6 - Slave Crucibles
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2014
Summary
I began to introduce myself around among [the slaves], but as I came from Mississippi, they looked down on me.
Slave migrant William Webb describing his experiences in Kentucky, 1873By the time William Grimes escaped bondage aboard a ship bound for New York, he had been owned by ten masters; performed both field work and skilled work; and been an interstate, local, and urban migrant to boot. Grimes’ experiences, which he recorded in 1825, ran the full gamut of the trials and obstacles that confronted forced migrants in the antebellum South. Surprisingly, however, his narrative reveals that with each move, he found little support from new slave communities. Indeed, Grimes’ frequent conflicts with his fellow bondsmen and constant feelings of alienation pervade his autobiographical account.
When Grimes was first sold away at the age of ten from his native King George County, Virginia, and moved locally to a plantation in Culpeper, for example, he claimed to have felt “heart-broken” at the thought of leaving his home and family. Depressed and unsociable at his new destination, he not only failed to forge any meaningful relationships with the other slaves – describing himself as “a poor friendless boy, without any connexions” – but indeed managed to make enemies almost immediately. Grimes insisted that his hard work in the plantation household “made some of the other servants jealous,” especially one Patty, whom he described as a dishonest “brute” with a “malicious temper.” Patty seemed to go out of her way to get Grimes in trouble for mistakes he did not commit, to such an extent that the newcomer requested to be transferred to the fields simply to get away from her.
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- Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South , pp. 218 - 253Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
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