Aspects of Slavery and Freedom Seeking in North Carolina Main Menu Creative Commons License Preface and Acknowledgements ArcOnline Maps and ArcStory Maps Additional Project Components Introduction Earth Wood Fire Water Wind Escaping Network to Freedom Underground Railroad Locations Maps and Additional Resources Resources Brian Robinson 351175f8b63e375b96b75c26edde5534c94e8162 Torren Gatson 9cd3f098d43ed240801c35d1d0fd0737b5602944 Rhonda Jones 4c7a2610c10c17f5b487bcebc8abbbf64c221aa6 Arwin Smallwood 329b2d587e93ceaac77a3b3e316b5ce377128ac0 Self-Publish
Getting to Know Somerset: The Enslaved Community
1 2021-11-09T18:55:04+00:00 Brian Robinson 351175f8b63e375b96b75c26edde5534c94e8162 3 1 Somerset Place State Historic Site. Getting to Know Somerset: The Enslaved Community, 2019. plain 2021-11-09T18:55:04+00:00 Brian Robinson 351175f8b63e375b96b75c26edde5534c94e8162This page is referenced by:
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Earth- Survival-Brief View into Quarter Life and Culture
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Life
Enslaved people had to do a better job of prioritizing problems. As the sale was always possible and could come at a moment's notice, enslaved people, for the most part, learned to appreciate their space and place with others as long as they could.
This is not to say that all enslaved people did or got along all the time. There was undoubtedly intra-slave community conflict. Being enslaved did not reduce the possibility of petty and large community problems. The slave condition also exaggerated issues.
Nevertheless, because Slavery bound all slaves to the possibility of sale or death [physical or social], they had more incentive to focus on cherishing individuals and finding ways to reconcile problems.
Home
To the enslaved, home served as the grand refresher—the storehouse of slave resilience. At home, a slave gained more control over their life. In the home, one can truly gain a sense of the slave adaptation to the institution of Slavery.
Slavery was physically but also psychologically complicated, and sometimes the home, family, community, and community worship could only do so much.
Some struggled to cope, and others found other coping ways that were not as productive to themselves or the community. On the other hand, some turned to things such as alcohol, fighting, or gambling.
Slavery was a recurring situation that held no grand goals for the slave but held work and death before them always as they built the dreams of others. It was frustrating that slaves did not have the opportunity to actualize their own potential as a people and build a world as they saw fit.
The Quarters
What helped to ease the mind of the enslaved was the time that the enslaved people had to themselves or in the quarters. Although the entire plantation was a contested space, the quarters served as a space that attempted to reverse and throw off the plantation ideals, where enslaved people were humiliated and demeaned. In the quarters where slave culture took precedence, the slave was imbued with positivity and dignity and valued creativity. It was also where the slave ideals were lifted up and expressed. In the quarters, slaves "spent these moments doing everything conducive to instilling and preserving a positive self-image and a healthy psyche."
Night (slave quarters)
Enslaved people worked from can't see in the morning until can't see at night. Without electricity, darkness played a larger role in the activities enslaved people could perform at night. Nevertheless, the night did not always end the day's labor, as duties such as repairing tools, fences or store houses and preparing food for the next day were often carried out at night.
The labor of love commenced at night with family duties—preparing a meal for the family, walking miles to see family, checking on a sick friend, or taking food to runaways hidden away in a local hiding spot.
It entailed time away from the white presence; the nighttime was unique for enslaved people who worked in the fields or returned to the slave quarters after laboring somewhere else for the day.
At night, enslaved people found their rhythm. After the evening meal, the community often spent time together around the quarters. Many gathered around fires to talk, update each other on the news, turn down pots to sing, tell and listen to stories about the history of their people, famous runaways and maroon communities, or tales of Brer Rabbit or the BoogeyMan.
These movements helped to make a people and a culture. Through routine, similar goals, and proximity in all matters, from labor to leisure, what was forged with direct, organic, and coincidental happenings was a life enslaved people made their own.
At night, the enslaved personality came alive. It was where it was replenished and rejuvenated. To this, Allen Parker noted, "For the Night was the Slaves' Holiday."
As we realize the enslaved people looked forward to the time they had to themselves, it is important to note that work slows and breaking tools were not simply signs of resisting labor demands and hard work, as blacks worked hard. These signs of resistance were also ways to conserve energy to spend it with the people they loved, the people they desired to be around, doing the things they enjoyed, and labor for the direct benefit of the people they loved.
Night was also therapeutic and meditative. The night reminded them that there was a life beyond laboring for someone else. It gave them rest and restoration. African Americans were a "Night People." At night, their territory expanded, their mobility increased, they moved about in ways slaveholders could only imagine, and that too, terrified whites who feared insurrection would come like a thief in the night. Yet, notwithstanding this fear, "no one ever seemed to find an adequate answer to the problem of restraining the movement of slaves."
Not to over idealize the night, it cannot be overlooked that enslaved people would have been tired and drained after every day of labor, particularly during harvest season. It was common for parents to stay up like James Curry's mother to patch clothes and only get a few hours of sleep. "Parents would often have to work for their children at home, after each day's protracted toil, till the middle of the night, and then snatch a few hours' sleep, to get strength for the heavy burdens of the next day." But it needs to be said that enslaved people lived beyond the light of the sun and spent a lot of time under the light of the moon.
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Earth-Survival-Quarter Culture
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Quarter Culture reveals the "Practical Language of the Slave".
It is critical to gain some fundamental understanding of slave culture, its contents, and its expression to gain a deeper understanding of how the enslaved people survived. Culture is a fostered worldview. Culture is about problem-probing, assessment, and problem-solving. Culture is civilization because it details how people need, have, and are organized to develop their potential to solve their problems and meet their psychological needs to live in reality. In short, culture is related to how a community solves its problems and builds around shared experience, history, values, sensibilities, instincts, and assumptions/understandings. Culture is also how communities give meaning to and express their routine and habits. Dance, food, dress, speech, song, rituals are all expressions of culture and are assigned meaning. For instance, it is highly likely that a cook-out among black folk, including family and friends-- if music is present for the festive, dancing to Maze's "Before I let you go," is highly expected to arouse spirits of both young and old among black folk. It is not that Maze's "Before I let you go" is the culture but the meaning that black folk has given to the song and included it in cherished movements as a way to express their love, joy of company, and life. So much so that multiple generations share the emotions and memories that have been imbued in the record.
Through culture, enslaved people were able to see their reality for what it was. An honest look at their existence, it would be assumed that they were a people of doom and gloom; however, their honest look did not rob them of their optimism or creative instincts. Although slavery was awful, dirty, and caused much suffering, the culture of the enslaved provided them with a mind to be resourceful. It helped them build lifestyles that created and responded to opportunities. The culture was a haven and gave enslaved people the mental and emotional resources to transcend their circumstances, have dignity. In many ways, slave culture defended the enslaved and acted as a buffer against internalizing white values and perspectives.
By and large, slave culture attempted to screen the more hostile ideas of Euro-America that [chimertized black folk] marked blackness as half-human, half-thing. These ideas of black existence and its assumed purpose were developed to foster to justify slavery and generate negative self-concepts within the black mind and create societal belief in black inferiority. If embraced, this could haunt and terrorize the soul of black folk and make the enslaved person less resistant to the visible and invisible chains of slavery.
The cultural forms and expressions of the enslaved differed from those of the slaveholding class, even though some cultural aspects were shared. The development and presentation of slave culture occurred within the mind of an individual enslaved person or group, where it was shared [formally or informally] with the group and, if accepted, became a way of doing things or thinking about a thing in the slave quarters. Slave culture established "norms, manners, and behavior, that which encouraged and promoted cooperation, mutual assistance, and black solidarity." Slave culture established a set of shared expectations, provided examples of positive self-concepts, and promoted their own slave values and ethics.
Culture contents comprise what scholars have called slave religion, and it is expressed through dance, folk tales, songs (spiritual and non-spiritual), and recreation.
These expressions not only manifested slave culture but more critically provided slaves with mental and emotional wellness, which explains that slave culture offered diversions and ways of expression that were outlets for dealing with bottled-up frustration, anger, sadness, grief, aggression, joy, shame, remorse, happiness, and laughter.
Allen Parker noted, "One of the diversions we had was coon hunting." Two or three men or young men went coon hunting together with coon dogs that were trained for the purpose of the hunt. Diversions such as coon hunting helped blacks to shed the frustrations of the workday and the condition of slavery while at the same time providing food for a family or one in need within the community.
Through culture, enslaved people generated a level of optimism "which makes sense of ultimate defeat not only unrealistic but impossible." Their culture helped them unlock the secrets of suffering that call for regeneration and restoring and make the goal and the demand of life, LIFE. Their culture helped them to deeply understand life "always included movement, process, inner activity, and some form of irritation. Their culture helped them to unlock the secrets of suffering, which to "reject annihilation and affirm a terrible right to live." Their culture which is nothing more than the summation of a people, their actions, goals, and ideas, helped them "reduce their exposure to violence," to live with the opportunity to have dignity according to their judgments. Their culture is a witness to the fact that these people remained creative and resilient in the worst of circumstances, which ultimately demonstrates their "majesty, beauty, and power."
Get to know Somerset Enslaved Community