a preference for physi-cal death over social death. '" Witness testimony abo ut w hat Tony endu red provides som esense of the ecology of his refusal. Throughout the punishments inflicted on him, Tony


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remained "in his stubbernes," "mute," and made "no signes of conforming himselfe to hisMasters will or command." Tony also suffered from "fits," which witnesses described as"feyned."^'

To those around him, Tony's refusals and his unintelligibility were emblems of hisstubbornness. But. his demeanor also raises questions about possible physical and cul-tural limitations. Were his fits caused by epilepsy? Was he a newly imported slave withno com prehension of English? Did a hearing or speech impediment qualify Tony as re-fuse? To what extent did he comprehend his masters? Simon Overzee's brother-in-law.Job Chandler, testified that he could not perceive "any speech or language" from Tonybut only "ugly yelling Brute beast like." Communication with Tony was not impossible,however. Chandler did interact with Tony five months prior to his death; the two men"made signes" to one another and, according to Chandler, reached mutual understanding.The substance of their c onvers ation also reveals tha t Tony w as likely in considerable pain.Chandler mentioned that Tony had a finger infection that degenerated into gangrene andthat he had "made signs" to indicate that amputation was necessary. We can only imagineTony's response to Chandler's pantomime.^^

The feelings of alienation and isolation that permeated the Overzee household werealso part of the ecology of Tony's death. His six mo n th s in Maryland were spent with ahandful of other unfree workers, including an Indian male slave, an African female slave,and a British female indentured servant. Two years after Tony's de ath , the now-free inden-tured servant offered testimony against her master, describing a violent and fragmentedhousehold where unfree laborers were powerless and aided one another only cautiously.She noticed that Tony held fast "in his stubbornnesse" and watched silently as he waspunished severely and was, in the end, left to twist in the wind . The female slave on theplantation remained in a "quartering howse" and "never stir'd out" during the brutalevents. No one at tempted to intercede on Tony's behalf until their master and mistresshad departed. Because it was clear that Tony was dying, the maidservant asked two malebystanders to cut Tony off of the ladder, but they would not do so. Although these indi-viduals recognizedand eventually testified toOverzee's excessive brutality, they didno t necessarily com preh end Tony's responses to slavery.^'

In refiising to rise when ordered, Tony relinquished control over his body but did notcede control over himself He was isolated both by choice (in absconding) and by circum-stance (failing to speak) from all others in the household; in short, he was dangerouslyalien. During his entire tenure in Maryland he was devoted to avoiding the violence thathe could predictably suffer as long as he refiised to work. Those themes were picked upin other accounts of suicide inside and outside of the North American mainland. Slavesw ho "met with no other slave who could talk their dialect, and quiet their fears" hanged


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Suic ide, Slavery, and Memory in North America 57

and, according to an observer, eventually submitted to "total obedience" when she wasmade to understan d that "she would get nowhere with her obstinacy."' ' 'For slaves in the early republic and antebellum North America, the choice of suicideflowed from an ecology that was similar to Tony's. In many instances, the horrors of slav-ery drew responses of refusal and isolation. The physician and author Jesse Torrey tellsthe story of one slave who was on the brink of being passed to a new master was asked byhis current master to remove his shirt for one final beating; instead, he drowned himselfin refusal. Torrey also gives several accounts of female slaves who leaped from windows,jumped into rivers, or cut their throats rather than face separation from their families.The subject of the 1825 lawsuit Ritchie v. Wilson was a female slave who drowned herselfafter "improper and cruel treatment," suggesting that she refused to tolerate further bru-tality. Similar themes surface in ex-slave narratives. Fannie Berry relates the story of herAunt Nellie, who told witnesses that she had suffered her last whipping and "climbed topof a hill an' rolled down." Those who found her body noticed that an untouched bundleof bread and food lay beside it perhaps a r itual accom paniment to suicide like that usedby slaves a century earlier. Ida Hutchinson Blackshear also recalled that one wo ma n , afrequent runaway who vexed her wo uld-be captors, "went to the slough and drowned her-self" rather than let the patrollers "beat her and mark her up."^'

Slave self-destruction often had a gendered calculus in North America . The denial ofmasculine prerogatives within marriage or sexual relations, for example, could lead someslaves to suicide. When the slave Roger hanged himself in South Carolina in 1712, hisoverseer noted that Roger had done so "not [for] any Reason" except that he had been"hind[e]red from keeping other negroe men's wifes." Roger was most likely a newly im-ported slave who had been entided to polygyny in his country of origin. The overseer's as-sessment was tha t R oger had transgressed his masculine entitlement by seeking to control(or "keep") more women than the overseer (who had "hind[e]red" Roger in this regard)thought he had a right to. The overseer was angered by Roger's display of powerboththe power he exercised over women and the power to kill himselfand in response heordered that Roger's head be severed from his corpse and displayed. This slave's act of self-destruction illustrates the importance of African beliefs about honor in shaping decisionsto commit suicide. The connections among slave suicide, masculinity, and honor can beseen at work in the 1851 case Bunch v. Smith. After Bob, his wife Binah, and their twochildren were sold as slaves, their new owner asked Bob whether he would like him as amaster. Bob replied that the owner "would not suit." The master threatened to turn hisdogs on Bob who responded that he "would run from no man." Bob then walked intothe "negro house" and came back out "with his throat cut." Gendered themes can alsobe found in the depictions of enslaved women in Jesse Torrey's portrait of slavery, par-ticularly in the image of an enslaved mother, whom Robert H. Gudmestad refers to as


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"Anna," leaping from her window after being separated from her children. As Gudmestadhas demonstrated, Anna's attempted suicide stirred a national debate over the moralityofthe domesdc slave trade. A similar story is told by escaped slaves William and Ellen Craft:the house servant An toin ette avoided rape by breaking loose from her attacker and "pitch [ing]herself head foremost through the window" to her "bruised but unpolluted" death."'

Slave suicide was also part of a pattern of collective slave resistance. In Virginia, slavesattempted at least eleven collective revolts in the course of the eighteenth century, andsuicide may have been a response to a failed insurrection. In 1736, an unnamed femaleslave broke into a storehouse, stole goods, wounded her master's son, burned a tobaccostorehouse, murdered her children and other slaves, and drowned herself In 1774, whenher master was at church, a woman named Juda set fire to her house and her master'shouse, murdered her son, and deliberately "rushed into the dwelling house" to her certaindeath.^^ It is possible to read those slave actions as preludes to or instigators of collectiverevolt as much as it is possible to read them as purely individual acts of resistance. Manyearly slave suicides in the South were like Roger's: a solitary act of self-directed violenceperform ed in isolation. In contrast, the suicides of Jud a and th e un na m ed female slaveinclude elements that were common features of collective slave resistance: master-directedviolence, arson, purloined goods. Moreover, the sequence of events surrounding thosesuicides begins with the seizure and destruction of material property; murder and self-murder are the final stages ofthe progression. It is possible that those slaves were initiatinga revolt that failed to materialize and th at they chose death at their own han ds rathe r th anbeing hanged for treasona measure of how anticipatory violence fostered self-destruc-tive impulses within the slave community.

Another aspect of the ecology of slave self-destruction can be seen in the actions ofslaves who killed themselves before the state ot their masters had an opportunity to ex-ecute them. By 1754, the runaway slave Dick had lost both ears as punishment for re-peated escapes. Like Tony, Dick created a rival geography: after his final capture, accord-ing to the slave patroller who seized him, Dick "fell down in the Road, and either wouldnot or could not go further." The patroller tied Dick to his horse's tail and dragged him toa nearby farm. O n the way, Dick ingested a wh ite substance an d po isoned him self If thepatroller's claim is true, Dick's action suggests that he was prepared for the eventuality ofdeath; the patroller remembered Dick "saying he was oudawed, and if he was carried toPrison he should certainly be hanged." In similar circumstances, other slaves also killedthemselves before the state had an opportunity. In 1837, the Rutherford (N.C.) Gazette

" Overseer's Accoun t, Selsdon Quarter, De c. 6, 1712 , Corbin Papers. Bunch v. Smith, in Judicial Cases concem-ing American Slavery and the Negro, ed. Helen TunniclifF Catterall (5 vols., Washington, 1926-1929), II, 425-26.Torrey, Portraiture of Domestic Slavery, 42-44. Robert H. Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformatofthe Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge, 2003), 3 5 - 6 1 ; Robert H. Gudmestad, "Slave Resistance, Coffles, and


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Suicide, Slavery, and M emo ry in N orth Am erica 59

printed the story of Lucy, a runaway slave who hanged herself rather than face recapture.The newspaper commented on the "firmness" of her resolve, far beyond that "exhibitedby any person," because the "place from w hich she suspen ded herself was no t high eno ug hto prevent her feet from touching the floor and it was only by drawing her legs up, andremaining in that position, that she succeeded in her determined purpose."^* In 1860, theMacon (Ga.) Daily Telegraph reported that, while awaiting trial, the enslaved John "delib-erately choked himself," in a manner similar to Lucy's. ' ' '

Perceptions o f slaves w ho w ere moved to destroy themselves by virtue of age or eth nici-ty or out of mere stubborn ness persisted throu gh ou t the antebellum p eriod and com petedwith assessments that slave suicide resulted from the excessive cruelty of masters and theinhumanity ofthe insdtution of s lavery i tself An examination ofthe ecology of slave sui-cide, however, reveals the subjectivities that drove some slaves to suicide and illuminatesthe intimate experiences of power that fostered self-destructive impulses. For some slaves,the path to choosing self-murder may have begun before embarkation in Africa; suicidewas an integral part of their culture of colonization, an act fostered by the predictablebrutali ty of enslavement, imminent punishment, household isolation, the str ipping ofgender entitlements, and physical pain. These circumstances continued to direct the self-destructive impulses of native-born slaves in the United States and shaped the memory ofsuicide through several postslavery generations.The Mem ory o f Slave Suicide

My d add y use to tell me all the time ab out folks wh at could fly back to Africa. Theycould take wing an d just fly off. . . . Lots of time he tell me another story about aslave ship 'bout to be caught by a revenue boat. The slave ship slip through backrivet into creek. There was about fifty slaves on board. The slave runners tie rocks'round the slaves' necks and throw them overboard to drown.Paul Singleton, Georgia Writers' Project interview, in Georgia Writers' Project,Drums and Shadows, 17.

In coastal Georg ia and So uth C arolina, ex-slave me mo ries o ft h e 18 03 Igbo suicide areoftenalthough not alwaysintertwined with versions of the flying African folktaleand other memories of slavery, as the stories from Jack Tattnall, Carrie Hamilton, MoseBrown, and Paul Singleton suggest. Historians, literary scholars, and folklorists have not-ed the power of flying African folklore to transform an "experience of mass suicide into atale of mythical transmigration." The folklore redresses the dislocations caused by slavery,as captives literally rise above their enslavement, transcending the natal alienation of themiddle passage, and returning to Africa. Because they serve as a form of reparation, the


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60 The Journal of Am erican History June 2010

than their function as a bridge between the living and the dead. The folklore ultimatelyreflects one means of reshaping the memory of suicide in slavery.'*"

The ex-slaves interviewed by the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s focus, in part,on the dislocations that newly imported slaves faced and reflect the ecology of slave self-destruction. Many ex-slaves recall flying Africans as unseasoned slavessuch as Tony orthe 1803 Igbowho did not comprehend the language, authority, or labor system oftheir captors. Mose Brown retold the story of a man and his wife "brung from Africa";Carrie Hamilton spoke about another couple that was "fooled" onto a slave ship ; and yetanother ex-slave recalled that the flying Africans were not "climatize[d]." According tothe interviewees, the flying Africans could not understand new world language or laborsystems. As one informant recalled, "they can't understand your talk and you can't un-derstand their talk" and "they did not know how to "work right." Informants' stories alsofocused on the shock of slavery's brutality: one noted that "wild" Africans were chainedin a house until they were "tame."^' Ex-slave memories do not mention any of the mate -rial elements that captive Africans used in ritual preparation for suicide (such as singing,bundled clothing, or food), but several of their accounts explain that there was often acollective ritual shout as a prelude to flight. Hamilton mentioned shouts of "goodie bye,"but another slave remembers the words as "quack, quack, quack.""*^

While we do not know the gender composition ofthe captive Igbo in 1803, genderalso figures importantly in ex-slave memoties of flying Africans. In the ex-slave telling,no single leader is remembered; instead, they refer to a couple, a man and wife, and itis the ritual magic performed collectivelyby men and women togetherthat chan-nels the power to escape enslavement and fly back to Africa. In the version of the storyremembered by Ha mi l to n , the couple ("this man and his wife"), together, decides "wegoing back home." In contrast, the Works Progress Administration interviewers' render-in g of the flying Africans as well as folktales published in the 1940s are built on a morepatriarchal model that focuses on one central male figure that empowers other slaves tofly. The Georgia Writers' Project interviewers, for example, describe the 1803 Igbo as agroup of slaves who were "led by their chief" as they deliberately walked into the waterto their deaths. In one version ofthe flying African tale published in the 1940s, a wo ma n"took her breast with her hand and threw it over her shoulder that the child might suckand be content" as she labored in the master's fields. Her child continues to nurse, evenafter taking flight, as do all ofthe children who "laughed and sucked as their mothers flewand were not afraid." Added to the sense of power that is conveyed by the ability to liter-ally fly away from slavery is the power represented by African American women sucklingover their shouldersan image with deep and troublesome roots in the European imagi-nation.'*' Taken together, these folkloric elements address the dislocations of slavery and


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Suicide, Slavery, and Memory in N orth Am erica 6 1

The m em ories of the ex-slaves interviewed in the 1930s revealed the com plex intersec-tions of folklore, slavery, and suicide. It is at just such a confluence, David Blight has not-ed, that historians may best be able to observe and explain the interplay between historyand memory to "write the history of memory." The coastal ex-slaves interviewed duringthe 1930s compressed separate discursive eventsthe flying African tales, their personaland familial memories of slavery, and the 1803 Igbo collective suicidein a way that wasunique to the Georgia Sea Islands. Paul Singleton, for example, summons the story ofthe slave smugglers who murdered their human cargo rather than face arrest immediatelyafter he recounts the story of the flying Africans. Other informants similarly associatedplace and personal nam es with their stories. A futher clue to this compression of m em orycan be found in the connection of the 1803 Igbo collective suicide, flying Africans, and aperson called "Mr. Blue." The boat that carried the Igbo ran ashore on St. Simon's Islandat a plantation owned by the Butler family. A Savannah written account of the event liststhe surname Patterson for the captain of the ship and Roswell King (overseer of ButlerPlantation) as the person who recovered the bodies of the drowned Igbo. None of thosenames appear in any of the ex-slave interviews; instead, Mr. Blue was the overseer men-tioned by W alter Q ua rte rm an in con nectio n with the flying Africans. "Well, at that t im eMr. Blue he was the overseer and Mr. Blue put them in the field but he couldn't do noth-ing with them. They gabble, gabble, gabble, and nobody could understand them and theydidn't know how to work right. Mr. Blue he go down one morning with a long whip forto whip them good." Wh en the interviewers asked if M r. Blue was a hard overseer, Q ua r-term an replied that "he ain't hard, he just can't make th em und ersta nd. They's foolish act-ing. H e got to whip them , Mr. Blue. . . . H e whip them good."^''

Alexa nder B lue was, in fact, the ma nage r of the Butler estate from 1848 to 18 59 .Quarterman was born in 1844 and his recollection of Mr. Bluemore than a coinci-denc e, surely makes sense. As the last man ager of the Butler plan tation before the end ofslavery. Blue's name would have been most prominent in the memories of ex-slaves whowere interviewed in the 1930s, especially because he was the overseerthe immediatesymbol of domination for most slaves.

The figure of Alexander Blue also exemplifies how ex-slaves may have connected sto-ries of suicide with their own experiences of separation, interweaving their knowledge offlying Africans and the Igbo in transatlantic slave trade with their personal memory ofdomestic sale. That connection developed simultaneously with Blue's role in the sale ofslaves for the Butler plantation. Living in Philadelphia and managing his Georgia estatesin absentia. Pierce Butler was, by 1855, in serious financial trouble. Eour years later, hesold 436 slaves (approximately half of the estate's holdings) in what became known asthe largest slave sale in history. The Butler plantation slaves were separated, packed intorailroad cars, and shippe d to a racetrack outside of Savannah w here they w ere sold over a


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Alexander Blue l ikely oversaw the sorting of hu m an prop erty for the m om en tou s saleon those rainy days. By attaching Blue's name to the flying African tale, the ex-slaveW alter Qu arterm an forged a conn ection between himself, the captive Africans who arrived and died in 180 3, and the Buder plantation slaves wh o were sold and dispersedin 1859. In that compression, water symbolically links memory and experience. The fatalimmersion of the Igbo has its parallel in the rain that fell on the great sale, and water joinsboth the experience of the African-born Igbo and native-born. Christianized slaves' no-tions of the spiritual and redemptive qualities of bapdsm. Water creates a bridge betweenthe Igbo, the flying Africans, and the ex-slaves in the 1930s; it also bridges suicide, sale,and the power to escape to home. In 1803, the Igbo chanted as they marched into thewateran element that is reconfigured in the flying African myth as a vocalization of thejoy of return (whether "goodie bye, goodie bye" or "quack, quack, quack"). Such expres-sion stands in stark contrast, however, to the sorrow of separation invoked by the ideaof a "weeping dm e." If the flying African folklore provides a "reprieve from do m ina tion "for the Igbo as they fly back to Africa rather than drown, the reprieve is tempered by oneex-slave's recollections of Mr. Blue, whose figure loomed large over the dispersal of theirfamilies and communities in Quarterman's own experience in slavery.^^' The great sale wasnot a suicide, of course, but the separation it engendered paralleled the permanence of amy thical retu rn to Africa. Like ma ny of those w ho were dispersed in the great sale, flyingAfricans were never seen again by those who watched and remembered their departure.

The flying African stories lie at the crossroads of memory and history. At that point,the tales are an atte m pt at som e restoration of the losses from suicide and separation thatwere necessitated by the slave trade. The stories assert the power of culture to maintaincommunity in the face of its forcible dislocation. Sullen stubbornness and sentimentaldespaircharacteristic of accounts of slave suicide in the early modern and early Repub-lican erashave no role in the tales, although the ecology of slave suicide is present in theform of refusals, brutality, labor regimes, and separation. Flying African folklore allowsfor the possibility of escaping slavery through the supernatural power of refusal ratherthan th roug h self-destructive violence. Like bo th the African- and N orth Am erica n-b ornslaves who contemplated or chose self-inflicted death, flying Africans also made a choice.Collective memory conferred upon them the power to flyto escape slavery and to re-turn home. Ex-slave metnories and folklore perform the cultural work of remaking thehistory of the self, the family, and the community within slavery, ultimately transformingthe crossroads of despair, suicide, and separation into an intersection of power, transcen-dence, and reunion.


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