Sally Shields was born in South Carolina in 1821, one of many children born to an enslaved woman and her so-called “owner”, a man named William Bryant Shields.

Details are sketchy, but some form of human bond must have slowly developed between William Shields and his “consort”.

Within a few years, Shields felt compelled to release all of the children resulting from this “union” from their legal birth condition of slavery.

It may be unpalatable and difficult for us to comprehend, but William Shields went further, and made gifts of property – including slaves – to many of his now liberated “mulatto” offspring.

That’s right.  Formerly unfree people were given their first leg up on the property ladder with gifts of “human property”.

Sally Shields, “mulatto” daughter of William Shields and his unknown slave “consort”, would go on to marry twice – first to another slaveholder named Anderson Robinson, and second to a man named Irving McGraw, who was also enumerated as a “mulatto” in records.

While slaveholding people of color formed only a tiny percentage of the overall slaveholding class, they were still a substantial part of a population of “free persons of color” in America which was far, far larger than most US citizens today realize.  In 1720, it is estimated that around 1 in 5 Virginians were “free persons of color”.

Increasingly stringent and harsh “race” laws saw this ratio drop to around 1 in 30 by 1790.

Before We Were White exists in part to explore what happened to this population.

Put in the simplest possible terms, many of these people headed for the western frontier in the years just before and after the American War for Independence. Many of these families, kinship groups, and communities would eventually pass over into “whiteness”.

It is almost impossible to write of these things in a sensitive and wise fashion with the USA still so divided over the legacy of slavery and ongoing systemic racism.

The most left-leaning liberals or progressives will query the motive for even bringing-up the subject of slaveholding among people of color.

Dispicable extremists on the other side will point excitedly, and say “See? Black people had slaves, too.”

As if this latter fact might somehow excuse centuries of color/ethnicity-based hatred and bigotry. As if it might excuse the “white caste” erecting barriers to Black education and equality before the law. As if it could lessen the brutality of lynchings, the dehumanization of Jim Crow laws, and red-lining, and, and…

But let’s set all that aside for now, and try to understand a past historical moment.

*****

Slavery has existed in human societies since time immemorial.

But “color” or “race”-based slavery?  That was a relatively recent development.

Before the invention of “race”, slavery was more likely to be a condition brought upon a person due to a difference of religion, political allegiance, country of origin, social status, poverty, criminality, indebtedness, or simply through being a war captive or the human “booty” taken by pirates.

Medieval England, like most other European kingdoms, had broadly continued with the type of slavery practices left behind after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. In England, the people most likely to be enslaved included those in debt, criminals, or people captured on the field of battle or on the high seas.

Beyond England, in the Eastern European, Ottoman and Arab worlds of the 1500s, 1600s and 1700s, people of color were often slaveholders.  Eastern European warlords in places like Wallachia (modern Romania) enslaved entire ethnic groups, most notably the Romani.

The Ottoman, Persian, and Arab worlds purchased slaves from as far north as Finland.

Central Asian cities like Samarkand and Bukhara (now in Uzbekistan) acted as international slave markets, moving human cargo between east and west, and from the Arctic Circle to the eastern Mediterranean.

The Moorish, Jewish and Romani merchant classes which included many slave traders who were expelled from Spain in the aftermath of the Christian Reconquista of 1492 went on to set-up shop throughout the Mediterranean world.  These slave traders operated from North and West Africa, all the way to the Ottoman world far to the east.  Markets in places like Persia, Tangiers, and Madagascar also supplied slaves to the all-devouring maw of various European colonial empires run by the Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, or French.

This should alter our perception that slaves were captured and shipped only from West Africa during the 1500s and 1600s.

As Europe came to be synonymous with “Christendom”, the Catholic Church began to discourage the enslavement of fellow Christians, and the list of people “deserving” to be enslaved was relocated to the non-Christian world.

This change during the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern period also happened to coincide with the busiest period of European exploration and colonialist expansion.

Because most people being subjugated and/or colonized were seen as pagans, heretics, or worse, European Christendom felt able to justify their enslavement and exploitation.

Portuguese colonies were mostly in Africa and India, so most of the enslaved were of course sub-Saharan Africans and South Asians.

Spanish, French and English colonies were mostly in the Americas, so most of the enslaved there came from local indigenous populations – at first.

African slavery didn’t become the basis for entire economies immediately, but certain circumstances hastened its advent.

Events like plague, the introduction of tobacco, sugar cane, and rice cultivation – and even The Great Fire of London in 1666 – created labor shortages making indentured labor much more expensive.

Add to this the catastrophic collapse of indigenous American populations, as tribes and nations became decimated by enslavement, disease, and warfare, or simply migrated inland to escape the reach of coastal slave traders.

The rest is history.  Colonial powers in the Americas eventually turned their baleful, greedy gaze to Africa’s non-Christian peoples.

It remains true that West Africa saw the greatest number of people sent to the Americas in chains – particularly to places like Brazil.

 

*****

 

I have written it elsewhere, and it is worth repeating again and again:

Racism did not lead to slavery.

Slavery and greed led to racism.

In the earliest days, Africans and other people of color were not enslaved due to their skin color.  They were indentured or enslaved simply by virtue of being non-English or non-Christian, or both.

But a problem soon arose.

Many Africans and other people of color began to abandon their old faith systems (including animism and Islam), becoming Christians.

This removed much of the justification for their condition of servitude, and during the first few decades of the 1600s, many, many such people of color managed to remain free (or they successfully petitioned courts for their freedom) in places like colonial Virginia.

Many became slaveholders themselves – remember that slavery wasn’t yet based on skin color.

But human greed is seemingly limitless, and the English who had begun to amass fortunes from the labor of slaves decided to change the rules.   Professing the Christian faith would no longer offer protection from servitude.

Christian or not, if a person looked non-European, they could be enslaved.

Racism was the eventual (and much later) thought system invented by innumerable self-interested, greedy European colonizers in an effort TO JUSTIFY their ridiculously arbitrary legislative changes and shockingly immoral level of avarice.

 

*****

 

The actual ideology of racism did not take root overnight.   A slow but steady creeping change to attitudes and legislation meant that for many decades, North America was a complicated place, with slaveholding families and their slaves coming from many different ethnic backgrounds.

In Anglo-America – especially in places such as New York and Maryland in the north, or Virginia and the Carolinas in the south – as already noted above, there were substantial populations of free people of color, and many of these were slaveholders.

Members of many indigenous tribes such as the Creek and Cherokee held slaves.

Africans held slaves.

Jewish and Romani people held and traded slaves.

And again, although the majority of these slaves eventually arrived from West Africa, many came from elsewhere. They came from anywhere within reach of a trading path or sailing vessel.

But as Anglo-America slowly began to crystallize its novel concept of exclusively African or color-based chattel slavery during the late 1600s and early 1700s, these slaveholding and slave-trading people of color in Virginia and the Carolinas felt the full weight of karmic irony dropping like a planet-sized lead ball upon their heads.

Many of these slaveholding free persons of color decided to get the hell out while the getting was good.

Some headed for the remotest hills of Western Virginia, Eastern Kentucky and Eastern Tennessee, where many were part of early statelet experiments like The Watauga Association or The State of Franklin.

Others took the southern route into Georgia, Alabama, and Spanish Mississippi, Louisiana and Tejas.

People like Sally Shields and her family.

But Sally would have been the exception, in being the slaveholding daughter of a woman who had actually been enslaved.

Most of the families and communities around her were slaveholding people of color whose people had never known servitude, or were generations removed from it.

The ones who went into Southern Appalachia ended-up being a foundational part of the people later called Melungeons.

The ones who went into Spanish and French territory became a foundational part of a predominantly ranching people later called “Redbones“.

But we know both groups are related when we see the ancient surnames shared between both groups. Names like Perkins, Ashworth, Bunch, Goins, and many others.

As already noted, Sally Shields was married twice, and her descendants intermarried freely among many different ethnic groups including the Redbones, the Melungeons, the Choctaw, Mexicans, Louisiana French – and even among Italo-Mexicans.

 

*****

 

I was contemplating all of this deep history while relistening to an old Rosanne Cash album a while back.

Rosanne’s father, Johnny Cash, often spoke out in support of the disenfranchised, incarcerated, and downtrodden.

Cash also spoke in support of indigenous communities – claiming at least some indigenous ancestry himself, although this claim is difficult to substantiate.

What seems clear is that Cash was descended from the roiling, mixed-ethnic lower classes of pre-Revolutionary War Virginia and the Carolinas – small farmers who often held only one or two slaves.

Needless to say, the interpersonal dynamics of having just a couple of enslaved persons (often girls or young women) living in close proximity to a family living in relative isolation along the frontier saw many “brown babies” born out of wedlock…

For every dark-complected “white” American today with an actual indigenous American ancestor (and there are many), there is also another dark-complected “white” American who is descended from a Black man or woman, but they were told that their brown skin comes from a “Cherokee great-grandmother”.

The advent of affordable autosomal DNA testing has finally begun to uncover some of these long-buried secrets at the heart of the American story.

Everyone knows about the long-term love affair between Johnny Cash and June Carter, but fewer might be aware that Johnny’s daughter Rosanne came from his earlier marriage to Vivian Dorraine Liberto.

You see, Vivian was a direct descendant of Sally Shields, and became a target of white supremacist hate during her not-so-brief marriage to The Man in Black.

Live footage of Rosanne Cash from the 1980s shows a beautiful young woman with a voice to match.  She also shares a clear resemblance to her equally beautiful mother.  It may be my own imagination, but it seems as if the make-up and lighting on Rosanne’s earliest album covers was designed to minimize her mixed-ethnic background.  If this was indeed the case, one suspects this was a record company decision.

 

 

It would not be the first time American business people chose to whitewash the ethnicity of the entertainers on their books in order to make an artist more saleable.

This is just one way in which the fall-out from racism diminishes everyone in a society – not just the direct victims of said racism.

 

 

Perhaps the biggest irony of all lies in the fact that many of the white supremacists who pointed a finger at Vivian Liberto HAD DEEP ROOTS IN THE EXACT SAME COLONIAL ERA MULTI-ETHNIC SLAVEHOLDING FAMILIES AS HER.

They were family, quite literally related to one another, yet America’s toxic binary racial caste system had made such a thing seem unimaginable to these racists.

The concept of “racial purity” in an American context is utterly laughable.  Only the profoundly ignorant could possibly believe in such a thing.

Ignorance might be bliss.  But ignorance can be a thing far worse, too.

Ignorance allows us to buy into fake history.

Fake history allows both politicians and their bases to create false justifications for their present abhorrent behavior.

Fake history allows both politicians and their bases to justify retrograde social policies.

Most of all, fake history serves the ceaseless attempts of the ruling classes to keep us divided and squabbling amongst ourselves, taking our eye off the ball.

And once we inhabit a completely fake reality, it becomes possible to justify just about anything…