Just a little history: Phyllis, 13, a slave

On Jan. 3, 1863, L. Miller of Lenoir County sold “one slave, a girl (negro), named Phyllis, and age about thirteen years” to Dr. Leroy Chappell, a Granville county native who had recently left Kinston, where he practiced medicine, and moved to Forestville to get away from the Federal blockade. Miller warranted “the said negro Slave, Phyllis, to be sound in mind and body and free from constitutional disease or defect.”

This deed was among the several deeds for the land and house we received from previous owners when we purchased our home on South Main Street and is all we know about Phyllis. I have always hoped that, with freedom two years later, she was able to return to Lenoir County and could be reunited with what family remained there. But if she had been sold when she was younger, or if all of her family were sold to different owners, she might never have been able to find any family members.

Whenever I think of Phyllis I have to consider what I would feel if I were sold at 13 to a stranger or if all our children were sold to separate owners or, even worse, marched in one of the coffles – a human train of men chained together followed by women and children roped together – from Virginia or North Carolina to Louisiana or Alabama or Texas. It was a common occurrence during the years between 1810 and 1860. In their new surroundings, they were often treated as a commodity able to work – and work harder and faster – or face whippings or worse.

But here in North Carolina was slavery any less brutal? Consider the shackles on the cellar walls of a plantation house just outside Wake Forest. A local man found them when he was a youngster and went through the house with his mother. Consider the cellar with wooden-barred cells one of our sons found while deconstructing a house near here.

Consider the number of slaves and acres local families owned, at least according to the tax rolls where, compared to the U.S. Census figures, slave owners regularly counted fewer slaves for tax purposes. In 1835 the tax rolls for the Forest District in Wake County showed that the Alston family owned 5,537 acres and 79 slaves, figures which increased to 6,497 acres and 109 slaves in 1838. Thomas, the father, owned 3,807 acres and 67 slaves in 1838; the mother, Sarah, owned 1,132 acres and 22 slaves; the older son, William, owned 527 acres and nine slaves (and was also the postmaster at his Forestville store); the younger son, Samuel, owned 1,029 acres and 11 slaves.

There were other plantations in the Forest District of similar sizes. John Purefoy, the Baptist minister at Wake Union Church (Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian and Presbyterian congregations shared the church), owned 486 acres and seven slaves in 1834 shortly before he remarried, sold the plantation and moved to Johnston County. His son, James Purefoy, owned an acre and had two slaves in 1839. Six carpenter slaves owned by his father-in-law, Foster Fort, built the house on that acre where we live today. Fort owned 827 acres, mills and other businesses and 11 slaves in 1838, though in his 1840 will he listed 24 slaves by name, parceling them out to his wife and their children.

There were slave auctions where men and women were debased, and it was worse for women because of the sexual context. “In the middle of Smithfield, North Carolina, Cornelia Andrews [former slave] said, slave sellers ‘strip them niggers stark naked and gallop ‘em over the square,” quoted from The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist, who grew up in Durham, page 99.

Slavery American-style was brutal and inhumane, a machine which destroyed families and bodies. The only good news is that it was finally ended though not without tremendous blood and suffering. The bad news is the toxic racist hangover we have been unable to cure yet.