Forbidden Fruit (16 page)

A
mong the most daring travelers on the Underground Railroad were the interracial couples
who sometimes risked mutilation or death to marry. This historical timeline sets the
stage for their stories.

1619:
A Dutch ship carries the first blacks to Jamestown, Virginia, where they become indentured
servants, working for a fixed period of service. The population of Virginia is then
about two thousand. Eventually, black slaves will replace the indentured servant system,
providing a free pool of laborers who will find it more difficult to run off and hide
and whose dark skin and non-European culture allow them to be viewed as heathens doomed
to a lifetime of servitude because of the sin of Noah’s swarthy son, Ham.

1630:
Virginia authorities sentence a white man named Hugh Davis to a public whipping “before
an assembly of negroes & others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and shame
of Christianity by defiling his body in lying with a negro….”

1640:
Robert Sweet, another white Virginian, is convicted of dishonoring himself with a
Negro, and the woman is whipped.

John Punch, a black indentured servant, is made a servant for life as a punishment
for running away, but the two whites with him receive only four additional years of
servitude.

1662:
Virginia rules that “children got by an Englishman upon a Negro woman shall be bond
or free according to the condition of the mother, and if any Christian shall commit
fornication with a Negro man or woman, he shall pay double the fines of a former act.”

1664:
Maryland turns Negro servants into lifelong slaves, gaining a free labor supply to
help tame a new land. The Africans are considered better suited to agricultural labor
than the Native Americans, less likely to perish from tropical diseases than either
Native Americans or whites and less able to run away successfully in an unfamiliar
land where their color makes them conspicuous. At the same time it enslaves blacks,
Maryland also enacts the first colonial law against racial intermarriage, beginning
a trend that will create more social distance between whites and blacks, and promote
the idea that blacks are an inferior race cursed by God and meant to be servants.

1681:
Maryland’s law is amended after the Irish Nell case in which a white woman claims
she’s been forced to marry a slave so a planter can get her labor free. The revised
law exempts the woman from involuntary servitude if she is entrapped by a master.
Nell Butler had married “Negro Charles,” the slave of Major William Boarman of St.
Mary’s County, in August 1681. A Catholic priest conducted the ceremony, and Lord
Baltimore is said to have been present on the day of the marriage and to have warned
Nell of the consequences. About a month later, Maryland passes a law that releases
white servant women and their mixed-race children from slavery if the marriage was
permitted or encouraged by the master.

1691–1725:
The Virginia Assembly rules that any whites who marry Negroes, Indians or mulattos
“shall within three months be banished from this dominion forever…. And it is further
enacted, that if any English woman being free shall have a bastard child by a Negro
she shall pay fifteen pounds to the church wardens and in default of such payment,
she shall be taken into possession by the church wardens and disposed of for five
years and the amount she brings shall be paid one-third to their majesties for the
support of the government, one-third to the support of the parish where the offense
is committed and the other third to the informer. The child shall be bound out by
the church wardens until he is thirty years of age.”

1702:
After a white woman named Ann Wall violates Virginia’s ban on intermarriage, she
is made a temporary slave for five years, and her two mulatto children are sold into
involuntary servitude for thirty-one years. The court rules that when Ann Wall’s term
of service expires, she will be banished to Barbados if she returns to her home in
Elizabeth City, Virginia.

1705:
Virginia rules that any free white man or woman who intermarries with a Negro will
be confined to prison for six months without bail and pay ten pounds to the parish.
Ministers marrying such persons will be fined ten thousand pounds of tobacco. Other
states follow suit.

Intermarriage is banned in 1705 in Massachusetts; in 1715 in North Carolina; in 1717
in South Carolina; in 1721 in Delaware and in 1725 in Pennsylvania. Punishments for
violating these laws vary. Free blacks who break these racial barriers can be enslaved
and those already enslaved can be sold away from their colony. White men and women
who marry slaves can be fined, jailed or also enslaved.

The laws create a class system that makes many poor whites feel superior to slaves
and prevents them from uniting with slaves to challenge the wealthy. The law is aimed
specifically at white women and designed to protect the economic interests of slaveholders
who do not want white women to produce mulatto children with a claim to freedom.

Virginia state law makes all imported blacks lifelong slaves unless they are Christians.

1738:
Runaway slaves form the first free black community in North America, Gracia Real
de Santo Teresa de Mose, better known as Fort Mose, in Florida. Soon the Indians follow,
remnants of the most resistant tribes, including the Creek, who have been fighting
the Europeans. Together they become known as Seminoles. They harbor runaway slaves,
who live in their own villages and give corn to the tribe as a tax. Intermarriage
becomes common.

1785:
A New York statute starts the process of freeing blacks, but they cannot vote or
hold public office and marriage with whites is forbidden. This gradual emancipation
bill frees children born to slave women after 1785.

Esteban Rodriguez Miro becomes governor of Spanish Louisiana, and in his inaugural
speech orders free black women to wear plain head wraps and bandannas instead of silks,
feathers and fancy curls. People call the new restrictions the Tignon (or turban)
Law. It is designed to break up the practice of light-skinned, fancily dressed free
unmarried black women living as mistresses of white men in little houses near the
ramparts.

1807:
George Thompson is born around this time in Madagascar, an island in the Indian Ocean
off the coast of Africa. In the early 1800s, he is enslaved in Boone County, Kentucky.
But he eventually escapes, traveling to freedom on the Underground Railroad until
he reaches Pennsylvania. He continues on to Canada, finding a job in Trois Rivieres
as a coachman for an Englishman named Ford. Ford’s daughter falls in love with Thompson
and the pair elope, living for a while on the Indian Reserve on Walpole Island. Thompson
runs a blacksmith shop. By 1850, they own farmland in Malden Township, Ontario. In
1862, Thompson makes a plow in his smithy shop, using forged steel in some parts of
it. It is a forerunner of the modern plow.

1810:
The third U.S. census reveals that America has 7.2 million people, 60,000 of them
immigrants and 1.2 million of them slaves.

1827:
After the emancipation of New York slaves, free blacks flood the city’s infamous
Five Points neighborhood (Anthony, Orange and Cross streets), joining the unskilled
Irish. In the Old Brewery building, blacks with white wives jam the cellar compartments.
Their children mostly stay indoors, fearing they will be snatched by kidnappers and
thrown aboard boats headed for the South.

1830:
In Virginia, a slave named Peggy and her black mate, Patrick, kill their master and
burn his house. Peggy claims that when she refused her master’s sexual advances, she
was chained to a lock and kept in a meat house. At her trial, she claims she refused
the man’s advances because he was her father.

1851:
In the January 1, 1851, issue of the
Voice of the Fugitive,
Henry Bibb talks about two letter writers in the
Amherstburg Courier
on December 7, one anonymous, one named Edwin Sarwill. The letter writers complain
that blacks are inferior and ignorant and that if they are allowed to settle in Canada
they will marry the whites and degrade both races.

Bibb’s response: “We think it would be paying their daughters a very poor compliment
to suppose such a thing if the colored people were half as worthless as these writers
have represented them.”

1853:
William Atwood is born a slave on a plantation in Wilcox County, Alabama, the son
of his master, Henry Stiles Atwood, and a woman who is part African and part English.
When Henry Atwood dies in 1853, his will frees his son, William, William’s mother
and twenty-one other slaves, sending all of them north to Ripley, Ohio. There, both
mother and son attend school. As a result, William later becomes a wealthy lumberman
in the timberlands of East Saginaw, Michigan.

1855:
Celia, a Missouri slave, is hanged on December 21, 1855, after clubbing to death
her widowed owner, Robert Newsom, whom she claimed had forced her to have sexual relations
over a period of years. She had borne him two children, both of whom became his property.
Although the second article of Section 29 of the Missouri statutes of 1845 forbids
anyone “to take any woman unlawfully against her will and by force, menace or duress,
compel her to be defiled,” Judge William Hall refuses to instruct the jury that the
enslaved woman is covered by the term “any woman.”

1858
: Henry Newby, a white Virginia planter born in 1783 and growing up in Culpeper County,
Virginia, frees his common-law wife, Elsey Newby, born an enslaved African-American
in Fauquier County, Virginia, about 1799. He also frees their children. In the 1850s,
he owns 248 acres and at least seventeen slaves. On September 17, 1858, he sells his
Culpeper land, then files a deed freeing four slaves, Evaline Newby, then twenty-six,
and her three children. The decision of most Newby family members to move with Henry
Newby to the free state of Ohio liberates over a dozen people. By 1860, Newby’s household
has disappeared from Culpeper, and the white seventy-seven-year-old farmer lives in
Bridgeport, Ohio, across the Ohio River from Wheeling. In his will Newby acknowledges
Elsey as the mother of his children named and leaves most of his property to her.

A police officer boards the steamboat
Portsmouth
in Louisville in search of a thirty-five-year-old slave belonging to Mrs. Susan Pugh
of Stewart County, Tennessee. The slave is believed to have run away with a poor white
woman named Lucinda Legett. According to historian Blaine Hudson, authorities find
Mrs. Legett, a dog, three children and a pine box on the steamer. It takes them a
little longer to find the slave, who is hiding inside the pine box.

1859:
Dion Boucicault, an Irish playwright and actor, writes
The Octoroon,
a play about the love of a white man for a black girl.

1860:
Hoping to find a refuge from white men who threatened to torch the homes of blacks
in Missouri and slaveowners who bring slaves into the free state of California, Sylvia
and Louis Stark leave the United States. They and their two children move from California
to mountainous Salt Spring Island off the coast of Vancouver, British Columbia. It
is a place where mussels hug the rocks, clams hide in the sand, wild strawberries
and blackberries flourish and the sea churns with oysters, salmon, cod and crabs.
The central area is settled mainly by blacks, mostly from California, and by Portuguese.

However, Salt Spring Island—the name is later officially shortened to Saltspring—is
neither a peaceful settlement nor an all-black one. White Americans, Englishmen, Germans
and Polynesians also preempt land on the rugged island. To survive, settlers have
to knead bread with guns beside them, trap cougars so large they call them panthers,
watch out for black bears and gray wolves and deal with the sniping at and shooting
of some black settlers, allegedly by Native Canadians. Conflicts flare up between
island residents, but in a land this hard and flinty, residents cannot afford major
strife. Intermarriage, in fact, becomes common.

1861:
At least nine biracial couples live in Buxton, a black settlement near Chatham in
Ontario, Canada. They include a white male and black female, seven black males and
white females and one Native American male and mulatto female.

1867:
Bill Wyrnosdick, a Crenshaw, Alabama, black man, pays a two-hundred-dollar fine and
goes to jail for thirty days for living with a white female employee.

1870:
The radical Mississippi legislature repeals the 1865 ban on racial intermarriage.

1880–1940:
The myth that black men, if not restrained, will roam the country raping white women
fuels the wholesale lynching of black males during this period. According to Tuskegee
Institute figures, between the years 1882 and 1951, 4,730 people were lynched in the
United States, 3,437 Negro and 1,293 white. The accusations against black persons
lynched, according to the Tuskegee Institute records for the years 1882 to 1951, included
felonious assault, rape, attempted rape, robbery and theft, insulting white persons
and miscellaneous offenses. In some cases, there were no explanations for the lynchings.