"He Drank My Mother Up"

The being of slavery, its soul and body, lives and moves in the chattel principle, the
property principle, the bill of sale principle; the cart-whip, starvation, nakedness,
and its inevitable consequences to a greater or lesser extent, warring with the
dispositions of men. — James W.C. Pennington

In seeking to understand the institution of American chattel slavery, the best place to start is here, with this fact: Commodification was not a side-effect of American chattel slavery but rather, the necessary force behind chattel slavery. Put another way, the commodification of Black bodies cannot be untethered from the practice of chattel slavery: it is foundational to the practice.

To illustrate this point, historian Walter Johnson points to William Johnson’s 1856 memories of slavery:

“Master used to say that if we didn’t suit him, he would put us in his pocket quick—meaning that he would sell us.”

In 1861, Harriet Jacobs used a similar turn of phrase:

“Under these circumstances, it was very natural that he should make every effort to put me in his pocket.”

Elsewhere, Jacobs lengthens that sentiment: “The guilty man put their value in his pocket.”

Given the benefit of literacy, both Jacobs and Johnson share a sentiment that is echoed

several times in WPA Ex-Slave Narratives across the United States:

Sarah Debro of North Carolina remembered:

One day grandpappy sassed Miss Polly White and she told him that if he didn’t

behave himself that she would put him in her pocket. Grandpappy was a big man

an’ I asked him how Miss Polly could do that. He said she meant that she would

sell him then put the money in her pocket. He never did sass Miss Polly no more.

Henry Doyl recalled:

Miss Neely told my mother that she was going to sell me and put me in her pocket. She told her more than one time. I recollect that.

Debro and Doyl were both recalling moments in their childhood, and that adds a different dimension to these sayings. Seventy years removed from chattel slavery, the terminology that floated to the surface was the same terminology that left so much of an impression on Harriet Jacobs and William Johnson: “she would put me in her pocket.”

Debro goes on to describe exactly what the phrase means: that her grandfather’s enslaver threatened to sell him and put the money in her pocket.

The phrase “put him in her pocket” skips the step between Debro’s grandfather being traded for money and calls her grandfather the money itself. In America’s economy, enslaved people were more than markers of capital or makers of capital; they themselves were the capital. There was no difference to their enslavers between trading human beings for money to be pocketed and pocketing the human beings themselves.

The same can be said of the saying, “he drunk up my mother,” taken from Mattie Fannen, Malindy Maxwell, and Jim Allen’s recollections in Arkansas and Mississippi. In the vernacular of their memories, their enslavers did not just sell their loved ones for a whiskey debt—they drank them up like the whiskey itself. Again, there is no difference between the consumable commodity of liquor and the consumption of Fannen’s mother, Maxwell’s grandmother, and Allen’s mother.

Commodities do not own their histories; their histories are told for them.

The story of cotton in Mississippi is a fascinating journey told, not by the fiber itself, but by its purveyors.

Similarly, the story of the people who were bought and sold to pick that cotton has been told, for the most part, by their traders and sellers.

The WPA Ex-Slave Narratives give us a unique opportunity to change that.

I’ll just be over here, shouting that fact from the rooftops.

Read More

William Johnson, interviewed in Benjamin Drew, ed., A North-Side View of Slavery, reprinted in Four Fugitive Slave Narratives (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1969), 19.

Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life in the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 377.

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 296. https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html

Sarah Debro, “Slave Narrative of Sarah Debro,” Access Genealogy, August 12, 2012. https://accessgenealogy.com/north-carolina/slave-narrative-of-sarah-debro.htm

Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 9, Mississippi, Allen-Young (1936). Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn090/

Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 2, Cannon-Evans (1936). Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn022/

Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 5, McClendon-Prayer (1936). Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn025/