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The house of slaves
By Andrew Stephen
07/09/06 "New
Statesman" -- -- In the murky basement of his home in Washington's
affluent Georgetown district, Andrew Stephen makes a discovery that leads
him to some terrible truths about America, past and present
Flipping through some dusty files at my local library in Georgetown the
other day, I made a horrifying discovery. I was looking up the deeds of my
nearby house, which I already knew was built in 1795, and which is
therefore - by American standards - almost literally a historic monument.
Devoted readers, meanwhile, will recall my least favourite task in the house:
crawling into a crude, darkly mysterious space beneath the basement to
remove the bodies of huge rats when their stench becomes unbearable on hot
summer days. Armed with a torch and crouching inside a crawl space where I
cannot stand up straight, I would tread warily on the unmade surface of an
old cesspit, and carefully peer in and around ancient brickwork and
cavities that served, I vaguely assumed, some long-forgotten purpose.
But that day when I looked up the records all these mysteries became clear.
The owner of the house in 1807 was one Thomas Turner, and the value of his
belongings at the property was fully listed, viz:
2 negro men $300
1 ditto woman $150
4 ditto girls $150
2 horses $200
2 cows $30
Put simply, that day in the library, I discovered that the occupants of the
crawl space under my house, before the rats, were slaves: fellow human
beings, living in surreal degradation beneath a household in which more
monetary value was put on the ownership of two horses and two cattle than
the ownership of a black man, or woman, or four girls. The brickwork, I
belatedly realised, was the remains of an old oven where the slaves cooked
for Turner and his family; the cavities, barely more than two feet high,
were probably where they slept. The discovery brought home to me
(literally, this time) yet another reality of American history that says so
much about the country today: this time, the roots of racial hatred and
shame, and why their legacies persist well into the 21st century.
But somehow I could not leave it there. Who were these people? How did they
come to be in my house? Why are there five all-black churches flourishing
in Georgetown today but fewer than ten black inhabitants left in the
current population of 4,800? We read so much about the fashionable four
square miles that make up Georgetown and why they are so important in the
nation's history; how Georgetown nestles on the Potomac that symbolically
separates the historic south from the north; how successive presidents and
congresses introduced unique legislation for such a tiny place because it
was so personally important to them; how Abraham Lincoln went to church
there; how John F Kennedy and his wife made it the chicest place on earth;
and how even the likes of the Democratic presidential and vice-presidential
candidates in 2004 happened to live barely a block from each other in,
naturally, Georgetown.
Yet we see or hear little of black people in Georgetown, save those who
empty our dustbins or serve us, often surlily, in the drugstores. The only
exception to this rule is on Sundays, when carfuls and busloads of
well-dressed blacks pour into Georgetown to fill those five black churches.
Walk past them on a Sunday morning and you hear the kind of gospel singing
and choruses of "Yessir!" and "Right!" in response to
the exhortations of the preacher that you expect to hear only in the Deep
South, and certainly not in genteel, white Georgetown. Indeed, few
inhabitants today know that black people once made up more than a third of Georgetown's
population, or how a combination of consciously initiated legislative,
social and economic pressures gradually forced them out so that Georgetown
could become not only chic and expensive but exclusively white.
Subhuman treatment
Lest we forget, neither blacks nor whites lived at all in Georgetown - then
known as Tahoga - until British settlers went ashore there in 1696. In
those days, it was a peaceful village inhabited by Algonquin Indians, but
they were soon expunged by the settlers. Then, in the 18th century, white
entrepreneurs realised that huge sums of money could be made from an
insatiable demand in Europe and elsewhere for the tobacco that was
cultivated in Virginia and Maryland (of which Georgetown was then part). So
black slaves, as US history textbooks have only recently started to tell
American kids, were forcibly transported into labour in the tobacco fields.
Its geographical position made Georgetown an ideal port from which ships
laden with tobacco could sail to Europe; by the end of the 18th century it
had become the largest tobacco port in the United States, an economic
powerhouse to which slaves were brought in (mostly from the existing
tobacco fields but some direct from Africa) to provide the labour and to
service the households of the white tobacco merchants. The blacks were
treated as subhuman in just about every conceivable way, while the more
successful of their white owners started to amass huge fortunes.
Perhaps, indeed, those white merchants included Thomas Turner? In peculiarly
personal ways like this, the sheer evil of it all somehow makes me feel
complicit. I shudder, for example, when I realise that just two minutes
from where I now live a white man called John Beattie set up a highly
successful slave-trading business that continued well into the second half
of the 19th century. In my research odyssey, I found a newspaper ad from
the time that read:
NEGROES WANTED: Persons wishing to dispose of Negroes from 10 to 25 years
of age, (both sexes) can obtain the cash for them, by applying to the
subscriber, two doors east of the Union Tavern Stage Office, Bridge street,
Georgetown. N.B.
A smart likely [sic] GIRL, 11 to 13 years of age, would be desirable.
Black people had thus become essential economic tools in Georgetown, but
were simultaneously rejected and feared socially. To the whites, it was as
though dangerous wild animals were roaming the streets - a seemingly
primeval white fear of blacks that led to the first legislative move to
keep them as much out of sight and out of mind as possible. The first law
designed to do just that came as early as 1795, when Georgetown had already
become part of what was then known as the Federal City (later the District
of Columbia), but was still entirely separate from Washington. The town
passed a law forbidding black people from congregating in Georgetown in
groups of seven or more. The 1800 census showed that, in a population of
5,120 in Georgetown, there were already 1,449 slaves and 277 "free
blacks" - those who were technically not the property of white people,
but who were treated as only marginally less dangerous animals.
Yet, against all the odds, a handful of "free" black men in
Georgetown nevertheless managed to distinguish themselves - but then,
crucially, remained oppressed and their achievements unrecognised. Benjamin
Banneker (1731-1806), for example, was of Ethiopian descent, but played an
important role in surveying the new boundaries of Washington; he had
somehow educated himself and even wrote a mathematical book containing data
on astronomical formulae and eclipses. He still had to sleep in a tent in
Georgetown while his white colleagues stayed in houses, and even the
supposedly enlightened president Thomas Jefferson - who wrote later that
black people were "improvident, sensual, extravagant and weak in
faculty" - told a friend that, in reality, Banneker himself had
"a mind of very common stature indeed" (which he did not mean as
a compliment).
Jefferson would doubtless have been equally unimpressed by Yarrow Mamout (c.1736-1823),
a Muslim who was born in Guinea but brought to Georgetown to serve nearly
50 years in slavedom. In his old age, Mamout was given his
"freedom" by a relatively benevolent owner and somehow managed to
amass enough money to buy a tiny house, an achievement so extraordinary
that he attracted the attention of the celebrated portrait painter Charles
Willson Peale (1741-1827).
Rigid segregation
By this stage in my research, I was beginning to get a glimmer of what life
must have been like for the former residents of my crawl space - though it
was going to get worse, for them and for their descendants. There was one
exception to that 1795 law forbidding them from congregating, however: they
could go to church on the Sabbath, which explains why those five churches
remain the one potent black force in Georgetown today. But blacks were kept
rigidly segregated from whites, and when St John's Episcopal Church was
established in 1815 - it's still there, only a five-minute walk away for me
- it had an outdoor staircase built specially for blacks.
The following year, hardly surprisingly, a handful of "free"
black men managed to raise a little money to start their own breakaway
house of worship, which was to become the Mount Zion Methodist Church, one
of the five black churches still very much thriving today (and, this time,
barely a one-minute walk away for me). But the white Methodist church, at
which Lincoln later worshipped, insisted that black churchgoers have white
ministers in charge; it took half a century before Mount Zion, for example,
was allowed to appoint its own black minister. On the secret
"underground railroad" through which slaves were later smuggled
north from the South, the Mount Zion burial vault was used as an important
hiding place.
Knowing what I now know, I found it strangely moving when the Reverend
Robert E Slade, chief pastor at Mount Zion today, who does not even live in
Georgetown himself, told my son and me that "when we didn't have
anything, the church was our everything . . . When there was nothing and no
place to go, [it] was the one place to go." Just those words alone
explained to me why the emotional bonds to the black churches in Georgetown
remain so overwhelmingly strong for the black descendants of slaves who
still attend today, even though the vast majority of them have never lived
in Georgetown itself.
I imagine that at least the girls who lived in my crawl space in 1807, if
not the adults, were still alive in 1848 - a year that should make every
white resident of Georgetown today, thinking in retrospect, hang his or her
head in shame. It was the year when just about the most despotic
legislative measure imaginable, known as the "Black Code" of the
Corporation of Georgetown, was passed into law.
I have the ten pages in front of me as I write, and it is hard to know
quite how to convey the flavour of the legislation. Chapter XCIV, maybe,
which ordered that "if any slave shall, before the hour of nine
o'clock, PM, and after the hour of five o'clock, AM, bathe in the Potomac
or Rock Creek . . . he shall be publicly whipped"? Or Chapter XCVIII,
which laid down that "if any slave shall fly any kite or kites . . .
such offender may be punished by whipping"? Or the law that any black
person watching a cockfight could be punished by up to 39 lashes?
Or perhaps Chapter CII, which insisted that "if any free negro or
mulatto person, living in this town" should have in his or her
possession "any written or printed paper . . . of a character
calculated to excite insurrection or insubordination among the slaves or
colored people" he or she should be fined or "committed to the
work-house"? That if a mere slave was to do the same he or she should
receive up to 39 lashes and his or her white owner fined? And that if the
owner refused to pay the fine, the slaves would then receive another 39
lashes? And so on, ad infinitum.
I went on to discover that in the same year, hardly coincidentally, 77
black slaves tried to escape this kind of oppression by sailing from
Georgetown harbour on a ship called the Pearl. Furious owners sent a posse
on a steamer called the Salem to recapture them, and they caught up with
the Pearl 140 miles downriver. Though this attempt was unsuccessful and the
slaves returned to their owners, the black flight from Georgetown was
already beginning.
The atmosphere was such that black people were still being bought and sold
as property in Georgetown as late as November 1861 - even though President
Lincoln signed a local law the following year to free slaves eight months
before his landmark Emancipation Proclamation of 1862. The white slave
owners of Georgetown, DC (as it was then known, because it was not
officially absorbed into Washington, DC until 1895) demanded compensation,
and an "Expert Examiner of Slaves" was brought in - this was a
local phenomenon that did not happen elsewhere in the country - who, after
examining the slaves' teeth and health in general, assessed their overall
value at $300,000.
Meanwhile blacks from the South, anticipating freedom following Lincoln's
Emancipation Pro clamation, poured into both Georgetown and Washington.
Between 1865 and 1870 the black population of Georgetown increased from
1,935 to 3,271. And yet white residents voted against the Negro Suffrage
Bill 1866 by a majority of 712 to 1, declaring that giving "the
elective franchise to persons of color is wholly uncalled for, and an act
of grievous oppression against which a helpless community can have no
defense". That helpless white community was still paying supposedly
free blacks just $6 per month on average to work for them.
The records at the local library showed that my house was undergoing
renovations and rebuilding at that time - and it was then, I suspect, that
the brick kiln was abandoned and the human occupants of the crawl space
finally moved to somewhat better housing. With hindsight, we can now see
that the next two or three decades were a golden age for blacks in
Georgetown: a skilled working class able to earn a reasonable living
started to emerge, as did a handful of professionals such as doctors.
But there were countless laws and regulations that prevented true economic
or social emancipation. Only white passengers were allowed to ride on
Georgetown's new electric streetcars, for example, thus enabling them to commute
into Washington for high-paying jobs that were in effect denied to blacks.
The forces of racism were still raging, too: I came across one news item
from the Washington Post of 1 September 1897, headlined "Mammy's White
Mistress Was Fond of It, and Neighbors Objected". It told of how a
white "philanthropic lady" of Georgetown had taken a shine to the
"nigger baby" of one of her servants, leading to fierce protests
from white neighbours, who objected to what the Post amusedly described as
the baby's "osculatory performances" on the front porch of the
white woman's house.
The Depression and dispossession
This kind of vicious racism, combined with such repressive legislation, was
already driving black people out of Georgetown in droves - but it was a
series of economic blows that then started to seal their fate. The Potomac
silted up, virtually ending the industrial effectiveness of Georgetown's
harbour. The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which flowed through Georgetown and
was crucial for many businesses such as flour and paper mills, flooded
disastrously in 1889; black people were the first to lose their jobs when
countless firms went bust. By 1910 the black population of Georgetown had
peaked, and when the Great Depression struck, 19 years later, more and more
black workers found themselves displaced by white people forced to take
their menial jobs.
I discovered, however, that FDR's New Deal then perversely began to work
against black people in Georgetown. It was intended to lift the poor out of
poverty, but the effect in DC was that thousands of new, white and
relatively well-paid civil servants flooded into the area to implement the
new legislation. Their arrival had a knock-on effect on housing prices in
Georgetown, putting homes hopelessly and finally out of the economic reach
of black people. "The dispossession of the Negro residents [of
Georgetown]," the Conference on Better Housing Among the Negroes
reported at the time, "is jointly managed by the city's leading
realtors and their allied banks and trust companies."
In the 20th century, however, two acts passed by none other than the mighty
US Congress itself were the final straws for Georgetown's blacks; both were
covertly racist pieces of legislation aimed specifically at Georgetown. The
ostensible purpose of the District of Columbia Alley Dwelling Act 1934, for
example, was to get rid of slums in Georgetown - but to a House of
Representatives that had only one black member and a Senate that had none
at all, slums were synonymous with black people. And many of the white
members of Congress lived in Georgetown, after all.
Then the US Congress passed the Old Georgetown Act 1950 "to preserve
and protect places of historic interest", but its real purpose - as
everybody, black and white, knew - was to make the white gentrification of
Georgetown legally enforceable. The result was that, less than a decade
later, the black population of Georgetown had dwindled to less than 3 per
cent. In 1972 the Washington Post reported that there were fewer than 250 blacks
left, "so few that some Georgetown residents are unaware they are
there".
Going full circle
The truth is that such entrenched racism in the heart of America's capital
had become so casually institutionalised that even such iconic Democrats as
the glamorous young senator John F Kennedy voluntarily signed a
"restrictive covenant" when he bought his house on N Street -
close to mine - which specified that the home should not "ever be used
or occupied or sold, conveyed, leased, rented, or given to Negroes or any
person or persons of the Negro race or blood". The likes of the
Kennedys, Pamela Harriman and Kay Graham joined forces to create those
Georgetown social salons of ludicrous legend, but the only black face I can
recall ever seeing in such a place since I moved to Georgetown is that of
Vernon Jordan, superlawyer and Mr Fixit for Bill Clinton.
Which brings us full circle to 2006. I went to the Reverend Slade's church
the other Sunday - I have rarely felt more welcome anywhere, even though
few white Georgetowners would even think of setting foot in the place - and
spoke to an 84-year-old black parishioner called Carter Bowman, who was
born in Georgetown but who has long since moved out.
With neat serendipity, I actually met three generations of Bowmans, because
his son and grandson, who attends university in England, happened to be
visiting. What was chilling to me, though, was to realise that if you go
back another three generations, you find that all of Carter Bowman's
great-grandparents were born and raised when slavery was at its most
wickedly intense in Georgetown. They were all subject to the Black Code of
1848, for example. The birthplace of only one is recorded, and it was
Madagascar. For all I know, they could easily have been residents of my
crawl space.
Who, knowing all this, should be surprised that present-day black employees
of drugstores in Georgetown are so often surly when they serve white
customers like me? I have to have blood tests every month and have become
chummy with the young black nurse who draws the blood; as she plunged her
needle in the other day, I told her of my shock and disbelief reading the
Black Code 1848 of Georgetown. "It can't be worse than the Willie
Lynch letters," she responded. I had no idea what the Willie Lynch
letters were and nor did any white American I later asked; white Americans,
after all, prefer to forget about their country's systematic and ruthless
oppression of black people.
But that gentle woman knows her black American history only too well - and
she and her children and grandchildren and subsequent generations will not,
I suspect, ever forget that their forebears were treated like rats. Nor
should they, and nor should any of us.
Slavery in numbers
10-15 estimated millions of Africans transported to America as slaves
27 dollar price of an African male in 1638
70 cost per day, in cents, of a European's labour in 1638
1833 Britain's parliament passes the Abolition of Slavery Act
1862 slavery is abolished in Washington, DC
Research by Sohani Crockett
This article first appeared in the New Statesman : http://www.newstatesman.com/
© New Statesman 1913 - 2006
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