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Beloved: Legacy
of Slavery
Beloved: Legacy of Slavery is a collection of portraits, simple pictures of 14 children, each captured in a single moment of time. Individually, the children are beautiful, and yet tragic in their own way. The weight in their faces and the burdens on their small shoulders is plain for us to see. Eleven of them were enslaved, and three were not, but practically speaking, they were all trapped in a world that was dominated by color and the accident of birth. Collectively, they offer us a window into the second half of 19th century America and illumine for us issues of race that we continue to address more than a century later. What can we learn from the Beloved? That remains to be seen, but it is certain that they offer us a springboard, a starting point for reflection and conversation that can perhaps move us beyond our own preconceptions.
There have been many obstacles to drawing the Beloved: Legacy of Slavery. Firstly, there are very few quality photographs of enslaved children in existence. Photography was invented around 1840, and commercial photography in the 1850s and 1860s was available almost exclusively to wealthy people. Photographers were not taking portrait photographs of enslaved people, much less enslaved children. Ironically, however, some slave owners had their own portraits made with a slave standing behind them, thus providing us unknowingly with a perfect image. Newspapers and photographs of military camps provide us with two other very limited sources. Secondly, in the few available photographs, the enslaved individual is rarely, if ever, named, nor location given. Words such as, “Taylor, Slave of Colonel Hamilton” scrawled on the bottom of a photograph represent a treasure trove of information. And so, our portraits are in some instances anonymous and in others, very minimally identified. A third obstacle presents itself in that the few photographs that do exist are often mislabeled or used without citation to illustrate articles. One can find the same photograph labeled as being two different individuals living in two completely different locations and sometimes residing in collections of different institutions. No infringement of copyright, if such exists, is intended in this work in any way. Every effort has been made to identify the Beloved accurately, but the difficulties and confusion are themselves a commentary on slavery. Slaves were a commercial commodity, entirely unimportant as unique individuals, and that fact is eloquently illustrated by our inability to name and place them with absolute certainty. And so we are left with the faces of 14 children, speaking to us powerfully across time and space. May we hear them.
Remembering John Henry
South Carolina was nothing like Belgium. I had lived in a small city named Louvain, or Leuven in Flemish, for all I could remember of my young life. It was a beautiful city built of stone, much of it hundreds of years old. I attended a convent school where Sister Lena laid the foundation for my academic life when I was only five or six years old. To her, I credit the straight A’s that would come many years later. To my parents I credit my love of learning. They read to us, recited poetry, played classical music, and on the weekends, took me and my brother and sister on train trips to see everything from castles to battlefields. It was a lovely life for a little girl, but it was not to last.
Daddy died in November of 1960 when I was seven years old. He was “only 44” people said, but to my young ears that sounded quite ancient. Mama packed us up and in short order, we were on a ship sailing for America. My parents were both Americans, but they had spent most of the years since the end of WWII in Europe. Daddy was from Idaho, but Mama was a southern girl, born and bred in tiny Gaffney, South Carolina. What I knew of South Carolina was that my grandmother lived there, it was hot (whatever that meant), and people flew rebel flags. The flag part I knew because Daddy had once procured one from somewhere and given it to my mother as a joke. What I didn’t know could have filled an encyclopedia.
Grandmother’s house sat on a paved road a few miles outside of Columbia, the state capitol. It was an ugly house, dark and squat, but beside and behind it were fields of grass. I would find out the next spring that thousands of daffodils had naturalized in the field next to the house, so many that a little girl could picks dozens and dozens and not make a dent. On the very edge of the back field, just where it met the woods, sat an ancient cabin. It was tiny, just one room, and had never seen a lick of paint. There was no running water or electricity, although such details eluded me at the time. The grownups said not to go near the place because it was haunted. More likely they didn’t want us disturbing the copperheads that had taken up residence. This was John Henry’s place, the place where he had lived out a lifetime and died a few months before.
John Henry’s little place always bothered me, but not because I was afraid of ghosts. It was the loneliness, you see. It seeped out of the walls and permeated the air around the place. I could feel it, and my heart ached for John Henry. Why had he lived some place like this, alone, on the edge of the field and of the world? Why had no one ever read to him or let him listen to the Viennese Waltz? I yearned to understand, yearned for his life to make sense in some way, but no answers were to be found.
My new family in South Carolina was firmly entrenched in the “Children are to be seen, but not heard” model of parenting. Grandmother had no interest in explaining the remnants of slavery to anyone, least of all a child. Mama at least answered, but the answer was always the same, “That’s just the way it is.” I didn’t understand much, but I understood without anyone telling me that John Henry wasn’t the same. Living less than a hundred yards away, he had received castoffs and leftovers, but never came for Sunday dinner, or birthdays, or Christmas. It seemed to me that in a way he hadn’t really lived. “Had he been a ghost long before he died,” I wondered?
Grandmother’s house is gone now, as are she and my mother, and anyone who might have known John Henry. Answers came slowly as I grew up, and in recent years, I’ve pieced together some important parts of the puzzle. Grandmother’s house was on Broad River Road, part of a huge parcel of land that once made up the Nunnamaker Plantation. The family had been granted this land in the mid-1700s. Mama remembered when the plantation house burned long ago, but many slave cabins and shanties remained on the place. As well as anyone could remember, John Henry was in his nineties when he died in 1959. That would place his birth somewhere in the late 1860s to 1870s. I would guess that his parents were slaves who stayed with the Nunnamakers after freedom came, and who, in the years after the Civil War, welcomed their little John Henry. I wonder what their hopes and dreams were for him? I wonder how 90 years could pass, and he could live and die much as his parents had?
I’ve always wished that John Henry had still been alive when we moved to South Carolina. I would have liked to be his friend, to read to him and bring him secret pieces of birthday cake. I am sure I would have been told to stay away from his place, but I don’t think it would have mattered. Even today, I yearn to chase the loneliness away, to comfort him, to hold his hand when he was dying. Is it possible to know someone you’ve never met? I don’t know, but I know that it is possible for that person to walk with you, to gently shape you.
In recent months, I’ve completed a portrait collection entitled Beloved: Legacy of Slavery. John Henry’s image is not there. As to my knowledge, no photograph of him exists. But he has been firmly in my mind as I have drawn. We’ve sat together there in that old, lonely place speaking softly of difference and sameness, of human failings and the love of God. Some people say that you never really die until no one remembers.
John Henry, I remember.
–Mary Burkett