Elizabeth's Field

Elizabeth’s Field

Barbara Lockhart

Secant Publishing

Copyright © 2012 by Barbara M. Lockhart

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher, except for brief excerpts used for purposes of review. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

First edition published in 2012 by the author.

Second edition published in 2020 by Secant Publishing, LLC.

615 North Pinehurst Avenue

Salisbury, MD 21801 USA

www.secantpublishing.com

ISBN 978-1-944962-75-3 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-944962-76-0 (e-book)

This book is a work of fiction. Although some characters and dialogues are based on historical record, the work as a whole is a product of the author’s imagination.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Mattie, 2000

The Burton Household, 1844

Mattie, 2000

The Language of the Fields, 1850

Libby, 1850

The Fire, 1852

A Bargain Kept, 1852

Mattie, 2000

Addy’s Journey

A Will and a Way, 1854

Mattie, 2000

Currents, 1855

The Alpha and Omega Seasons, 1856

Wheels of Change

Mattie, 2000

Preacher Green and the Borrowed Book, 1857

Aftermath, Spring, 1857

Inside the Walls, Fall, 1857

Elizabeth in Rain and Snow

Mattie, 2000

Deliverance, March, 1862

Mattie, 2000

Notes

Family Tree

For Sadie

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Mattie, 2000

The Burton Household, 1844

Mattie, 2000

The Language of the Fields, 1850

Libby, 1850

The Fire, 1852

A Bargain Kept, 1852

Mattie, 2000

Addy’s Journey

A Will and a Way, 1854

Mattie, 2000

Currents, 1855

The Alpha and Omega Seasons, 1856

Wheels of Change

Mattie, 2000

Preacher Green and the Borrowed Book, 1857

Aftermath, Spring, 1857

Inside the Walls, Fall, 1857

Elizabeth in Rain and Snow

Mattie, 2000

Deliverance, March, 1862

Mattie, 2000

Notes

Family Tree

Acknowledgments

To John Creighton, who devoted his life to researching Dorchester County history and the genealogy of its enslaved and free families, I celebrate his work and the stories and facts that filled in the blanks of my own research and spurred me on. To Chris Noel and Kathryn Lang, I’ll always be grateful for the crossing of our paths and your reliable advice. To Ron Sauder, editor, I owe gratitude for taking this project on and sending it beyond our shores. To Lynne Lockhart, so many thanks for the loan of her painting of an Eastern Shore field for the cover.

And to Mary Taylor, neighbor and friend, wherever she may be, I send this message: Thank you for telling me your story. I’m passin’ it on.

Prologue

Twenty-two Acres, More or Less

In the forty years I’ve lived on this small farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, I had largely ignored the land that was rented to the neighboring incorporated agribusiness. But after being challenged about the number of acres I owned, I researched the deeds and found the original dimensions had remained intact since 1849: twenty-two acres, more or less. One deed, in particular, written in 1857, caught my attention. Elizabeth Burton, recorded as a free Negress, owned the land from 1852 until 1857. My curiosity was whetted. The fact that Elizabeth was able to acquire ownership at all was startling and to lose the land before the Civil War told a significant segment of Maryland’s history when it was a border state and people of the Eastern Shore were largely of Southern sentiment.

What happened on these twenty-two acres is only hinted at by the sequence of names on the deeds and wills of the time. It is a scant record to be sure, a time that easily lends itself to the imagination, a time fueled by oral histories passed on by an isolated race. What was not recorded invites fictionalization based on the merest of facts. It is a liberty I take humbly, and it is based on the assumption of the desire for freedom, for ownership, for inalienable rights. It encompasses the immense struggle to survive in a time of the greatest peril for any single group of Americans, the so-called free Negro of antebellum days.

Through the exploration of long forgotten stories told in local workshops regarding the history of Harriet Tubman and others, the tale of the preacher, Samuel Green, who served as an agent of the Underground Railroad, emerged. The church he ministered is down the road from what was Elizabeth’s farm. He was imprisoned for owning a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an event that received national attention in the 1850s. It reflected the atmosphere in which runaway slaves, white planters, and free blacks coped in a political climate struggling with the same moral conflicts as the rest of the nation. It was during this era and here in Dorchester county that Harriet Tubman was born and whose legacy is celebrated.

Long ago, in this quiet agricultural landscape, some land was likely cleared by the Indians, but much of it was cleared by slaves and free blacks, for the shipbuilding industry was prominent in this part of the world and white oak needed for that purpose. The stump-riddled land was good for planting tobacco which didn’t have to be planted in neat rows. However, the growing of tobacco was labor intensive, and planters and landholders depended on enslaved and free blacks for its production.

When the tobacco crop had spent the land, the tree stumps were cleared for growing wheat, then corn, and more recently, the truck crops: asparagus, cantaloupes, tomatoes, soybeans, string beans, and potatoes. It was in the time of wheat when Elizabeth lived, in a time when a Maryland farmer could get a thousand dollars for a slave if he was having a bad year and needed to pay his debts, a time when Georgia traders walked the streets of Cambridge, Maryland, with $20,000 in their pockets, ready to buy enslaved men, women, and children to pick cotton in the South. The others, the free black population, had to be kidnapped if profits were to be made. It was the free Negro whose life often hung in limbo, whose freedom was not acknowledged, who pricked white society’s sense of righteousness and conscience, who challenged simply by his existence the anomaly of the idea of black freedom, and who had to be suppressed with a violence only frightened men can muster.

From the time of its clearing, the land was tainted by the existence of slavery. The silence of the fields began to hide visions of cruelties in its soil like a bad dream, fluid, ephemeral, and unsubstantiated, for the black man’s history was largely unrecorded, erased as easily as the newly plowed field erases all evidence of last year’s crop. It was a long time ago, and the fields know no time, only the rhythm of the seasons.

In the future, those who will look back on the present will have an overwhelming record of detailed statistics to refer to regarding yields, government subsidies, fertilizer, herbicide and insecticide costs, types of runoff, surveys, and aerial photographs, all in the complicated network of food production. Now, massive irrigation systems spread over the fields, insuring yields despite drought. Huge machines, driven by men encapsulated in air-conditioned cabs, prepare the soil and harvest crops. With the great strides in food production, there is more than enough to feed the nation. It is easy to forget on whose backs the initial profits were made.

And for this reason, I include the present day story of Mary Taylor, my neighbor, who worked Elizabeth’s field and the fields in the surrounding countryside one hundred and fifty years after Elizabeth’s time. Her oral history lends credibility to the larger picture of our national struggle with civil rights.

Who is buried in these fields? What tears, hopes, and fears were lived here in the long hours of labor? Nothing we can hold in our hands, no artifact, no piecing together of a civilization, a passing culture. Nothing but a silence only the wind might remember, reminding us that in the end the fields are only loaned to us. The definition of ownership began with the land, and we’ve used it to measure ourselves by deed and status, yet how worthy are the people who worked the fields and had little to show for it.

Mattie, 2000

Ipassed. I knew I would, those last days. But what I didn’t know was there’d be more. I was Mattie Thomas and I’m not now, bein’ part of somethin’ bigger. I was scared at first, at the thought there might be more, though I didn’t waste a lot of time thinkin’ about it, figurin’ it was for the churchgoers to figure out. The faithful. And I ain’t never been faithful. Another operation, they say, stickin’ needles in my arm already black and blue under the brown. Another tumor, they figured. And then I knew. And it was soon after that, two days before my eighty-second birthday. I never thought pass was the right word, but it is.

The amazin’ thing is what I thought about in life is true, even though I only been lookin’ out at these Maryland fields for fifty years. All that time it was like seein’ a house with one dark window and one wide open. When I passed, I could see everythin’. A light shined on all the long ago times I’d only guessed at and pieced together from what my mama and papa told, and from my grandmother and my friend Gordy. A lot of it nobody wanted to talk about. Even Grandma wouldn’t talk about much from slave days. Them days is best forgotten, she’d say. Over and done with. But in the stories we told and passed down, that’s where true history is. It goes from mouth to mouth. It’s not in no books.

Not much was written down ’bout us anyhow, a will, a deed, a list of whoever a farmer owned put down right next to his cattle. That was it. Lots of times there’d be no last names, no lastin’ names to tell how they connected, nothin’ but silence, the flat fields holdin’ everthin’ in the wind till the day we pass. Like that field ’cross from my place. I call it Elizabeth’s field since she the one what owned it before the Civil War. Nobody heard tell of a black woman ownin’ anythin’. But my friend, Gordy, knew from stories passed down. He the one what tol’ me about Elizabeth and how she got her field. For generations, they’d plow it, plant it, harvest it, plow it again, and everythin’ would get covered up till there was no memory of any one year at all. Yet ever one who lived around here knew how the cold would come and the heat, and how it would look in each of those times, but who married who, and how they did, and what they thought, and who stayed with who, how the kids got raised and what they loved—all of that weren’t written down because we in our brown skin just didn’t matter that much. So I used to wonder ’bout Elizabeth, what her life was like, thinkin’ her spirit still hung over that field. I did a lotta guessin’. I don’t have to guess no more.

Sittin’ under my peach tree them last days, chewin’ tobacco, and watchin’ the rows of corn ’cross the road, I had time to study how the leaves looked when they were stirred by a soft breeze on a summer mornin’ and how they flashed in the sun. There’d be so much light my eyes would sting. I’d be squintin’ and at the same time tryin’ to block out the roar of that diesel engine sittin’ ’cross the road not twenty foot from my door. It drove the irrigation system ’cross Elizabeth’s field. Still does. When rain was promised, they’d shut it off and I’d hope to get a good night’s sleep.

I learned to pay it no mind though. Most of the time, I’d be wanderin’ around in my own thoughts, caught in a veil of rememberin’ that would come over me with all the colors and smells and feelin’s of a lifetime. I could pass between ’em and the shade of the peach tree without tellin’ ’em apart, because it seem like everthin’s connected in one long thread. Maybe I was so old it was my last sightin’ of home come to haunt me. I could be standin’ before the clapboards of Mama’s house in Georgia and my house in Maryland with its ’sbestos shingles and padlock swingin’ from the door latch and think they was the same. Maybe the work of a lifetime is to make a home like the one you left.

I’d watch the corn leaves shine and the streams of water sprayin’ from the irrigation pipeline, the wheels turnin’ slow as time itself. I’d always look for a rainbow. It was company to have tractors and trucks go by and people wave. Webster’s white pickup would pass, and I’d think he’d kill himself with hurry and worry. He both owned and rented a lotta fields around here. He tilled ’bout 3,000 acres, I heard. He’d wave a finger as he rushed by. If I called out to him, Hey! in a voice I hoped was louder than the diesel engine, seem like he still wouldn’t hear and go on.

Sometime he’d stop on his way back, though. If I was out of chewin’ tobacco, that Redman, he’d pick me up some, since I had no way to get to town. That old Thunderbird sat in the yard all peelin’ paint and rust, dead as a stone. One time I painted the vinyl top white, but soon after that the engine froze, like it’d been through the worst—a roof painted with a brush.

My house sat on the edge of a wide field of potato plants bloomin’ pretty by June. All that food growin’ under the ground, enough for the potato chip plant down the road and plenty for me to set by for winter after the harvester gone through. First the potatoes, then string beans, then sweet corn, then tomatoes and cucumbers, then cantaloupes and watermelons and field corn. And at the last, the soybeans. Everythin’ in its time, year after year. In so much plenty, white peoples didn’t mind if you walked on their land and took some. Go ahead, Mattie, they’d say, "Take what you want." I did, and give some back to ’em washed, shucked, cut, peeled—everythin’ ready for the kitchen. Maybe it was my religion, if I had any. I just hated to see food wasted.

I’d sit under the peach tree thinkin’, fritterin’ away the time without a care about what would come. What couldn’t help but come. Lookin’ the other way. Watchin’ the family I worked for grow, raisin’ up the babies and nursin’ the old, sittin’ on the edge of their field watchin’ their tractors, their plantin’s, listenin’ to their irrigation diesel outside my door, waitin’ for the harvester to come through so I could go out in the field with my bucket and pick up what was left. There was always plenty. Too much, most times. To see potatoes roll offin the truck and never picked up, string beans layin’ by the side of the road, corn seed spilled along the ditches, and combines come that could do the work of a whole congregation, water from the pipes spillin’ over the road on days when even the peach tree was parched. There’s always plenty for the takin’. It weren’t like the old ways I was used to.

But now, I’m not sure it weren’t all a dream. We don’t pay no mind to death because the onliest thing we know is the fight to survive. Yet, when you pass, you see all of it. All the layers. All the feet that walked through the dust on these big fields. My friend, Gordy, used to tell me stories ’bout Dorchester County, ’bout what happened to the people who lived on the fields, and ’bout Elizabeth. If Gordy was right, I used to think, then that Elizabeth was near about the onliest one of my peoples around here who owned land. Then when I passed, I understood. I saw her and all that happened, and it weren’t much different from what I seen all my life. I saw how her time was cut short, and how the best of dreams make you be wantin’, and then wantin’ more, it all tastin’ so good you want it forever. I saw how that story would end like all the others, how the owners of everythin’ get to own more.

Lotta peoples don’t know nothin’ ’bout livin’ hard, ’bout makin’ it day to day with your life on the line—not some line drawn in the sand, but somethin’ like a skunk smell. A thing you knew was there and would one day jump out of the bushes at you. Elizabeth stay in my heart a long time, she wantin’ so much and expectin’ it because she was free. You only hope that much when you see a way and the way come to you dropped right there in your lap. Her hope was big. It was probably the brightest thing about her. I had a time like that in my life, too, when I went to New York up from Georgia on the train with money in my pocket from my aunt and my papa, and they tol’ me to find my peoples in New York and stay with them. I had a fine time in New York.

I had to go. I stabbed my husband. After that, nothin’ was ever the same. But sometime, our worst times bring us somethin’ good.

Ol’ Gordy was right. That’s one good thing about sittin’ ’round on a summer night and tellin’ stories. There’s stories you’ll never forget, and I’m findin’ out most everythin’ he say was true. I want to tell ol’ Gordy there’s much more than we ever knowed. Bet he can see that for himself by now.

Gordy and me was just friends. I been married twice. Came to Dorchester when I was thirty and already I was finished with men. Had some hard times with ’em, and I figured there was no way I’d be bamboozled into that again. When I met ’im, Gordy was married, livin’ over there next to Elizabeth’s field. Lived in a cabin with no electric. His wife, Margerite, did ironin’ for peoples and Gordy worked the field. I remember when they got electric and Margerite got a new iron, he’d run outside and watch that ol’ meter spin ’round and he’d get plenty ticked off. Started yellin’ at her to heat the ol’ iron on the cook stove. Never mind this modern stuff, he say. The summer Margerite died, me and Gordy been workin’ the fields and I guess he got real lonely. No way was I gonna get hitched up with him, the way he hollered at Margerite. But when the crops come in, we’d work together all day pickin’. When we got done, he say, Come on down for a beer, Mattie. So I did. That’s when the stories started.

I wasn’t from Dorchester County, Maryland so I didn’t hear them kinda stories before. I was born in Blakely, Georgia, and I had my own stories. But I only lived there till I was nine, and then Mama died. After that I was havin’ my stories laid out for me, and I got caught up in my own hard times. Before that, it seem like the stories were mostly good, or at least that’s what I remember.

One thing about Gordy, he didn’t just talk, he’d listen, too. So when I started tellin’ my stories, I felt like he was enjoyin’ himself. He said it brought him back to the way things used to be. So I tol’ him just ’bout all of it, even little things like when we were chilren there in Blakely, my younger brother, Bo Pete, and I played in the yard all day and I took care of Bo Pete while my mama and papa went to another farm, different from the farm we were living on, and went to hoe for different peoples. They called me Pete then because I was a tomboy and was always climbin’ trees. I called my youngest brother little Bo Pete but his real name was John. My older brother, Willie, was Tater, and my oldest sister, Lizzie, was Sister. Next come Alace, who we called Baby. There were five of us, and the older three worked in the fields hoein’ with my mother and father.

Think I’ll call you Pete, Gordy say, his face all wrinkled up like last summer’s squash. Sound like you got no use for a woman name no more. I knowed what he was gettin’ at, but I wasn’t goin’ for it. Once I got started on the stories, I was on a roll and that was all that mattered. Now I’m goin’ through it all again, seein’ it in this here afterlife. We stayed friends, Gordy and me, and it lasted longer than any man I got hitched to.

One way our stories were the same. My folks didn’t hardly get enough to live on, and neither did his. The white peoples took it all and charged them for everythin’ they could think of. By the time my folks were paid, there was nothin’ much left so they went and hoed for other farmers, too. White peoples paid to hoe by the acre. Two dollars an acre. Five of them hoein’ could hoe two acres in a half a day and make four dollars.

One fall, we was pickin’ cotton. I hated it. The thorns would get up under my fingernails, make ’em bleed and come off. I was six year old and didn’t know how to do it right. Mama took my hands in hers and wiped them on her sack. She say, Mattie, you go on home and take little John with you. Stay with him in the yard. You don’t have to pick no more, but you have to take care of John. He stuck a marble up his nose once, and I had to get it out. I knew if I didn’t, Mama’d take care of me when she got home. I got whipped more’n anybody in that house. Mostly for pickin’ on little Bo Pete. But me and him played in the yard and stayed there till the others got home. We had chores to do. We had to get the kindlin’ and clean the lampshades. My parents were strict. We couldn’t act wild like some do now. When company come, all Mama had to do was point that finger toward the door and we got to get out of there or we was give the backhand whip. Oh Lord, we was give a backhand whip.

When I was sittin’ under that peach tree and watchin’ the school bus go by with the kids all actin’ wild, I used to think ’bout Mama and her backhand whip. Some o’ those kids coulda used it. My parents taught us a lot—how to act, get along in the world, have a garden, and feed ourselves.

We always had enough to eat because we raised our own. When she come home from work, Mama would kill a chicken. Didn’t take her long to pluck ’im out, boil ’im, or fry ’im up. The chicken that was raised on the farm was better’n any chicken you get now. They weren’t filled with all them chemicals. And turkeys—we’d be so glad when that old gobbler hen would come up in the yard with those turkey babies. Once, one came up there with twelve little turkeys. Don’t you go back in the woods, Mama say. Stay right here! We had hogs and we even had a cow so we could have milk.

The trouble was you farmed but you never got nothin’. We worked hard to get the crops in and the white man got the money and said you owed him this, and that cost that, and this cost this. Thanksgiving come by, then Christmas, and we’d pick the last ball of cotton and Papa would have just enough left over to get a whole bolt of cloth. Mama made all our clothes. She’d sew up shirts for the boys and dresses for the girls on her ol’ treadle machine. It still workin’. My sister, Alace, still usin’ it. Some years, there’d even be enough for Papa to buy us some shoes, and when the soles went off, he had extra leather and put the soles on himself.

Now in this aftertime, I see us in church, Mama holdin’ my hand, all of us in clothes she made, the girls in white dresses with big bows in the back, the boys in shirts too big but made to last for a long while, all of us sittin’ in the long pew with Papa at the other end. I hadn’t been to church since Mama died, but back then there weren’t no choice. You had to go and pray and sing your heart out. But it never made any difference as far as I could see, and I still don’t see anythin’ in it. It helps peoples, I know. I see peoples need God to keep ’em in line. But it only work for some.

Best part of church was Christmas. In our house, there would always be a Christmas. You could count on it. Mama cooked up a whole lot of potato pies because Papa dug a hole down in the ground and put in sweet potatoes and he’d put pine shavin’s down there and dirt on top. Mama made sweet potato pies and sweet potato bread and cakes and sweetened them with honey. You could go out in the woods and get all the honey you wanted in those woods. Bees made their honey in the trees and Papa smudged them out and got the honey. He’d get a rag and burn it for the smudge. The comb was our chewin’ gum. I’ve chewed many a bees’ honeycomb.

A lot of white peoples had electric, but we didn’t have none. We used kerosene lamps. We had a fireplace for heat in the winter, and we had a Home Comfort stove. Some white peoples moved away and give us that old stove. It had a place on the side to heat up water for baths. We used the tub we washed clothes in to take a bath. We had to wash our feet every night though.

I need to tell you how it was, because everythin’ so different now. Talk ’bout bein’ on our own. We had no insurance, no hospitals. Dentist? Papa pulled our teeth. We did have an ol’ doctor, Dr. Jack. He had a buggy and a horse and he’d come around and leave Mama a quart bottle of castor oil for us. He tol’ her to give us a tablespoon of that every night so we wouldn’t get colds or nothin’, and she did. We were pretty healthy. Dr. Jack cared for colored folks. He wouldn’t doctor on nobody but the colored. He was white, but he helped the colored. He come from the North and he did a good thing. Most peoples couldn’t pay him money, but they paid him with ham or middlin’s or potatoes or peach preserves. He loved Mama’s preserves. He’d take whatever she give him, and he was glad to get it. Mama always say, You feed your own, but there’s always extra. You supposed to spread it around. It always come back to you one way or another. Same as bad. Bad come back to you, too.

All the places I been, I lived in Maryland the longest. Didn’t like Texas much, even though the cotton was so tall it was like pickin’ it off trees and a lot easier. Much as I loved open sky, it was too big out there, and I felt lost and worried each night before I fell asleep thinkin’ I might