slavery Archives

Grenada- Carl David: The Cane and the Corn

Posted on May 4, 2017June 2, 2022 by Alvino Sandoval

“Without working, you cannot inherit your part in life.”

Carl David is a taxi driver and our guide while researching the spices on the island Grenada. He left school when 11 years old. He helped his family grow yams, sweet potatoes, corn and sugar cane. Later, he held many jobs, among them a diver, pipe-fitter at the water works, and soldier for revolutionary leader Maurice Bishop. He said the revolution taught him much and made him “sensible.” He said people worked hard back then. They don’t work as hard today.

I was born in 1954. My mother moved to Trinidad and left me in 1955 – I was very small. [At first] I lived with a family. Being that I was not the lady’s child everything I did was wrong. It was very bad and I was forced to run away. Then I was adopted by these people, they were very good, they were my adopted mother and father…My adopted father lived for 99 years.

My mother and father worked on land at the estate – that’s what they did for a living. We never knew the people who owned the estate. There was no “massah”, no head of slaves, lashes, that was abolished in the 1800s. By then, the government owned the land – you paid a tax to the government, something small.

We planted yams, sweet potato, corn, and sugar cane. We made mounds for the sugar cane that were round and long. Each stalk has joints and we cut the cane at the joint and planted it so a group grows out of the joint. We cut the cane every year in the dry season, just before the rainy season. These days the rainy season may be in June, you never know, with global warming, it’s not like before. You plant in June and reap in August.

Sugar Cane -Before and After

We cut on different days: everyone came together and cut one field at a time. Then the young people would put the cut cane in heaps and put it on trucks and we would sell it to the Woodline sugar factory. It was nice cane – very good and very tall. It was soft cane with a good long joint.

We would peel the cane with our teeth. The cane juice would run down our (motions to chest and stomach)… we were half naked in those days. I remember my mother would cut the stalk and hold it up like this, and the juices would run into her mouth. There are different kinds of cane, black cane, green, yellows, crayfish – red and yellow – each one tasted a little different. The sugar cane was soft, you could squeeze it, it was so soft. Not like today. Today it’s hard and not as good.

I never knew my (biological) mother again until 1984. I went to look for her. I didn’t sit down and ask her questions or any of that. I just saw her. That’s all. Now, I have one son – he is a chef – and a life I have enjoyed.

Featured Products:

[one-fourth-first]

[/one-fourth-first]
[one-fourth]

[/one-fourth]
[one-fourth]

[/one-fourth]

[one-fourth]

[/one-fourth]

Abolitionists, Resistance, and the Nation’s First Candy – Part 3

Posted on March 4, 2017May 6, 2022 by Alvino Sandoval

The Author’s Illuminating (for her) Experience

I recently had an experience in my hometown of Shepherdstown, WV. It was about racism, not against African Americans but Muslims, and it did not directly involve me. Still, I felt strongly about it and got involved. The situation, which is still ongoing, gave me new insight into how Mrs. Spencer and, dare I say, the escaped slaves, felt.

Here’s how it started: I found, among other things, an anti-Muslim meme on the Facebook page of the town’s police chief, who is also a star in the hit show Ghosts of Shepherdstown which reaches tens of thousands of people. Someone had shared the meme and it stayed there for ten days until I called it out. Through Facebook I revealed the post and said the community needed to make decisions about how the town could prevent such posts in the future.

Here’s what happened: At the prompting of a town council member, the chief took the meme down. Once he did, the town council member told me the matter would not be discussed any further. The chief soon weighed in on Facebook, saying he too had rights to freedom of speech and could express what he wanted.* The town’s people rallied behind him and were among hundreds who testified on his behalf , volunteering that he was “nice guy” and a “good, honest man” although that was never the question. Some castigated me for calling him out in the first place. I did contact a number of attorneys and local political figures about the matter. The response was minimal. The chief never apologized for the meme.

Insights into Mrs. Spencer: From my experience I could imagine with greater clarity the loneliness Mrs. Spencer must have felt. She was part of a community of decent people. Still, the overwhelming population were not abolitionists. They may have addressed issues in the safety of a group, at church, for example, but were unwilling to confront them in the immediacy of their communities. To stand out from the crowd in protest is difficult –to be an activist abolitionist in the early 1800s must have been remarkably isolating.

Mrs. Spencer was also up against those with the greatest power: the police, attorneys, political figures. Even more to the point, she was standing up to an unjust law which, if broken, would have profound consequences on her and her son’s lives, including fines, imprisonment, and physical punishment. Whatever supports that were available, were few and too hard-pressed to devote time to any one person.

As for the slaves – it’s hard to grasp their perspectives in this regard, many existential in nature. How could they fathom why a mass of people could subject them to such inhumane treatment? And how could they make sense of a universe where their very children were stolen from them? We can only focus on their actions, their songs and words, and their many modes of resistance.

And in Conclusion…

The issues regarding the meme were existentially jolting. I wake up in the morning asking how my neighbors could fail to confront that sinister form of racism. These are people who vote, join marches, comment on the news. What does this say about their ability to act on their convictions? To take a stand outside of the group? Work against their best interests for something of consequence? I wake up in the morning and confront the community that I love. The meme is somewhere in cyberspace. But Mrs. Spencer, and other abolitionists of the early 19^th century, and above all, those who were enslaved, did not have that escape.

*The reality behind the chief’s claim to freedom of speech was untrue: the courts make provisions for law enforcement officers. Punishments range from fines to firings.

Abolitionists, Resistance, and the Nation’s First Candy – Part 2

Posted on March 3, 2017May 6, 2022 by Alvino Sandoval

Resisters Under the Seat

Salem Waterfront 1770-1780
At the time Mrs. Spencer landed in Salem, slavery had been part of the New England landscape. The first slaves were brought to Boston in 1634 and by the mid-1700s, 2.2% of the population were enslaved. All told, the total population of African Americans was 10% yet even those who were “free” did not have the same rights as whites. While slavery was less common in the early 19th century, it still existed and remained legal until the ratification of the 13th amendment.
Some of the most impressive symbols of Boston were constructed from the “blood and sweat of slaves” as abolitionists called it. Faneuil Hall was built by wealthy slave trader Peter Faneuil and Harvard Law School, financed by a donation from slaveholder and plantation owner, Isaac Royall Jr. to name only two.

It’s hard to know where the enslaved people in Mrs. Spencer’s buggy started. Slaves labored at the ports of Salem and many other nearby places in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Likely, they didn’t come from the South, as freedom was too far for escape. Regardless, they traveled on inconspicuous roads and paths, with little food, drink, or chance to rest.

The escaped slaves fled for many reasons, among them the harsh reprisals of slaveholders; starvation and brutality where they worked; and the need to seek out family members who were sold away from them. How they found Mrs. Spencer is also unknown: possibly through a formal network of abolitionists or through informal contacts. They waited out the hours as the buggy rocked on gutted roads, moving slowly forward then stopping when Mrs. Spencer sold her candy, keeping up the guise of normality.

Within the buggy, they were certainly cramped and hungry, whiffs of sea air filtering through the wooden buggy skin, penetrating the suffocating air. There they encountered icy loneliness: outside was a world of strangers where even the sympathetic ones could turn them in or silently let them be caught. Should the worst happen, they could be flogged, branded, imprisoned, returned to slavery, or killed.

Mrs. Spencer resisted enslavement by transporting slaves toward their freedom. The enslaved people resisted, too, by escaping. Some succeeded.

…Stay tuned for the Final Chapter