One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) Read online

  “At night when he was sitting quietly in his chair, sometimes he would offer us children two cents for every louse we could find in his hair,” Battle told Hughes. “Of course, we could never find any lice. Much to the amusement of my mother, he would go to sleep as we searched through his hair.”

  Of more lasting significance, Thomas instilled discipline and directed his children out into the world. He infused “a strictly Christian upbringing” enforced by corporal punishment. Battle’s father administered “whippings” as he felt necessary. Anne would slip away rather than witness the pain. Only once could Battle remember her laying a hand on him. She struck him “when I was still quite small,” Battle said, “during a New Year’s Eve ‘watch-meeting’ at St. Peter’s AME Zion Church when the building was rocking with hymns, spirituals and the shouting.” He recalled:

  At midnight it reached its peak of prayer and song. There had been many testimonials, rejoicing, and much thanksgiving that the Lord had carried us all safely through the old year. Suddenly the spirit entered into my mother and she began to shout. Another woman nearby began to shout, too.

  In her excitement she started to pound her fists on my mother’s shoulders. I thought this intended to hurt my mother, so I leaped on a bench and started pummeling the woman for all I was worth. My mother suddenly slapped me, shook me and sat me down on the bench again. Then, she resumed her shouting.

  Early on, Battle proved blessed with intellectual and emotional intelligence. He astutely observed the world and easily mastered reading, writing, and arithmetic, not that he was much interested. Adventurousness propelled him instead to roam the streets, fields, and riverbanks, a head taller and beefier than his peers, blessed with strength and athleticism, and unencumbered by the behavioral expectations of bondage. As a member of his family’s first postslavery generation, Battle was freer to be a boy, not a boy. He recounted for Hughes, and Hughes sketched, an episode that brought to life the racial strictures of the day and gave a first glimpse at the insistence on dignity that was bred into Battle’s spirit.

  I passed the home of a prominent white family, the Bryans. On the sidewalk, one of the Bryan boys was playing marbles with others, so I stopped. I was about sure that I could beat any of them and said, “I’d like to shoot marbles. I can beat any of you playing, I’ll bet.”

  I stooped down to play, and they said to me, “We don’t want no niggers here.” Mr. Bryan’s son said that. “We don’t want no niggers in here.” As he did, I slapped him with my right hand on the side of the face—the left side of his face with my right hand.

  The boy screamed because I had a powerful hand—I was a big, strong, husky fellow. There were five or six white boys. The rest of them were afraid to even tackle me. His mother ran out. His mother said, “What is your name, boy? We’ll have you arrested.” I said, “My name is John Brown,” and I walked away.

  The Bryan boy’s father was a lawyer. It happened that there really was a colored boy in town named John Brown, so the Bryans got a warrant out for him. When the police found him, young Bryan knew Brown was not the lad who had struck him. Brown was practically a runt. It did not take them long to discover that it was Tom Battle’s son who had wanted to fight young Bryan.

  Since my father was well known to the white people of the town and respected by all of them as a good workman, the warrant was promptly withdrawn. Instead, Mr. Bryan sent word to my father to come to see him and bring me along. We went to the Bryan’s back door.

  Young Bryan still bore the marks of my hand. When my father saw the youngster’s face and learned what I had done—I had struck a white boy—my father offered to let Mr. Bryan or his son whip me.

  Before either of them could answer, I said to my father, “I will die first! I will let you whip me, but not anyone else on earth.”

  No one said a word. So I repeated, “You can whip me, but nobody else.”

  Seeing that I meant what I said, my father whipped me himself in front of the white boy and his father. I was flogged severely there in the yard. This the white family accepted as satisfactory. I took my father’s punishment and did not shed a tear. Nothing in the world could have made me cry. On the way home my father counseled me about butting in where I was not wanted, and that night he prayed that I might learn to get along in this world of Negroes and whites.

  WHEN THOMAS WOULD tell his story, he would start with the American Revolution. He believed that his grandfather had fought as a slave shouldering a rifle at the side of a young master in the war that brought forth the new nation. Thomas handed down the lore as a badge of honor that stood as an irrefutable claim to citizenship and spoke of a bloodline whose enduring characteristic was to stand as upright as a person could stand.4

  New Bern was prosperous as the war for independence had approached. Located at the confluence of the Trent and Neuse rivers, its harbor offered easy access to Pimlico Sound and then the Atlantic. A maritime industry exported goods and brought imports of clothing, shoes, hardware, rum, salt, and other mercantile necessities, including slaves.

  Well-to-do whites enjoyed horse-drawn chaises; poor whites earned barely enough to survive. Slaves worked for food, clothing, and shelter. But, comprising roughly a third of the population, blacks had some latitude to live independently. They gathered for recreation and friendship and patronized shops that illicitly catered to them, including with the sale of liquor.

  New Bern served as a base for disrupting enemy commerce during the war. With American independence—and ratification of a Constitution that pointedly failed to outlaw human bondage—came prosperity. Merchants, ship owners, and planters built handsome townhouses and Georgian homes. Eventually, a stately courthouse, complete with a tower for hangings, became a government center.5

  For a US Census, Thomas reported the year of his birth as 1829. Antislavery agitation was then on the rise. Writing safely in Boston that year, a freed North Carolina slave by the name of David Walker published a pamphlet that came to be known as his Appeal. There, he declared, “I tell you Americans! that unless you speedily alter your course you and your country are gone!!!!!” And in neighboring Virginia, Nat Turner would soon lead a slave insurrection that killed fifty-five white men, women, and children.6

  With fear of bloodshed running rampant, North Carolina’s governing institutions clamped the vise even more tightly on bondage. The state supreme court upheld an owner’s right to assault a slave—even to shoot and wound a slave—free from penalty, with a chilling turn of phrase: “The power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect.”7

  New laws stripped free blacks of the right to vote, preach in public, carry a weapon without a permit, buy or sell alcohol, or attend public school. The New Bern town commissioners restricted the number of slaves who could offer services for hire to whites. Those engaged in such employment were required to wear badges. All citizens were barred from teaching slaves to read or write.

  Regardless, Thomas became devoted to book learning. Even more, while still a slave, he earned a living by laying brick and smoothing plaster for white townsfolk. He also gravitated to the unifying force of religion. Self-educated, he earned the status of minister in the African American Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, a storied denomination that came to be known as the “Freedom Church” in that its members included the giants of early black activism, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman.

  Thomas took on the roles of preacher and Sunday school teacher. By saving his masonry income, eventually, and remarkably, he purchased emancipation. Over the years, he supported relationships with two women, described by Battle as his father’s first two wives, and sired with them eleven of his eventual twenty-six children. Why he parted from the women, whether due to death or disagreement or through forced separation, has slipped into the mists.

  At the outbreak of the Civil War, at the age of thirty-two, Thomas stood witness to the end of a world. Young whites went off to fight distant battles and N
ew Bern fell to Union troops. Thomas saw whites flee before the assault, and he saw blacks flock to New Bern to escape marauding Confederates. Where the town had counted fewer than three thousand blacks before the war, he saw the number approach fifteen thousand at the conflict’s end. And he saw death and fear as yellow fever took at least nine hundred lives.8

  Still, New Bern stayed largely on the war’s periphery, allowing Thomas to persevere as a tradesman and minister. In the only words of his that are known to be extant, he described for John Wesley Cromwell, author of The Negro in American History, an episode from his ministry that involved an eight-year-old boy who would grow up to be the Reverend Joseph C. Price, founder of Livingstone College and prominent advocate of black self-help. Thomas recalled:

  It was in the year 1862 when I was superintendent of the Sunday School of St. Andrews Chapel that I was led by Providence on a bright Sunday morning to the church door. There I stood for several minutes and while standing there I saw a little black barefooted boy coming stepping along on the railroad track.

  When he got opposite the church I halted him and invited him in the Sabbath School. He liked the services so well that he was constrained to come again. At last he joined the Sabbath School and became a punctual scholar.

  From his stern, yet pleasant looks, his nice behavior and other virtuous elements that were maintained in him Sunday after Sunday he attracted my attention more than any other scholar. While other scholars would laugh at him because of his boldness of speech and his eagerness to answer the questions that were put forth.

  One Sunday in the midst of these abuses which he received, I was compelled to lay my hands on his head and exclaim these words: “The day will come, my dear scholars, when this boy Price will shake the whole civilized world, and some of you will be glad to get a chance to black his boots.”

  Little did I think my prediction would come to pass so exact, but so it did.9

  Around the war’s end, Thomas took a third wife who was more girl than woman. Fifteen-year-old Anne Vashti Delamar was the daughter of a slave mother and a white master. Anne’s eyes were blue and her skin was the color of ivory. Lustrous black hair fell below her shoulders and completed the impression that she was as white as any of the women who traveled New Bern’s dirt streets in horse-drawn jitneys.

  With the passing of the war, Thomas and Anne shared the jubilation and disorientation of freedom. He supported the family and gained respect among whites and blacks alike; she tended to their home. Across the racial divide, whites restarted life in the grand houses and reasserted their belief in natural superiority. By 1870, blacks comprised fully two-thirds of New Bern’s population. No matter. They were put in their place, if need be at the end of a whip.

  As one New Bernian told Whitelaw Reid, a Civil War correspondent who later became editor of the New York Tribune, “The poor, shiftless creatures will never be able to support themselves in freedom.” Reid was left to conclude: “Nothing could overcome this rooted idea, that the Negro was worthless, except under the lash.”10

  And the lash was officially enforced.

  The state legislature passed the Black Code of 1866, a statute that restricted freedom of movement and barred blacks from carrying unlicensed guns. Worse still, the white power structure responded to enactment in 1868 of the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing equal rights to all, and ratification in 1870 of the Fifteenth Amendment, ensuring the right to vote, as if the expressions of the national will were the decrees of a hostile power.

  But Thomas and Anne also witnessed the rise of black churches and social affairs, saw the federal Freedmen’s Bureau open schools for blacks, and eventually experienced the start of the black franchise. They weathered the good and the evil of the world, while at home they built a family that was a monument to parental strength, built on a belief in the goodness of the Lord and reverence for the American ideal.

  AS BATTLE TURNED fifteen, Thomas and Anne asked one of his half-brothers to help rear their obstreperous son. James lived sixty miles away in Goldsboro. He had been a teacher and was working as a railway mail clerk, an elevated position for a Southern black. He took Battle in, promising to guide him through high school and instilling the even higher aspirations of going to college and law school. It wasn’t to be. After James contracted pneumonia and died, Battle returned to New Bern, brokenhearted at this first death of a loved one and harboring the fantastic notions that not only could he get as fine an education as a white man but he could also become an attorney. He had seen black men of such prominence. They “came repeatedly to our home as if to a shrine” to seek his father’s counsel. Many had secured advanced degrees. Never could Battle achieve that in New Bern or in North Carolina or in the South, and a flickering ambition to attain the standing of an educated man now merged with New York’s pull.

  The attraction was all the stronger because a tide of oppression swept the South as the twentieth century drew near. The US Supreme Court opened the floodgates in 1896 by upholding in Plessy v. Ferguson the constitutionality of providing separate and purportedly equal accommodations to blacks. In North Carolina, severe economic dislocations intensified the ruling’s corrosive impacts. As plunging cotton prices drove white farmers toward poverty, Democrats flew the banner of white supremacy against a biracial Fusion movement of Republicans and Populists.

  In 1898, Battle’s hometown newspaper, the New Bern Journal, called for renouncing “negro supremacy, indecency, menace to property, destruction of social law and order.”11 An armed white paramilitary rode the countryside to make its Democratic and supremacist preferences plain. Dressed in crimson, they became known as the Red Shirts. After an election, word came from the state capital, Wilmington—like New Bern, a majority black city—that a white mob had deposed the municipal government, driven from town a black newspaper editor who had decried lynching, and killed as many as thirty blacks.

  That same year, Battle witnessed the appearance in New Bern of men unlike any he had ever seen: young black men wearing the uniform of US soldiers and preparing for duty in the Spanish-American War. The army had deployed standing regiments, including the all-black Buffalo Soldiers, who had served on the western frontier and who would save Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders at the battle of Las Guásimas. When President William McKinley called for volunteers, a soon-to-be ousted North Carolina governor enabled African Americans to enlist in regiments attached to white militia units. On leave, many traveled for recreation to New Bern. To whites, they were arrogant armed men who personified a refusal to accept the lot assigned to blacks; to Battle, they embodied adventure. He dashed to the tracks to watch the soldiers go off by train into places that lived in his dreams.12

  But he understood that he was not yet ready to follow them. To acquire some of the polish he admired in the Delamars, Battle went to work for Major Graham Davies, whose family lived on grounds large enough for a mansion and a second house. He tended the lawns, gardens, and shrubbery; pumped drinking water from a well; and brought soft water for the laundry from a rain cistern. Indoors, he emptied chamber pots and fanned away flies by pulling a cord that waved paper strips over the dining table.

  The household staff included a cook, housemaid, and two coachmen, plus a Miss Dissoway, their demanding leader. Battle wrote letters for them, “as well as the letters for a neighboring white man’s concubine who often visited.” Eventually, Miss Dissoway allowed Battle to serve as one of the family’s mealtime waiters.

  “There I learned the proper way of laying a linen cloth and placing silver. As have so many other Negroes, from ‘backing chairs’ I learned how people of real culture and refinement behave, converse and live,” Battle told Hughes, adding, “My period of work with this family of the Old South was a happy one and it was with some regret that I left them. At the age of sixteen, however, feeling myself a man, I decided to pull up stakes and head north to make my way in the world on my own.”

  There would be no stopping him, nor were Thomas and Anne inclined to
thwart their son’s ambitions. He had grown past six feet and was on his way to within a ham’s weight of 240 pounds, a size that made him several inches taller and more than 50 pounds heavier than the average American male in 1900. He was fit for labor and, thanks to Thomas’s tutelage, he had a tradesman’s skilled hands. In matters of the mind, he was perfectly literate and had no problem with arithmetical computation. It stood to reason that someone could put Battle to use.

  A sister, Nancy, had already headed north to Hartford, Connecticut. The family developed a plan. Battle and Anne would travel together to Brooklyn, where Anne would visit the Delamars. Battle would go on from there to link up with Nancy and make his start in Connecticut. When all was ready, Thomas spoke to his son in typically bracing fashion. Battle told Hughes: “The night before I left home my father, who had always prayed with us and for us, had a long special prayer with me alone. He said, ‘Dear Lord, I am now laying my youngest son upon Thy altar.’ He prayed that I would learn to curb my temper, quit fighting, and be a good Christian. Then from his knees he arose to give me his blessings and encouragement.”

  Then the morning of leave-taking arrived, as it would soon come for virtually every black Southern family through the mid-twentieth century, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters atomizing to overcome what they could of the dictates of skin color. In moments that turned out to be the last in which he saw his father alive, Battle left behind the cool rivers and the open fields, the black washerwomen with baskets on their heads and the whites in high carriages, the hiss of hot dirt streets under the spray of a water wagon, and the sweetness of the drink Caleb Bradham had invented in his drugstore, Pepsi-Cola.13