When you can’t compromise
Squatting down, I plucked a cotton boll, ready to be harvested, snowy white and softer than kitten’s fur. Rubbing it between my fingers, I glanced at what appeared to be the former plantation house in the distance, and sickened, thinking of the slaves who had toiled in these fields.
My husband and I were recently in North Carolina, east of Raleigh on the Albemarle Sound. Before we arrived, I had wondered how the official record dealt with that dark history, one whose legacy still reverberates across the country — at a time when athletes are kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality against African Americans; when white supremacists march out in the open, and the president and his administration are their apologists.
Earlier this week, John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, claimed that the “lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”
Compromise? How can you compromise over the abhorrence of slavery, unless you think that the people in bondage are less than you?
At a visitor center in North Carolina, we spotted a historical exhibition about Harriet Jacobs, author of “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” first published under a pseudonym in 1861.
As I started to read the placard, I fumed, “During the first six years of her life, Harriet Jacobs ... enjoyed a close- knit family life with [ her] parents.” Enjoyed — as in living with every freedom stolen from them?
After the death of her mother, Jacobs moved into the home of her white mistress, who eventually died, and Jacobs was bequeathed to another family, the Norcoms. According to the placard, the husband “harassed” her, the wife became “vindictive and jealous.”
Harassed — as in attempting to rape her?
In the placard’s telling, the Norcoms’ treatment of Harriet “brought her to the attention of Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, a future United States congressman. Harriet chose to begin a relationship with Sawyer. Their liaison produced a son ... and a daughter.”
Chose a liaison — as if suggesting she could voluntarily enter a romantic relationship with this powerful lawyer?
Shaking with rage, I left the center, vowing to read Jacobs’ book. As I suspected, the visitor center had distorted the history, glossing over tragedy to create a rosier narrative. I urge you to read it, too; her eloquent words are just as searing and timely today.
Of her first mistress, Jacobs writes, “She had taught me the precepts of God’s Word. ‘ Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ ‘ Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.’ But I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor. I would give much to blot out from my memory that one great wrong. ... Notwithstanding my grandmother’s long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God- breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.”
Jacobs writes chillingly about the threats that slave girls encounter upon entering adolescence: “If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave. ... My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him.”
Her words resonate, as scores of people have been coming forward to share their stories of sexual assault and harassment at the hands of the mighty.
When Jacobs falls in love with a free born man, a “young colored carpenter,” he proposes to buy her so they can be together, she writes. Her master refuses, tells her he can “take up” with one of his slaves instead, and threatens to kill her young love.
Desperate, she gets entangled with Sawyer, whom she describes as a “white unmarried gentleman ... he expressed ... a wish to aid me. He constantly sought opportunities to see me, and wrote to me frequently. I was a poor slave girl, only fifteen years old.”
By getting pregnant, she hopes she might ward off her master, and that Sawyer might someday free her. He does not. Eventually, she escapes by hiding for nearly seven years in an attic above a storeroom — “that dismal little hole, almost deprived of light and air ... with no space to move my limbs” — before fleeing to New York by boat.
“Slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks,” Jacobs tells us.
It’s a curse that Kelly, President Trump and their ilk can’t distort any longer, a curse that we must face as a country, or remain as haunted as we were then.
How compromise can you over the abhorrence of slavery, unless you think that the people in bondage are less than you?