I wrote "Mrs Langdon's Diary -- Or -- They Carry It Too Far," set on a South Carolina upcountry cotton plantation, in which the progress of the Civil War was narrated through the contrasting perception of the plantation owner and her oldest slave. This was for Katharine Kerr's 1996 fantasy anthology, The Shimmering Door.
The shock I got from the reception of that story by my then SFWA male colleagues remains one of my most vivid recent memories: I was told in no uncertain terms that I was risibly ignorant of history and the Civil War for even suggesting that secession and the formation of the CSA had anything whatsoever to do with slavery. Further, it wasn't concealed by some of them that women were not qualified to engage with the Civil War, or even with history in general. In any case those slaves were just some long-dead people, a mere sidebar to history, unfortunate perhaps, but without real significance and certainly without agency when it came to that great, grand, glorious striving of marvelous to- always-be-refought battles.* Some of those boy-os now are among the loudest voices instructing other sf/f writers that the Civil War was all about slavery, though others of them have merely gone silent on the subject. Hallelujah, that's how far we've come since then
The credit for that goes to many, many people, many, many of them people of color, who began publishing their research, their own family stories, writing in styless that were reader friendly, in contrast to the demands of academic publish-or-perish texts. I could run down a bibliography of those publications right here, if I wanted to take the space, for I was there already (and reading all these books as they came out), due to Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Haiti, and had already been conducting my own research in these areas -- including West Africa -- since the early 80's. When one takes on slavery in the New World there is no way to avoid looking at that, then, still, elephant in the North American living room, a slave system that lasted longer than any other in the New World, except Cuba's and Brasil's. Yes, the USA was the third last nation to give it up.
A few weeks ago, planning an extended field trip to certain places such as Monticello and Charleston, I remarked how all these plantations and museums put exhibitions and information about slavery on top, front and center as an attraction. I knew from experience that a very short time ago this was not so. We visited Andrew Jackson's Hermitage several times back in the 80's. To even whisper the word 'slave' got you an ungentle pursed-lip-flared-nostril reprimand on the order of you having broken wind. Now the Hermitage has restored the slave quarters, which did not exist during our visits.
Still ... yesterday I had a meeting at the county's historical museum concerning the talk we're giving at their new year's inaugural reception and banquet. Meeting with the museum's director and curator upstairs for an hour we discussed the local history of slavery in terms of the county families -- their participation in the trade, the number of slaves, which side they took over secession (this is the Eastern Shore, the heart of secession for the state, which in the end did not "go out," as it was spoken of back in 1860 - 1861), how abolitionists were treated, so on. After that we were brought to meet an elderly member of the board, a gentle, learned, elderly, local origin's, retired economist / professor. He's been doing a great deal of work in these matters here in terms of numbers of residents of color, free and enslaved. That there are these long periods during which the numbers of free people of color outnumbered slaves he has given to the difference between slave owners here and those 'down south.' the County's slave owners were kinder, gentler, truly the embodiment of the post-bellum south's golden haze of nostalgia for the patriarchal slavery system. When I showed him the stat research we'd been doing on the numbers, and our sources for these number, what those numbers show is that the Shore was short on the enslaved because they'd sold them all to traders and speculators in a money-making frenzy -- it was all new to him. This wasn't information that pleased.
Charleston's Old Slave Mart Museum only opened in 2007. There is still a great deal of work to be done. But so much progress has been made. I like to think that we've been part of the cause for that!
This, from the Times feature:
The museum doesn’t pretend to present a history of slavery, or an account of its abolition (though on the second floor, a traveling exhibition purchased from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in New York, does address the subject). It simply chronicles the domestic trade. There is nothing here still redolent of such barter —the backyard prison, kitchen and outbuildings are long gone — but it doesn’t matter. The transformation of a slave showroom into a slave-trade museum gives a poignant edge to the account, in which an auction of slaves could resemble a sale of used cars.-----------------------
The most valuable workers sold for nearly $40,000 in 2007 dollars (a chart of costs is shown). Hundreds of slaves, it is evident, could be worth more than the plantation they worked on. We read, too, that most white Southerners didn’t even own slaves. But slavery’s presence was widely accepted as natural.
Spend an hour here, and it starts to seem all the more remarkable that a museum has not undertaken a more ambitious examination of the subject. That will be one of the challenges for the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, which is scheduled to open in 2015. In the meantime, remnants of slavery’s presence are so prevalent here that it becomes poignantly evident just how major an achievement is reflected by slavery’s enduring absence.
* This is no joke even now. There have been those who have written angry comments to the Disunion column demanding to know why we're always dragging slavery into every discussion connected to the Civil War. They want the fun stuff, the important stuff, they want the battles!
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