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Chris Rock’s Nat X character is right; February is too short for Black History. I have lived in the Charleston, South Carolina, area for most of my life and in the last 20 years, I have found more and more opportunities to study local history from an African-American perspective. My awareness of African-Americans as key players in local and national history really started when I saw an exhibit at the Charleston Museum in the 1990′s highlighting the significance of African-American labor in historical South Carolina. It showcased the multitude of skilled labor jobs held by African-Americans in antebellum Charleston; wood carving, carpentry, bricklaying, fishing and oystering, etc. I came to realize that all or almost all of the beautiful buildings and furnishings that make Charleston so appealing as a tourist destination were in large part produced by slaves. Sounds like a big “Duh”, but I grew up in the “60s and early ’70s going to plantation tours and candlelight house tours where slave labor was barely mentioned.
After seeing this exhibit, I could clearly envision black hands building the entire city and all the outlying plantation homes, chapels of ease, etc. It was like turning on a light. My previous concept had been that enslaved people were just forced to farm rice, indigo, and cotton and to cook and take care of homes and children. I became aware of these black pioneers and colonists as key foundations of the society and I began to see their cultural legacy more clearly.
Edward Ball’s book, Slaves in the Family, provided another clue to this hidden past that really intrigued me; the historical fact that enslaved people engaged in day-to-day travel around the community on their owners’ business, the men going up and down the local rivers on boats. I had never before pictured African-Americans moving around the community on a regular basis prior to emancipation. I always thought of them as confined to their owners’ homes and property. An account that I recently read of Harriet Tubman hiding in plain sight from a former owner while on one of her “undercover missions” also underscored this fact. She hid behind a newspaper knowing that the former owner had no idea she could read. Reading, by the way, was one of the most supremely subversive acts a slave could commit in many pre-war Southern states including South Carolina.
Ball also talked about the place in Charleston where slaves were sent for “correction”, which meant being beaten, tortured, and possibly maimed by having toes cut off among other things.The Sugar House, also known as the Charleston Workhouse, was where these corrections probably took place. The Sugar House has no historical markers. I recently visited the site where it stood. I found the location in the book, Charleston, Charleston by Walter J. Fraser. It was next to the old City Jail on what was then called Mazyck Street, now Magazine Street. Knowledge of the treatment of captured runaway slaves while incarcerated in the Sugar House was a prime factor in Sarah Grimke’s decision to leave behind a life of wealth and privilege for a more spiritually fulfilling life as a Quaker abolitionist activist in the North.
This February while planning a Black History Month event at my library celebrating the history of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry , I learned that Harriet Tubman was with the 54th Massachusetts at the Union assault on Battery Wagner in 1863. She also led a Union raid into “enemy territory” in the Lowcountry in that same year (around Hampton County) and is the first American woman to lead an armed assault. Before last month, I had no idea that Harriet Tubman had even been in South Carolina, much less made military history here. I always have room to learn something new. Other things on my Black History “to do” list are visiting the recently renovated Old Slave Mart Museum on Chalmers Street and learning more about the Reconstruction-era Cainhoy Riot and other significant post Civil War events in local African-American history.
The Charleston Museum exhibit that sparked my interest 20 years ago also included Denmark Vesey’s drum. I found it to be a powerful symbolic object, even if Vesey was just a scapegoat, as some believe, and not the freedom fighter of popular history. For me, the drum symbolizes the call to action to examine historical facts as closely as possible and not try to sanitize or pretty them up. There is nothing warm or fuzzy about most of Black History, just accounts of individuals struggling alone or in groups, trying to make headway against injustice and human rights abuse, real stories that are more inspiring than any fiction. It is important to make sure those stories get told.
