The Bone and Sinew of the Land Read online

  But walking behind a plow was only possible once the earth underneath had been cleared. To clear not what grew above but what grew below, however, was a different challenge. Charles and Keziah did not own long-cultivated earth; their land had been virgin forest up until recently, and everything had grown on it but crops. Trees, bushes, brambles, ferns, vines, wildflowers, and more had thrived there. And all of them, all of them, had roots.

  Within a few feet the team hit the first big root. The oxen put their heads down and pulled, groaning a little. Charles would have called to them, whistling, cajoling, encouraging, until the root snapped and they jerked forward. The next root was bigger, and as the team pulled Charles would have had to call to Keziah. But she certainly already had the axe off her back, walking towards Charles as he reversed the team clear of the root, so he could dig around it. It could well have been as thick as his leg. Once he had cleared around the root Keziah would have lifted the axe high above her head and brought it down hard, hacking into the earth as shoulders strained and the blade dulled on the dark dirt.5

  Once she was through the root, they started off again, knowing they did not have long before the next root, for roots lay under the earth like a second forest. In this rich, newly cleared land, they would hit a sizable root about every eight feet, or every half a minute. And each root stopped the team.

  Even if all went well, after half a day of this labor they would all be in pain. The oxen’s shoulders, where the yoke lay, would be so sore that the beasts would flinch if Keziah laid her hand even gently on their tender skin. Only two creatures have the strength, patience, and courage for this labor: oxen and humans.

  This work stretched ahead of Keziah and Charles, not just that year, but for years to come. It generally took at least twenty years to clear forty acres of virgin land, twenty years before most of the roots and rocks were gone. And those twenty years depended on surviving droughts, floods, infestations, and early frosts. But their farming was an act of hope.

  There were other options. The white settlers pouring into their region would have been glad to hire Keziah to do their laundry or cooking. And Charles could have become a blacksmith or woodworker or set up shop in Vincennes as a barber. And there was always the river. He could have bought or built himself a boat and become a river man—they knew enough people of African descent who had done that. But this was their land, their life together, their choice.

  As they turned the oxen toward home, the sun would have been high overhead. But though they were weary and warm, there was a freshness to that first spring.

  Everything was fresh—their marriage, their love, their land, even their freedom.

  As Keziah led the team back, the sun would have glinted on her skin, shining like the wings of the crows that clamored round them on the newly turned earth.6

  Did Charles catch his breath with the wonder of her—the wonder of his wife? For this was not her first frontier. She may have been younger than he, but she had already helped found a farm in this territory.

  But that farm was not hers. Keziah had been brought in bondage from South Carolina by a family of white pioneers who believed that settlement on the American frontier was impossible without the aid of forced labor.

  Keziah’s owners were not unique in this belief. Many a slave-owning family was making a similar argument to the politicians back east, some of whom seemed open to their pro-slavery arguments. True, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 clearly laid out that this was to be a free land where slavery could not take root. But there were already some loopholes. There was one for the French slave owners just up the Wabash River in Vincennes, whose cooperation the new United States desperately needed in the Great West. And there were a few other loopholes besides.7

  But most slaveholders were supposed to free the people they held enslaved once they entered the Northwest Territory. Of course, they could always ask those enslaved people if they wanted to become indentured servants, to labor for a set period before being freed with some small reward for their labors. But this system quickly became rife with corruption, and enslaved people often had little choice about their indenture. Indenture bonds could last seventy years or more—long outlasting the actual lives of those they held in contract.8

  And then there were families like Keziah’s owners, who assumed that there would be little oversight or interest in upholding freedom laws out there on the frontier. And for a while they were correct in this assumption.

  So Keziah was forced to leave her home in South Carolina. She must have remembered the sea—the sea that separated her from everyone. She would have remembered all that she had been forced to leave behind, kin, friends, community.

  And then Keziah had been forced to do frontier work as a pioneer girl in bondage. She had to learn how to hitch a massive felled tree to an ox team and drag it out of the woods to a building site. She had to learn how to notch a log with an axe so it fit snug and sure atop another and then another until a cabin was complete. She had to learn how to find the best patch of woodland in which to tether the milk cow so it could feed on oak leaves when there was no grass to be found.

  All this while war waged, making this a more dangerous frontier than those to the south. The rumblings of the War of 1812 had started in 1811 in the Northwest Territory. In that year the Battle of Tippecanoe, just up the Wabash River from where Keziah was living, helped bring the nation toward war with the British and their allied Native Americans. Before she knew it, Keziah was on the front lines of the battle. She and the family who owned her may well have had to flee to nearby Fort Allison to keep from being killed.

  They had all survived; they had all stayed, despite the war, even though the pioneer population on the western side of the Wabash River had plummeted during the conflict.9

  But even after the war ended, there were still so many dangers.

  There were always the wolves. Keziah would have heard them howling close on a winter night, those same wolves that had so terrified the English explorer William Faux, who had risked a trip to this wilderness around the same time Keziah and Charles were married. Faux had stayed in the more settled town of Evansville, close to the Ohio River. But even there the wolves “howled and prowled into town” till the explorer had shivered with fear in his bed.10

  But Keziah did not have the luxury of shivering inside, in bed or anywhere else. She would have had to be up and out in the cold darkness of a winter morning to empty the chamber pots, bring in the wood, and build a fire to warm the white people who still slept under thick blankets. The others who labored with her would have been up as well, all of them people in bondage north of the Ohio River.

  Of course they were supposed to be free in this free land. But they were living on the frontier, and the men responsible for upholding the ban on slavery had little interest in doing so. Many of the administrators of the Northwest Territory moving into Vincennes on the Wabash River were avid pro-slavery men. This meant that the people who held Keziah in bondage—asleep in the cabin while she worked—were bringing their own laws north with them, trampling her rights just as surely as Keziah trampled down the fresh snow to make a path to the barn.11

  Oh, it was cold—colder than she could have ever imagined.

  Did she remember her first glimpse of snow when she had arrived from South Carolina? Had she tried to catch the delicate flakes that first winter as they flew through the air like petals in springtime? Now they only stung her face like a swarm of frozen bees, blown so thick and fierce by the wind that she could not have seen any wolves even if they had stood just a few feet away, watching her trying to survive.

  Years later, as more and more people in America who called themselves white began to make viciously prejudicial arguments about the inherently inferior nature of people from Africa, did Keziah wonder at the illogical world they seemed to inhabit? As an enslaved laborer she was considered an appropriate settler on the frontier, but as a free woman she was not. The contradiction was hard to miss.

&
nbsp; Then again she may have shrugged her strong shoulders, not surprised at what little sense people made when driven by their baser passions—whether greed, jealousy, fear, or hate.

  At least she could know that, no matter what others thought of her, she was loved by Charles.

  He was her own. There was no family to introduce them, no fussing aunt or grandmother to arrange a meal after church. No cousin to vouch for his character. She only knew him after he had come north.

  But she would have watched, and she saw him weather what would make most men founder.

  Word must have gotten around when Charles bought his first forty acres in 1815 from the federal land agent’s office in Vincennes. That first growing season on his land may have been a good one. But then the world came to an end.

  The weather had already been running cold for years, but in 1816 summer disappeared entirely. Few knew that in a place now called Indonesia a volcano had erupted, blowing ash into the upper atmosphere, shadowing the earth. The sunsets were wonderful, but then spring never came. The frost lay heavy on the ground, refusing to loosen and thaw. And then it snowed in June.

  This cold was not merely uncomfortable; it was deadly. Many people in the United States were subsistence farmers like Charles, and the lost summer meant lost crops. And with no crops, people starved from New York to the frontier.12

  At least there was the forest filled with animals. They too were starving, but a squirrel or pigeon could make a passable stew, seasoned with the tough wild onions that could still be found under the snow. But Charles must have been gaunt when he courted Keziah, his clothes cinched tight and bunching around his waist, his bones sharp against her hands when they first embraced.

  Maybe it was the fact that he had survived that terrible year without starving or turning to despair or to drink. Maybe it was the fact that even though he had seen so much, survived so much, he still had a heart to give. And so they got married in 1818.13

  Like Keziah, Charles had lived most of his life enslaved. He had been born in Virginia in 1782 to an enslaved woman. This meant that from the moment Charles took breath, he was in bondage. However, he was proud that he knew the exact day of his birth.14

  Charles might have stayed an enslaved person until death but for the death of the man who owned him. The will handed Charles down, like a piece of furniture or a farm animal, to a pastor by the name of James Grier. The Reverend James Grier then made the astonishing decision to free the man given to him—a deliberate decision to sacrifice his financial gain, for Charles was walking wealth, either sold or kept. Many men did not have the courage to do this, but James did, and Charles would take his last name in recognition of the Reverend James Grier’s extraordinary act.15

  But just because James Grier wanted to free Charles did not mean that he could easily do so. As early as 1691 the leaders of the Virginia colony had passed a law making the manumission of enslaved people more difficult. And while Virginia had softened some of those laws during the Revolution, by 1813 it had put back numerous legal hurdles in place to block freedom—an ironic truth during this time when the nation was trying to preserve its freedom from British bondage.16

  One of the most challenging legal hurdles was an 1806 law stating that anyone freed in Virginia had to leave that state within twelve months or risk reenslavement. This was a dreadful requirement for anyone with an enslaved family, and Charles may have had to leave behind beloved kin to come to the Indiana Territorial frontier. Perhaps he was still grieving their loss when he met Keziah. And she would have been grieving losses as well, because being enslaved meant facing constant loss, not just of freedom but of family and community.

  Beyond the surprise of freedom was the surprise of the location of that freeing. Most Virginians who desired to free the people they held in bondage headed due north to Ohio because it was the closest portion of the free frontier. But by 1807 Ohio had already created laws hampering the settlement of recently freed people like Charles. These Black Laws insisted that all African American settlers had to prove they were free and, worse, had to find two men on the frontier willing to deposit a bond totaling $500, supposedly to ensure that free people of African descent would not hamper the local economy. In reality, this law discouraged free African American immigration into the state, for $500 was a crippling sum.17

  Whatever the reasons, in his thirty-first year Charles was brought to the western edge of the Indiana Territory to be free. And once brought, he had to survive.

  Keziah had seen him do just that. And she had grown to love him.

  There must have been affection, an attachment, an understanding between them. They were not forced together; they chose each other.

  Even in their portion of the Great West, there were choices. This was not about blood or color; this was about the human heart and sympathetic minds. And there were certainly others of a similar mind to either Charles or Keziah. Marriage between people of different backgrounds, different colors, different languages was not unheard of out on the frontier. But Charles and Keziah had a good deal in common. The sorrow for one thing. Both had endured the hardship of being brought to the wilderness from a home place.

  Now they had each other, and their church—Elder Wasson’s New Lights congregation—and there were others around them as well who shared their ancestry and some of their hardships. Everyone would have known about the Morrises, Andersons, Tanns, Goinses, Coles, Portees, Caseys, Byrds, Days, Pettifords, and others in and around Fort Allison, just across the Wabash River. They were also pioneers of African descent, but they were the earliest, and they were the freest. And they and their friends were bringing a radical vision of freedom and equality to the Northwest Territory frontier.18

  This group had arrived free around 1800 to help to build Fort Allison. The Northwest Territory was a dangerous place to build anything in 1800, much less a fort. It is little wonder that this small group of Americans started gathering to pray together.19

  They were only a small group of Americans living along the Wabash River, trying to lay claim to a territory where the United States was barely recognized as having dominion. Indeed, their new nation barely existed. The Revolutionary War was over, but many in the country were unsure about the break with England, and the United States was having a hard time staying united, much less laying claim to its vast new Northwest Territory. And the local peoples were none too pleased with these upstart Americans trying to take what the British and the French had previously agreed were the sovereign lands of the First Nations.

  But this small band of families had made the long and difficult journey west in order to stake a personal and national claim to this frontier. Among them were the free African American brothers Sian and John Morris and their families.

  Despite their endangered and uncertain lives, the families of Fort Allison held a strong belief about what America should look like. Indeed, their group symbolized their hopes for an integrated, free, and equal America.

  By 1806, John Morris helped to found the Maria Creek Baptist Church. He and all the members knew that people were enslaved all along the Wabash River, their bondage legalized through loopholes in the Northwest Ordinance. But his integrated band of frontier folk was intent on making clear that the United States should be a place for freedom and justice for all. So when writing their church’s charter, John Morris and his white and black brethren included the stipulation that their congregation would grant slave owners neither membership nor communion.20

  Of course, they were still intent upon fighting the Native peoples of the region to clear them from the land so that immigrants from the east could purchase and farm it. By 1818 free African American Indian scouts were already the stuff of legend. Austin Tann had worked out of Fort Allison as an Indian scout. In 1810, when only nineteen, he had watched as the Indiana territorial governor, William Henry Harrison, met with the Native American leader Tecumseh.21

  However, their belief in the equality of people of African and European descent put these
African-descended people at Fort Allison on the front lines not only of the new nation but of the debate that was already tearing apart the fragile fabric of the American territorial settlement. Just up the river from them was Vincennes, a town founded by the French in the eighteenth century, and many of its elite French-descended residents owned slaves. They were soon joined by the new members of the territorial government, including Governor Harrison who was appointed as governor of the Indiana Territory in 1800 at the age of twenty-seven. The Indiana Territory at that time was a region covering almost all the Northwest Territory except for a portion of what is now the state of Ohio. Harrison was a man who put his ideals into action. The young Virginia-born politician illegally brought enslaved people into the territory and forced them to support his life there while he waged his battle to make slave labor legal in the region he was governing. Harrison was determined to make his stand on the frontier to force the issue of slavery.22

  Yet the Morrises, and the other families at Fort Allison, both white and black, were also determined to hold to their ideals, even if it meant angering or alienating powerful people in the settlement nearest to them.

  While the Maria Creek Baptist Church would have welcomed them, Charles and Keziah belonged to a different congregation, a little outpost of the New Lights order led by Elder Wasson, an ardent abolitionist who had come from Virginia with James and Charles Grier. All these Virginians, black and white, brought with them opposing positions on slavery and the future of their new nation. But they were intent upon making their vision a reality by living it out—Governor Harrison by forcing illegally enslaved people to build him mansions while the Griers and Elder Wasson worshipped together and supported each other.23

  So, Keziah and Charles were far from alone, even when they were first married.