Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon Read Free Book Online Page B

of the Cahaba looked pale
    and gray.
    The big eld, long devoid of its hardwood forest, was striped
    with lifeless rows of cot on stalks and corn husks standing against
    the low, sharp-angled rays of winter sun. In every direction,
    thousands of bedraggled slips of lint stil clung to broken cot on
    bol s—wisps of that portion of the harvest that time and weather
    and, in Elisha's mind, the obstinancy of "his Negroes" had conspired
    to leave behind. Al winter long they would hang there, limp and
    wet, layering the dead elds with a hazy whisper of white and
    goading Elisha Cot ingham in their waste.
    How di erently lay the land for Henry Cot inham and Mary Bishop.
    They had been reared on farms within a night's walk of the plain
    country church where now they would marry, and the hil s and
    elds and forests fanning out from the Cahaba eastward along Six
    Mile Road had been the width and range of life to these two slaves.
    Contrasted against that circumscribed existence, the extraordinary
    events in the aftermath of emancipation—no mat er the deprivation
    or arduousness—must have been bathed in a glow of wonder and
    astonishment.
    It was slaves who had created the Cot ingham plantation and
    It was slaves who had created the Cot ingham plantation and
    civilized the Cahaba val ey and al of rugged central Alabama. Bibb
    County was a place where there were no at places. A freshly
    cleared tract of forest ground displayed a roiling surface of earth, a
    scene more like swel s pitching in a rol ing sea than elds
    beckoning the plow. It was the rst generation of slaves, like
    Scipio, who hacked and burned the woods, sawing down the great
    virgin forests, digging out and dragging away the stumps and stones
    left behind, breaking by plow for the rst time the rich, root-
    infested soil, smoothing and shaping the land for seed. For the
    generations of slaves that fol owed, it was the traces of a mule-
    drawn plow that de-marked the boundaries of hour upon hour
    spent restraining the iron blade from plunging down hil sides or
    struggling to drive it up the impossible inclines that fol owed.
    As wel as Scipio and the black families that surrounded him had
    come to know the shape and contours of the Cot ingham farm,
    never, until wel into the years of war, had they even imagined the
    possibility that they could someday own the land, grow their own
    harvests, perhaps even control the government. Now, al those
    things, or some luminous variant of them, seemed not just possible
    but perhaps inevitable.
    Whatever bit erness Elisha Cot ingham carried on the day of
    Henry and Mary's wedding must have been more than surpassed by
    the joy of the plantation's oldest former slave, Scipio, the
    grandfather of Henry. Almost seventy years old yet as robust as a
    man a third his age, Scip, as he was cal ed, had witnessed near
    unearthly transformations of the world as he knew it. He had been
    born in Africa, then wrenched as a child into the frontier of an
    America only faintly removed from its eighteenth-century colonial
    origins. Through decades spent clearing forest and planting virgin
    elds, he watched as the unclaimed Indian land on which he found
    himself evolved into a yet even more foreign place. In the early
    years of the Cot ingham farm, Cherokee and Creek Indians stil
    control ed the western bank of the Cahaba's sister stream, the Coosa
    River. Choctaw territory extended to within fty miles of the
    plantation.48 Steadily as the years passed, the natives of Alabama
    plantation. Steadily as the years passed, the natives of Alabama
    receded, and the frontier outposts swel ed into set lements and then
    lit le, aspiration- l ed towns. As the Civil War years approached,
    the Cot ingham plantation fel nal y into a steady rhythm of
    stability and cot on-driven prosperity.
    Whether the child who came to be a Cot ingham slave cal ed
    Scipio knew the speci c place of his origins, who his parents were,
    what African people they were a part of, how they