Her Real Name was Martha

My grandmother, Laura Belle Foster (1890-1976), thought the world of her little brother, my Uncle Howitt (Howitt Hodge Foster, M.D., 1893-1980). He was the last child of great grandfather Henry Howitt Foster (1851-1930), who had eight children with his first wife, Madeline Debnam (1850-1885), and three with his second wife and my great grandmother, Belle Catherine Hodge (1863-1893). You may have noticed that Great Grandmother Belle died in the year Uncle Howitt was born. Since his father, Henry, was 42 years old with ten other children to feed and a business to run in Mathews, Virginia, baby Howitt was sent to live with Belle’s parents in Wake County, North Carolina. There Howitt grew up with his grandparents and then his Aunt Fannie. He became a doctor like Fannie’s husband John Smith, and practiced family medicine in Norlina, North Carolina, for the rest of his life.

Like my grandmother, my mother, Mary Belle Jones Lewis (1923-2016) loved Uncle Howitt. His daughters, Priscilla and Laura Belle, were her favorite cousins and treasured life-long friends. Like me, Mom loved family history and collected many items that are now part of my genealogy collection. Mixed in with papers sent to her by Priscilla, I found a photocopy of a picture of Martha.

On the back of the photo of Martha, Uncle Howitt wrote, “I called her my ‘colored mamy’ as did rest of family and she was treated as one of us as long as she lived. She had her own room and own things which were furnished by my grandpa and grandma.”

The thought of this makes me feel uncomfortable. The way my family swept formerly enslaved people into their households as servants who worked without agency was not unusual for the time. Yet I still feel uneasy and awkward about how to reconcile this past, let alone do something about it. Although I wasn’t raised by a Black woman, I have friends and relatives my age (ahem, 65) who were. And there were plenty of people descended from those who were formerly enslaved who did the cleaning, cooking, and yard and farm work at our house in Gloucester and my grandparents’ home in Mathews. I have a history of white privilege that I have known for a long time, but like so many others, current events are calling me to look and think about racism anew.

An article in the New York Times, Overlooked No More: Nancy Green, the ‘Real Aunt Jemima,’ says that the Aunt Jemima logo is an outgrowth of Old South plantation nostalgia and romance. This may have rung true at the time of the Columbia Exhibition, but thank goodness most people today aren’t nostalgic for a “Gone with the Wind” past. As my mother would say by way of explanation, “it was just the way things were.” Accept it and get over it. But what white people are waking up to now is that such things as a syrup brand and a statue of Robert E. Lee are legacy items from that “just the way things were” time. We cannot just get over it. They are hurtful to some and harmful to us all as we move our diverse society forward. Aunt Jemima was a brand. Nancy Green was a real person. She had a job, was a church missionary, had a family, and died in a car crash in 1923. The United Daughters of the Confederacy tried to erect a monument to “faithful colored mammies” on her grave, but the measure was not approved. Thank goodness. One less monument to tear down today.

The New York Times article which gives agency to Nancy Green references an earlier article by Riche Richardson, an associate professor in the Africana Studies and Research Center at CornellUniversity. She writes that the Aunt Jemima logo is “grounded in an idea about the ‘mammy,’ a devoted and submissive servant who eagerly nurtured the children of her white master and mistress while neglecting her own. Visually, the plantation myth portrayed her as an asexual, plump black woman wearing a headscarf.”

Yes, just like Uncle Howitt’s Martha. In his inscription, he said that Martha was “a woman born into slavery” and who was owned by his 1^st and my 3rd great grandparents, Thomas Richard Debnam (1806-1883) and Pricilla Macon (1812-1878). The 1860 US Federal Census Slave Schedule lists them as the enslavers of 52 people in Wake County, North Carolina. They gave Martha to their daughter, my 2^nd great grandmother, Arabella Catherine Debnam (1837-1900), who married Alonzo Ross Hodge (1835-1910), in 1858 and lived at Marks Creek, Wake County, about ten miles east of Raleigh, North Carolina. Uncle Howitt wrote that Martha helped raise Alonzo and Arabella’s children: Alonzo Richard Hodge, Priscilla, Fannie, Aurelia, and Belle. “Martha outlived grandpa and grandma, although she had attacks of asthma when I was a small boy and then went to live with my uncle Alonzo Richard Hodge until she died in her late eighties.” In the 1870 US Federal Census, Martha is listed as a 35-year-old black domestic servant in the household of AR and Arabella Hodge.

Martha died between 1920 and 1925. I don’t know if she had a husband or children. The only documentation credits her with no life of her own. I have walked around graveyards in Wake, Franklin, Granville, and Warren counties looking for ancestors. I never thought to look for Martha and I wonder if she’s buried with her white family.  

Probably not.  

Update on Alexander Hudgins

I mentioned the Slave Wrecks Project in my last post, Reshaping the Narrative: Alexander R. Hudgins. After posting, I decided to take a stab at contacting someone with the Project to see if they might have heard of the Brig Ann. I was delighted to hear back from Steve Lubkemann the very next morning! He and an associate filled out the story.

"Quelimane was the largest source of slaves from Mozambique (then Portuguese East Africa) because it was at the mouth of the Zambezi river," said Steve, "in essence a highway into the deep interior where most of the enslaving took place." He explained that maritime archaeology is not done in the waters off of Quelimane itself because the Zambezi delta is a very challenging dive location with treacherous water, bull sharks, and 20 foot long crocs! They dive in other locations on the coast such as Mozambique Island, Inhambane,and Maputo (Delagoa Bay), and have folks involved in various levels of archival work on the whole coast. 

Steve put me in touch with Kate McMahon, an archivist at NMAAHC who has insight into a variety of lines of the project research. And yes indeed, the Brig Ann is in her database of American slave ships operating in Brazil. According to Kate, during the 1840s, a man named George William Gordon of Massachusetts was the consul at Rio de Janeiro. Gordon was an abolitionist whig who called out Americans participating in the illegal foreign slave trade. He watched and created lists of these American ships, slave traders, and the merchant firms that consigned them in Rio, as well as information about the captains and crews. 

Kate found the Brig Ann in Gordon's list: “To Africa yr ending 12/31/1842” and “arrivals at Rio year ending 12/31/1843”. The Ann actually departed Rio on November 24, 1842 under the consignment of the American merchant firm Maxwell, Wright & Co., for the merchant Manoel Pinto da Fonseca. He was the most active and wealthiest slave trader in Rio and, in fact, all of Brazil. This fact alone means that the Brig Ann was almost certainly a slave ship. "He essentially had almost a monopoly on the illegal slave trade to Mozambique during the 1840s, and was hiring dozens of American vessels per year to transport tens of thousands of enslaved people to his plantation and auction facility in Ponta do Caju, southwest of Rio," said Kate. "Fonseca’s only businesses were slave trading and sugar production using enslaved labor."

But did the ship wreck? Looking at the dates, probably not. "It appears the Ann did not wreck during this trip to Mozambique and successfully landed a cargo of enslaved people in Brazil in July 1843, if this is the same vessel, which given the timing seems very likely." Kate thinks that Uncle Alexander was a crew member and a regular sailor, not an officer, given his age. He must have died "At Quilliman" in Mozambique, like the death announcement says. I was wrong to assume a ship wreck. "During this time, there were massive outbreaks of yellow fever ravaging different parts of Africa and Brazil, directly tied to the transmission of diseases by slave ships," said Kate. So this may have been the cause of death.

Kate adds another important, albeit sad, note. "If your ancestor was a regular sailor, he may not have even known that the journey was a slave journey." She said crews were not often told they were going to Africa after Rio. A 6-month contract journey they thought they had signed on for would last a year or more. Kate concluded, "There are a lot of records of complaints by crews because of this and they actually make one of the richest sources for information about the operation of this trade."

As my research continues, I'll be looking for other links between Mathews men and this scheme.

Reshaping the Narrative: Alexander R Hudgins

Mathews, Virginia, is off the beaten path today, but during the age of sail, its Chesapeake Bay location was ideal. The Virginia Gazette, 18th-century Virginia’s local newspaper, included advertisements for ships built in Kingston Parish (then a part of Gloucester County; became Mathews in 1791). In ads and shipping reports, cargoes reflect the triangular trade between the Americas, Europe, and Africa: incoming rum and slaves, outgoing barrel staves, iron ore, tobacco, and food crops.

A broader understanding of Mathews’ role in shipbuilding and trade is not well known beyond a few historians. Perhaps this is due to the uncomfortable conclusion to which it leads: our ancestors were involved in people trafficking. I intend to do more research in this area as part of my work in family history. The little I have done so far reminds me how much more there is to know about Africa and the slave trade that was left out of my lily-white education.

Although I’m sure more than one of my Mathews ancestors was involved in the slave trade, my 2^nd great uncle Alexander R. Hudgins’ (1824-1843) story is perhaps the most telling. He died at the age of 19 in a shipwreck off the coast of East Africa, according to this death announcement from the Baltimore Sun, on 8 Sept 1843:

So, what exactly was he doing at Quilliman on the coast of East Africa? We’ll probably never know the details, but it seems obvious, really. Young Alexander was involved in illegal slave trade. 

According to Smithsonian's Slave Wrecks Project, more than 12 million Africans were enslaved during the trans-Atlantic slave trade era (1525-1867) and an estimated 1,000 ships are believed to have wrecked with slaves on board when headed for the Americas, the portion of the triangle known as the Middle Passage. The Project is an international collaboration exploring the slave trade through research and maritime archaeology in order to produce new histories and narratives that reshape the way we understand the past. 

In 2014, Project researchers found a shipwreck off South Africa’s, Cape of Good Hope which was the first archaeological documentation of a ship carrying a cargo of enslaved people. Its story is told at the National Museum of African American History & Culture along with the story of the last slave ship headed to America, the Clotilda. As far as I know, the brig Ann has not been found. If it has, my inquiry into Uncle Alexander may result in a small reordering of the way we think about Mathews’ pre-Civil War shipbuilding and seafaring history.

At Quelimane (spelled Quilliman in the 19^th century). traders sold gold and slaves to the Portuguese, who had settled in the seaport by the 16^th century, and its slave market grew in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Beginning in 1808, the United Kingdom outlawed the Atlantic Slave Trade, making it illegal for British ships to transport slaves. The Royal Navy established a presence off the west African coast to enforce the ban and soon negotiated treaties with other countries to intercept and search ships for slaves. From 1819, the US Navy made an effort to prevent slave trade and in 1842 it was agreed they would work with the United Kingdom to abolish the trade, which was considered piracy (robbery or criminal violence by ship). By this time the trade had expanded from the west coast to the east coast of Africa.

Many enslaved people from the east coast would be sold in Brazil, still one of the largest slave trading nations, where the British call to cease trading was defied. During the Atlantic slave trade era, Brazil received more African slaves than any other country. An estimated 4.9 million slaves from Africa were brought to Brazil during the period from 1501 to 1866.

The story of an American slave ship named Kentucky which was involved in the Quelimane-Brazil trade in 1844 is told on a University of Kentucky website. This slave trade operation also ignored treaties banning trade but the ship was eventually found by a British armed vessel. Trapped in the Angozha River in Mozambique, the crew set the ship on fire and escaped by land. This took place just a year after Alexander’s brig was lost at Quelimane and makes me want to know more. So does another fact I read about the last slave ship, the Clotllda: her captain was William Foster. Could he be related to me too?

Uncle Alexander’s sister was my second great grandmother, Anne Macon Hudgins (1830-1859), also of Mathews, who was the first wife of Joseph Finch Foster (1819-1896). Foster held 11 enslaved people on his Rose Hill Plantation in 1860. Uncle Alexander and Grandmother Anne’s father was Mathews’ legendary shipbuilder Lewis Hudgins (1797-1866). He lived with his wife, my third great grandmother, Elizabeth L. Williams (1804-1850) at Fitchett’s Wharf. According to the Virginia Highway Marker there:

“Fitchett's Wharf was a center of commercial activity for this area of Mathews County from 1845 until the early 20th century. It also served as a major port of call for vessels plying the Chesapeake Bay until 1932. An important shipyard, owned and operated by Lewis Hudgins, stood here until it was burned by Union forces in 1864. Several well-known brig and schooner class commercial ships were built here, including the Victory and the Conquest. The shipbuilder's house still stands nearby, and the wharf store has been restored as a residence.” 

The marker does not include the fact that in 1860 Lewis Hudgins enslaved 22 people. It also did not include information from Civil War Officer Reports that refer to Lewis Hudgins as “a noted rebel” who was the leader of a Confederate smuggling and resistance party “calling themselves the Arabs.”

Some twenty years before the Civil War, when Lewis and Elizabeth’s first son was 19 years old, they had four boys and three girls at home. Alexander may have left a crowded home for the seafaring life several years earlier.  After his son's death, Lewis would have two more children with Elizabeth. In 1846, they named a son Alexander R. Hudgins in memory of their first born. Lewis would have three more with his second wife by the time of his Civil War exploits, and afterwards a few more children as well as a third wife before his death in 1866.

On this 4th of July, A revolutionary conflict of words and deeds

During this summer of Coronavirus and Black Lives Matter, what better way for a genealogy enthusiast to spend a muggy 4^th of July than chasing down the Revolutionary War service records and slave holdings of her veteran ancestors? Liberty and slavery. Celebrated and reviled. While searching, I let myself think about what we celebrate and how we hold celebration apart from the statement that “all men are created equal.”

War and slavery. Two practices that I’m not drawn to as a writer and I am challenged to put my thoughts down on paper about either one. I haven’t found the words. It’s been easy for me to look the other way. I hope that by writing this blog I will be able to confront the legacy of my Southern slave-holding ancestors.

So, to get started, without celebration or blame, I speak their names:

4^th Great Grandfather Thomas Healy (1746-1813), Middlesex County, Virginia

Healy was recommended as ensign in the county militia in 1778. Later, he was made captain and qualified as major after the war, in 1794. He furnished the Continental Army with 900 pounds of grass beef, a cart and driver for 2 days, and one gun, for which he sought reimbursement after the war. According to the US Census of 1810, his household included 8 white and 32 enslaved black people.

4^th Great Grandfather Peter Foster (1757-1819), Mathews County, Virginia

Virginia’s navy of the revolution lists Peter Foster as a ships carpenter. He served on the Henry under Captain Robert Tompkins, and received a bounty as a Revolutionary War veteran. According to the 1810 US Census, his household included 7 white and 19 enslaved black people. Peter Foster was married in 1776 to Ann "Nanny" Hall and his father-in-law was Robert Hall, whose sons Robert Jr. and Spence served with Peter on the Henry.

5^th Great Grandfather Burwell Bell (c. 1754-1824), Wake County, North Carolina

When he was called up, Bell paid for a substitute, Jacob Newsom, to take his place. During the American Revolution, Newsom served 4 tours of duty for a total of 30 weeks of service in 1780: 3 tours for others and 1 for himself as a draftee. In 1832 at the age of 70, he petitioned to receive a bounty for his service. According to the 1798 US Census, Burwell Bell’s household included 6 white and 8 enslaved black people, and by the 1800 US Census there were 10 white and 15 enslaved black people in his household.

5^th Great Grandfather Henry Harrison Macon (1745-1790), Louisburg, North Carolina

Macon served as a captain in the North Carolina militia. He was wounded at the Battle of Camden, 10 August 1780, and imprisoned by the British in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1781, he was granted leave to ship his tobacco crop in order to defray debts contracted while he was imprisoned. He died at the age of 45 in 1790, before the first US Census was taken. During the 1810 Census, his son and my 4^th great grandfather, Nathaniel Macon (1778-1843), reported 6 white and 7 enslaved black people in his household.