“Mr Ballard, I am compelled to write again”: Beyond Bedrooms and Brothels, a Fancy Girl Speaks Sharony Green, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Abstract Using a review of several letters from the papers of Rice C. Ballard, a former Virginia slave trader, this article examines the lives “fancy girls,” a little known group of high-end, enslaved women who were sold for use as concubines or prostitutes during antebellum America. Specifically, this study uses letters from two women to demonstrate how this unique female slave encountered an industrializing America in ways that often differ from the experiences of other female slaves. O n February 2, 1840, a black woman named Avenia White wrote a letter to Rice Ballard, her former master. At the time of her letter, the fifth that she had written in a period of a year and a half, Avenia was struggling in Cincinnati where Ballard had recently freed her. She had her son in tow. They were not alone. Ballard also had freed another black woman. Her name was Susan Johnson, and she had three children. Before Ballard departed for the South, he left enough money for Avenia, Susan, and the four children to reside for nearly three weeks in a boarding house. The women and children were positioned to exist better than they had as slaves. But, as Avenia’s February 2nd letter stated, they soon found themselves “almost destitute in a strange land.”1 In her earlier letters, Avenia told Ballard about the difficulties she and Susan faced while searching for employment. Ballard sent $150, which kept them going for a while. Their struggles continued—Avenia’s in particular. It seems a local woman was trying to destroy her reputation. Avenia asked Ballard to ignore the woman. “[If] you have forgotten me,” Avenia said, “I hope you have not forgotten the children.” Although Ballard had married in 1840, his emotional connection with Avenia was so great and Avenia found the challenges of living on her own so Black Women, Gender, and Families Spring 2011, Vol. 5, No. 1 ©2011 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois pp. 17–40 18 sharony green enormous that she probably returned to the South to be closer to her former master. And there she died. Avenia’s sorrowful letters are important because they echo the unrecorded pleas of countless antebellum black women who found themselves the castoff concubines of white men. Given the literacy hurdles facing pre–Civil War blacks, it is the researcher’s privilege to hear directly from one of them. Avenia’s letters are important chiefly, in this instance, because she appears to have been a “fancy girl,” the term used for female slaves who, often because of their fair complexion, were sold for use as concubines or prostitutes in antebellum America.2 Using the letters from black women in the Ballard papers as a case study, most critically the letters from Avenia White, this essay sets out to show how the fancy girl fits into the bigger story about the victimization of black women in America. But because of her positioning as a specific kind of slave—one whose relations with white men sometimes involved the expenditure of as much emotion as it did money—this study especially seeks to demonstrate how the fancy girl was in many instances situated to exploit her regrettable status. She is, therefore, a historical casualty possessing agency of the highest kind, the kind whose outlines are often blurred, as shall be shown, by an incomplete record. Bearing such agency, the fancy girl, links arms, if they would have her, with the black female domestic who developed political strategies to fight frightful working conditions in the postwar South, as Tera W. Hunter powerfully describes.3 The fancy joins forces, too, with antebellum women, black and white, who displayed awareness of self so powerful that they created what Laura F. Edwards has called a gendered confusion in pre–Civil War America.4 Moreover, the fancy who, as will also be seen, appropriated Victorian norms in slave-trader showrooms, even tampered with the trajectory of entitlement typically reserved for the elite white woman. In doing so, she challenged the white man’s perception of himself that had been built on an English template. This template was flawed, for, as Kathleen M. Brown has written, though “racialized patriarchy and sexualized concepts of race created new ways for white men to consolidate their power in a slave society,” they “did not suppress individual negotiations of behavior and identity” for marginal actors.5 Marginal actors certainly include the fancy girl. Edward E. Baptist has written the most important study to date concerning fancy girls. Looking to the letters between Ballard, who was a domestic slave trader, and Ballard’s slave-trading partners, Baptist makes a strong case for how the economy in nineteenth-century America was built on what he called the “fetishization” of black female slaves.6 That is to say, much of the spring 2011 / bl ack women, gender, and families 19 antebellum economy relied on devaluing black women and girls as people, reducing them to commodities. Baptist did not, however, place the men’s letters in conversation with those from black women who appear in the same archive. Fetishized or not, these women were persuasive about one thing: patriarchy had a crack in its wall regarding the antebellum black woman, especially the fancy girl. Because a fancy was a slave who was highly valued, she could, through her physical and emotional proximity to white men, position herself to capitalize on her status. She could, as Avenia did, ask for assistance and expect to be heard. She was, therefore, more than just an exploited commodity. She was a person who could communicate her desires and even her fears, and sometimes have them acted on. In the end, she is yet another example of how, though the economic infrastructure of the strongest nation in the world was built in considerable part on the commodification and fetishization of black women, it had much to worry about because the trampled tend not to go down without a fight. Four reasons exist for the lack of research on the fancy. Reluctance to study her is sometimes an outcome of sexual relations between female slaves and white men being so commonplace before the Civil War: she seems to be of little consequence to the larger story about slavery in America. In this regard, she seems to lack qualities that distinguish her much from any other female slaves. A second reason for the dearth of research on this particular historical character is the definitional confusion about what made a slave a fancy girl. Scholars tend either to assume that fancy girl and prostitute are synonyms or to regard prostitutes and fancies as entirely separate entities. There was actually a distinct overlap. A female slave could have been a prostitute and a fancy girl, but not all fancy girls were prostitutes.7 Conversely, not all prostitutes in antebellum America were fancy girls, just as not all prostitutes were enslaved black women. What made a fancy different from other slave women, even other slave prostitutes and prostitutes in general, lay primarily in how she surfaced as a brand-name slave under a collective set of circumstance that gave her leverage.8 These circumstances included (1) her actually being a concubine or prostitute; (2) her proximity to a slave trader or slaveholder who had the ability to shape her in a particular way, even if he had acquired her solely for his personal use and never marketed her under the fancy moniker; and (3) her possessing certain attributes, high among them a particular skin color that were considered valuable in the marketplace. Along with skin color, her exposure to high culture was another plus for slave traders seeking to market such women as fancies. An illustration is the description of one 20 sharony green female slave by Isaac Franklin, one of Ballard’s slave-trading partners. Isaac was attentive to the fair complexion of “Yellow Girl Charlott.” He also found Charlott’s social breeding valuable. In an 1834 letter to Ballard, Isaac noted that Charlott was from “some Branch of the Barber [Barbour] family,” whose respectability would have a great effect on her future sale.9 A third reason for the lack of research may be attributed to the historian’s personal discomfort with the fancy’s legacy. If it is true that we bring who we are to our work, perhaps those in academe from the African Diaspora see in the fancy long-held conflicts over fair skin being an indicator of worth and status. White academics, on the other hand, women included, may feel shame or resentment about a particular gendered evil that is more comfortably explored with broad brush strokes, if explored at all. After all, history is always more easily recounted when focusing on the generalities. Both viewpoints are undoubtedly reinforced by the fancy’s appearance as the quintessential tragic mulatto. Her imagined life has figured into many literary works and film projects. She appears so soundly fictional that the serious and skeptical researcher keeps her at a distance. Conversely, she appears so strongly positioned that some fail to see the value in recounting her past. The fourth, and perhaps most cogent, reason for the neglect is the lack of evidence. When fancy girls turn up in the historical record, they do so most often in a slave trader’s ledgers and letters. The moment a trader purchased a black girl or woman who could be marketed as a fancy, he typically wrote the word “fancy” beside her name. An example of this practice was the enslaved girl listed by one trader in this manner: “1 Girl Sally Fancy Cost 750.”10 If this girl was purchased for $750, it is likely she sold for considerably more. While adult males sold for as much as $1,000, fancy girls went for $1,200 to as much as $5,000. So valued was this particular class of slaves, one slave trader asked a fellow trader to keep an eye out for “handsome fancy girls at all times.”11 Primary sources containing such references aid the researcher in documenting how slaveholders and traders regarded certain female slaves but amount to little more than external constructions of women and girls whose own voices are harder to hear. The Ballard papers are helpful in this regard. Avenia White’s five letters are among at least eight letters written by black women that were in his papers when he died in 1860.12 Five letters may seem too little to establish the voice of a particular historical actor, but again, given literacy restrictions on antebellum blacks, scholars are forced to make do with scanty evidence or else abandon the effort to recount the experiences of the fancy girl. spring 2011 / bl ack women, gender, and families 21 The Historiography Using letters from black women in the Ballard papers, and the letters of one woman in particular, this article will shed light on the fancy girl as a historical actor and demonstrate how she exerted agency in however limited a fashion under the patriarchal structures that dominated both her and antebellum American society. It augments earlier scholarship that explores the complex relations between white slave traders and black women by going beyond interpretational frameworks that depict the female slave as a mere commodity. Frederic Bancroft’s 1931 study of slave trading in the South is one of the earliest to explicitly mention fancy girls by name. He wrote that fancies were common in most large urban areas but were especially numerous in New Orleans and Lexington, Kentucky, a favorite resort for wealthy horse breeders and gamblers who were on the prowl for high-end female slaves for sexual purposes.13 Bancroft discusses the major players in slave trading such as Lewis Robards, Isaac Franklin, and John Armfield. J. Winston Coleman, an early 20th-century amateur historian who lived in Kentucky, added details about Robards’s life. Robards’s fancies were housed in nicely furnished apartments above his Lexington office. His slaves were the talk of bars, tippling houses, and taverns, some as far away as New Orleans. Orville H. Browning, a nineteenth-century Illinois senator and one of Robards’s notable visitors, said the women he saw had very genteel manners. They engaged in needlework while waiting for a buyer. And when asked, they stood up to show “their finely developed and graceful forms.”14 Studies on the interdependencies of actors in the slave market expand the historiography on fancy girls. The most essential of such works is Walter Johnson’s important monograph Soul by Soul, which makes clear that slaves tirelessly worked in the marketplace to shape how potential buyers saw them in order to have an effect on their sale. Johnson provides essential data on the fancy girl. Some fancies were as young as thirteen and were sold for as much $5,233. While he shines vital light on the agency slaves possessed, he does not fully interrogate the fancy girl’s particular ability to interact with her potential buyers or slave traders.15 The work of Deborah Gray White is, thus, more important for this study. In examining known archetypes in Southern antebellum households, including the house mammy on whom the master relied for advice about his home and other matters, White has demonstrated how enslaved women gained 22 sharony green the trust of white men and, in doing so, acquired some measure of power. White mentions the existence of the Fancy Trade, a supposed auction—as she puts it—for the sale of fancy girls (the “supposed” qualifier hints that she knows most fancies were sold in private sales.) This auction scenario fits well into White’s bigger project on how black women have historically stood at the intersection of discourses in America regarding women and what she terms “the Negro.” These discourses depicted African American men and women—women especially—as infantile, irresponsible, submissive, and promiscuous. White males have benefited most from such myths, White explains.16 When their work is considered together, Johnson and White suggest the ways some slaves were able to change the course of their lives. This interpretational framework is valuable in explorations of the fancy girl who appears to have had more autonomy than the average slave and was in a position to capitalize on her intimate, however unfortunate, relations with her master. Works concerning female and slave agency aside, the fancy girl’s legacy also dovetails with several black feminist writings, including the work of Patricia Hill Collins who has written about the ways in which black women who were situated behind closed doors with whites because of economic need or through force assumed an outsider-within status that provided leverage.17 The fancy girl’s placement as a specific kind of slave in the bedrooms of white men and on the streets and in the brothels of bustling commercial centers—unlike black women who worked as prostitutes without such status or geographical placement—fits safely within this interpretational framework. Though exploited, the fancy girl likely heard and saw much. The luckiest used what she heard and saw to great advantage. Amy Dru Stanley’s work on how free black women in Northern and Southern states exercised agency by endeavoring to control their bodies and labor positions the fancy girl in a theoretical critique anchored deeply in the marketplace. Of particular importance is Stanley’s focus on marriage and prostitution as crucial sites when scrutinizing the nineteenth century as a pivotal era for contracts.18 For the first time ever, marginal actors, even slaves and by extension subgroups like fancy girls, glimpsed a form of freedom in the marketplace. Coverture laws in many states posed property limits on married females, both black and white. But unmarried black women could and did acquire property. Some even owned businesses. A great many entered local economies in the United States and Caribbean as prostitutes and madams. Pedro L. V. Welch’s study of relations between black women and white spring 2011 / bl ack women, gender, and families 23 mariners in nineteenth-century Barbados suggests that black women who resorted to prostitution did so primarily as means of survival. He recounts the observations of Dr. George Pinckard who, in a 1792 visit to Barbados, observed how black female sex workers made enough money to purchase their freedom and even property. Among such women was Betsy Lemon, a mulatto woman whose “‘whole deportment,” he believed, “bespoke a degree of delicacy and refinement.” According to Pinckard, the once-poor Betsy ran a tavern in Bridgetown. Lemon was so impressive that Dr. Pinckard suspected he was witnessing “‘the art of a courtesan’ at her best.”19 The Old Lady and Susan From the 1830s through the early 1840s, Isaac Franklin, reputedly the most successful domestic slave trader in U.S. history, trafficked hundreds of slaves from Virginia to the Deep South. He did not do it alone. Franklin had help from his nephews, John Armfield and James Franklin, and from a fourth trader, Rice Carter Ballard. The 1830s were their heyday. Agriculture in Virginia was in a slump. Many local planters were happy to unload their slaves on the Franklins, Armfield, and Ballard, who took them to the Deep South and to frontier-hungry settlers anxious to clear land in the Southwest. In 1833 alone, their firms took in more than $400,000.20 With a tight-knit operation that positioned Ballard in Richmond to locate slaves, Armfield in Alexandria or Norfolk to ship them, and Isaac and James in New Orleans to receive them, hundreds of slaves were transported twice a month. Ballard and his partners often discussed the details of their shipments via letter. When they were not writing about the weather, their inventory, or sailing issues, they were candid about their exploits with female slaves, fancy girls in particular. Speaking to Baptist’s observations about the extent to which the sexual exploitation of female slaves figured into slavery as an economic system, James shared in one letter to Ballard how he had seen a “handsome girl . . . that would climb higher hills and go further to accomplish her designs than any girl to the North & she is not too apt to leave or loose her gold[.] . . . [T]o my certain knowledge she has been used & that smartly by a one-eyed man.”21 James’s usage of the word “gold,” which is alternately a metaphor for sex and currency, is enmeshed with the mention of a “oneeyed man,” the term used during this period for a man’s penis, an archetypal patriarchal tool. In another letter to Ballard, Isaac inquired about “the Fancy Girl from Charlottsville.” He told Ballard to send this fancy to New Orleans. If Ballard delayed, Franklin jokingly threatened to charge Ballard the amount 24 sharony green he was expecting to get when he found a buyer for her. “Will you send her out or shall I charge you $1100 for her?” Franklin wrote.22 In 1834, Isaac wrote Ballard yet another letter. In this one, he discussed two particular women. These he did not call fancies outright. Instead he called them “the Old Lady and Susan.”23 Isaac wanted Ballard to make these two “earn their keep by running a whorehouse.” Given the transient male population of Richmond, there was money to be made. Trains carried coalminers to areas just south of Richmond. Slave traders and agents were increasingly passing through the city on foot or horse. Such men were potential patrons of a brothel. It is unknown if Ballard took Isaac up on his idea. More seems to be known about the Old Lady and Susan. From the time Ballard bought her, Avenia White seemed to have a distinctive place in his life. Her name is the very first listed on a schedule of 262 slaves he purchased in 1832. Susan Johnson, another female slave, is third on the list.24 Ballard did not resell these two women as he did other slaves. Their names do not appear among the 212 slaves who were shipped on from Norfolk to New Orleans in 1832. Nor do they appear on his 1833 or 1834 shipment ledgers. Paternity may have been one of the reasons that Ballard was holding on to both women. Sandwiched between Avenia’s and Susan’s names on the 1832 slave schedule is that of a boy named Preston. This child was likely Avenia’s son because Preston’s name appears directly below hers. Slave agents and traders typically noted relatives of slaves in this manner. Preston’s name also appears in other places in Ballard’s records. There is an entry in Ballard’s expense book that shows, in 1834, five dollars was used to buy “a suit of clothes” for Preston. This was no small amount of money to be spending on a single slave boy. Ballard also spent $1.50 on a pair of shoes for Preston.25 While slave traders routinely bought clothing for slaves they planned to sell, these entries for Preston appear in lists in which Ballard recorded the purchase of household or business goods. This attention is especially curious given that Preston was born before (exactly how long is unclear) he and his mother were purchased by Ballard. Preston clearly seemed to fit into Ballard’s life in a special way, not unlike another male child. In Ballard’s slave schedule book, there is a casual scribble on a blank page that reads, “Susan Johnson was delivered a boy child 21 May 1833 4 o’clock in the morning.” No other births were recorded in this book, which suggests that this childbirth was unique, not unlike Ballard’s relationship with these two female slaves, Avenia in particular.26 The 1840 U.S. census lists Avenia as being between the ages of 24 and 36, which means she could have been born as early as 1804. The family of spring 2011 / bl ack women, gender, and families 25 Nathaniel White, a slave agent who once helped Ballard gather slaves in Virginia, may have been her first owners.27 That said, she might have been related to Davy White, Carter White, Sally White, and Sam White, four slaves who were also purchased by Ballard in 1832. But Ballard’s records show that these slaves were immediately shipped to the Deep South, while Avenia was kept behind. In 1836, he left Virginia for Mississippi and presumably took Avenia, Susan, and their children with him. How Ballard met Avenia is unknown. Perhaps he saw her while he was out gathering slaves. She may or may not have been fair in complexion.28 After he saw her, he may have hired her to cook or clean for him, maybe to do more. During the early 1830s, he regularly recorded payments for the transport of women to his home. In one case, he paid six dollars to a “boy for bringing home woman.” Given that proper white women did not travel unaccompanied by a male relative or appropriate stand-in, these women, or woman, being brought to Ballard were likely slaves. It is possible that Avenia was one of them and, in due time, was impregnated by Ballard before he bought her. His relationship with Susan Johnson might have developed under similar circumstances. In August of 1838—four years after Franklin’s proposal to put two women to work in a brothel—Avenia and Susan stepped off of a pier in Cincinnati. Four children were beside them. Ballard was also present. Their entry into Cincinnati occurred while Ballard was making a critical career transition. In the face of growing outcry over domestic slave trading, he was repositioning himself as a planter. By the time he set the women and children free, he already owned a plantation in Natchez and, in time, would acquire an interest in several other plantations throughout the South. The prospects for a better future also seemed secure for Avenia, Susan, and the children.29 The “Queen of the West,” as Cincinnati was called, had become a burgeoning shipbuilding center.30 Charles Dickens was among a growing number of visitors who had their first view of Cincinnati from a bustling Ohio River. Here, on the body of water early French settlers called La Belle Reviere, workers toted, pushed, and pulled cargo.31 Frances Trollope, another English visitor, was among locals and other visitors who sat down in drawing rooms to hear the poetry and essays of Harriet Beecher. Trollope saw the city’s potential for greatness even as she decided that Cincinnati went wanting for “domes, towers, steeples.”32 So great were expectations for the city’s growth, some believed Cincinnati was destined to become the most important urban center in North America, and by the 1840s it seemed a contender, being the third busiest port in the United States.33 26 sharony green Many jobs in the city relied on river traffic. Even with racial exclusion and job discrimination present, as one local directory makes clear, African Americans were visible in the workforce during this period. A case in point is Mary Fletcher, a black woman, who was listed as a washerwoman,34 and Henry Hobbs, a black man who was listed as steward.35 Their appearance in a city directory published by whites suggests that Hobbs and Fletcher were members of Cincinnati’s upstanding free black community. They had both managed to skirt the prostitution and gambling houses found on the banks of river cities like Cincinnati.36 As newcomers, Avenia and Susan might have been encouraged after seeing blacks like them from afar. As single black mothers without a male head of household, these two women doubtless wanted to be viewed in a similar manner. While settling in, Avenia and Susan found a friend in Frances Bruster, a black woman, who owned a boarding house on Elm Street in the city’s predominantly black Fourth Ward. Before he departed for the South, Ballard left funds for the women to pay one dollar per day apiece for themselves and fifty cents a day for each of the children for room and board. These charges were so considerable that Avenia wisely located a house that would soon be vacant. It went for thirteen dollars a month. If she and Susan could find work and move into this house, she figured they could do very well. There were many obstacles before them, however. All this was shared in a letter that Avenia dictated on September 13, 1838. “Mr Ballard, Sir, I write you a few lines” began Avenia, who also reported that she and Susan and the children were in good health but “somewhat depressed in spirits.” It appears Bruster’s boarding house was not close to “business.” The kind of business to which she was referring is unclear, but it was likely something that could be found on the riverfront. Avenia yearned to be near the Ohio even as the region was experiencing a drought, which reduced the river’s waterborne traffic. This bottleneck hurt commerce. The economic slowdown made local business owners reluctant to hire additional workers. With job prospects dim, Avenia asked Ballard for financial assistance so she and Susan could continue paying their rent and “purchase little articles toward housekeeping.”37 Ballard did not reply to Avenia’s letter. She decided to try again. On October 25, 1838, another letter was written. In this one, she stated, “I am compelled to write you again.” She told Ballard that the river was still low and affecting business, which was having an impact on her and Susan’s ability to find regular work. She was taking in sewing and laundry, and Susan was “compelled to go to service by the week,” probably as a domestic worker. spring 2011 / bl ack women, gender, and families 27 Their earnings, however, were not enough. They needed beds, she said. They also needed funds to buy wood for fuel as the night air was growing cooler. By now, their funds were so limited they had to borrow eight dollars from Mrs. Bruster, who was sending a hello. Avenia herself sent “love.” She ended the letter with this postscript: “PS Harvey has been very sick. He is now recovering.”38 Mention of Harvey—who might have been one of Susan’s children if we are to rely on the 1840 census, which lists Avenia White as having only one child—was done in a clever manner: at the end of Avenia’s letter. Assuming the last idea mentioned is the one most remembered, putting Harvey’s name here was strategic. Avenia was using the children to get Ballard’s attention. This tactic failed. Ballard did not respond to this letter either. More desperate, Mrs. Bruster wrote a letter to make a plea on behalf of the women and children. Her motivation was not entirely charitable. She also needed Ballard’s help. In a letter written on November 29, 1838, and bearing the same penmanship as Avenia’s two earlier letters, Bruster informed Ballard that she lacked $300 to make the final payment on her mortgage. Speaking to her having glimpsed in Ballard some sense of obligation to the women and children boarding with her, Bruster stated that she would be “under ten thousand obligations to” him and “anything that concerns” him if he would loan her $100. If he did not, she said, the “children will be deprived of a home.” Bruster ended the letter with, “Avenia and the little boy are well She has written you twice once to Louisville. The last letter she directed to Natchez.”39 Bruster asked Ballard to send the requested money through Calvin Fletcher, a city councilman who was also a local merchant.40 The mention of Fletcher suggests the community into which Avenia and Susan had entered. Though new arrivals in Cincinnati, the women had access, however limited, to a prominent Cincinnatian. Ballard did not reply to Mrs. Bruster’s letter either. 41 Still not hearing from Ballard, a more anxious letter was addressed to him on December 30, 1838. In it, Avenia repeated that Harvey had been sick and that Susan was now ill. The cold weather was the likely cause of their poor health. Upset, Avenia told Ballard, “I am sorry to have to trouble you so much but my present necessities are so great at this time that I am compelled . . . to get Mr Fletcher to advance me ten dollars to get me some wood” for heating.42 Perhaps moved by her pleas or ashamed of how Fletcher might regard his apparent neglect, Ballard sent money. In a letter dated January 28, 1839, 28 sharony green Fletcher acknowledged the receipt of $150 from Ballard, $50 of which was immediately delivered to Avenia. Fletcher set aside the rest presumably to use in a way that would aid the women and children. Like Mrs. Bruster, Fletcher sensed Ballard’s concern for the women’s and children’s welfare, for, in his letter, he assured Ballard that his former slaves “appear to be getting along very comfortably.”43 Unlike other single black mothers or unaccompanied women in urban areas during this period, the women and children clearly benefited, though in an imperfect way, from their past status as kept slave women. Grateful for his assistance, however delayed, on January 20, 1839, Avenia sent Ballard a letter of thanks. She used this opportunity to tell him again how business was “dull.” She added that Harvey was “mending slowly” under a doctor’s care. In the postscript, she stated that Mrs. Bruster had also received a letter from him. Bruster, however, was waiting for Fletcher to attend to a particular matter, which was likely the requested loan. “When you write you can mention it to him,” Avenia said.44 One may infer from this last bit of information that Ballard loaned Mrs. Bruster her requested $100. Finding Community Avenia did not write Ballard for a year and a half. Her silence may have been due in part to knowing that his sense of obligation to her and Susan, who emerges almost soundless, had limits.45 Ballard was getting married. For months, he had been courting Louise Cabois Berthe, a woman in Louisville with ancestral ties to Mississippi.46 If she was aware of Ballard’s desire to start a new life, something momentous had to occur in order for Avenia to contact him again. On February 2, 1840, approximately two months before his wedding, Avenia sent Ballard the final letter he preserved. In it, she stated that she was encouraged by better work prospects but was still struggling. The house in which she and Susan had lived, presumably Bruster’s, had been sold from underneath them. She was most distressed by a local woman who was trying to destroy her reputation even as she put great effort into living in an honorable manner. This same woman had also informed her of Ballard’s decision to provide no further financial support. Avenia maintained that she was “innocent of everything” that this woman had “so maliciously reported.” She asked Ballard to respond by writing her in care of a “Mr. Dennis Hill.” She ended her letter in this way: Your most humble [servant] A. White PS Elizabeth is well and going to school.”47 spring 2011 / bl ack women, gender, and families 29 This letter is of great significance on several counts. First and foremost, Avenia was alarmed over Ballard’s deciding no longer to assist her and Susan financially. On top of that, if Mrs. Bruster had finally lost her house, Avenia, Susan, and the children were homeless. These setbacks occurred just as Avenia and Susan were beginning to lead more stable lives. The change in fortune is most evident in the news that Elizabeth, one of the children, was in school. With better work prospects, Avenia and Susan were better situated in Cincinnati. Avenia had even befriended someone other than Bruster and Fletcher who was assisting them in communicating with Ballard: Hill, an African American porter.48 The arrival of a new person, and a black man, in Avenia’s life, particularly one who appears to have been a respectable member of Cincinnati’s free black community, suggests great change for Ballard’s former slaves. To employ Hortense J. Spiller’s interpretational framework concerning how slavery destroyed the black family unit, Hill’s emergence suggests that Avenia and Susan’s lives had stabilized in some semblance of familial normalcy.49 Even if all Hill provided was a fixed address for them to receive letters from an earlier benefactor, his doing so was of immense significance. This modest switch could have tremendous payoff for these two women who had a specific past and specific status. It should also be noted that the handwriting in this letter is different from Avenia’s earlier letters, as well as Mrs. Bruster’s letter. Hill probably not only provided a fixed address, but he wrote this fifth letter for Avenia. We might envision how she sat beside him as she had once sat beside Mrs. Bruster, dictating to him. Given his line of work and her presence on the busier side of town, Avenia almost certainly met Hill on the waterfront. Though we cannot be sure of his motives for helping her, he was clearly someone she trusted. She turned to him either because she no longer had access to Calvin Fletcher or, being more in control of her life, she chose a man who inhabited the milieu to which she aspired. Hill’s appearance on the heels of first Bruster and then Fletcher demonstrates that she was finding community bit by bit beyond Ballard’s oversight. Had she mentioned a more central figure in the free black community, a minister or educator, we might say that she was safely situated in such a new world. Nevertheless, Hill’s presence and her announcement that one of the children was in school signal progress. And if the term fancy has not been invoked for the reader for a long while, it is because, no longer being a slave but instead a mother with a specific past, Avenia can no longer be cast in this manner even as her earlier ties to Ballard as a kept slave woman—the 30 sharony green key thing that separates her from other single black women in Cincinnati and beyond—continued to shape her world in a special way. Avenia’s life was still unstable, and her existence in Cincinnati tenuous. Her emotional support was being provided by two people whose lives were related to transient living—a boarding-house owner and a porter. And a woman was trying to destroy her reputation in a moment when one-fourth of the city’s black population belonged to temperance organizations, compared to one-tenth of whites. Because of the dangers of a habitually immoral riverfront, the city’s respectable free black community policed themselves. They discouraged women from wearing flashy dresses. They frowned on men’s openly imbibing alcohol.50 Avenia and Susan’s experiences in such an environment presage the policing of black women in urban areas in other Northern cities in the first half of the twentieth century. Hazel V. Carby has written about the “moral panic” created during this period by the arrival of unmonitored and morally lax single black women who posed a threat to respectable blacks who feared racial blowback from the communities of which they were striving to be a part.51 Determined to make it, Avenia and Susan probably strove for the chance to be seen as honorable women. This particular yearning was encapsulated in Avenia’s stating that Elizabeth was well and going to school. In dictating this sentence, cleverly placed in the postscript, Avenia seems to have understood, as most aspiring to a higher position did, that education was one of the routes to a better and more respectable life.52 That said, letter writing does allow for performance. The reader has only to look at how Avenia always addressed Ballard in a business-like way, as was the case when she used the phrase “humble servant” in the closing of her fifth letter. This phrase and variants such as “your most obedient servant” frequently appeared in antebellum business correspondence. But Avenia’s use of the phrase “humble servant” points to more. The word “servant” seems to have been her unconscious attempt to win Ballard’s favor. She did this, ironically, using a word that conjures imagery of her former status as a slave. Rest assured, she needed to do this. She needed him, but she had to state her need in a way that massaged his ego and safeguarded his racial dominance while simultaneously engaging his thirst for enterprise. In employing this phrase, Avenia was pushing several buttons in Ballard. She was also likely pushing several buttons in herself. “Who am I?” Avenia might have asked herself. “What am I going to do now that I am free?” and most crucial of all, “How am I going to go forward on my own?” She was not the only black woman in Ballard’s life asking such questions. spring 2011 / bl ack women, gender, and families 31 Another Woman Speaks During the summer of 1847, a black woman named Lucile Tucker wrote Ballard from Bainbridge, Georgia. In her letter, Lucile indicated that she was earning good money in an unstated profession. Instead of seeking financial assistance, Lucile asked to be freed. With beautiful penmanship and perfectly spelled words, Lucile wrote, “I wish you could have emancipated me when you was last in New Orleans for that is a matter I deserve to have arranged as early as possible and if you could do it without putting me to the expense of returning to New Orleans, I should much prefer it for life you know is very uncertain and you might die before I can see you.”53 When and where Ballard purchased Lucile is unknown. She was, however, doing better financially than Avenia and Susan had years earlier. By the time Lucile wrote her letter, Ballard’s career as a planter was well underway. His portfolio was spread broadly, the economy had improved, and he was also allowing one of his female slaves to earn money without his direct supervision. Whether he hired Lucile out and let her keep her own earnings is hard to ascertain. From the tone of her letter, Ballard and Lucile did seem to have an understanding. By allowing her to work and live independently in Bainbridge, he had positioned her to earn more than enough money to live on her own. Such an existence emboldened her to request something more critical: her freedom. In fact, in this letter, she also stated that being free was “a matter I deserve to have arranged as soon as possible.” This seems to suggest that Lucile regarded her manumission not as a privilege but as a right. One might infer from this attitude that she was reminding Ballard of a commitment made earlier. If he was reneging on a stated promise, had he done so because she was one of Avenia and Susan’s successors in his bed but not necessarily in his affections? The record offers no clear answer. As was true of Avenia and Susan, Lucile’s livelihood was tied to waterborne commerce. Bainbridge was a former Indian trading post. Situated in the southwestern corner of Georgia, it sits beside the Flint and Chattahoochee rivers, two streams that flow into the Apalachicola River, which in turn empties into the Gulf of Mexico. These rivers were important thoroughfares for travelers seeking to avoid the mountains when heading west to and beyond New Orleans; sitting astride them, Bainbridge reaped the economic benefits. Lucile likely prospered from the incoming traffic. She may have been a domestic worker. She may have been among the numerous entrepreneurs who capitalized on the many “unattached” male travelers. One such entrepreneur was “Old Rachel,” a black woman who owned a cake shop in Bain- 32 sharony green bridge. She also operated a dance house on Saturdays for the “Kulud ladies.”54 Because Old Rachel’s dance hall featured black women, it was probably a prime spot for prostitution. How Ballard responded to Lucile’s request to be free, we do not know. More certain, though not entirely clear either, is his response to someone who had earlier been in his life. The Old Lady Dies On May 19, 1851, R. F. Morgan, the manager of a plantation in which Ballard had a financial interest, wrote a letter announcing the death of a woman. The woman had been sick for a while, and Ballard had asked to be filled in on her progress.55 Morgan shared how the deceased had experienced “bloody flux which she was unprepared to stand.”56 It is my belief the dead woman mentioned in this letter was Avenia. In January 1841, two months before Louise Ballard gave birth to her first child in Louisville, her husband Rice had two curious receipts. One showed that he paid five dollars for the “passage of Negro girl from N. Orleans” presumably to the Ballard’s Natchez home.57 The second showed that he paid five dollars for the passage of a “Negro girl from New Orleans” to Natchez on another occasion. This second receipt also lists the fifteen dollars he paid for himself and a servant.58 Given that a distinction was made in the second instance between the “Negro girl” and the “servant,” the Negro girl in question was probably not a slave but free. Avenia could have been the anonymous free woman who accompanied Ballard on a boat from New Orleans to Natchez. To get to Mississippi from Cincinnati, she possibly traveled down the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers to New Orleans.59 Reservations over this guesswork are in order. It is hard to believe that Avenia returned to live in a slave society and still less plausible that she returned to a master who almost certainly had sexually exploited her. However, driven by a need for security and safety (the threat of slave catchers was ever-present in Ohio, and Cincinnati was across the river from Kentucky, a slave state), she may have returned to the South to live near or with her former master. Ballard had, after all, exhibited some measure of the paternalism that figured well into the South’s ideological defense of slavery. If the deceased were Avenia, one may wonder if she decided to leave Cincinnati because she truly had a genuine emotional connection to Ballard and he to her or whether she left because work prospects in Cincinnati were continually discouraging. Rather than becoming a prostitute, the occupation spring 2011 / bl ack women, gender, and families 33 to which many poor women turned, she returned to what she decided—and this is important, she decided—was a lesser evil. Accommodating The Modern Researcher Not long after Morgan’s 1851 letter, Ballard began to spend more time at his Kentucky residence. But as late as 1857, three years before his death, he was frequently in Natchez, so much that his relatives and friends wrote him, asking him to return to Louisville. His wife, it appears, was socializing with a questionable crowd. In a letter written on March 1, 1857, W. A. Ellis, a Louisville pork merchant and family friend, said, “Your dear children I feel for very much. . . . [T]he older they get the worse it is for them as they are more liable to be injured by the wickedness of an unnatural Mother.”60 Two months later, Ellis wrote Ballard again, saying, “I fully believe if you will come up soon . . . the influences can be broken off and much good done.”61 For years, it appears that Ballard may have displayed more affection for a former slave than his wife. In one letter to her husband, Louise seemed to be resigned to raising their three girls on her own. “I must not look for you until I see you,” she wrote.62 It is unknown if Louise was aware of Ballard’s relations with black women. If she expressed her suspicions in writing, Ballard failed to preserve it. The pain Louise evidently experienced during Ballard’s frequent and prolonged absence figures into one of this study’s aims: to show how the fancy girl differed from other female slaves. On the most fundamental level, anguish is anguish no matter a person’s station. That said, save her fair skin and favor from white men, a fancy girl was greatly unlike other female slaves or even white mistresses. However, like most women of this period, black and white, immigrant and native, the fancy suffered under a rigid patriarchal system that held women in place, some places higher than others. The large presence of young men on the West Coast during the gold rush led to a set of consequences for Asian and Asian American women in nineteenth-century California where the growth of prostitution was directly tied to increased business in the state.63 As a married white woman in the lower Midwest during the same period, Louise was more protected than women living without a male head of household. But she unsuccessfully competed with several other females seeking her husband’s assistance, if not attention. Another slave woman, this one named Virginia, wrote Ballard from a Texas jail on May 6, 1853.64 She appears to have been a relative of Samuel Boyd, a man who co-owned a plantation in Vicksburg, Mississippi, with 34 sharony green Ballard. In her letter, Virginia, who was pregnant, condemned an unnamed man who was trying to sell her and her children. Ballard must have been concerned about her plight because C. M. Rutherford, a slave trader, sent a letter to Ballard on August 8 announcing that Virginia and one of her children had indeed been sold, but the oldest child had not.65 Delia, another female slave, wrote Ballard on October 22, 1854. In her letter, she asked Ballard to buy her husband.66 We do not know how Ballard responded to Delia. We can be sure that she and other black women observed something unbolted in a man we recoil from because we should. The little we have learned about him in this study may compel us to list the reasons, however. Several black women, including some who were still enslaved, saw in Ballard’s persona something that suggested he was receptive to their appeals, and the fact that he preserved their entreaties and sometimes responded is undeniable evidence that these women read him correctly. That they did read him properly suggests that they had a close and emotional rapport with him. Though he enslaved hundreds, Ballard was also open to assisting others in ways we may never fully understand. The complexity of his personality is illustrated in how a woman managed a plantation in which he had invested money. Appointing women to management positions ran against the grain of nineteenth-century American gender roles. But this particular woman, Catherine Prince, also witnessed his temperamental ways. When some of his cotton was left to rot by the side of a river, Ballard was furious and told Prince as much. In a letter written on May 14, 1839, Prince apologized. She also let Ballard know how much his admonishment had hurt her. “Mr Ballard,” she wrote. “I could not blame your plain language. . . . [I]t alarmed and distressed me much.”67 Avenia White surely witnessed his temper, too. Through exploring her life and that of other black women, we see yet again how master–slave relations and gender relationships were complicated by the emotional connections between white male slaveholders and the female slaves they owned, particularly the female slaves who were uniquely valued for their stated or unstated categorization as “fancy girls.” However exploited, such females were individually positioned to capitalize—financially or not, with due moral deliberation or not—on their proximity to white men. Such slaves were unknowing actors in a crucial financial moment in American history. They encountered the market embodying both the limitations in and opportunities offered by their gender and skin color. Like many nineteenth-century women, Avenia and Susan grappled with what happens when a woman loses the regular support of a man, or in spring 2011 / bl ack women, gender, and families 35 Lucile’s case, when a woman discovers she no longer needs the support of one. Because they surface as a particular kind of slave woman, they were positioned to ask for more than most of their sisters. And ask they did in strategic ways, especially Avenia. As a means of soliciting Ballard’s assistance, Avenia emphasized her role as a mother, an honorable situation. She did this even though social mores she could not control believed women like her were in need of moral correction. She, and later Lucile, might have looked over Ballard’s shoulder unaware of the complexities of the investments and interests he pursued. But she was savvy enough to understand the financial currents of the period in which she lived and the benefits she had received from a man who had sometimes shown her one face and the world another. Avenia had what Patricia Hill Collins has called the outside-within status, a peculiar marginality that gave black women a “distinct view of the contradictions between the dominant group’s actions and ideologies.”68 Such insight affected her correspondence. She never engaged in dialogue that was romantic, and her appeals were explicitly tied to her maternal role. Her requests were also practical. Her disposition might have been enabled by, as Amy Dru Stanley has written, her being one of the women whose worldview was oddly aided by the gradations in their master’s dominion as well as the absence of a husband.69 Around such women were tensions that made them extraordinary creatures on some occasions, victims in others. According to Stanley, such tensions revolved around “autonomy and dependence, volition and coercion, equality and inequality, entitlement and dispossession, self proprietorship and alienations [which are all] dualisms” at the center of a century celebrated for its tendency toward propping up the individual in a country that championed individualism. Avenia and other women in commercial regions were part of that testing ground for what was new between the sexes. Relationships between men and women, blacks and whites, were being interrogated by the power of the marketplace and in some instances redefined. In writing to a man as powerful as Rice Ballard, Avenia did not challenge patriarchy; rather, she employed it to her own advantage, in the process demonstrating her own agency and power, if not her autonomy. Why Ballard kept Avenia’s five letters and those from other black women we may never know. But we can be certain that, in keeping them, he has accommodated the modern reader and, in the end, himself. For though the work he engaged in was among the most reprehensible in pre–Civil War America and although his transparency in preserving such a detailed record of his life can hardly absolve him of that moral taint, historians owe him a debt of gratitude. 36 sharony green Endnotes For their insight and encouragement, I thank David R. Roediger, Rebecca Ginsburg, Kimberly Manganelli, and John Beeler. I also thank this essay’s anonymous reviewers; other readers; Jeanine Mitchell; Kathryn J. Lillethun of the Decatur County (GA) Historical Society; the staff at the Indiana Historical Society; the staff at the Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and the editors and staff of Black Women, Gender and Families. 1. Avenia White to Rice Ballard, February 2, 1840, folder 31, from the Rice C. Ballard Papers, hereafter Ballard Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 2. Fancy is also a moniker for a prostitute during the nineteenth century. The term, among other things, referred to a woman who was a kept mistress. See Oxford English Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 715. 3. Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 4. Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1997). 5. Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 211. 6. Edward E. Baptist, “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men’: Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States,” The American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (December 2001): 1628. 7. This problem is evident in the following sentence from Sonya Ramsey’s review of Mary Naill Mitchell’s Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future after Slavery in The American Historical Review 114 (December 2009), 1468: “One of the most prominent images was of Rebecca, a mixed-race child from New Orleans, where women were frequently enslaved to serve as fancy girls or prostitutes.” In this sentence, Ramsey appears to differentiate between a fancy girl and a prostitute, although the categories could and did overlap. An example of how a fancy and a prostitute, even a white one, could be one and the same is also seen in Hang ‘Em High, the Clint Eastwood cowboy movie, where the word fancy is used as a synonym for prostitute. In this case, and as if to invoke the expected disdain, a minor character in the film was called “nothin’ but a two-bit fancy.” 8. Much has been written about how black women aggressively pursued and recognized opportunities to exploit the clout and possessions of white men. See David Barry Glaspar and Darlene Clarke Hines, eds., More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). For more insight on black women’s agency specifically in and near the plantation household, see Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); and Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Females Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985). 9. Isaac Franklin to Rice Ballard, September 27, 1834, folder, 15, Ballard Papers. 10. Silas and R. H. Omohundra Ledger, 1857–1864, University of Virginia. spring 2011 / bl ack women, gender, and families 37 11. P. M. Owings to T. B. Oakes, December 1858, Oakes Papers, Boston Public Library. 12. As an aside, the Ballard Papers contain approximately 6,000 documents, about 3,200 of which are letters. 13. Frederic Bancroft, Slave-Trading in the Old South (Baltimore: J.H. Furst Company, 1931), 131. 14. Orville Hickman Browning, The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. 1, 1850–1864 (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library), 139. 15. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 113. 16. White, 27. 17. See Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed., Perspectives on Gender (New York: Routledge, 1999). 18. Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 19. Pinckard’s trip was chronicled in his 1806 book, Notes on the West Indies, referenced in Pedro L. V. Welch, “‘Unhappy and Afflicted Women?’ Free Colored Women in Barbados: 1780–1834,” Revista/Review Interamericana 29, nos. 1–4 (1999). 20. Baptist, 1628. 21. James P. Franklin to Rice Ballard, March 27, 1932, folder 5, Ballard Papers. 22. Isaac Franklin to Rice Ballard, November 1, 1833, folder 12, Ballard Papers. 23. During the nineteenth century, the term old lady was a euphemism for a kept woman. See Isaac Franklin to Rice Ballard, September 27, 1834, folder, 15, Ballard Papers. 24. RC Ballard & Co Slaves Bought 1832–1834, folder 420, Ballard Papers. 25. Expence Book 1831, folder 425, Ballard Papers. 26. RC Ballard & Co Slaves Bought 1832–1834, folder 420, Ballard Papers. 27. Ballard paid $237 for Avenia White, $425 for Susan Johnson, and $425 for Preston, the slave boy. As an aside, the purchase price for Avenia was curiously low, which may suggest that Nathaniel White gave Ballard a deal that was recouped, perhaps, on the purchase price of other slaves. RC Ballard & Co Slaves Bought 1832–1834, folder 420; Bill from Nathaniel White, folder 341, Ballard Papers. 28. For discussion on how slave traders sometimes preferred darker female slaves because they believed them to be freer from disease than more fair-skinned slaves, see Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 125. An illustration of this point may be how Ballard paid $1,250 for a female slave in Natchez on November 2, 1836. The bill of sale describes this slave as a girl of “black complexion and about sixteen years old.” Given her youth and high price, she was likely considered a fancy. See receipt for purchase of Negro girl named Louisa Long, November 2, 1836, folder 34, Ballard Papers. 29. To learn more about the economy of antebellum Cincinnati and the experiences of free blacks during this period, see Henry Louis Taylor Jr., ed., Race and the City: Work, Community, and Protest in Cincinnati, 1820–1970 (Urbana: Univesity of Illinois Press, 1993) and Nikki M. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802–1868 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005). 30. Cincinnati: A Student’s Guide to Localized History (New York: Teachers College Press, 1969), 8–11. 38 sharony green 31. D. J. Kenny, Illustrated Cincinnati Pictorial Handbook of the Queen City (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1875), 23. 32. Greater Cincinnati and Its People: A History (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Co., 1927), vol. 11, 393. 33. Kenny, 11. The first and second were New York and New Orleans, respectively. 34. The Cincinnati Directory Advertiser for the Years 1836–7 (Cincinnati: J.H. Woodruff, 1836), 61. 35. Ibid., 83. 36. The Encyclopedia of Louisville, ed. John E. Kleber (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 31. 37. Avenia White to Rice Ballard, September 13, 1838, folder 24, Ballard Papers. 38. Avenia White to Rice Ballard, October 25, 1838, folder 25, Ballard Papers. 39. Frances M. Bruster to Rice Ballard, November 29, 1838, folder 25, Ballard Papers. 40. Several entries in a diary kept by Calvin Fletcher, an Indianapolis lawyer, described interactions with another Calvin Fletcher, a distant relative who lived in Cincinnati and shared his name. Fletcher of Indianapolis described a trip to Cincinnati that included a visit to see this relative who was found “engaged in his counting room. . . . While with him he received returns from of his shippers from N[ew] O[rleans]. He is about 42—a man of small statu[r]e—slim but dark complected—much of a scholar & has a great taste for mechanics. He is a man of no pride who lives in a very ordinary house & plain style far below his means but in all there is a temperance philosophy that is worthy of imitation.” Diary and Letters of Calvin Fletcher, Vol. I (1838–1843), ed. Gayle Thornbrough and Dorothy L. Riker (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Historical Society, 1973), 210. 41. It is possible that, during this period, Ballard was so mobile he missed both women’s letters. He might have been in Louisville when one was sent to Natchez and vice versa. 42. Avenia White to Rice Ballard, December 30, 1838, folder 25, Ballard Papers. 43. Calvin Fletcher to Rice Ballard, January 28, 1839, folder 26, Ballard Papers. 44. Avenia White to Rice Ballard, January 20, 1839, folder 26, Ballard Papers. 45. Ballard could be detached when he wanted to be. When a cholera epidemic in Mississippi reached his slave population in 1832, Ballard decided to abandon the slaves altogether rather than get medical help for them. “We had better loose [sic] all and begin again than loose [sic] ourselves,” Ballard wrote Isaac Franklin in one of the rare letters he copied for his own records. See Rice Ballard to Isaac Franklin, December 2, 1832, folder 8, Ballard Papers. Avenia was also aware of the pressures on a man who was buying and selling slaves, purchasing plantations, and even starting a mercantile business on the heels of the Panic of 1837, the financial crisis that sent the nation into an economic depression. But even in the midst of financial calamity, Ballard freed Avenia, Susan, and their children rather than sell them. 46. Nuptials were in the air for others in his life. During this period, Ballard received a letter from his niece who was attending a boarding school in Virginia. The letter provided news from back home including the arrival of John Armfield and his wife. Isaac Franklin and his new wife had also stopped by. Franklin’s marriage provides clues about Ballard’s intentions when he left Avenia, Susan, and their children in Cincinnati. One month before Ballard’s niece wrote her letter, Franklin wrote a letter in which he mentioned a black woman named Lucindy. The recipient of the letter, a Kentucky acquaintance, was asked to house Lucindy and her child indefinitely. Franklin apparently wanted to make “all things spring 2011 / bl ack women, gender, and families 39 easy” concerning Lucindy because he had just married “a very pretty and highly accomplished young girl.” Franklin was disposing of his concubine and their joint offspring so as not to offend his new bride, not unlike, perhaps, Ballard. In fact, Ballard’s impending marriage might have been among the reasons he deposited Avenia and Susan and their children in Cincinnati, 139 miles north of Louisville. He could check on the women and children with ease while also having a family in Kentucky. This removal of female slaves was par for the course for slaveholders like Franklin and Ballard who stopped at nothing to hide the truth about their relations with black women and the children they had with them. It is also worth noting again that Ballard and Franklin had been slave traders, an occupation that was one of the lowest on the social hierarchy in the South. Becoming planters placed both men in new social strata where appearances mattered more. See Ann Redd to Rice Ballard, September 24, 1839, folder 28; and Isaac Franklin to William Cotton, August 27, 1839, folder 28, Ballard Papers. 47. Avenia White to Rice Ballard, February 2, 1840, folder 31, Ballard Papers. 48. The Cincinnati Directory Advertiser for the Years 1836–7 (Cincinnati: J.H. Woodruff, 1836), 82. 49. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2, “Culture and Countermemory: The ‘American’ Connection” (Summer, 1987): 80. 50. William Dabney, Cincinnati’s Colored Citizens: Historical, Sociological & Biographical (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1926), 39. 51. Hazel V. Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 739. 52. Though she does not focus on the factors and circumstances that distinguished the experiences of immigrant and black women from white women, using New York as a case study, Christine A. Stansell has also shown how single women found ways to endure the circumstances of urban migration for the first time in U.S. history. See Christine A. Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789–1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986). 53. Ballard had apparently left Lucile in the care of a man named R. W. Hanson who had left for Mexico. Georgia, like other slave states, required enslaved people working independently to have guardians. The 1830 census lists a Reubin Hanson in Coweta County, Georgia. The 1840 federal census lists a Reubin Hanson in Carroll County, Georgia. The 1850 federal census lists a Robert Hanson in Morgan County, Georgia. Each man’s close proximity to Atlanta, a growing commercial center, would not make it improbable that any could have been one of Ballard’s business associates. See Lucile Tucker to R. C. Ballard, June 25, 1847, folder 113, Ballard Papers. 54. Frank S. Jones, History of Decatur County, Georgia (Spartanburg, GA: The Reprint Company, 1996), 210. 55. Ballard had an interest in at least seven plantations in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. 56. R. F. Morgan to Rice Ballard, May 19, 1851, folder 177, Ballard Papers. As an aside, this letter was in poorer condition than most of the letters in the Ballard Papers. The name of the deceased began with a capital “A.” The following two letters are more indistinct. These letters appear as “Arv . . . ” or “Ave . . . ” 57. Receipt for passage of Negro girl, January 29, 1841, folder 352, Ballard Papers. 40 sharony green 58. Receipt for passage of Negro girl, freight charges, and passage for Ballard and servant, May, 19, 1841, folder 41, Ballard Papers. 59. It is unclear what happened to Preston, who appears to have been Avenia’s son. When Avenia was freed in Cincinnati, Preston might have stayed in Mississippi with Ballard. However, if this were the case, one imagines she would have invoked his name in her letters to Ballard. I never found a Preston White who was Negro or mulatto in any census. There is a chance that, if Preston survived, he chose to pass as a white man when he grew older, something that may not have been difficult to do if he was mulatto. There are two Preston Whites in the 1860 census. Both are listed as white men. One, a schoolteacher, boarded with a Kentucky family; the other, a laborer, boarded with a family in Virginia. The former was born in 1836, the latter in 1838. Unless these men were unaware of their true age, neither was the boy whose name appeared beneath Avenia’s on Ballard’s 1832 slave invoice. It is intriguing that both men lived in Kentucky and Virginia, two states to which Ballard and Avenia had ties. The fate of Susan and her children is more vague. I could not locate them in any census. 60. W. A. Ellis to Rice Ballard, March 1, 1857, folder 176, Ballard Papers. 61. W. A. Ellis to Rice Ballard, May 18, 1857, folder 177, Ballard Papers. 62. Louise Ballard to Rice Ballard, November 14, 1847, folder 120, Ballard Papers. 63. Lucie Cheng Hirata, “Chinese Immigrant Women in Nineteenth-Century California,” in Women of America: A History, ed. Carol Ruth Berkin and Mary Beth Norton, 225–39 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). 64. Virginia to Rice Ballard, May 6, 1853, folder 192, Ballard Papers. 65. C. M. Rutherford to Rice Ballard, August 8, 1853, Ballard Papers. 66. Delia to Rice Ballard, October 22, 1854, folder 217, Ballard Papers. 67. Catherine Price to Rice Ballard, May 14, 1839, folder 27, Ballard Papers. 68. Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 11. 69. Stanley, From Bondage to Contract, xi.