Frederick Douglass wrote:
” What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.”
Today I want to reflect on Jane Iles. First, I want to introduce you to Jane Iles, my great-great-great-grandmother. Jane was probably born a slave, born in 1830 and lived at least until 1900. Not much is known about Jane other than information found on the census. Jane had at least one daughter, Caroline. Jane was illiterate and a laborer. Jane lived in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana which has fascinating history as the contested lawless Neutral Strip.
Calcasieu Parish was called the Neutral Ground and/or Sabine Free State
The Neutral Ground (also known as the Neutral Strip, the Neutral Territory, and the No Man's Land of Louisiana; sometimes anachronistically referred to as the Sabine Free State was a disputed area between Spanish Texas and the United States' newly acquired Louisiana Purchase. Local officers of Spain and the United States agreed to leave the Neutral Ground temporarily outside the jurisdiction of either country. The area, now in western Louisiana, had neutral status from 1806 to 1821.
Neutral Ground
Jane was born in Virginia and probably transported to Louisiana via the Domestic Slave Trade. Little is ever mentioned about the Domestic Slave Trade, we read a lot about The Middle Passage, which was horrifying in its brutality and inhumanity. The Domestic Slave Trade was just as brutal and inhumane. Plantations were established for the sole purpose of breeding slaves to enrich white men. A higher price was paid for women who were strong and in their child-bearing years. Breeding plantations in America, yes, after the Revolutionary War? Yes. What did the Fourth of July mean to those slaves?
Here is more about the Domestic Slave Trade
The domestic slave trade within the United States did not begin, as is often assumed, with the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. It originated half a century earlier in the 1760s, and overlapped with the trade from Africa. It was extensive even between 1787 and 1807, a period in which more Africans were forced to these shores than in any two decades in North American history. The domestic trade continued into the 1860s and displaced some 1.2 million men, women, and children, the vast majority of whom were born in America.
At the cost of immense human suffering, this forced migration unlocked a great reservoir of labor and made possible the rapid expansion of the "Peculiar Institution." The domestic slave trade brought misery, separating families and increasing the climate of insecurity in the community.
It also distributed the African-American population throughout the South in a migration that greatly surpassed in volume the transatlantic slave trade to North America.
Jane lived to be emancipated in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana. Her daughter Caroline Smith was born in Louisiana so I can estimate that Jane was in Louisiana by at least 1850. Jane has stayed with me since I’ve found her. To date, she is my oldest ancestor that I could find. Jane moves me to tears when I think about her. This bonded woman is faceless, was nameless just ten years prior in the 1860s census. I write for Jane Iles. No doubt, Jane was illiterate. Jane spent about 35 years enslaved. She was probably born in Virginia and sold Down The River via New Orleans to end up on a farm in Southwest Louisiana. I’ve not found Jane’s partner. I’ve not found Jane’s other children. That is only a matter of time, possibly...if I can find property records or wills because it seems these are the only times the enslaved were mentioned.
Jane may have come through New Orleans on a boat, but others didn’t, they trekked across land.
The great majority of forced migrants trekked southward chained together in "coffles" . Sella Martin described such a convoy in which he and his mother had made "that dreaded and despairing journey [from North Carolina] to Georgia":
A long row of men chained two-and-two together, called a "coffle" and num¬bering about thirty persons, was the first to march forth from the "pen," then came the quiet slaves - that is, those who were tame and degraded - then came the unmarried women, or those without children; after these came the children who were able to walk; and following them came mothers with their infants and young children in their arms.
Charles Ball was marched from Maryland to South Carolina in a fifty-person coffle:
The women were tied together with a rope, about the size of a bed cord, which was tied like a halter round the neck of each; but the men . . . were very differently caparisoned. A strong iron collar was closely fitted by means of a padlock round each of our necks. A chain of iron about a hundred feet long was passed through the hasp of each padlock, except at the two ends, where the hasps of the padlocks passed through a link of the chain. In addition to this we were handcuffed in pairs.
Major traders moved south with "droves" of up to three hundred people. These terrible journeys usually took seven to eight weeks and covered up to six hundred miles. En route, the captives would sleep in tents or other rough accommodations. On reaching their destinations, the traders would often remove the chains, as they prepared their "product'" for market, while wielding guns and whips to keep the people under control.
Though coffles were the primary means of transport, as railroad routes became more extensive they were also used. In 1856, Lyman Abbot, a Northern visitor to the South found that "every train south has slaves on board . . . twenty or more, and [has] a "nigger car," which is generally also the smokers’ car, and sometimes the baggage car." Sometimes buyers, as they made their purchases in ones or twos, sent people down the line to be collected by their trading partners.
Traders also moved the gangs of people along waterways - the Mississippi River from St. Louis to Natchez and New Orleans; the Alabama River from Montgomery to Mobile, and then on by sea to New Orleans.
Link
In 1910, the Calcasieu Parish courthouse was damaged due to a fire in Lake Charles. Very few documents housed in the courthouse survived. Trying to find Jane Iles and other relatives has been a real challenge. While I’m pretty sure she has ties to some of the first settlers in Calcasieu Parish, one should note, slaves weren’t discussed. I’ve found many historical sketches of Calcasieu (later Beauregard) Parish and for me, an African American, the omissions are glaring. So as we think about July 4th, you should ask yourself, what is omitted from the mythology around July 4th? Surely, not only white men played a role in our nation’s history. Based on the history books, no. White men were abundantly represented and most everyone else was unworthy of note. The sanitizing of the genocide of Native Americans should also rest prominent in your mind as you think of history, the white-washing and July 4th.
As I mentioned, there are several historical sketches for a Parish that housed a sugar cane, saw and grist mill. Do you think that sugar was harvested and planted all by itself? Well based on the Anglo-Saxon history, yes, it did or rather there was no need to even mention slaves…
Here is an excerpt of the “history”
I will vary from my discourse on the parish to inform you of how tradition says that the town of Sugartown got its name. Bob Martin, (now the Bob Martin of the Civil War fame), one of the old settlers, had obtained a few stalks of sugar cane from Saint Mary Parish which he had planted, saved what it produced and repeated for about three years when had about one-eighth of an acre of nice sugar cane, he remarked to his neighbor, Saddler Johnson, that if I had some way of getting the juice out of that cane I would make some nice cane syrup. Mr. Johnson being the skilled mechanic said, “Bob, let’s make a mill by taking two short sections of a big gum tree and turning them with a turning lathe until they are uniform, then fitting cogs into them so that they can be turned with a lever and thus squeeze the juice out of the cane.” This was done; also a small furnace built using wash kettles instead of sugar kettles. Neither of them being familiar with making syrup permitted it to boil too long and when the mass cooled they had two or three nice kettles of sugar. When getting up the petition for a post office it became necessary to name the office and someone present, having Bob Martin’s sugar in mind, said “Let’s call it Sugartown.” So it was named and has been ever since and is today of the best country communities in Beauregard Parish or Southwest Louisiana. Bob Marin moved to Live Oak County in Southwest Texas long before the Civil War and became wealthy but his brother has many has many descendants in this section of the state.
About this time a question of planting cotton was discussed, (cotton at that time brought a good price), they agreed to plant if a cotton gin could be erected. Dempsey Iles, the first settler and a wealthy stock man for that time, agreed to furnish the finance and Saddler Johnson built the gin. This was the first cotton gin west of the Calcasieu River or Southwest Louisiana. It was located about one hundred yards north and a little west of the cemetery at Sugartown community. This cotton gin served the cotton growers for more than forty years.
Link
So there you have it….a wonderful excerpt of the history of the Anglo-Saxons in Calcasieu and Beauregard Parish. A mention of the sugar cane and cotton produced. No mention of the slaves, my ancestors who did the back-breaking work of planting, growing and harvesting the sugar cane and cotton. The slaves purchased as property and brought to the very edge of Southwest Louisiana to enrich and grow a community that in 1931, the mayor while recounting the history couldn’t even be bothered to mention their contributions. This becomes a sad testament to this day that slaves never registered in any narratives. It wasn’t important to document how many came with these original settlers, who grew the cotton for the gin, who grew the sugar cane for mill. So much racial amnesia, same as it has always been.
Oh, wait, there wasn’t a total Black-Out (pun intended), at the end of the speech, the mayor says…
If there is anything else you wish to know about the old times and old timers in this vicinity, see me privately and I will tell you if I know, and if I do not know, you might see my good colored friend John Towner, sometimes known as John Isriel, an ex-slave who is the best informed person now living as to the pioneers of this country. If neither I nor John can tell you, you will not likely ever secure the information.
So this July 4th, I’ll be pondering the life the ex-slave, Jane Iles. Not much is written about the slavery of African American women in Louisiana. I did find an article that helps to illustrate what Jane may have endured.
But we know they were there and we know this country would not have prospered if not for their back-breaking work. But…
There is an aspect of the history of Louisiana that has been essentially neglected. The role of women, particularly the contributions of the black woman, is all but eliminated in the texts that attempt to outline the achievements of explorer, governor, and merchant in the development of Louisiana. Historian Gerda Lerner notes that "the modern historian is dependent on the availability of sources. The kind of sources collected depends to a large extent on the interests, prejudices and values of the collectors, archivists and historians of an earlier day." <1>
This observation was also made by W. E. B. DuBois in 1951 when he wrote, "We have the record of kings and gentlemen ad nauseam and in stupid detail, but of the common run of human being . . . the world has saved all too little of authentic record and tried to forget or ignore even the little saved." <2>
Such has been the case with the role of women in history. Arthur Schlesinger Sr. wrote in 1922 that "from reading history textbooks one would think half of our population made only a negligible contribution to history." <3> The black woman has been ignored even more; she has been considered historically inferior to the white female in the United States and at the same time a member of an entire family of people that was considered little more than chattel for more than 200 years….
Honestly, I am depressed about the role history plays in validating current generations of Americans and yet there was an effort to remove black women from the history as if they don’t matter. Of course, they didn’t matter but I think this is just one truth writ large that underscores just how meaningless black life and black women were and are. If there were records, they were not detailed records and many times ignored or destroyed being categorized as not worthy of adding to the body of historical text.
What I found striking and sickening was the word of historians who did mention blacks.
Here is an example…
First, it must be recognized that it is difficult to locate black female leaders in traditional history texts. For example, Louisiana Studies by Alcee Fortier has been a commonly referenced background text. Consider some of his observations regarding blacks: "[Slaves] were, as a rule, well treated by their masters, and, in spite of their slavery, they were contented and happy." In addition, "the negroes, as all ignorant people, are very superstitious."
Same as it ever was….echos of this sentiment by Alcee Fortier are still with us today.
Fortier's comments were not limited to New Orleans: "St. Martinville was the home of a true hero. Alcibiade DeBlanc, ex-justice of our Supreme Court. It was he who started the White League movement which was to save Louisiana from carpet-bag and negro rule."
Same as it ever was with folks wanting their country and their party back.
In describing the 1870 legislation that required the integration of public schools, Fortier had this to say: "Colored children, instigated to apply for admission to white schools, were firmly refused.... In several instances, where the colored pupils had been admitted, upon a concerted movement, large companies of parents visited the school and required the obnoxious classes to withdraw." However, conscious of exhibiting a reasoned viewpoint, he acknowledged the establishment of Southern University. "The establishment of the Southern University is a proof of the good will of the whites toward the colored people and of their desire to see them as well educated as possible." It could be inferred that this historian did not expect too much of this education. <8>
Same as it ever was with white flight and public school segregation. In fact, this country is more segregated now than it ever has been. So much for “color-blind” racial “tolerance.”
In a search for women of any color in this text who were considered noteworthy, the index was reviewed. Grace de la Croix Daigre was cited because "she took notable pictures of places and people along the lower Mississippi and gave one-man shows throughout the state." In addition, after 1920, "the Louisiana Negro, unlike the Negro of other Southern states, was not used as a political issue and although he benefited from the extensive social legislation took little interest in politics. As late as 1940, when there were over 700,000 white registrants, there were fewer than 1,000 Negroes registered to vote." <9>
Such an analysis fails to consider the role of the White League movement extolled by Fortier. It neglects the reality of the "grandfather and grandmother clauses" that were used by the state to eliminate the black vote. Further, Davis' analysis can be refuted by examining the pieces of information that have managed to survive the historians' selections.
Yes, same as it ever was….the universalizing of the white experience to black folk in America and thus when there are disparities…it must rest with black folk’s inherent genetic or cultural inferiority.
Despite the statements of Fortier, black slave women were not contented and happy. "in general, the lot of black women under slavery was ill every respect more arduous, difficult and restricted than that of the men. Their work and duties were the same as that of the men, while childbearing and rearing fell upon them as added burden. Punishment was meted out to them regardless of motherhood, pregnancy or physical infirmity. Their affection for their children was used as a deliberate means of tying them to their masters. . . . The chances of escape for female slaves were fewer than those for males. Additionally, the sexual exploitation and abuse of black women by white men was a routine practice." <11>
Many black slave women resisted. Their awareness of the political and economic implications of resistance to the sexual exploitation of the masters was summarized in the narrative Memoirs of Margaret Jane Blake. "If all bond women [resisted pregnancy] how soon the institution could have vanished from the face of the earth and all the misery belonging to it." <12>
The chief defenders of white supremacy in New Orleans were the white-owned newspapers which continually vilified and ridiculed the Negro. Describing blacks as "niggers," "darkies" and "Sambos," white journalists generally depicted Negroes as speaking in almost incomprehensible dialect, and as an instinctively stupid, immoral, criminal, debased, dishonest, lazy, brutal and lustful subhuman species. According to whites, there was nothing in the historical record of blacks which proved their capacity for advancement; they bad contributed nothing to civilization or to the art of government. <16>
The population of black readers had already been severely limited. Slaves were denied access to any kind of schooling by a law of 1830 that forbade teaching them to read or write on pain of imprisonment for between one and 12 months. <17> Despite such a law, a black slave woman by the name of Milla Granson conducted "midnight school" in her cabin.
Same as it ever was…the media promoting the black archetype as other and Americans buying into it without a critical thought or care.
For more about black women in Louisiana, go here…
So this brings me back to Jane Iles and July 4th, 2011. If I can speak to Jane today, I would say, It Does Get Better. I would tell her about all of the accomplishments of her descendants. I know she would be pleased. I know she would be relieved to know that we want to know her, we want to find her, and she will not be forgotten even through the white hegemony and shame of enslaving her and treating her and her children as no more than property for the enrichment, power and prestige of white men. I will let her know that the more things change, the more they stay the same but we fight on. I wonder what Jane Iles would make of President Obama. I’m sure she would have never imagined it. On this Fourth of July, I’ll be in quiet remembrance of Jane Iles. As I asked earlier, I hope you will spend this Fourth, thinking of the underbelly of our history, forgotten, discredited and woefully missing, to make this democracy possible.
I’ll be writing more about Jane Iles in the future. It really is too much to encapsulate in one diary. I want to send a special thanks to Denise Oliver-Velez and edwardssl, whose generosity of spirit, patience and time have helped me immensely. I can’t describe my gratitude to these women.
Reflective Fourth, to you all!