As a teenager, Weatherford was uninterested in her past, and more concerned with life in the present. She knew her great-great-grandfather Phillip Moaney had been enslaved but that was the extent of knowledge of her ancestry. Before Alex Haley's mini-series, "Roots" few Black people considered exploring their ancestry back to Africa. With his book and the television show that changed.
At Wye River, a plantation named Wye House includes Long Green, a village of tradespeople, sailors, sawyers and boat builders. At Long Green, enslaved people lived and loved, having both shackles and bonds that linked them. Life is hard: they sleep on bare planks with only one blanket and the food is not good.
Wye House is the jewel in the Lloyd family's crown. Its Puritan patriarch, Edward Lloyd emigrated from the British Isles to America in 1645. He eventually settled in Maryland colony, and was granted land by Lord Baltimore, Charles Calvert. Wye House states that it is an "agricultural factory" powered by hundreds of Black slaves. The house states:
"I am proof of the wealth
that America's founding families could amass
by enslaving laborers and marrying money...
I witnessed more cruelty than I care to recall
The sin of slavery haunts my every hall..."
The Lloyd's 1781 ledger contains an earliest known ancestor including the name of twenty-one-year old Isaac Copper. The ledger is a record of the Lloyd's property including cattle, farming equipment and slaves: their names, ages, occupations but also infirmities and quality. All are property, even the people.
Weatherford's great-grandpa James Henry Moaney never told her that his father (her great-great-grandfather) Phillip has been enslaved and that his father-in-law, Isaac Copper was also enslaved at Wye House but fought in the Civil War.
A litany of Lloyd's from Edward Lloyd III (who lived from 1711 to 1770) to Edward Lloyd VII (1825 to 1907) speak about life at Wye House and in the Maryland area. Edward Lloyd III is concerned about "the French corrupting enslaved people with promises of freedom" while his son Edward Lloyd IV switches sides during the Revolution. He now owns two-hundred-sixty Blacks. As the Lloyd's influence grows, Colonel Edward Lloyd V (1779 to 1834) becomes a state senator and eventually Maryland's thirteenth governor and a U.S. Senator. A boy called Frederick listens and learns outside the schoolroom window as Lloyd's children are tutored.
Edward Lloyd VI (1798 to 1861) owns over four hundred Blacks, worth more than twenty-eight thousand dollars. He trusts his overseers "to wield the lash and report runaways." Unable to support so many slaves at Wye House, Lloyd moves some slaves south to Mississippi, taking them along as punishment and selling some. Edward Lloyd (1825 to 1907) sees all of his slaves freed as a result of Emancipation. In 1881, that boy called Frederick, Frederick Douglass returns to Wye House where he makes peace with the slaver Thomas who repeatedly beat him.
Frederick Douglass (1818 to 1895) was brought to Wye House by his grandmother when he was six-years-old. He lived with Captain Anthony who he learned was his father. He was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey and he was enslaved. He was "a ship caulker, abolitionist, orator, and publisher of the North Star newspaper. After the Civil War, a public servant who rose to become minister of the Republic of Haiti." Frederick Douglass writes about Isaac Copper, a Doctor of Medicine and a Doctor of Divinity, and a confirmed cripple who taught Douglass and other children how to say the Lord's prayer. It is Douglass's written account of Wye House that leads the author to an Isaac Copper, the man she knew who leaned heavily on a cane. He was not the Isaac Copper who fought in the Civil War but likely his son. The Isaac Copper in the ledger of 1781 was likely born c.1760 or 1763. Weatherford wonders how he came to be owned by the Lloyds in a poem filled with many questions.
From this point on, the life of the children of Isaac and Nanny Copper, other slaves at Wye House are told, including some who flee as the Civil War approaches. And after freedom, it is the Coppers who work at building Black villages during the Reconstruction era, their industriousness and their determination to make a better world for their children and grandchildren.
Discussion
Kin is author Carole Boston Weatherford's family's story, begun in Africa and told in America. It is a story mostly lost in the mists of time, with just enough hints and records to form an understanding. The setting spans the mid-1600's to the early 1900's, in Talbot County on Maryland's Eastern Shore, at Wye House, the state's largest slave plantation and in the Black Reconstruction-era villages of Unionville and Copperville.
Before Alex Haley's famous "Roots" mini-series, many African Americans never considered tracing their own "roots" back to Africa. For many, their roots go back only a few generations, before the darkness of the past closes in. For Weatherford and her son, they could only trace their family back five generations. And so with what information she could glean from records, library records and historical societies, from databases of slave ships and records from Wye House, Weatherford has pieced together a story, giving voice to her ancestors who were enslaved but who, when freed after the Civil War, played an important part in the founding of several Black Reconstruction-era villages.
Kin is written in verse, featuring many different voices, including several Isaac Coppers whom Weatherford believes are her ancestors: Young Isaac Copper and his wife Nanny, some of their eight children including Marena, Prissy and Polly Copper as well as sons Henry (born 1800) Isaac Copper II (born 1798), and Isaac Copper III who fought in the Civil War and became a founding father of a Black village.
Other poems give voice to Colonel Lloyd, Daniel Lloyd son of Colonel Lloyd whose companion was Frederick Douglass, Edward Lloyd IV's wife Elizabeth Tayloe Lloyd, house servant Daphne, Chicken Sue who cares for the poultry, the servant Katy who once worked in the Great House Kitchen but now cooks for her people because she's too old. Then there are poems in the voice of former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Francis Scott Key composer of The Star-Spangled Banner and Harriet Tubman,
Chesapeake Bay, Wye House, the Wooden Case Clock, and the ship The Rachel also lend their voices, all having no say in their involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. The Rachel laments being involved in the slave trade:
"I am no vessel for sweet memories...
I bore thirty-seven Blacks into bondage
in the British colonies, having lost but one
Black captive enroute from Antigua
Yet my belly is full of regret..."
The ship mentions it is like the enslaved teenager, Rose who bore Captain Bruff two sons: "I had no more say in carrying cargo than Rose did in bearing those children." .
Each of these poems piece together a part of the story, from the beginnings of Wye House, the generations of the Lloyd family who enrich themselves through the slave trade and move up the social class ladder, the ships that brought the enslaved to America, the enslaved who lived, suffered and worked the plantation, those who ran away sometimes successful sometimes not, the enslaved who fought in the Civil War and who returned free men to rebuild their lives and communities.
The poems portray life as a slave: the beatings for the slightest infractions, long hours of back-breaking work in the fields, little food, one set of clothing and shoes that once worn out meant going naked, the rape and forced pregnancy of young enslaved girls, and separation of families as children and parents are sold off sometimes for extra money, sometimes as punishment. In contrast, the life a slaveholder like the Lloyds was one of opulence, enriched by the free work of the enslaved. Many poems describe Wye House as one that included beautiful furniture "mahogany table draped in fine lace and set with English crystal, china, and silver", and expensive carriages, saddles and harnesses. The family ate delicious food and sipped "fine wines shipped from across the ocean".
Wye House was a house of many mirrors, of all types, that witnessed the goings on in the plantation. Those mirrors saw all the occupants of the house, including the enslaved. Weatherford notes this in several poems including "My Question For the Looking Glasses" and in "Missing Faces" The mirrors are "...forever neutral as generations dart past or pose to ponder reflections." The author also noticed that while the oil paintings, etchings and silhouettes remain as memorials to the Lloyds, there is nothing to remember the generations of enslaved who passed through the house. In Missing Faces, Weatherford writes, "Absent are the visages of my ancestors" who "hanged the Lloyds' framed conceits," While the decor endures, Weatherford writes, "...But the faces of my kin have vanished. Erased." And so through her poetry, Weatherford gives voice to some of those enslaved at Wye House, and allows us to see them through the artwork of Jeffery Boston Weatherford.
Carole Boston Weatherford has written a thought-provoking novel-in-verse about slavery in Maryland, at the state's largest slave plantation, imagining what life might have been like for her enslaved ancestors. It's evident from the extensive Bibliography at the back of the novel, that she has done considerable historical and genealogical research. This research, as is often the case, leads only to more questions which Weatherford expresses in her poetry.
What might have given more clarity to the genealogy of the author's family as she understands it to date, is a cast of characters and perhaps a family tree that outlines her connection to the Coppers. From the novel's poems, Weatherford reveals that her great-great-grandfather Phillip Moaney was enslaved and that his son, her great-grandfather James Henry Moaney, born in 1872, seven years after the end of the Civil War (1865) was born free. His father-in-law was Isaac Copper who was enslaved at Wye House, and fought in the Civil War. For whatever reason, James Moaney never spoke about Isaac Copper being enslaved. Weatherford assumes that the practice of naming children after kin continued throughout the passing generations - a reasonable assumption given the number of Isaac Coppers in the ledgers. This is a custom common to many families.
Kin: Rooted In Hope also portrays one of the consequences of slavery: the loss of family roots that often cannot be reclaimed. Our heritage connects us to the past, to our culture, our beliefs and our identity. Knowing our past helps us to understand who we are and develop resiliency as we see how ancestors dealt with difficult life situations. For Weatherford, knowing that her ancestors were significant contributors to life for Blacks in the Reconstruction Era was likely encouraging and a source of intense pride. Despite the hardship they had endured, they built something good out of slavery and the ruins of war. They formed a sense of community and connection that continues to this day.
The beautiful artwork, done on scratch board adds considerably to the story, capturing the many emotions of various characters and embodying the darkness of slavery. The cover art is exquisite, the purple background suggesting royalty and the title in gold, as many of the enslaved came from what was known as the Gold Coast of Africa, including many African kings. Kin: Rooted In Hope is a book that asks its readers to pause and think about those that came unwillingly before, ripped from land and home, and yet persevered, bringing a rich cultural to what would become America.
Book Details:
Kin: Rooted In Hope by Carole Boston Weatherford
New York: Atheneum Books For Young Readers 2023
Kin: Rooted In Hope by Carole Boston Weatherford
New York: Atheneum Books For Young Readers 2023
202 pp.
No comments:
Post a Comment