Many Thousands Gone*

   History is replete with catastrophes that destroy more lives than can ever be counted. The living build memorials and observe holidays, but also needed are stories—or better, histories—in which a few well-drawn individuals can stand in for the rest. Both Amy Godine’s Black Woods and David Nicholson’s The Garretts of Columbia are histories of this kind. By making vivid the experience of particular men, women, and children whose brief time on earth was blighted by slavery, civil war, and stony-faced injustice, they pay heartfelt homage to the many.

I say “heartfelt” because both books seem written out of love. In Godine’s case, the love appears to be her adopted home, the Adirondack Mountains, where in 1846 a wealthy landowner and philanthropist named Gerrit Smith offered 3,000 grants of 50 acres each to freedmen and fugitives living in New York City. The idea was to rescue Black families from urban vice, disease, and racism, and teach them to become yeoman farmers. A further goal was to enable them to achieve the amount of land equity—$250—required for Black men to be granted the franchise, and thereby encourage them to vote for Smith’s Liberty Party, which sought to end slavery by constitutional means.

Smith’s giveaway was an improvement on the earlier “colonization” schemes put forth by white abolitionists whose concern for enslaved Black people did not extend to accepting them as equals. But it was not a resounding success. Despite support from esteemed Black leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet, only 50 of the 3,000 available land grants resulted in Black families moving upstate. (Many others were held in deed, sometimes for years, in the hope of future sale or bequest.) The standard explanation for this failure to launch was that Black people lacked grit. Even Douglass opined that “slavery … robs its victims of self-reliance.”

Without contradicting this explanation, Godine adds two others. The first is that, regardless of grit, most Black New Yorkers could not afford to buy the tools, implements, building materials, seed, and livestock needed to set up a farm. The second is that after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 all Black people, fugitive and free, were in danger of capture or kidnap by bad actors eager to sell them down South. For many, it felt safer to blend into the New York City crowds.

An alternative was put forth by Stephen Myers, a former slave emancipated at 18, who together with his wife Harriet helped make the Albany stop on the Underground Railroad “the most efficient and effective one north of New York.” In 1846 Gerrit Smith gave Myers 37 acres of an 18,000-acre tract in Oneida County west of the mountains that Smith had owned since 1818. But because the grant was in a town called Florence, which Smith hoped to make into a center of lumber and grain production, Myers did not start a farm. Instead, he “broke his gift piece into quarter-acre lots for buyers who liked to keep their neighbors close, their farms and woodlots at their settlement’s perimeter.”

The key word here is “buyers.” In addition to his antislavery activism, Stephen Myers was a successful newspaperman and publicist with definite ideas about Black self-reliance. Writing in Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune, he proposed that Blacks in New York “club their means and buy a whole County in Iowa or Michigan, each man owning what he paid for … under a general agreement to sell only to men of their own race.” And while claiming Smith’s support at every turn, Myers also opined that “Such a colony would do more for the Race than any amount of ill-advised philanthropy.”

Myers had a point. Smith’s father, Peter Gerrit Smith, grew up in the predominantly Dutch slave-holding region of the southern Hudson River Valley, and in the late 1700s he built a fabulous fortune, first in the Canadian fur trade and then in land speculation. His son Gerrit inherited that fortune, which included vast tracts in northern New York State, and spent his life dutifully managing it.

Gerrit Smith also inherited the burden of his father’s deceptive, exploitative treatment of people whose race, caste and class he considered inferior. And that burden was harder to bear. For example, as an ardent supporter of the Temperance movement, Smith required his land grantees to renounce alcohol. Douglass chided him for this, noting that it left no room for normal socializing and conjured the negative stereotype of “Black men behaving badly” that pervaded the Temperance leadership.

Nowadays, a lesser historian might feel tempted—or obliged—to resolve such disagreements along racial lines, with the Black side always right and the white side always wrong. Godine does no such thing. Comparing the success of the white benefactor Smith with that of the Black entrepreneur Myers, she finds them roughly equivalent. And her most intriguing comparison is between two white men: Smith, whose extraordinary philanthropy is nearly forgotten today; and John Brown, whose resort to violence, while reviled by some and revered by others, is remembered by all.

Smith met Brown in 1848, when Brown purchased from him a plot of land in North Elba, a tiny hamlet on high ground overlooking Lake Placid, for a dollar an acre. In exchange for the low price, Brown promised to help Smith’s Black grantees cope with the rigors of farming the thin, rocky soil of that region. The promise was kept, but mainly by Brown’s wife and children, because Brown was rarely there. The conflict over slavery was heating up in the 1850s, and Brown responded by “shifting gears from community building in the Black Woods to a long-nurtured plan to raise a guerilla band of antislavery fighters and wage a direct, emphatic war on slavery in Kansas, Missouri, and Virginia.”

Smith did not discourage this shift. On the contrary, he was one of the wealthy white abolitionists known as the Secret Six, who bankrolled Brown’s paramilitary attacks on proslavery militias in Kansas, as well as his 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry. But as Godine reports, Smith lived to see his generosity questioned:

   The John Brown who came calling on Smith in 1848 was one more cash-needing scripture-quoting small-town abolitionist among a hundred looking to do good, another walk-on with a bit part in the great man’s script. Smith was pleased to see that bit part grow. He helped it grow. The hundred-dollar bank note Brown had on him when he was seized at Harper’s Ferry bore Smith’s name. But to see his image of himself shaved back from leading man to shadowy accomplice—this was not how Smith expected to be known. (Emphasis added)

Smith’s later years were clouded by controversy over his support for Brown and, it is said, mental illness. But rather than end the story there, Godine highlights the ground-level success of his antebellum land-grant venture:

   White farmers in North Elba, St. Armand, Duane, and Franklin, whose sole acquaintance with Black Americans were the pranksters and buffoons they met in syndicated columns in their newspapers, now schooled their children with the sons and daughters of Black neighbors. They learned these neighbors’ names at the gristmill, and sang hymns with them in church.

Further evidence of that success is offered later, when Godine reports how, when corrupt tax collectors and slave catchers came after the Black farmers, they were resisted by their white neighbors. In a refreshing change from today’s ideologically motivated white “allies,” she emphasizes that what held these neighbors together was not ideology but the humble, granular knowledge that one human being has of another. “It was the sense of a fellow you got from growing up with him, watching him gut a fish, prune an apple tree, soothe a fretful child,” she writes. “Not just anybody could claim the patrimony of community.”

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, the young men of the Adirondacks, Blacks as well as whites, were eager to take up arms. But Blacks were not allowed to join until January 1864. And this delay, combined with different understandings of the casus belli, not to mention gross racial disparities in the treatment of soldiers, began to fray the ties between the two groups of Adirondack farmers. When the war ended, many Black farmers, like their counterparts all over the country, went in search of better prospects and, most poignantly, family members stolen from them during slavery. And the Adirondacks filled up with lavish resorts catering to whites who were not just rich but “Anglo-Nordic” (to use the baleful parlance of the eugenics movement).

Godine ends her book with a lament shared by everyone who has ever yearned to visit the past. “[The] closer-in the zoom, the more I want to know. Too bad!, says history with a shrug. I’m done here. You’re on your own.” But she readily admits that history is the only path that “gets us to the point of asking—to wondering, and then imagining.” And she asks, “Can there be a better view?”

   The same yearning pervades The Garretts of Columbia, David Nicholson’s family saga, which picks up more or less where The Black Woods leaves off. A respected journalist and fiction writer, Nicholson started with several boxes containing “a trove of documents” that his mother Ruth found on the sidewalk outside the house in Columbia, South Carolina where her mother had been raised. Had Ruth not been visiting that summer day in the 1970s, the boxes would have been lost. But with an instinct honed by her job as a senior manuscript librarian at the Library of Congress, she took charge of them—and later entrusted them to her son David, who confesses it took “nearly sixty years to write this book.”

David Nicholson came of age in 1960s Washington, DC, worlds away from the South Carolina of his Garrett great-grandparents. His father was Jamaican, but apart from stating that he spent part of his childhood in that country, Nicholson does not pursue the topic of his own paternity. Instead, he focuses on his maternal great-grandparents: Casper George “C.G.” Garrett, called “Papa,” born in 1865; and his wife Anna Maria Threewitts, called “Mama,” born in 1871.

Nicholson never knew the Garretts, of course, but he understands all too well the era in which they lived. The final three decades of the 20th century were a time of unchecked lynchings, crimes, and outright massacres aimed not just at subjugating the freed population in the South through Jim Crow laws, but at reinforcing white supremacy in the rest of the country, if not by legal segregation then by other laws and customs.

But The Garretts is neither an old-fashioned tale of woe nor a newfangled horror story. Instead, it is a tribute to the heroic optimism of a generation that had plenty of reason to despair. Without denying the harshness of the postbellum South, Nicholson describes a place of refuge that, unlike the hush harbors, hideouts, and sanctuaries that preserved the humanity of African Americans through centuries of bondage, was hidden in plain sight. To the surprise of this Yankee reviewer, that place was Columbia, South Carolina.

Extolled in its 1895 City Directory as “beautiful and exceptionally healthful,” Columbia was also strictly segregated. Indeed, Nicholson notes that “Though Black men and women made up nearly fifty-three percent of the population, they received scant mention in the directory’s introduction.” No surprise there. But then he adds, “No matter. Afro-Columbians were creating their own community, separate and hardly equal, but nonetheless vibrant and thriving.”

To illustrate, he reports that by the late 1800s that community included one public school, two colleges, ten churches, two militia companies, two doctors, one undertaker, and dozens of trades, ranging from barbers to fishmongers, tailors to grocers, bakers to blacksmiths, dressmakers to music teachers. There was also a park with picnic grounds, a swimming pond, an auditorium, and a lunch counter—all of which, like the aforementioned businesses and amenities, were for “colored” only.

This is the backdrop against which Nicholson traces his great-grandfather’s striving for leadership in Black institutions like Allen University, his alma mater, where he taught history, grammar, mathematics, and law—“whatever was needed.” Founded in 1870 as Payne Institute, the college was moved to Columbia in 1880 and re-named after Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.

With its national reach, the AME church was the key institution in which Papa and other ambitious Black men vied for power, honor and esteem. Unfortunately, those prizes were never held free and clear, because every “uppity Negro” found himself hemmed in by the vigilance, threats, and soul-corroding ridicule of whites. For a man of Papa’s intelligence, irascible temper and gift for polemic, it was never going to be a fair fight. But that made Papa’s persistence all the more admirable. In the boxes recovered by Ruth, there was a photograph of him taken shortly before his death, which his great-grandson includes in his book with the comment:

   He’s with five others, a cohort of grim, fierce-visaged, behatted old men in three-piece suits, some girded with watch-chains or sporting vest-pocket fountain pens. Though he’s leaning on a cane, Papa’s face is defiant. And why not? Like the others, he’d survived slavery’s aftermath, defied white supremacy, made a way for himself in a world that considered him of little value. Grizzled and gray, he and his cohort of dark old men face a final enemy, one they can neither defeat nor escape. Even so, they remain unbowed.

The portrait of Mama is no less eloquent. The daughter of a former slave who in 1853 had purchased his family’s freedom for $2,900, she grew up in relative affluence, “not having to cook, clean, or help keep house.” Blessed with a decent education, she devoted her life to teaching, training and supervising teachers, and the cause of Black education in general, while also caring for her husband and raising ten children. Like Papa, she was an “Afro-Victorian,” defined favorably by Nicholson as “a believer in religion, education, and a right way of being in the world, one of those in that first generation after slavery selected to help uplift the race.”

Regarding such a woman, the cliché that comes to mind unbidden is that in another era she might have accomplished great things. I hereby banish that cliché, because Mama did precisely that in her own era. Enhanced by passages from her surviving letters, Nicholson’s portrait is of a woman committed to “the essential proprieties,” meaning not “simply good manners” but the self-control “necessary to maintain order in the world she and Papa had made.”

In recent decades those proprieties have been disparaged as “the politics of respectability,” a term denoting the erasure of true Blackness for the sake of pleasing whites. But as Nicholson points out, his great-grandparents belonged to a generation who “did what they could with what they had, instead of worrying about what they couldn’t and didn’t have.” And he adds, “All the same, Mama was loath to accept white condescension and brooked no insults. Her sons … lived in fear that one day she’d shoot a white man.”

Throughout her career, Mama worked harder than many white counterparts for one-third the pay, and celebrated when that rose to half. The wages of Black teachers did not reach parity with whites until February 14, 1944—the day before Mama died. And her obituary in the Palmetto Leader mentioned only her domestic role, not “her long career as a school supervisor teacher, her advocacy in the state’s Negro teachers associations, and her work with her beloved sororal organizations.”

Yet rather than lament the injustice, Nicholson relates a family anecdote about how Mama’s lessons stuck. After laying her to rest in the family farm outside Columbia, her sons gathered on the porch of the family home, and the following scene ensued: “‘Well,’ one said, ‘we can smoke now,’ and all took out cigarettes. They lit them only to put them out almost immediately—‘I just can’t smoke in her house,’ one of the boys said sheepishly. ‘I just can’t do it.’”

In a prologue called “Confessions of a Weary Integrationist,” Nicholson tells another anecdote about his first year at Sidwell Friends, the exclusive private school in Washington, DC, that had only recently admitted Black students. It was Thanksgiving, and his middle-class family were preparing a sumptuous dinner when the doorbell rang. It was the family of one of David’s white classmates, bearing a turkey and several side dishes as a charitable gift. His mother Ruth, “a natural aristocrat who seldom offended anyone by accident,” told her daughter to close the dining room doors, so as to hide “the white linen tablecloth … [and] sparkling, special-occasion china,” and “graciously accepted the dinner we did not need.”

The Nicholsons ended up giving the food to an elderly neighbor who really was too poor to afford such a feast. And on the way home they “laughed ruefully again, marveling at the ways of white folks.”

   There’s a long history behind that laughter, and Godine and Nicholson do a fine job of telling it. But I have one criticism, and it is the same for both. The Black Woods and The Garretts of Columbia are harder to read—and review—than their subjects deserve. The reason seems obvious: the authors were not prompted, either by their own good judgment or that of their editors, to complete the unforgiving task of separating the wheat of their rich narratives from the chaff of names, dates, digressions, and details they accumulated over decades of research. There are too many long passages, some taking a couple of pages, that are little more than lists of people’s names, more or less embroidered with information that no reader can be expected to absorb.

I have left this criticism to the end of my review, because it harks back to the beginning, where I credit both books with being labors of love—not just for the few individuals whose stories unfold in the spotlight, but for the many others half-hidden in the shadows or wholly concealed in the dark. Having found traces of at least some of the “many thousands gone” alluded to in the old spiritual, Godine and Nicholson must have been loath to let them go. This reader can sympathize, but also wish for a less burdensome way to have held on.