Frozen.
Four degrees above zero before dawn one morning.
A foot of snow.
But this was an order to walk, not an invitation, and the face issuing it didn't invite dissent.
John was chained to an old man and fellow slave who tried to keep his spirits up as they walked through snow and cold, wind and desperate loneliness.
One hundred miles. Norfolk to Richmond. But who cared about the names? Mama was gone. Daddy had sold him.
He had the chains freezing his wrists and the old slave trying to warm his heart.
And he was property.
This is a multipart diary based on dozens of sources on the life of John P. Parker. See also part two: "John Parker: foundry by day, freedom by night" and part three: "John Parker, Eliza and the kids."
Richmond was frigid, and John and that old slave were exhausted. Three days of walking -- of breathing -- in snow and ice so bad a city in Georgia had gotten to zero degrees.
That old slave was sold, then whipped to death.
Amid the cold, hate burned holes in John Parker’s heart. To whip a man -- to own a man. And that man, of all men, who had consoled a boy leaving his mother forever.
He had been sold and sold and sold some more, perhaps because beatings didn’t subdue his rage at being beaten and being property. In time, he was sold to a slave caravan going south. As property still, four months after the frozen march to Richmond, he walked with four hundred other slaves nine hundred miles.
June was warmer. Flowers were blooming free. Trees were full of leaves. Birds were chirping, and the sun was beaming.
He hated it all. The trees could do whatever they wanted. The birds -- the flowers.
He grabbed a stick, reached out and struck a shrub, sending its flowers crashing to the earth, spoiled.
Another, smaller boy among the four hundred was newly without his mother. Jeff was so miserable that his crying earned him John’s ire -- and kicks.
Didn’t work, so John befriended him instead. On the walk to Mobile, through the forests being turned into cotton farms, a bigger boy took Jeff’s dinner -- because he was bigger.
Size lost to fight, and John convinced the boy to give the food back.
That fight would stay with John for the rest of his days.
A doctor bought John Parker in Mobile, Alabama. His sons enjoyed their new playmate and taught him -- a slave -- to read, which was severely illegal in Alabama in 1835. When his master found out part of what had gone on when John and the boys were off hunting and fishing, he promptly … let the slave keep reading library books. (That book is self-published, not a great sign of accuracy, but the Yale episode illustrates that the doctor already knew John could read.)
Boys become teens, and well-to-do teens in the 1840s go to college. And sixteen-year-old John would be going with them -- to Yale.
The doctor, his two sons and John were traveling from Mobile, Alabama, to new Haven, Connecticut. When they got to Philadelphia, John was told twice to watch out, once via written note.
Oh hell no. He’d been beaten before, and the way that first man had sought him out, he was expecting a fight. The doctor quickly sent him back South -- before the Quaker abolitionists who were planning to rescue him from slavery could get hold of him.
Back South, the doctor told John he had to learn a trade. He chose plastering and was apprenticed to a drunk who hadn’t read the memo:
Beating me only makes me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.
… you wouldn’t like being beaten with a board with a nail through it after you’d been set up to fail by a guy looking to destroy you.
The beating hospitalized John -- a mid-teens slave in southern Alabama in the 1840s. If you were expecting terrible medical care and a staff uninterested in anything better, you were right: another beating.
Administered by John Parker. The woman running the hospital was hitting a patient with a rawhide whip. John turned it on her.
And then he was as good as fertilizer.
Or … not.
The accounts of John Parker’s life from 14-18 are detailed but inconsistent. We have John Parker:
1) Selling himself to Mrs. Ryder, the widow of one of the doctor’s patients, at 14 for $1,800, payable back at $10/week with interest.
2) Doing the same at 16, for the same amount of money, at the same weekly rate, and paying it off by the same point. Accounts that detail this exchange talk about what an escape-prone troublemaker he was and how that increased the going rate. This seems unlikely.
3) Going partway up to Yale to serve the doctor’s boys, then getting sent home so he wouldn’t get escaped, getting in less trouble and then selling himself for $1,800 at $10/week, which he paid off in eighteen months.
4) Getting in stupid teenager trouble because he was very good with his hands very young and didn’t remember his place as a teenage black boy in Alabama in the 1840s.
A higher rate based on being trouble seems like the opposite of what should happen. And if we accept the notion that the doctor didn’t object to his learning to read and kept giving him chances to make good, we have a man who takes pity on an eight-year-old boy and wants his sons to grow up in a different kind of world. So they have a black playmate who also drives the doctor around. He teaches them about the wilderness, and they teach him about books.
He’s good at what he does, except that because he’s black, part of what he has to do to survive in a job is allow himself to be treated black.
The hospital episode shows he’s not interested in doing that. The first foundry episode -- buying expensive clothing with his wages -- shows he’s not interested in doing that. So does the second foundry episode, in which he lasts less than a week because he’s too good at what he does.
When I was pondering this section of John’s life, one thing troubled me: At $10/week plus interest, he’d have to work roughly four years to pay off an $1,800 debt. Starting at fourteen and ending at eighteen made simple sense. But that source above has him often paying double what he agreed to. And page fifty-one of that source, which is obscured in that preview, is visible here as page sixty-eight.
Amid John’s walk down through Virginia and into Alabama, he saw a pile of land being deforested for planting cotton. Today, you ask someone for an antebellum (a phrase I think is far too pretty considering the barbarism it encapsulates) crop in the South and you get cotton as a pretty common response. But John passed through forest -- land being cleared for cotton.
That concept stayed with John, and when he worked at the foundry in Mississippi for Mrs. Ryder, he worked privately on a prototype clod smasher. He thought the idea would give him the money for his freedom and a good financial start.
Google "Intellectual property rights for slaves in the 1840s" and you’re unlikely to come up with anything that isn’t depressingly expected. So when John showed his idea to the foundry superintendent, his idea was promptly stolen. He was tossed from the foundry for fighting, and the foundry made his clod smashers without him there. (The literature doesn’t indicate how successful they were.)
Things would have ended there -- two foundries, and he’d been fired from both -- except that a third foundry opened and he worked there, paid by the piece. And thus he earned the rest of that $1,800 by working a pile at that foundry and, according to this source and another, the docks.
And in 1845, John Parker turned eighteen, paid back Mrs. Ryder, knocked the unethical superintendent out and fled North, a free black man.