I was sitting at my computer a few years ago, digging through family stories, wondering where to start, what to focus on when it came to researching my US family history. The temptation was to start with my great grandfather, James Nathan Calloway, and his brothers Thomas and Clinton--not only because there was so much information available on them on the internet and other places (something that surprised me)--but because it was less painful. Less... I don't know...pitiful, maybe? They were safe and affirming, while the others were not.
In the still-colonized portion of my mind, at least, they were to be avoided. The part of me that remembers cringing, as a child, at the snickers and pitying (or, more often, gloating) looks whenever anything even touching on slavery or Africans was brought up. In school and even as an adult.
That traumatized part of me shied away from researching ancestors of mine who had been held in slavery. Like many Black people I had been made to feel almost ashamed of them--as if it were their shame instead of the shame of those who thought they owned them and their children, mind, body and soul. Yet those prominent, notable and internet-searchable members of my family weren't even one generation from being held as slaves and they puzzled me. How did they do that, I wondered?
And then I met my Uncle Louis. Or, rather, my great-great uncle, Louis Calloway. Not literally, of course, but through the family archives. And, yes, it's true he was long dead, but I'm positive he spoke to me.
What he said was, "Understand me, us (with a wave to all in his generation and before,) and you'll understand them." The ones who came after. So I tried. And I'm so happy I did.
Louis was a "house slave," a secretary of sorts, in fact, because he and his siblings had been taught to read and write. Cushy job, maybe, as enslaved work goes, or at least that is what some would like to believe. A softer bed, maybe, and softer cruelties, humiliations (perhaps his was the pen that recorded the people who were bought and sold, or born into tragedy--easy enough) and chains to go along with it. Even I, before this, sometimes fell into similar thinking--wishful thinking, that perhaps a timy portion of the "we treated them just like family" tripe was true. My Uncle Louis put paid to that fantasy, though.
Louis ran away 12 times. Each time he was captured somewhere in the surrounding area (many escapees didn't travel far because they didn't want to leave their families,) returned and beaten. And put back to work.
After the 10th or 11th escape attempt, the man who claimed ownership of him made good on his threat to separate Louis from his family, his home and the only people he had ever known, and sold him to a slaver in Louisiana, known, I think, for being a "hard master."
And he was. It was in Louisiana that my Uncle Louis made his 12th attempt to escape. But things were different. First they set the dogs on him and let them loose on his body. He was already badly mauled by the dogs at recapture, but when he was returned to his "master," he was then beaten so badly he almost died. They thought, in fact, that he would die, so they threw him in a shack and left him to it (more trouble than he was worth, maybe.)
Surprising all, though, he lived. Perhaps with the healing administrations of conjure women or root workers, or simply other captives who had great experience in tending to the wounds of men and women tortured to within an inch of their lives.
So, yes, however it happened, he lived--but he was different now. Broken, his new owner wrote to the old one. Tractable. No spirit or defiance left--he just wandered around, soft as a ghost, and silently did what he was told.
Broken, he said. And so he and all believed.
Until my Uncle Louis escaped again. For the 13th, and final, time. This time, as he wrote to the man who still held his family captive in Tennessee, after he was safely in Canada--this time it worked because things were different. His family ties had already been severed--he was lost to them and they to him. He knew no one in Louisiana but, more importantly, no one knew him, or had the sort friendliness and loyalty to his "master" as the people in Tennessee did.
So, while he was "broken" he befriended the white daughter of whatever sort of clerk issued those all-magical papers--the ones that would let him write his own proclamation and declare himself a free inhabitant of the space he was in. That said he could walk down a street without (much) harm. That said he had a perfect right to take those few steps across a border that meant he would be truly free--at least from the monsters on the trail behind him.
Broken, but not how they thought. Yet, still, in some ways, how they intended.
My Uncle Louis' story in our family history ends with that letter from Canada. A letter written, no doubt, partly to let his old "master" know he hadn't won, but also to let his family know that he was okay. He'd made it. And, maybe, to say the goodbyes to his loved ones he may not have been allowed to say before. Unless it's simply been lost to history, to my knowledge he was never heard from again. Save for a whisper in the unwilling ear of at least one who shares his blood:
"Understand me," he said, "and you will understand them."
Tragedy, tortures, triumphs, setbacks, howls of pain, shouts of joy, disfunction, depression, always, always getting back up no matter how far we're knocked down and pride, pride, so much love and pride in those who endured those hundreds of years of captivity and, even after, unimaginable oppression in whatever way they could...
I do understand, now. I see and I hear and bear witness.
Thank you, Uncle Louis.