They called the child Moses.
Moses was separated from his mother while still a young child. He would be sold and resold several times during the course of his enslavement. As a child he was a domestic slave, working around the house. As a teenager, he was sold to a Mr. Gooch, a brutal man in Cashaw County, South Carolina. From this point, he repeatedly attempted to escape, and each time was caught and returned to his master, under whom he faced increasing cruelty. An example of his torment, as later recorded by Roper follows:
Having reached Mr. Gooch's, he
proceeded to punish me. This he did, by first tying my wrists together and
placing them over the knees, he then put a stick through, under my knees and
over my arms, and having thus secured my arms, he proceeded to flog me, and
gave me five hundred lashes on my bare back. This may appear incredible, but
the marks which they left at present remain on my body, a standing testimony to
the truth of this statement of his severity. He then chained me down in a
log-pen with a forty pounds chain, and made me lie on the damp earth all night.
In the morning, after his breakfast, he came to me, and without giving me any
breakfast, tied me to a large heavy harrow, which is usually drawn by a horse,
and made me drag it to the cotton field for the horse to use in the field.
Thus, the reader will see, that it was of no possible use to my master to make
me drag it to the cotton field and not through it; his cruelty went so far, as
actually to make me the slave of his horse, and thus to degrade me. He then
flogged me again, and set me to work in the cotton field the whole of that day,
and at night chained me down in the log-pen as before. The next morning he took
me to the cotton field, and gave me a third flogging, and sent me to hoe
cotton. At this time I was dreadfully sore and weak with the repeated floggings
and cruel treatment I had endured. He put me under a black man, with orders,
that if I did not keep up my row in hoeing with this man, he was to flog me.
The reader must recollect here, that not being used to this kind of work,
having been a domestic slave, it was impossible for me to keep up with him, and
therefore I was repeatedly flogged during the day.
Mr. Gooch had a female servant
about eighteen years old, who had also been a domestic slave, and, through not being
able to fulfil her task, had run away: which slave he was at this time
punishing for that offence. On the third day, he chained me to this female
slave, with a large chain of forty pounds weight round my neck. (fn. This was a
chain that they used to draw logs with from the woods, when they clear their
land.)
It was most harrowing to my
feelings thus to be chained to a young female slave, for whom I would rather
have suffered one hundred lashes than she should have been thus treated; he
kept me chained to her during the week, and repeatedly flogged us both, while
thus chained together, and forced us to keep up with the other slaves, although
retarded by the heavy weight of the log-chain.
Here again, words cannot describe
the misery which possessed both body and mind whilst under this treatment, and
which was most dreadfully increased by the sympathy which I felt for my poor,
degraded fellow-sufferer. On the Friday morning, I entreated my master to set
me free from my chains, and promised him to do the task which was given me, and
more if possible, if he would desist from flogging me. This he refused to do
until Saturday night, when he did set me free.--This must rather be ascribed to
his own interest in preserving me from death, as it was very evident I could no
longer have survived under such treatment.
It seems that in writing this account, Moses’ mind turned to the events of the following day - Sunday, and its significance. In the next paragraph after which he describes such torment, he notes that Mr. Gooch
was a member of a Baptist Church,
called Black Jack Meeting House, in Cashaw County, which church I attended for
several years, but was never inside. This is accounted for by the fact, that
the coloured population are not permitted to mix with the white population.
As a slave Moses had at some point been introduced to something called Christianity, but the words of the abolitionist orator Frederick Douglass are descriptive of what Moses observed in the spirituality of his slave masters:
between the Christianity of this
land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible
difference — so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of
necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of
the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure,
peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt,
slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical
Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful
one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the
climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all
libels.
A similar theme of observed hypocrisy colours Moses’ narrative. After a momentarily more successful escape attempt that saw him briefly reunited with his mother after ten years, Moses was caught. Recalling those who captured him on this occasion, he writes:
I was told afterwards, that some
of those men who took me were professing Christians, but, to me, they did not
seem to live up to what they professed; they did not seem, by their practice,
at least, to recognise that God as their God, who hath said, "thou shalt
not deliver unto his master, the servant which is escaped from his master unto
thee, he shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall
choose, in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best; thou shalt not oppress
him."--Deut. xxiii, 15, 16.
He later sees fit to remind the reader of Mr. Gooch’s churchmanship:
Mr. Gooch was a member of a
Baptist church. His slaves thinking him a very bad sample of what a professing
Christian ought to be, would not join the connection he belonged to, thinking
they must be a very bad set of people; there were many of them members of the
Methodist Church. (fn.: In fact, in some of the States, nearly all of the
slaves are Methodists; and when in the field at work they may be often heard
singing these words, "I am happy, I am happy, Lord pity poor me.--Me never
know what happiness was, until I joined de Methodists. I am happy, Lord pity
poor me.").
It is a wonder that the victims of such savage hypocrisy would have any interest at all in the faith allegedly held by Mr. Gooch, but it is a testimony to the overwhelmingly compelling message of the gospel that it could not fully and finally be obscured by the disillusioning and damaging wicked behaviours of counterfeit Christians. Slaves actually wanted to go to church! But Roper reminds us:
On Sunday, the slaves can only go
to church at the will of their master, when he gives them a pass for the time
they are to be out. If they are found by the patrole after the time to which
their pass extends, they are severely flogged.
Nonetheless, there were ways, still risky, of taking spiritual refreshment at home:
On Sunday nights a slave, named
Allen, used to come to Mr. Gooch's estate for the purpose of exhorting and
praying with his brother slaves, by whose instrumentality many of them had been
converted.
In his excellent part-memoir,
part-civil rights history, Blood Done
Sign My Name, Timothy B. Tyson comments on the faith of slaves:
To the South’s four million
slaves, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “God was real. They knew him. They had met him
personally in many a wild order of religious frenzy, or in the black stillness
of the night.” And in that stillness and tumult, the enslaved sons and
daughters of Africa met their God and their neighbors, and affirmed that they
were all children of the same Lord who’d brought the Israelites out of bondage,
the same Lord who’d rescued Daniel from the lions den, the same Lord who’d
given a little Shepherd boy a slingshot to bring down mighty giant Goliath. In
the “brush arbor” as some called their invisible church, they sang their own
songs, drawn from the Scripture and from the lives of their slave ancestors.
They knew that God, in his grace, had sent Jesus to be nailed to the cross to
raise them up, and that their names were written in the Lamb’s Book of Life:
“Ain’t you glad, ain’t you glad, that the blood done sign my name”, they would
sing.
Sadly, Roper reported:
One evening, Mr. Gooch caught
them all in a room, turned Allen out, and threatened his slaves with one
hundred lashes each, if they ever brought him there again.
Eventually, Roper’s repeated attempts to realise freedom wearied Mr Gooch, who gave him up to a slave dealer, before changing hands a few more times by exchange or purchase. Along the way, Roper continued to note the hypocrisy and injustice of the judicial and ecclesiastical social context around him.
It seems that two occasions were particularly good for the slave trading business. The first of these was court week, when traders and slaves would set up camp outside the town wherein the courthouse stood, to do business. Over the course of the week, Roper reports how it was common for traders to “sleep with the best looking female slaves among them”, and to by these acts of power-rape, produce children that would later be sold with their mothers thus increasing their profits at no cost to themselves but the pleasure of a free sexual experience.
Court sessions may have been good for business, but the week would give way to Sunday and sometimes the court houses would be used as places of worship. This did not hurt the slave trade at all, however, as Roper notes of one occasion:
There was preaching in the
Court-house on the Sunday; but scarcely had the sweet savour of the worship of
God passed away, when, on Monday, a public auction was held for the sale of
slaves, cattle, sugar, iron, etc. by Z. Davis, the high constable and others.
Indeed religious gatherings were the second occasion good for the trading business, particularly those events known as camp meetings. While working as a house servant for a Mr. Rowland, Roper’s job was making sure other slaves were prepared and looked their best for auction:
I travelled with him [Mr.
Rowland] for a year, and had to look over the slaves and see that they were
dressed well, had plenty of food, and to oil their faces. During this time we
stopped once at White House Church, a Baptist Association; a protracted camp
meeting was holding there, on the plan of the revival meetings in this country.
We got there at the time of the meeting, and sold two female slaves on the
Sunday morning, at the time the meeting broke up, to a gentleman who had been
attending the meeting the whole of the week. While I was with Mr. Rowland, we
were at many such meetings; and the members of the churches are by this means
so well influenced towards their fellow-creatures at these meetings for the
worship of God, that it becomes a fruitful season for the drover, who carries
on an immense traffic with the attendants at these places. This is common to
Baptists and Methodists.
After falling once again into the hands of a particularly cruel master, Roper finally made good his escape in Florida in 1834. His journey would take him through rivers filled with crocodiles, and forests filled with wolves and snakes, but the danger he feared most was being caught and returned to slavery:
I had now to wade through another river to
which I came, and which I had great difficulty in crossing, in consequence of
the water overflowing the banks of several rivers to the extent of upwards of
twenty miles. In the midst of the water, I passed one night upon a small
island, and the next day I went through the remainder of the water. On many
occasions, I was obliged to walk upon my toes, and consequently found the
advantage of being six feet two inches high, (I have grown three inches since,)
and at other times was obliged to swim. In the middle of this extremity, I felt
it would be imprudent for me to return; for if my master was in pursuit of me,
my safest place from him was in the water, if I could keep my head above the
surface.. I was, however, dreadfully frightened at the crocodiles, and most
earnestly prayed that I might be kept from a watery grave, and resolved, that
if again I landed, I would spend my life in the service of God.
To be continued with Part Two - Abolitionist in England
No comments:
Post a Comment