Accessibility and Archives: Richard Harris: “a pet on the plantation”
In an earlier blogpost, Philip Milnes-Smith encouraged us to see disabled people in the context of empire, colonialism and enslavement. In this post, for Black History Month, he models reading against the grain of a text, to centre the life of an enslaved person in South Carolina who acquired a disability. Language of the period is quoted which is now offensive.
It is important to start by reiterating that the history of disabled black people does not start and end with enslavement. For example, at the recent Disability Studies conference in Leeds, Sami Schalk presented about the history of disability advocacy by the Black Panther Party. But intersectional effects constraining our source material mean that disability histories are more likely to be those of white people, and black histories are more likely to be non-disabled people.
The memoir I am using for this blogpost was published in 1916. Written by the son of an antebellum plantation-owner in Abbeville County, South Carolina (the “Birthplace of the Confederacy”), it has a preface that sets out his aim of counterbalancing the narrative of the abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The intention was to prevent future generations of (white) Americans believing their ancestors were “only half-civilised”, arguing that “Slavery was not all bad.” The book is unapologetically full of the ‘n-word’ (and other such terms).
Briefly, the facts of Richard Harris’ life, as reported in the chapter about him, are as follows. His earliest life experiences were on a tobacco plantation in Virginia, and he was ‘sold on’ when his mother died. The writer’s father had purchased him from a dealer in South Carolina, selecting him (now aged twelve) from a publicly displayed line-up. He was set to work first as a house-boy, a “general utility servant”. Intelligent, he took advantage of this domestic environment, learning “to talk as correctly as the average white child” and using “words that were utterly meaningless to his fellows.” After three years, he had proved so successful in this role that the author’s parents refused an offer of three thousand dollars for the “precocious lad”. Months later, however, he contracted typhoid fever with disabling results – he lost the use of his legs (paraplegia) which were seemingly now contracted up against his chest. He could not now fulfil the tasks for which he had been purchased and was instead made supervisor of the (approximately fifty) children kept in the yard while their mothers worked, older siblings looking after younger. After emancipation, he found work as a childminder in the home of Pleasant Watts (probably another recent freedman). At a later date, he was called back to the plantation, this time in the service of the author. When Richard died, aged fifty, he was buried in an adapted coffin.
There are two details that I want to explore in a bit more depth. First, the text notes that at first “[t]he men carried him from place to place on their backs,” and that, subsequently, he taught himself to move independently using his arms (a process that was “slow and tedious at first, and not without pain”). The author is keen to suggest that “[h]is owners, my parents, were glad to make life for the poor fellow as happy as possible,” but we ought to note that they did not, for example, provide a wheelchair.
Secondly, in a State where it was against the law to teach enslaved people to read and write, Richard taught himself to do both, with the (innocent) connivance first of the author’s sisters, and then their mother, who supplied him with reading material. This included a New Testament – conveniently, therefore, excluding the book of Exodus with its story of slaves being freed by the mandate of God (see also the Select Parts of the Holy Bible for the use of the Negro Slaves in the British West-India Islands) – and subsequently poetry and novels, papers and magazines. Undoubtedly, there is a sense in which when the author says “somehow not a member of the family regarded Dick as a slave”, he intends to reinforce the idea that plantation life could mean “the close relationship and the tender feeling existing between master and slave.” However, it is also true that without his acquired disability (which limited his capacity to labour, and therefore seem a slave) Richard would not have had the opportunity to start developing literacy.
If the Broadway Plantation seems a long way from the collections of ARA members, we should note that one of South Carolina’s senators predicted in 1858 that “England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her” should cotton be withheld. There were, indeed, considerable hardships for mill-hands, but Manchester’s citizens wrote to Lincoln as follows: “Since we have discerned,.. that the victory of the free North,.. will strike off the fetters of the slave, you have attracted our warm and earnest sympathy” adding “if you have any ill-wishers here, be assured they are chiefly those who oppose liberty at home.” We need actively to remember the black (and disabled) lives across the globe not named in our civic and industrial records, but whose unfree labour was crucial to the context of their creation. In the absence of a portrait of Richard Harris, the preview image shows a boy (supposedly a stowaway) whose name is yet to be identified.
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Thumbnail image: By William Lindsay Windus (1822 - 1907) (British)Born in Liverpool, England. Died in Denmark Hill, London, England.Details on Google Art Project - 8AGED7OjTv-3DA at Google Cultural Institute maximum zoom level, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21878740